Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

No one could have predicted…

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Let’s finish the job.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Open Thread: “Fighting for History”

Open Thread: “Fighting for History”

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Professor Krugman, on short memories and long-term narratives:

…[I]n a postmortem on the UK election Simon Wren-Lewis notes one failure of Labour in particular: it made no effort at all to fight the false narrative of Blair-Brown profligacy. Wren-Lewis writes,


I suspect within the Labour hierarchy the view was to look forward rather than go over the past, but you cannot abandon the writing of history to your opponents.

Meanwhile, Brian Beutler notes the very different ways Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are dealing with the legacies of the presidents who bore their surnames. Bill Clinton presided over an era of peace and immense prosperity; nonetheless, Hillary is breaking with some of his policy legacy, on issues from trade and financial regulation to criminal justice. George W. Bush presided over utter disaster on all fronts; nonetheless, Jeb is adopting the same policies and even turning to the same advisers.

These are, I think, related stories. Progressives tend to focus on the future, on what we do now; they are also, by inclination, open-minded and if anything eager to show their flexibility by changing their doctrine in the face of evidence. Conservatives cling to what they imagine to be eternal verities, and fiercely defend their legends.

But I’m with Wren-Lewis here: progressives are much too willing to cede history to the other side. Legends about the past matter. Really bad economics flourishes in part because Republicans constantly extol the Reagan record, while Democrats rarely mention how shabby that record was compared with the growth in jobs and incomes under Clinton. The combination of lies, incompetence, and corruption that made the Iraq venture the moral and policy disaster it was should not be allowed to slip into the mists…

There’s a reason conservatives constantly publish books and articles glorifying Harding and Coolidge while sliming FDR; there’s a reason they’re still running against Jimmy Carter; and there’s a reason they’re doing their best to rehabilitate W. And progressives need to fight back.

Reader Interactions

131Comments

  1. 1.

    MattF

    And ‘ceding history’ on Iraq means, specifically, pretending that there ever really was intelligence about Saddam’s WMDs or nukes. Or that intimidation of anyone who disagreed is just a lefty myth. Is there anyone (um, apart from John Bolton and Dick ‘Darth’ Cheney) who still claims that any of that is true?

  2. 2.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    Not seeing John E. Bush catch fire. He’s been away too long from politics and he isn’t clever enough to dance his way through the near-constant questions about his brother.

    This thing looks like it will shape up as a fight between Walker and Rubio to see who gets to lose to HRC.

  3. 3.

    shell

    Why is all the good TV crowded onto Sunday nights?

    We got Game of Thrones, Nurse Jackie, the finale of Mad Men…
    And I just saw TCM is showing ‘Cabaret’ at 8PM. Dang.

    Well, at least ‘Wolf Hall’ is over. No, wait, that’s a bad thing. Sob.

  5. 5.

    Poopyman

    I was going to wonder why no one mentions that the only other JEB! was James Ewell Brown Stuart, Confederate cavalry general. But of course that’s exactly the reason Bush is using it as a first name. Silly me.

    Still, it might be useful for someone in the MSM to ask why he identifies with a Confederate general. Useful, but highly unlikely to happen, I’m sure.

  6. 6.

    Davis X. Machina

    There’s a reason conservatives constantly publish books and articles glorifying Harding and Coolidge while sliming FDR;

    Yeah, the price of (especially hardcover) books…. People will only read about the saints of their own church.

  7. 7.

    David Koch

    I just don’t see how Rubio overcomes amnesty for brown people, his bankruptcy, his hair waxing, and his tax problems.

    Just giving brown people access to in-state tuition sunk GoodHair. Amnesty is the whole enchilada.

    Walker is an blundering embarrassment.

  9. 9.

    David Koch

    Jeb! on women:

    Women on welfare, Bush said, “should be able to get their life together and find a husband” or other ways to support themselves.

    Jeb! on teh gay:

    Gays and lesbians, he said, do not deserve special legal protections because “we have enough special categories, enough victims, without creating even more.”

