Originally Posted by Redress

OH NOZ! A movie that is not factually accurate! Holy cow, we have never seen anything like that before....

Originally Posted by DarkWizard12

Give it to the democrats to be able to hold a grudge for 8 years....

Originally Posted by aquapub

Translation: Left-wing revisionist propaganda is common, therefore it is OK.

Nice logic.

Originally Posted by Redress

Noooooo, that is not at all what I am saying. What I am saying is it is a movie. It is not factual.

Originally Posted by Redress

On the list of things I am willing to get upset about, a movie not being factual is way down on the list, no matter which side is shown in a poor light.

Originally Posted by aquapub

"In defending the movie's accuracy, HBO has touted the amount of research that went into its making. Strong interviewed 40 people who were directly involved in the complex legal fight, and he relied heavily on four books about the recount penned by journalists."

Los Angeles Times. May 19, 2008. Bush vs. Gore, one more time. Pg. 1.



Lying about Republicans stealing elections (especially when it is Democrats who actually tried to do that) under the guise of an accurate, objective historical film affects the way Republicans are seen and voters also get bombarded with smears like this from other supposedly objective sources run by Democrats (the news media, academia, and Hollywood).

Disguising outrageous partisan lies as objective historical facts is what Democrats have to do on a regular basis to stay in the game and you shouldn't have to have it explained to you why that matters.

Originally Posted by Redress

I have never seen it listed as being "objective". I put this whole thing down as any other movie about real world events. It can be interesting, but should not be trusted as factual or unbiased.

Originally Posted by aquapub

I call it perpetual slander that constantly costs one side votes.

Originally Posted by Redress

I doubt I would go as far as perpetual, but it is frequent. Note that it does, less frequently, go the other way too. You right wingers need more film makers to balance things.

Originally Posted by aquapub

HBO has put out a Hollywood revision of Gore's attempt to steal Election 2000 (Recount) that buries key facts and portrays conservatives as ruthlessly maneuvering against innocent truth-seeking Democrats who were simply trying to figure out who won.

1) Katherine Harris pushed for a statewide recount. This was completely omitted so HBO could misrepresent Republicans as trying to suppress the vote while Democrats innocently tried to count them. Gore's people fought tooth and nail against letting all the votes get counted, insisting that only votes from the four most liberal counties in the state get re-examined (repeatedly, until Gore could manufacture a win for himself). HBO at least bothered to show the fact that Gore was pressing for only those counties, but still somehow managed to make it look like an honest attempt to get to the truth.

2) Every single person portrayed in the film was consulted about the script and how they were represented long before it was made-except Katherine Harris, who actually made attempts to preview her portrayal, but HBO would never talk to her. They ended up releasing the film without getting one iota of input from her, and overtly smeared her as some bizarrely unstable, meandering religious zealot randomly quoting the Bible and taking all her cues from a Bush strong man sent to keep the loon in line.

All the facts and witnesses from her office during that time show this portrayal to be an outrageous slander.

3) If the media recount had confirmed that Gore won, HBO would have certainly included some mention of it at the end, being that this film was an attempt to cast Gore's near theft of the election as Gore getting robbed by hardball Republicans. But since the media recounts confirmed that Bush won by an even greater margin when done the way Gore was asking for, it was omitted entirely.

4) HBO fails to even mention the thousands and thousands of votes Bush lost by the media (despite receiving written requests from Katherine Harris ahead of time not to do this) falsely declaring Gore the winner while the rigidly conservative panhandle still had more than an hour left. There was a huge drop in conservative turn out because of the media's willful activism on Gore's part, but none of this was even mentioned, while HBO twisted other facts to make Gore look like he had been deprived of thousands of legitimate votes, until the end, and even then, it was mentioned not as royal screwing that it was, but as a shrugged off "guess we'll never know how those votes would've gone" type of dismissal.

