Part I: Introduction
In 2007, the late Robin Williams starred in a pretty good satire about corrupted American politics called “Man of the Year.” I encourage everyone in the slightest concerned about the sad state of American politics to watch it carefully and several times to absorb the very dense information available.
But, if you are really going to learn about reality, you have to remember the exact year within the chronological sequence of events in history when the film was released.
In 2007, the Iraq disaster had become ‘history’ and a 2008 Presidential election is a year away. The film is set from the Summer of 2008 through the election but before the Inauguration of 2009.
Robin Williams plays a TV talk show humorist who focuses on Politics the way TV, unfortunately, evolved after Johnny Carson’s 1992 retirement. At first, Jay Leno was the only such TV host and his political commentary was trivial compared to the A$$holes of the last 25 years who ‘traded in’ humor for blatant Left-Wing Democrat Party advantage.
When Jay Leno would replay a filmed segment with simple questions about American Government to college-aged giggling imbeciles on the street, it took quite a few of such segments to realize how far public knowledge among the ‘educated’ and such had fallen, compared to the far less ‘educated’ world that I grew up in during the 1950s.
The Cold War was over and the world was replacing common sense with rampant and foolish Narcissism. (During George W. Bush’ second term, when over-the-air TV analog signals switched over to digital, I refused to go along. Old movies and even TV series on video tape or DVD is all I ever watch on home TV.)
Part II: The Movie Narrative
Robin Williams plays an honest and humorous version of the mega-millionaire A$$holes of the last 20-30 years. In an audience ‘warm-up’ preceding his live broadcast, a young lady in the audience says that she and her friends are sick and tired of the (2008 setting) politics in the USA where everything is both stupid and corrupted – especially but not exclusively – by money. She suggests that he should run for President and the audience cheers and applauds enthusiastically.
Going into the 2008 election, it is shown that the two major parties are each spending $195 million on dishonest advertisements – and all such political communication is misleadingly dishonest – filled with the half-truths that professional public relations liars make a career of.
Within days, Robin Williams is inspired to run as an Independent – just as was suggested by the young lady in the audience.
After several weeks of barn-storming campaigning with the regular serious political clichés about mostly unspecified ‘special interests’ and other vacuous political clichés, he qualifies to run in thirteen swing states and secures an invitation to the final Presidential ‘Debate’ with the two Schmucks from the two major parties.
At that debate, everything changes. He starts talking about reality instead of employing political Sophistry and Bull$hit. He uses the term ‘Emotional Issues’ as opposed to real ones saying such things as ‘politicians should tell the truth about DONORS and NATIONAL SECURITY’ highlighting the difference between American Citizens rigorously cross-examined on airport re-entry with the idiotic ‘randomization’ instead of COMMON SENSE avoiding carefully examining potential young Islamic terrorists while the tenth ‘randomly audited’ individual can be an old lady in a wheelchair being strip-searched (to avoid accusations of ‘RACIAL PROFILING!’) To gales of laughter, he points out that millions illegally cross our southern border ‘…with bedroom sets on their heads.’
Among his many jokes, he ridicules the fatuous idea of people voting for ‘CHANGE,’ regardless of identifiable meaning, is IRRATIONAL.
Ironically, in 2008, Obama’s actual campaign’s oft-repeated campaign theme is “Hope and Change.” In 2025, the newly elected NYC mayor used the same sales cliché with equal effectiveness. The lessons of this movie are completely lost in our country.
[The stolen 2020 election cost Biden (and Biden’s autopen) DONORS an unprecedented official $3.25 billion.]
Part III: Computerized Elections
In the movie, the 2008 election tallying has been contracted by Congress to the DELACROY software corporation (not the yet to be uncovered Dominion Company). In the movie, an innocent (unplanned) ‘computer glitch’ causes Tom Dobbs (Robin Williams) to actually be ‘elected.’ (Just before the election, the computer ‘glitch’ was discovered by ace programmer Eleanor Green, ably played by Laura Linney, who reports it to management which then ‘covers it up.’ They spend part of the rest of the movie trying to kill her to cover up the hoax. The eternally entertaining Christopher Walken plays an advisor to Tom Dobbs.)
