Welcome Back, Bill Moyers

"You can't keep asking young people to die for a lie," he said this morning on Democracy Now!, where he talked about his return to public television with a new weekly series called "Bill Moyers Journal." (Have a look at the DN! interview.)

The first program in the series, "Buying the War," debuts tonight. Variety's Bryan Lowery describes it as "a methodical, devastating, pull-no-punches recap of mainstream journalism's collective failure to challenge the Bush administration [a k a the BananaRepublic] in the run-up to the Iraq war."

He quotes Moyers as saying, "The press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush administration [again, a k a the President With His Head Up His Ass] to go to war on false pretenses." Which dovetails with this from yesterday's item, dontcha think?

Tom Shales raves about the program: "Perhaps the truth shall eventually set you free, but first it might make you very, very depressed." He calls tonight's program "one of the most gripping and important pieces of broadcast journalism so far this year." He also notes, "It's always depressing to learn that you've been had, but incalculably more so when the deception has resulted in thousands of Americans dying in the Iraq war effort."

(Gee, Tom, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dead, dying, and displaced Iraqis. You forgot them.)

Meanwhile, here's something else Moyers said this morning on Democracy Now! (not that you haven't heard this before either): "Let's just face it, democracy has become a racket when it comes to politics and the media. ... This is contempt -- contempt for democracy and freedom. We cannot rightly claim to have a democracy as long as money is sovereign. ... There is a cancer eating at the heart of democracy, and it's money in politics."

Finally, congratulations to Sen. Harry Reid for calling Huha's vice president by the right moniker. "The president sends out his attack dog often. That's also known as Dick Cheney."

I've never really decided how best to refer to the vice president. I've called him everything from the chief crony, Assistant Maximum Leader and the oily conman to the wayward shooter, Cheney Boy and Mr. Sourpuss. But this settles it. Henceforth he will be called Attack Dog.

April 25, 2007 10:04 AM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on April 25, 2007 10:04 AM.

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