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NOTE: This is the debut of a new occasional column pointing out factual inaccuracies, misstatements, falsehoods, disinformation, misrepresentations, propaganda and lies in the mass media - from cable news to talk radio to movies and beyond. In our Orwellian era of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” when journalists are vilified as “enemies of the people,” truth - and the ability to discern it - is becoming increasingly endangered. This “post-truth” climate threatens is corrosive to our social discourse. Indeed, something I’ve noticed is that the very word “fact” itself is frequently used incorrectly on the airwaves.
The world premiere of Tim Alderson’s Salvage is a little gem. Musicals are often faced with the creative conundrum of how and why the characters move from talking to singing, but Salvage solves this naturally because it is largely a story about singer-songwriters who strum their own guitars. Preacher (the smoldering David Atkinson, a Georgian who, at certain angles, resembles Kris Kristofferson) is boozing it up, in between crooning CW tunes at a nearly empty hole-in-the-wall bar in god-knows-where-ville. When in walks the much younger Harley (Christopher Fordinal), another Country Western wannabe superstar, who is passing by when he’s lured into the watering hole he has recognized as a musical shrine.
Writer/director Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire epitomizes the type of specialty cinema that makes a cineaste’s heart go pitter patter when it plays at a favorite art house. On the other hand, popcorn munchers at the local multiplex used to superheroes, explosions and car chases would likely find this 2-hour foreign film subtitled in English to be excruciatingly slow - only “redeemed” by its hot lesbian sex scenes.
This French feminist film - which won the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Screenplay and Queer Palme awards, and was nominated for Cannes’ grand prize, the Palme d’Or - is set in Brittany in 1760. Portrait ponders: How enlightened was the Enlightenment when it came to women and their rights? In particular, how reasonable was the Age of Reason when it came to the love that dared not speak its name - especially when it involved the female of the species.
On Thursday afternoon, the Washington Post sent out a news alert headlined "John Kerry Endorses Biden in 2020 Race, Saying He Has the Character and Experience to Beat Trump, Confront the Nation's Challenges." Meanwhile, in Iowa, Joe Biden was also touting his experience. "Look," Biden said as he angrily lectured an 83-year-old farmer at a campaign stop, "the reason I'm running is because I've been around a long time and I know more than most people know, and I can get things done."
But Kerry and Biden don't want to acknowledge a historic tie that binds them: Both men were important supporters of the Iraq war, voting for the invasion on the Senate floor and continuing to back the war after it began. Over the years, political winds have shifted—and Biden, like Kerry, has methodically lied about his support for that horrendous war.
Let’s bomb Iowa! Or maybe Texas or Michigan or Nebraska . . .
Oh wait, I got confused for a second. Those places are part of America and we love them. We would never bomb them. These are places we would bomb: Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, etc.
Thanksgiving is gone and no thanks were given for the House Democrats’ unfolding plan for a quick, tidy, Christmas-wrapped impeachment package. Why are they doing it like this? What are they thinking? Why not take the fight to the president on all the available grounds? What is the rationale for a rushed process based on a fraction of presidential infractions? Why deliberately give up control of the narrative when you have mountains of evidence on your side?
That’s where the Democrats appear to be taking us. At this point, no one knows how it will turn out, and I long to be wrong in my apprehensions. But there’s not much to work with here. Democratic leaders don’t even explain their thinking publicly. The state of play as this is written seems unchanged from what CNN reported November 21:
It is not often that one hears anything like the truth in today’s Washington, a city where the art of dissimulation has reached new heights among both Democrats and Republicans. Everyone who has not been asleep like Rip Van Winkle for the past twenty years knows that the most powerful foreign lobby operating in the United States is that of the state of Israel. Indeed, by some measures it just might be the most powerful lobby period, given the fact that it has now succeeded in extending its tentacles into state and local levels with its largely successful campaigns to punish criticism or boycotting of Israel while also infiltrating boards of education to require Holocaust education and textbooks that reflect favorably on the Jewish state.
Occasionally, however, the light does shine in darkness. The efforts by Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to challenge the power of the Israel Lobby are commendable and it is worth noting that the two women are being subjected to harassment by their own Democratic Party in an effort to make them be silent.