    Jeb on Blacks:

    Asked what he would do for African-Americans, he famously said, “probably nothing.”

    http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2015/01/12/jeb-bush-probably-doesnt-care-about-black-people-either

  10. 10.

    Germy Shoemangler

    Here’s an excellent comment I saw from a RWNJ on my local media:

    Is bashing Bush the best you can do to take the focus off the Democrat nominee, Hillery?
    The GOP has got 16 candidates and the best you can do is wheel out another Clinton?
    Sucks to be a liberal in 2016.

    Trying to think of a possible reply, but my mind is blank.

  11. 11.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @shell:

    And Marlene Dietrich scorching the screen in The Blue Angel (1930) follows at 10:00. There’s your decadent Weimar Germany right there!

  14. 14.

    Amir Khalid

    @Poopyman:
    The idea that ¡Jeb! was identifying with a Confederate general might only make him more popular among some Republican voters.

  15. 15.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @Germy Shoemangler: How about “The GOP has 16 candidates and not one of them is even remotely qualified to be President of the United States, so if you love your country, voting for Hillary Clinton is a patriotic act of self-defence”.

  20. 20.

    John Revolta

    Liberal, progressive, or whatever: we’re still too open-minded to take our own side in an argument.

  22. 22.

    Germy Shoemangler

    Okay, here’s something I didn’t know… George Miller, the seventy-year-old director of the original 1979 Mad Max, directed the new one?? I honestly had no idea. He also created “Babe” and “Babe: Pig In The City”??

    Holy crap, I really had no idea.

    There are gaps in my knowledge, I’m the first to admit.

  23. 23.

    NotMax

    @
    Germy Shoemangler

    Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Elsa Lanchester, Charles Laughton, Ian Wolfe, Una O’Connor. Directed by Billy Wilder, from a tale by Agatha Christie.

    What’s not to like?

    Another film in which Dietrich shines (along with Jimmy Stewart) is Destry Rides Again, which unfortunately only rarely shows up on the TV.

  26. 26.

    Tree With Water

    “I suspect within the Labour hierarchy the view was to look forward rather than go over the past, but you cannot abandon the writing of history to your opponents”.

    The democratic party will do just that by nominating Hillary. There is not a dime’s worth of difference between her story of what transpired to unleash the Bush-Cheney War, and the stories told by any of the republican candidates for the presidency. She would have the world believe that “honest people made honest mistakes, and so war came”. That is utter and complete bullshit, but also irrelevant to her supporters. They are OK with kowtowing to that false historical narrative, even though it is a thoroughly corrupt one, and serves only to feed the vital interests of the neo-fascist republican party. Go figure..

  27. 27.

    Mike in NC

    @Amir Khalid: Yes, being a Confederate sympathizer is a big win for any Republican pol. If pressed, even northerners like Walker or Christie would probably claim forebears who marched with Stonewall Jackson.

  30. 30.

    Tree With Water

    Jeezuz. I just read a follow up to that Waco shoot out, and it was the cops doing most of the shooting. They had been waiting outside the restaraunt, and no officer was harmed. I had assumed the bikers had fought, shot, and killed themselves, but apparently not- or not all of them, anyway.

  38. 38.

    Schlemazel

    I have been feeling pretty positive since I got the infection cleared up. This were going along about as well as they have in a long time. But I just clicked a link to an alternet article on the power of Alex Jones. I knew he sold insane bullshit but I had no clue how low he dug. I could have lived with that but I made the mistake of reading the comment thread. Apparently the shit-flinging monkey brigade was alerted and are out in force with a huge supply of shit to fling. Now I just want that damn meteor – a particularly big one – to have slipped notice & come crashing in tonight.

  41. 41.

    Brachiator

    @Tree With Water: I need a list of everyone in Congress who supported the war. All of them obviously should resign.

    By your standard, Winston Churchill should never have been elected prime minister because he had been one of the chief architects of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in which hundreds of thousands of British and Turkish troops needlessly lost their lives.

