Coming Soon to PBS: Ken Burns’ Production of You Bet Your Life
I used to think of Ken Burns as being an earnestly leftwing but honest documentarian. Until I read this:
The filmmaker, who works primarily on projects for PBS, says there wouldn’t be a birther movement with a President Joe Biden in the White House. Burns then turned his attention to the Tea Party, saying a friend who attended a Tea Party event told him “almost every one she met there invoked the ‘n-word’” about the president, he recalls.
That friend isn’t the only one hearing that racial slur of late, he alleges.
“I have heard in last four years the ‘N-word’ used more often than in the rest of my life,” the 59-year-old filmmaker says, adding Obama’s detractors routinely call the president “un-American,” the “other” and a Muslim.
That’s according to Christian Toto at Big Hollywood, who says that Burns’ comments took place “during an interview with Breitbart News.” I’m hoping Breitbart News will release the audio or video of these comments. Assuming Toto accurately transcribed them, they instantly transport Ken Burns deep into Michael Moore territory — a hard left partisan who can no longer be trusted to deliver an honest narrative, as the late Pauline Kael perceptively noted in her review of Moore’s first agitpropumentary, Roger and Me.
I’m also curious if anyone at Breitbart.com counterpunched Burns’ hearsay in response. Especially after their late founder’s classic moment where he played a variation of Groucho Marx’s old You Bet Your Life game show with the left — prove that the N-Word was uttered when they claimed it was shouted to Democrat Congressional reps during the day in 2010 when ObamaCare was passed, and win $100,000.
As even the original BenSmither himself told Andrew Breitbart back then, “I think you’ve pretty much won this one, no?”
But then, it shows you just how inherently racist the Tea Party is, and how much their hatred of Obama is tied to racism, that they concurrently protested Barack Obama — and supported Allen West, Tim Scott, Herman Cain, Mia Love, and other black conservatives. Not to mention that numerous people in the Tea Party are black themselves, as Newsbusters’ Bob Parks vividly pointed out:
Now that’s racism straight up. Or not, but try telling that to anyone on PBS’s payroll.
Incidentally, Burns’ Civil War documentary and his other efforts have made historical events come alive for millions. Burns relied heavily on still photos and contemporaneous reports read by actors to recreate an era before movies, when simply the still photo was still a new and novel technological development. In sharp contradistinction, today’s news events are covered by zillions of words of news articles, blog posts, countless still photos, and hours of video, shot by both professionals and amateurs with cell phones, flip cams, tablet video, etc.
All that data — at least that which survives* — will serve as the raw material for the future Ken Burns and Michael Moores of the world to catalog this current era.
How inaccurate do you think it will be?
* Yes, and for that, I apologize.
“Un-American”, “other”, and “Muslim”.
Many think he is all these, but it isn’t his race that’s the issue. It’s his ideology.
I don’t think he’s Muslim. I think he’s athiest, which in itself doesn’t bother me, but I think he’s presented himself dishonestly. You don’t seek out religion and end up in a liberation theology church, unless you are very stupid, or you are actually seeking a fake religion, a “beard” of sorts.
That said, it is understandable some think he’s Muslim, given the fact that his father and stepfather were Muslim. Muslims in fact would consider him Muslim on this basis alone.
“The filmmaker, who works primarily on projects for PBS, says there wouldn’t be a birther movement with a President Joe Biden in the White House.”
That cuts both ways… the left will not be able to whine “raaaaacism” when a self-absorbed white nincompoop falls on his stupid face and fails miserably.
I always wondered why there wasn’t a segment on the Copperheads (slavery-enabler Democrats) in Ken Burns’ Civil War series.
Now I know.
A few things:
1.) You’d think a guy as media/technically savvy as Ken Burns would have simply pushed the ‘record’ button on his smart phone app and captured all these evil teabaggers dropping the ‘n-word’ as casually as they were at this confab. What a major coup this would have been for Burns and PBS;
2.) Joe Biden won’t know what hit him starting about January 2015 if he truly does plan to run for president. After the results of this year’s election, the Democrats are going to be welded to ginning up turnout via special interest identity politics for years, which means they’re going to want another ‘first’ to be their nominee, not some 70-year-old white guy. Ideally, they’d focus on nominating the first Latino president, but Marco Rubio might mess that plan up, which is why Sheriff Joe is likely to be annihilated not just by Hillary, but by much of the big media, who see the same ground rules working for the Dems in ’16 and to make it so will suddenly ‘discover’ all of Biden’s weird gaffes over the past three decades.
3.) Burns’ Civil War documentaries may have used the then-new technology of photographs to tell a story, but with the advance in technology in recent years and the ability of people with mindsets like Burns apparently has to access it, the line between images showing reality and creating unreality is going to be blurred. GCI is getting so adept at recreating life, I fully expect people in Hollywood and the media in the not-too-distant future to abandon trying to find incriminating evidence against conservatives and simply go into the digital studio to create their own, whether it be faking a Republican politician doing something in a supposed ‘hidden’ video, or a crowd of Tea Party members saying the ‘n-word’ in a Ken Burns PBS documentary. And with the low-information voters, it really wouldn’t matter if the image was later shown to be a fraud, based on the idea that a lie goes around the world while the truth is putting its boots on (i.e. NBC may get sued for doctoring a tape trying to show George Zimmerman is a racist, but how many out there still think George Zimmerman is a racist because they remember NBC’s doctored tape?)
I call horse manure on that story – either Burns is lying or his friend is.
You know the last time I heard the N-word being used? It was a another member of my department, someone I had until that conversation respected and appreciated. He was telling me what a useless “lying sack of sh*t” Romney was, and couldn’t understand why anyone had a problem with Obama. And said when Obama first appeared on the public scene he thought he was “just another street n***er from Chicago”. Said it right in front of me.
I’m not making that up, although I admit I have no recording of it, and I will not reveal this colleague’s name. But to hear an affluent, highly educated professor call Obama the N-word and to suggest *I* am the one who is racist? That’s astonishing.
Don;t you love how these lefties hear all these things and never have any evidence? Mitt makes his 47% comment at a private fundraiser meeting and it gets out but hundreds of people yelling the N word at public meetings never get recorded.
I really am starting to hate these people. They want to destroy us and the country and we better always remember that, Boehner?