"Dave" and Our Situational Politics

The Continental Congress ^ | 18 Feb 2025 | George MF Washington

[Rummyfan]

Whenever I write about the decline of Hollywood, which regular readers know I do all the time, I often use the 1993 Hollywood release schedule as a benchmark for all that has been lost. If you pull up the list of Summer releases for 1993, almost every one of the top 50 movies released that summer is an absolute banger… movies you would stop and watch all the way to the end any time you stumbled on one while surfing through the channels on your cable TV guide… back when the cable TV ad model was still a thing.

One of those truly great movies of 1993 was “Dave”, a much-beloved comedy directed by the legendary Ivan Reitman.

Kevin Kline stars in two roles, first as President Bill Mitchell and, later, as regular guy Dave Kovic who happens to look exactly like Bill Mitchell and who is called upon to surreptitiously replace Mitchell after the President has a… uh… a mishap in his office… after hours… with his, uh… his secretary… and winds up in a coma.

[Rummyfan]

Dave was innocuous. The West Wing OTOH was pure propaganda, a Dem's wet dream of what. the Clinton Administration should have been.

[Rummyfan]

“Dave” (1993), and then later on “The American President” (1995) and “The West Wing” (1999) created a gauzy Federal fantasy land where Progressive Government was always and everywhere a force for good. Where all Americans aspired to a life beneath an all-powerful benevolent Government which did everything for us from birth to earth. In these movies, government never arrests you for speaking out at your local school board meeting. They don’t deny you disaster aid based on your political yard signs. And they never, ever, kick down your door and murder your pet squirrel. These movies built a world where the heroes were always coded Liberal, where they always did the right thing, and where screenplays written by prominent Hollywood Progressives ensured that Conservative-coded villains would always be frustrated by the ability of their opponents to tie them in rhetorical knots.

[higgmeister]

I was willing to watch it again but it isn't streaming free.

STBM

[Rummyfan]

And...

Imagine President Biden hauling Alejandro Mayorkas into a cabinet meeting and asking him “I don’t wanna tell hurricane victims in North Carolina that they have to sleep in the snow because illegal immigrants need to be given free rooms at the Roosevelt hotel in Manhattan… do you wanna tell them that?”, while Mayorkas blinks stupidly for the cameras.

You can’t imagine it because of course it didn’t happen… it could never happen under a Liberal President… even though this appears to be exactly the choice that the brain trust at DHS made during the last administration.

[marktwain]

Bingo. You have it correct.

I want to see a blockbuster movie with the Media as the bad guys. Where people go to them for help and they are betrayed, but somehow manage to figure it out and escape, maybe to have a successful website based in? Panama? which outs the Media.

[FLT-bird]

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha. You see my friends, I actually went to the theater and watched “Dave” when it came out when I was in college. I distinctly remember it. I remember the supposed crescendo at the end when the “good guy” who was acting as President announced that everybody who wanted one would have a job.

As if the president can simply decree such things.

I remember pointedly discussing it with the friend I went to the theater with and saying “gee....that’s great *Dave*....but how you gonna pay for that *Dave*?....then I sarcastically commented “and they say Hollywood is liberal”.

Here Hollywood was 2 years after we definitively won the Cold War espousing communist ideals.

[Taxman]

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