    Clinton and the other candidates have to be judged on their foreign policy vision of the future. The GOP is failing here big time. I don’t know yet that this is the case with Hillary. I am not an automatic supporter, not by a long shot. But I respect what she has done and the alliances she has forged as Secretary of State.

  42. 42.

    Chris

    These are, I think, related stories. Progressives tend to focus on the future, on what we do now; they are also, by inclination, open-minded and if anything eager to show their flexibility by changing their doctrine in the face of evidence. Conservatives cling to what they imagine to be eternal verities, and fiercely defend their legends.

    Funny enough, in my case, becoming a liberal (after a couple years as a right-wing teenager) was as much a matter of looking backward as forward. Matter of recognizing that the worldview that went mainstream in 1980 was a freaking shitshow, and reconnecting with values that my parents and grandparents’ generation would’ve been raised under. It didn’t hurt that for my money, both “patriotic” and “Christian” ethics find a far truer political translation in liberalism than in conservatism.

    But I’m with Wren-Lewis here: progressives are much too willing to cede history to the other side. Legends about the past matter. Really bad economics flourishes in part because Republicans constantly extol the Reagan record, while Democrats rarely mention how shabby that record was compared with the growth in jobs and incomes under Clinton. The combination of lies, incompetence, and corruption that made the Iraq venture the moral and policy disaster it was should not be allowed to slip into the mists…

    Yep.

    There’s a reason every conservative with the smallest soapbox claims to be “a student of history.” (A claim that should be greeted everywhere with Mel Brooks’ immortal line “oh, a bullshit artist!”)

  43. 43.

    Elizabelle

    Krugman’s had a lot of excellent columns and blogposts lately (as always).

    From blogpost Blinkers and Lies:

    Jeb Bush definitely did us a favor: in his attempts to avoid talking about the past, he ended up bringing back a discussion people have been trying to avoid. And they are, of course, still trying to avoid it — they want to make this just about the horserace, or about the hypothetical of “if you knew what we know now”.

    For that formulation is itself an evasion, as Josh Marshall, Greg Sargent, and Duncan Black point out — each making a slightly different but crucial point.

    First, as Josh says, Iraq was not a good faith mistake. Bush and Cheney didn’t sit down with the intelligence community ….They decided right at the beginning — literally before the dust of 9/11 had settled — to use a terrorist attack by religious extremists as an excuse to go after a secular regime that, evil as it was, had nothing to do with that attack. To make the case for the splendid little war they expected to fight, they deliberately misled the public ….

    Second, as Greg says, even this isn’t hindsight. It was quite clear at the time that the case for war was fake — God knows I thought it was glaringly obvious, and tried to tell people — and fairly obvious as well that the attempt to create a pro-American Iraq after the invasion was likely to be an expensive failure. The question for war supporters shouldn’t be, would you have been a supporter knowing what you know now. It should be, why didn’t you see the obvious back then?

    Finally, and this is where Atrios comes in, part of the answer is that a lot of Very Serious People were effectively in on the con.

    That history is not as distant as Very Serious People would have you believe.

  44. 44.

    Chris

    @Germy Shoemangler:

    Yes, the GOP is fielding sixteen candidates.

    And still the best they’ll be able to come up with is another Bush.

    Something to brag about it ain’t.

  46. 46.

    Elizabelle

    We can haz Mad Men thread?

    Watching The Milk and Honey Route (penultimate episode) now.

    Also: it’s sad to see all the progress made in relatively short time during the period the series covered (albeit some of it — Viet Nam and JFK and civil rights murders — was tragic) and realize how it stalled and was corrupted.

    I can’t imagine wanting to watch a show about the Reagan era. Other than Family Ties and Dynasty and maybe Dallas at the time, have there been many? Or any in retrospect?

  47. 47.

    Baud

    Progressives tend to focus on the future, on what we do now; they are also, by inclination, open-minded and if anything eager to show their flexibility by changing their doctrine in the face of evidence.

    We are also relatively good looking and, by and large, a charming folk.