Incidentally, the media called states that went for Gore by extremely narrow margins (and at least one state that actually went for Bush-Florida) immediately, while delaying calls for states like Alabama that went right away for Bush by double-digits for hours and hours. Their own internal data showed Bush ahead when the media called Florida for Gore.

5) Every Republican course of action is portrayed as a calculated strategy to win, regardless of the Truth, despite them having the facts and the law on their side at every turn, while Democrats were consistently portrayed as fair-minded truth-seekers as they lied, cheated and attempted to steal the election.

6) HBO showed only the parts of the voter purge list controversy that made Michael Moore's hysterical race-baiting conspiracy theory look accurate. In 1998, the Florida courts overturned an election because convicted felons had been allowed to vote, contrary to Florida law.

As David Kopel points out from the Palm Beach Post:

"The Florida legislature ordered the executive branch to purge felons from the voting rolls before the next election. Following instructions from Florida officials, Data Base Technologies (DBT) aggressively attempted to identify all convicted felons who were illegally registered to vote in Florida.

There were two major problems with the purge. First, several states allow felons to vote once they have completed their sentences. Some of these ex-felons moved to Florida and were, according to a court decision, eligible to vote. Florida improperly purged these immigrant felons.

Second, the comprehensive effort to identify all convicted felons led to a large number of false positives, in which persons with, for example, the same name as a convicted felon, were improperly purged. Purged voters were, in most cases, notified months before the election and given an opportunity to appeal, but the necessity to file an appeal was in itself a barrier which probably discouraged some legitimate, non-felon citizens from voting. According to the Palm Beach Post, at least 1,100 people were improperly purged.

The overbreadth of the purge was well-known in Florida before the election. As a result, election officials in 20 of Florida's counties ignored the purge list entirely. In these counties, convicted felons were allowed to vote. Also according to the Post, thousands of felons were improperly allowed to vote in the 20 non-purging counties. Analysis by Abigail Thernstrom and Russell G. Redenbaugh, dissenting from a report by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, suggests that about 5,600 felons voted illegally in Florida. (The Thernstrom/Redenbaugh dissent explains why little credit should be given to the majority report, which was produced by flagrantly ignoring data.)

When allowed to vote, felons vote approximately 69 percent Democratic, according to a study in the American Sociological Review. Therefore, if the thousands of felons in the non-purging 20 counties had not been illegally allowed to vote, it is likely that Bush's statewide margin would have been substantially larger.

Regardless, Moore's suggestion that the purge was conducted on the basis of race was indisputably false. As the Palm Beach Post details, all the evidence shows that Data Base Technologies did not use race as a basis for the purge. Indeed, DBT's refusal to take note of a registered voter's race was one of the reasons for the many cases of mistaken identity.

DBT's computers had matched these people with felons, though in dozens of cases they did not share the same name, birthdate, gender or race...[A] review of state records, internal e-mails of DBT employees and testimony before the civil rights commission and an elections task force showed no evidence that minorities were specifically targeted. Records show that DBT told the state it would not use race as a criterion to identify felons. The list itself bears that out: More than 1,000 voters were matched with felons though they were of different races.

The appeals record supports the Palm Beach Post's findings. Based on the numbers of successful appeals, blacks were less likely to have been improperly placed on the purge list: of the blacks who were purged, 5.1 percent successfully appealed. Of Hispanics purged, 8.7 percent successfully appealed. Of whites purged, 9.9 percent successfully appealed. John R. Lott, Jr., "Nonvoted Ballots and Discrimination in Florida," Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 32 (Jan. 2003), p. 209. Of course it is theoretically possible that the appeals officials discriminated against blacks, or that improperly purged blacks were not as likely to appeal as were people of other races. But no one has offered any evidence to support such possibilities."

In other words, this "controversy" was an example of Democrats receiving thousands of votes they weren't supposed to get, yet it was falsely portrayed as a deliberate Republican suppression of black votes.

In short, this film was another typical Hollywood assault on the truth and an example of why the left's complete inability to correctly depict historical events should raise concerns about their stranglehold on our educational system.