New film out about Lee Atwater before election. "Boogie Man"

From Think Progress today.

Echoes Of Atwater In McCain-Palin Campaign





Two examples of Atwater's work.



Same old same old. People keep falling for it, hope it doesn't work this time.

Here is the link to the page with the video trailer and more info about where it is showing.

Boogie Man

The film points out that Karl Rove was a protege of Lee Atwater, and the similarity is pretty clear. The politics of hate and division that have ripped our country apart for years still continue. Ripped our families apart...mine included.

This last week-end the New York Times printed a paean to Karl Rove.

His proteges are in charge of the McCain campaign, and the cycle of hate continues.

Karl Rove is still treated with respect, even by Democrats who appear with him in public forums.



Tom Daschle was at the forum as well.

The trailer for Boogie Man points out that Atwater used the media to spread his hate and divisiveness. It is still happening today. Those tactics are at the heart of the McCain/Palin campaign.

and i pissed on his grave...so fuck him!!!

But I would take that with a grain of salt.

but Satan dragged him to hell, claiming the little fucker was just procrastinating and there wasn't enough time in all of eternity to apologize to everyone.

http://wallwritings.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/palin-will-help-mccain-hide-the-rove-smear-machine/

"Was it that sarcastic nature that convinced McCain that the governor of Alaska, in office less than two years, and former mayor of Wasilla, was his best option as vice president? Of course not, which places her in the same role as Clarence Thomas when Bush One called him the best qualified African American candidate for a Supreme Court judge. So why pick this nice (and yes, attractive) 44 year old governor with a very slim resume, to fill the number two slot?

The answer is easy. She was what Karl Rove needed as a soft front behind which he could operate his smear machine against Barack Obama. The former mayor of a suburb of Anchorage, Alaska (population around 6,000), is already being spun by the Republicans: She is pro life, belongs to the NRA, hunts and fishes for real, not just for political photos, belongs to a nondenominational evangelical church, i.e., not one of those liberal mainline denominational churches.

She eats mooseburgers, and is the mother of five, the oldest of whom will soon be deployed to Iraq. In 1984 she was runner-up in the Miss Alaska contest. A nice hockey mom like this would certainly have no part in smearing a political opponent. Would she?"

Interesting concept.

Bad Boy: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater by John Brady (a classic liberal teacher of journalism) is the definitive source of information about Lee Atwater's life.

http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Boy-Life-Politics-Atwater/dp/0201627337

It's a strong, touching biography. Would Lee Atwater approve of how low down Republican tactics have sunk? We can't ask him unless he'd show up at a seance. It seemed that towards the very end of his life, Atwater was SORRY for some of what he'd done. He did make some kind of apology.

We are seeing it right now in the McCain campaign. No issues just paint the other guy as something he isn't and incite the crowds to anger.

Willie Horton, of the 68 World Champion Detroit Tigers! That Willie is a great and good man.

http://www.cmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081015/OPINION/810150312/1027/OPINION01

"Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story is playing at Red River Theatres in Concord through tomorrow night, and the timing couldn't be better. To watch Atwater at work - manipulating journalists, engineering dirty tricks and denying his involvement, betraying colleagues and destroying political opponents, all with a terrifying, impish charm - is to understand the nastiness of the 2008 presidential race. Surely American political campaigns have always had a mean streak - sometimes outrageously so. But Atwater was the master to whom many of today's operatives looked to for inspiration. Indeed, early in his career he engineered the election of Karl Rove as head of the national College Republicans in a disputed election that was eventually decided by the head of the national party: George H.W. Bush.

..."In 1980, Atwater destroyed the reputation of a South Carolina congressional candidate who had once been treated for depression by letting voters know that the Democrat had "been hooked up to jumper cables." But it was the 1988 presidential campaign, featuring Bush and Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, where Atwater really made his mark."

..."Most chilling, perhaps, is the film's footage of the elder Bush discussing the hardball politics of the 1988 campaign. He found it disturbing, he said, but necessary.

A former CIA man, Bush seemed to display a talent for compartmentalizing: He saw himself as a decent, civic-minded public servant while Atwater, the hired help, did his dirty work. There are shades of John McCain here: a military hero who desperately wants voters to see him as honorable and respectful - while his own campaign at times leaves just the opposite impression.

Rove reminded McCain last week to let himself be above it all.. and let his minions do the dirty work. It worked for the bush's, it's classic Atwater and Rove.

Daschle isn't exactly striding the halls of power anymore. Doomed to a life of appeasing the wrong people and never getting the payoff - too bad for him.

The politics of hate was around millennia before Atwater was born, so he didn't achieve anything special. It was just that for a time America thought and acted a level better than that, and the likes of Atwater dragged the nation back into the gutter.

He was a coward, and a creep. Fuck him. He deserved the early checkout.

... make me wish I wasn't an atheist. Then I could more fully enjoy the vision of him turning slowly on a spit through all eternity.

It sounds like a lot of people need to see this.

He was scarier than Freddy Krueger and all the other monsters combined.

(not quite sure why the title was changed - I suppose because most of us here need an explanation of who Lee Atwater was).

It's a very good film, and I recommend it. Atwater seems to have got started in the dirty tricks department not so much because he liked Republican politics, but more that he enjoyed attacking people, and he thought he'd be allowed to go further in dubious attacks and tactics by the Republicans than the Democrats.