  49. 49.

    KG

    @Brachiator: a foreign policy vision for the future is important, but so is the ability to show that a candidate has learned from their mistakes in prior positions. And quite frankly, until she lays out a foreign policy vision for the future, all we really can judge her by is her past and for a lot of people the Iraq War vote is going to loom large.

    And I have to ask, what alliances did she forge as Secretary of State?

  51. 51.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Brachiator: Also remember how the AMUF was sold in 2002, it was to show a united front to get weapons inspectors back into Iraq. That, of course, was a lie. The vote also was right before the midterm elections.

  54. 54.

    Elizabelle

    @BillinGlendaleCA: Karl Rove’s fingerprints are all over the timing of those votes.

    And he is one of the semi-competent ones. If the title “Ship of Fools” hadn’t already been used …

  58. 58.

    Elizabelle

    @Beatrice: Will catch up on that later. Lovely show.

    Still in awe of Wolf Hall, and chilled by the finale (even while you knew what was coming).

  59. 59.

    Mike J

    @KG:

    i hear there’s a good market for weeds in Washington and Colorado…

    The price of BC bud crashed when WA legalized. Very few people want to risk import, even of high quality stuff, when local is legal.

    According to my friend.

  60. 60.

    Valdivia

    @Elizabelle:

    I thought all the acting in Wolf Hall was superb. Damian Lewis who is a long time favorite, Mark Rylance who was subtle is his power, and Claire Foy who was a big surprise to me (I remember her from a Dickens series but her acting here was at another level)

  61. 61.

    raven

    Damn, I hit the beach to fish again at 6 and it was way too windy so we took a long ride to Sneads Ferry and forgot about Midwife and Selfridge. We going to stay up for Mad Men but I am wore the fuck out, sunburned and cut. I made stock from the nice redfish and we had blue and redfish cipppino!

  62. 62.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Valdivia:

    Claire Foy who was a big surprise to me

    The show’s depiction of Anne Boleyn was the one letdown for me. I don’t think they ever captured the appeal (sexual, intellectual, and more) that she appeared to have had.

    Foy was amazing in the last episode though.

  63. 63.

    Elizabelle

    @Valdivia: Hope to see D Lewis and M Rylance back for the sequel Ms. Mantel is writing now.

    Claire Foy was superb. Shall be watching for her in later efforts.

    @raven: Yum re the cioppino. The redfish put to good use.

    And you can catch Mad Men and other shows on rebroadcast, I would think ….

  64. 64.

    Kay

    Mary Cheney has a new job:

    American Crossroads, a Republican-linked super PAC, paid for the polling from Vox Populi, whose cofounder Mary Cheney is the daughter of former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

    They released a battleground poll that, oddly enough, used “unamed Republican candidate” versus Clinton rather than any of the Republicans who are running.

  65. 65.

    raven

    @Elizabelle: I filted the red and froze it. I used the skeleton, “cheeks” a then added the bluefish filets at the last second!

  69. 69.

    NotMax

    @Valdivia

    The problem with A Foreign Affair is male lead John Lund. So wooden that one expected anyone brushing against him to get splinters. That and there was zero chemistry between him and the marvelous Jean Arthur.

    As with any Wilder-directed film it has moments of wicked brilliance*, but chalk the whole up as a good but flawed try. Same goes for his One, Two, Three.

    *with the possible exception of Kiss Me, Stupid, which desperately needed to to go back for rewrite and re-casting.

  70. 70.

    Valdivia

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I was struck by how petty, manipulative and absolutely horrid Anne Boelyn was as a character. As you say, there was nothing attractive or appealing about her. It made me wonder if this is the case because we are seeing her through Cromwell’s eyes all the time? It left me wondering what the hell Henry saw in her at all? (a more alluring Boelyn was present-day Margery from GOT doing the role in the series The Tudors, though the series was more a soap opera than anything else).

