Review: Davis Guggenheim's Barack Obama documentary The Road We've Traveled (2012) alternates between patronizing simplicity and creepy propaganda.

Maybe I'm just too cynical.  But even while I agree with about 90% of the content of this 17-minute documentary, I can't help but be creeped out by the context.  With Tom Hanks's narration, generically swelling music, and various stills of Barack Obama looking 'presidential' while various Americans smile or cheer approvingly, this is the kind of thing that bugs me on a number of levels.  First of all, I cannot help but be repulsed by the idea that a president ordering a military execution, even one on Osama Bin Laden, is seen as a crowning example of 'leadership'. Putting aside the issue of how much Obama's foreign policy has resembled Dick Cheney on steroids (Obama doesn't torture, but he will hold you in indefinite detention and/or order your due process-free execution while randomly bombing the crap out of civilians with unmanned drones), there is something deeply wrong with a nation that puts the ability to order the killing of another person, even a sworn enemy under just cause, as paramount example of 'leadership'.  Aaron Sorkin of course rebutted the idea in both several episodes of The West Wing and during a key first-act juncture in The American President, where Michael Douglas explains in detail why ordering military action that will take human lives is perhaps 'the least presidential thing I do'.  No, President Barack Obama never donned a flight suit and gave a presidential address from an aircraft carrier, but the idea that the (perhaps lawful/justified) killing of another person should be among the crowning accomplishments of any person, let alone a leader, is distasteful.  It was distasteful when Bush played cowboy while other people's sons and daughters bled out in the Middle East, and its only a little less distasteful when Obama claims this single military action as a shining example of 'leadership'.

Rush Limbaugh's advertiser desertion feels good, but why doesn't it feel right?

About a week after Rush Limbaugh's (insert negative adjective HERE) comments about Sandra Fluke, a law student who testified before Congress regarding the ongoing 'debate' about contraception, the longtime right-wing talk-radio host has lost 30 sponsors from his show as a result of public outcry and calls for advertiser boycott.  As someone who has followed politics for the last twenty years, a practice that inevitably involves hearing or reading about any number of god-awful things Limbaugh has uttered over the decades, I suppose I have to wonder what took so many of his sponsors so long?  As a political liberal who has witnessed not only the sheer absurdity of many of Limbaugh's often fact-less rants, as well as the incredible power he holds over Republican office holders, it fills me with no little good cheer to see him getting his ass kicked over his misogynistic tirade against a private citizen who exercised her right to testify before Congress over a matter of personal concern to her (and her friend, who needed contraception for the treatment of ovarian cysts).  But I have to admit that it's a little disarming, scary even, to see the blinding speed and brutal effectiveness with which this activism took place.  It feels good because I happen to be on the same side of the political (and moral) fence as the activists.  But what happens next time when we get targeted... again?

Politicizing apolitical Americana... Will the GOP/Right Wing surrender their biggest advantage by protesting the Clint Eastwood Chrysler Super Bowl commercial?

I've written from time-to-time about how Democrats and Liberals seem so willing to cede what should be basic apolitical American values to the Right/Republican wing of America.  Pundits, even liberal ones, brand movies as Conservative because they espouse family values, morality, private charity, personal responsibility, monogamy, the right of self-defense, entrepreneurship, patriotism, etc.  Never-mind that such American values are technically apolitical and are shared and practiced by people of all political stripes, the 'Right Wing sound machine' did a bang-up job in the 1980s and 1990s basically branding much of Americana as 'conservative', and we stupid liberals went on and allowed them to do it.  The Democratic wing has long struggled with rebutting an opposition that successfully branded itself as 'explicitly American' and has defined the debate by defining the vocabulary.  So to those criticizing last night's Chrysler commercial, which aired during the Super Bowl and was narrated by Clint Eastwood (longtime Libertarian/Republican) as some kind of pro-Obama propaganda, knock yourself out.