Even though I saw the DVD years after its release, the idea of a computerized voting system incapable of proper ‘auditing’ struck me as totally corrupt and Irrational. There is one line in the dialogue specifying that ‘computerized voting is faster but cannot be back-checked.’ (The first three times that I watched the movie, I missed hearing that critically important little ‘fact.’)
At the 2000 election, with ‘hanging chads’ in Florida, I paid no attention to the whole process of voting. In fact, when I actually did vote for the fourth time in my life in 2004, I barely noticed the 20th Century universal process had begun to change.
In 1953, at the mayoral election in NYC, I was eight-years old and accompanied my mother who was an election worker in the basement of PS 93 in Manhattan. (I remember seeing ‘Impellitteri for Mayor’ advertisements on trucks that year.) The process was identical just about everywhere in the 20th Century with a voting booth, a sign-in book where signatures were checked for consistency and with both parties supplying precinct workers. Those old voting booths led to final counts by the end of the evening and a completely reliable auditing record matching the number of the voter and the particular voting booth fully checkable.
The only known voter fraud in the 20th Century was dead people still voting in a few Democrat Party controlled cities like Mayor Daley’s Chicago and utterly corrupt Dixiecrat Southern Jim Crow states like Texas used to be.
In the “Making of the President 1960,” the prestigious, honest long-term AP White House Bureau Chief Theodore White wrote that it was common knowledge that Nixon had won the 1960 election – but Electoral Cheating in Chicago and Texas stole it from him. (In Left-Wing but honest Oliver Stone’s movie “Nixon,” that truth is dramatized.)
Unlike Al Gore and the 2000 ‘hanging chad’ hoax, Nixon accepted the loss to keep from unnecessarily dividing the country with thoroughly legitimate court challenges.
In the movie “The Manchurian Candidate,” as re-done in 2004, the Liev Schrieber character is seen entering the NYC old-fashioned voting booth to vote even though, in that election, the old reliable process was in the process of changing.
Part IV: Donald J. Trump – POTUS 45 & 47
I would wager everything I ever owned that Donald J. Trump watched that movie (‘Man of the Year”) many times before being inspired to try to save the country in the election of 2016. I trust and admire him immensely – but I remain a Pessimist about the future of American Politics. Maybe you should watch the movie and think it over.
Part V: Epilogue – TV News
There is a little scene in which the crew is traveling in which the business manager character says to another staff member how troubled he is about how TV news talk shows have corrupted elementary morality and the historical knowledge that the country shared (back before the academic indoctrination of several generations of ‘students’).
He declares that he hates TV news shows because they put Talking Heads ‘…into little squares…’ and whatever anyone says is the implied moral equivalent of anyone else’s statement. He says that a Talking Head will ‘…deny the existence of the Holocaust…’ as if it is just another opinion – and everyone’s opinion is the moral equivalent of anyone’s.
In several essays on this website, I bemoan the EVIL SCUMBAG PRESS conspiracy to perpetually hide the pictures of our fellow citizens jumping to their quicker death from the Twin Towers on September 11. 2001.
Here we are, 25 years later – after far more than one generation has passed through the disaster of American Education – and Racist Islamic Supremacist Anti-Semites have taken over the Democrat Party and, with the gleeful assistance of every cowardly careerist Whore-Politician including today’s most disgusting of all KAPOS of Jewish ancestry, are contributing to not just Holocaust II but also the end of Individual Liberty in western open Democratic Societies.
As Hard-Left Political Activist Lawyer William Kuntsler used to boast – “we will use the system to destroy the system.”
(America’s Mayor Rudy Giulliani was disbarred for pursuing blatant Electoral Fraud in the 2020 election in the courts. No one ever thought of disbarring William Kuntsler excepting powerless me.)
All the most articulate among the young politicians of Racist Islamic Supremacy ever have to say on that ever so rare public question about September 11, 2001 is their best cliché – “a few people did something that day.”