    It was this very disagreeableness though that left me most impressed with her acting–from what I had seen she had mostly roles of innocence and goodness and seeing her transformed into this harpy was pretty revealing. The last episode was her best in the series.

    @Elizabelle: yes I can’t wait for the third book/adaptation.

    If you get a chance watch Little Dorrit, Foy was very good in that, and I think no one can go wrong with Dickens.

  71. 71.

    NotMax

    @raven

    Was the bluefish served on the left side of the bowl and the redfish way, way over on the right?

    ;)

  74. 74.

    Valdivia

    @Kay:

    oh Rove and Cheney reunited again in the form of the offspring. Will no one rid me of these bothersome people?

    @NotMax:
    I loved One, two, three mostly for the scenes of silly communism/capitalism cognitive dissonance.
    Much better in that vein is Ninotchka which was on only just last week or two weeks ago.

  76. 76.

    raven

    @Elizabelle: I don’t know if you read my earlier post. I’m fishing after having ulnar never reconnection surgery. The doc said to keep it dry so I’m wearing a surgical glove. When I caught the red I put it in my bucket and went to put water in it. The fish got out and I jumped on it, scraped the hell out of my knee and soaked my surgical site. I got it cleaned up pretty quickly but then the guy at the bait shop reminded me of some damn virus or something that could get to it! I cut my knee last summer and, when I got it all submerged, it became a nasty sore. I’m hoping for the best but this is just my first day!

  77. 77.

    Kay

    @Roger Moore:

    It’s probably good for us if they rely on fake polls again. Pretend to rely. Whatever this thing is called that they do.

  79. 79.

    Elizabelle

    @raven: Thanks. Knew about the hand, but hadn’t caught why people were quipping about the knee.

    Stay healthy and give those fish what for!

  80. 80.

    NotMax

    @Valdivia

    Don’t get me wrong, One, Two, Three is a hoot. For some reason, the scene with the band in the ballroom of the East Berlin hotel playing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” just cracks me up. And a by then past his prime Cagney still professionally managed to shoulder the bulk of the film with crisp panache and spot-on timing.

  82. 82.

    Kay

    @Valdivia:

    Rove’s group, as it prepares for the 2016 campaign, has been taking steps to distinguish itself from Bush’s, which has centered its appeals to donors around the former governor’s vision for the country. In its pitches, American Crossroads promotes itself as a hub of anti-Hillary Clinton activity, tapping into a desire among the party’s benefactors to go on the offensive against the presumptive Democratic nominee at a time when Republican candidates are busy jostling for position in a crowded GOP field.

    There’s a whole bunch of Republicans here who believe that both McCain and Romney didn’t attack Obama enough- they think that’s why they lost- so they’ll love this.

  83. 83.

    Glidwrith

    @Germy Shoemangler: You are up to 20 candidates now and not one of them can find anything different to say from the others. What difference does it make which clown – I mean clone – actually gets the nomination?

  86. 86.

    GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)

    @Germy Shoemangler:

    15 of those candidates are going to lose to the other one, and then he or she will get their ass handed to them by clinton.
    Sucks to be a republican.

  88. 88.

    Valdivia

    @Kay:

    I have been both curious and disturbed to read that Bush plans to outsource all of his campaign to a SuperPac. I wonder exactly how that works? And once that happens, if it does, how will it change how things are done?

  93. 93.

    Cervantes

    @Valdivia:

    I was struck by how petty, manipulative and absolutely horrid Anne Boelyn was as a character. As you say, there was nothing attractive or appealing about her.

    Of course, that would be the Catholic view of her; whereas to Protestants she was a martyr.

    Given that you seem interested in how she is portrayed by various actresses in various shows, you will appreciate the following:

    The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen
    Susan Bordo, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013

    Bordo is a feminist philosopher, not properly a historian, but the book — she calls it her “rescue fantasy” — is none the worse for it, if you are particularly interested in Anne’s “evolution” through the years, including in popular culture, including in Hilary Mantel’s re-telling of the tale.

  95. 95.

