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keywords: LBJ VOTING DEMOCRATIC 200 YEARS
Posted on 01/06/2015 9:41:34 AM PST by Brad from Tennessee
Before I came to dislike the movie “Selma,” I was deeply moved by it. Twice it brought me to tears. A crane shot of Martin Luther King Jr. leading thousands of demonstrators over the Edmund Pettus Bridge was one such moment, and so was the vicious attack on John Lewis — bravely, steadfastly walking into the beating he knew was coming. Today, Lewis is a member of Congress. Forever, he’ll be an American hero.
Too bad, though, that the movie had to go Hollywood on Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, as if from the grave, has bellowed his protest. In its need for some dramatic tension, “Selma” asserts that King had to persuade and pressure a recalcitrant Johnson to introduce the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The movie also depicts Johnson authorizing FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to smear King and — as King himself suspected — try to drive him to suicide. It is a profoundly ugly moment.
But a bevy of historians say it never happened. It was Robert F. Kennedy, the former attorney general, who authorized the FBI’s bugging of King’s hotel rooms. Yet, for understandable reasons, Kennedy appears nowhere in the film. By 1965, he was no longer the AG and, anyway, he remains a liberal icon. But LBJ — Southern, obscene and, especially when compared to the lithe Kennedy, gross of speech and physique — was made the heavy. He should get a posthumous SAG card. . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Hollyweird should have made King white.
A film like this (or something like ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ for example) should be taken in the same light as Shakespeare’s history plays. There are also anachronisms in Shakespeare that both he and his audience were well aware of. ‘Meet Me in St Louis’ is an American classic and goes well beyond the pretentious moron demographic.
LBJ was a leftist radical. Michael King, aka Martin Luther King jr. was an even more hardlined communist radical than LBJ. I do not understand the idol worship of MLK.
“King’s masters brought the war to our shores. After fifty years of unremitting attacks We are losing.”
What war did King bring to our shores?
Was it the Vietnam War? Can you point to incidences where MLK brought VietCong to attack America on our shores?
I think LBJ could have found many more boxes with ballots for him. Something else kept him from running.
He should get a posthumous SAG card. . . .
Yeah. Signed by Dalton Trumbo. And Will Geer.
These race-based dramas are put forth as if they're actual history, and deserve criticism as such. Most of the idiots who go to see this film will come away from it -- just as they did from Oliver Stone's wildly [insanely] ahistorical JFK -- as if they've learned something about history. They haven't.
No one engaging in this kind of historical malpractice deserves a pass on "artistic" grounds.
Nobody with any sense should be taking this or any drama as a historical document. Strict adherence to historical record is not a criteria for drama and has never been at any time in the history of western civilization.
“Yes no doubt slaves were abused like that, but not on the scale that movie portrayed.”
I think we can agree, that by definition, slaves were abused each and every day that they were held in slavery as one cannot be a slave without being abused.
MLK is the prototype for Al Sharpton.
Sadly, this movie will become “official” history for those who see it.
Carter actually wasn’t a bad president.
Its only AFTER his time in the White House that he became a deranged old fool.
“although you can be certain he will be a democrap.”
I agree, but there are plenty of FReepers who will argue that No. The Worst Ever President was in fact a Republican.
Hint. He was the first Republican President.
I’ve never seen any evidence he was a communist. Rumors, but no evidence.
If it's [mis]represented as history, it can be criticized on that basis.
Meet Me in St. Louis is a musical. Like all musicals, it appeals to morons. So its demographic includes both the pretentious, and the nonpretentious kinds.
The 1964 Election was a critical moment in American electoral politics and that that moment was defined by Barry Goldwater opposing the Civil Rights Act and then getting the GOP nomination the same year.
Had Goldwater or the GOP nominee supported the Civil Rights Act in 1964, blacks would not be voting 90% for the Democratic Party.
I'm not sure how anyone could paint this loser in any positive way.
Oh, I am SO STEALING THIS!!!
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It was all Goldwater’s fault.
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