Reprising their anti-Israel screed in Munich (2005), Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner are at it again in their widely acclaimed new best picture nominee, Lincoln. The film itself is refreshingly free of wild leftist sucker punches, except for a bizarre rewriting of history that left two Connecticut Congressmen on the wrong side of the 13th Amendment banning slavery. But that doesn’t mean that its creators won’t spin the story of Barack Obama as a replay of Lincoln’s life.
The latest move in that direction came this week when Kushner, an Israel-hating radical leftist, told Charlie Rose that Barack Obama’s big win in 2012 signified the end of the “Reagan era ideology.” He stated:
And you know I consider myself a person of the left. And — and I have left impatience with the pace of change and I am aware that people suffer terribly while they`re waiting for change to happen. The most vulnerable people suffer the most terribly. And I’m a gay man and I`ve been waiting a long time for, you know, full enfranchisement and I`m still not there.But watching this President and reading about that President, I really began to think long and hard about the processes of electoral democracy and the pace of change in an electoral democracy and what’s possible, you know.
This is typical stuff from the triumphalist left, which believes that each electoral victory is an irreversible step in the progressive march to the communitarian sea.
But it’s Kushner’s hijacking of history to push his agenda that’s truly offensive. Kushner has stated that Barack Obama’s cynical embrace of gay marriage – an announcement perfectly timed to win him plaudits and campaign cash from gays and lesbians in Hollywood, even though Obama continues to stand against the federalization of gay marriage – was “Lincolnian.” Kushner continued:
I mean he started out in ’08 saying I don’t believe that marriage should be — I believe marriage is between a man and woman but I’m evolving. And that was clearly code to anybody with a brain saying, you know, of course I believe in same-sex marriage. The constitutional law scholar, he understands the difference.
Well, no. Obama never said that traditional marriage was unconstitutional. He still has not. In fact, he opposes making marriage a constitutional issue at all. Yet Kushner continues this rampage through historical rewriting: “I think it was handled with absolute strategic and moral perfection. It arrived at exactly the right moment. As my husband said to him tonight, it was a life-changing moment when the president of the U.S. said that.”
That’s not the only comparison Kushner has made between Lincoln and Obama:
Watching the Obama presidency through the lens of Lincoln has been a transformative thing for me. I think Barack Obama is a great president. I won’t say that he’s as great as Lincoln. I don’t know if there’ll ever be a president as great as Abraham Lincoln. But I think Obama inherited a mess as formidable as the mess that FDR inherited when he came into Washington during the Great Depression. Progressive people have not been patient enough, and thoughtful enough, in our criticisms of him. I feel it’s been a blessing to be thinking about Lincoln the whole time. Lincoln reminds you that great good can come from compromise, and always from politics.
Obama is not a compromiser; he’s never passed a budget, and Obamacare was a partisan farce. Nor is he in Lincoln’s league in terms of the challenges he has faced. After all, is there any challenge to screwing up a recovery so badly that it marks the worst economic recovery in American history, then being feted by a lapdog media? And where’s the Lincolnian leadership in campaigning around the country without a shred of political maneuvering back home to care for the needs of Americans?
Hollywood has done its part to interpret Barack Obama as a great president, the same way they rewrote FDR into a dynamo of economic genius. If George W. Bush were still president, Lincoln would never have been made; no one in Hollywood would have tolerated the comparison, even inadvertent, between Bush and Obama. But Obama’s record is substantially worse than Bush’s in virtually every area, and Bush was no great shakes. The difference? Obama’s a far-left radical. And the Lincoln project is designed to achieve the same goal Barack Obama tried to achieve with his second inaugural address: hijacking American history and rewriting it to fit leftist narratives.
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