    Matt McIrvin

    I have a friend who insists that Hillary Clinton will never be elected simply because the United States is too sexist to elect a woman President. He thinks we haven’t evolved nearly far enough; cites the way that overtly sexist jokes are still acceptable in a way that overtly racist ones aren’t. Says essentially any male candidate will beat her in the general election.

    I guess we shall see.

  98. 98.

    Valdivia

    @Cervantes:

    Thanks for the recommendation it’s now on my list.

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    I wanted to know if the book’s Anne was different from the screen’s Anne (or even the play version) since I had not read the books.
    Anne came accross as clever, bu not sensually alluring at all. And yet, the scene between her and Cromwell when they’re looking out the window at Thomas Moore was quite electric. A charge missing in the rest of her interactions at Court. Maybe because we rarely see her and Henry together, as a couple? All we see is Anne calculating and castigating others for her ambitions.

  99. 99.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Cervantes: I’ve done both. Henry was religious and was willing to risk his “soul” for
    Anne. She had to be amazing. Alluring. Brilliant. Sensual. And more.

  100. 100.

    Valdivia

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I was a little slow: I kept thinking that the choice of Anne’s portrayal was deliberate–not a mistranslation of her from the page to the screen, which seems to be what you felt after reading the books?

    As far as electric intimacy in the series you felt it, alive and vibrant, between Cromwell and Henry.

  101. 101.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Valdivia: How could the woman from Wolf Hall keep a king that nuts? He could get a woman anytime he wanted, even an interesting one. She had to be amazing to have caused what she did. I am guessing that she was her age’s Angelina Jolie – with a Ph.D.

  102. 102.

    Cervantes

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    How could the woman from Wolf Hall keep a king that nuts?

    The original Wulfhall was home to Jane Seymour’s family.

    He could get a woman anytime he wanted, even an interesting one.

    Anne strung Henry along, or vice versa, for seven years before the marriage, which only lasted three — during which, despite her undeniable charms, he availed himself of numerous other girls and women.

    She had to be amazing to have caused what she did.

    Groigne qui groigne, Anne did cause certain things to happen — by pushing Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man on the king, for example — but she was also used by others in service of their own agenda.

    Anyhow, thanks. I’m off for the evening.

  103. 103.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Cervantes: Wolf Hall was italicized for a reason in my comment. And you are sophisticated enough to know that. I won’t dignify the rest of your comments with a response, because you ignored the stuff in my first sentence. If you choose to be silly about that, why should I bother to respond?

  105. 105.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Valdivia: I got the impression that she was supposed to be someone like that. At least to Henry, but that the others understood. Until her last scenes, Foy wasn’t that electric. Based on her acting in the last episode, she could have done it, but they didn’t ask it of her.

  106. 106.

    redshirt

    The Dem bench is no deeper than the Repubs. We’re one Hillary away from a thousand year Rethuglican Reich.

    In fact, the Repub bench might be substantially deeper. Do Dems other than a select handful get to be noticed on the national level?

  109. 109.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @redshirt:

    In fact, the Repub bench might be substantially deeper.

    Explain that. Specifically, explain the word “substantially.”

  110. 110.

    Mike J

    @redshirt: Corey Booker, the Castro brothers. There are lots of others.

    How many times was Obama on Meet the Press before he ran for president?

  111. 111.

    redshirt

    @Omnes Omnibus: Substantially in terms of numbers. They simply have more people speaking and making noise on the national stage. Certainly not in terms of depth of character or quality of candidate.

  112. 112.

    redshirt

    @Mike J: Probably zero, I bet. And he was lightning in a bottle, I fear. Maybe one of the Castro’s is a good bet.

    My overall point being the media is wired for Republicans so they instantly get a recognition boost nationwide.

  114. 114.

    Valdivia

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    It does seem as if the choice was directorial since she can clearly act. There is this piece from NYRB blog by Mantel on how to play the characters.

    This one, which I have not read, compares the books to the plays and the tv series. Maybe some insight as to why in the series Anne as a calculating figure took precedence over Anne as the woman Henry fell madly in love with.

  115. 115.

    Valdivia

    @Mike J:

    Also Eric Garcetti mayor of LA, Kamala Harris. There are quite a few.

    @redshirt:

    but this has been the case since before Obama was elected. It’s what Josh Marshall calls DC being wired for the GOP.

  116. 116.

    redshirt

    @Omnes Omnibus: Playing the numbers. After Hillary, the Dem field will be The Next Generation. Given we’ve had several generations now where Repubs dominate most level of media, how will that shape the playing field?

  118. 118.

    Mike J

    @redshirt: The media has been rigged for “conservatives”since Father Coughlin.We still get Democratic presidents.

    We have plenty of people ready to go to the big leagues. We need more people running and winning in the minors though.

  120. 120.

    redshirt

    @Mike J: From 1979 on America has been getting “Republicanized” and I’ve been saddened to see Obama’s terms have done little to change this trajectory.

  126. 126.

    redshirt

    @Omnes Omnibus: Well then, the bubbles of oxygen rising up from a drowning man here means the bubbles are the small accomplishments of progressives (breaking the surface, free!) amidst the crushing waters of total republican media dominance.

  127. 127.

    Brachiator

    @David Koch: @Valdivia: But Henry fell madly out of love with her as well. Like some others, I think Claire Foy was at her best in the last episode. And her execution scene was amazing, sad, solemn and noble. This episode makes me want to read the books, now.

    Fly was also excellent on the Dickens adaptation. A very different character.

    Anne and Henry are really mysteries. We can never know what they were “really” like. I think I was in the past most impressed by Keith Michell’s Henry in the British TV series “The Six Wives of Henry VIII.”

  128. 128.

    Sloane Ranger

    To be fair to the Labour Party, the Tories have been running with the story of how they tanked the economy since 2010 so it was already established as fact. When Milliband tried to set the record straight during a Q and A session, the audience groaned in disbelief.

    Also they didn’t help themselves when a Junior Minister left a letter for his successor which said there was no money left. Cameron carried it around during the campaign and produced it at the slightest excuse.

  129. 129.

    Valdivia

    @Brachiator:

    Omnes really got me thinking about why we get such a particular view of Anne in Wolf Hall and I wonder if the focus on Cromwell is what does it. She serves almost as the foil for him, we see his ambition set against hers. In fact it is that word, ambition, that I most associate with the representation of her in the series. Fascinating really to have such a varied kaleidoscope of interpretations as windows into who these characters are.

    I loved Little Dorrit, and thought Foy was really good in it. It is the contrast between that character and her Anne that so impressed me, the range, and how credible she makes it.

    I too want to dive into the books now, alas it will have to wait until my summer courses are done. But after that, absolutely.

  130. 130.

    BobS

    @Mike J: The ACA is probably not the universal health care plan FDR would have envisioned. Plus New Deal legislation faced powerful opposition. FDR’s Committee on Economic Security felt that including universal health insurance – opposed, naturally, by the AMA – in the Social Security Bill of 1935 would threaten the passage of all Social Security legislation (you may recall that in the midst of the depression unemployment and old age benefits – which were implemented – were the priority). A conservative resurgence in 1938 resulted in a backlash against New Deal legislation and the failure of the National Health Act of 1939. A subsequent iteration of the National Health Act, the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill (which would have provided for national health insurance funded by payroll taxes) that was introduced originally in 1943 & 14 year subsequent congressional sessions was red-baited as a product of the International Labor Organization.

  131. 131.

    Cervantes

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Wolf Hall was italicized for a reason in my comment. And you are sophisticated enough to know that.

    Are you reading my response there as a contradiction of what you said? There’s no particular reason to read it that way.

    I won’t dignify the rest of your comments with a response, because you ignored the stuff in my first sentence. If you choose to be silly about that, why should I bother to respond?

    It may not surprise you to learn that I have no idea what you’re talking about here. You seem annoyed. I hope you feel better by now. Cheers.

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