A rather surprising thing happened on HBO's "Real Time" Friday evening.
Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of the former Speaker of the House, scolded host Bill Maher for spending the first half of his show "dissing America" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
On Thursday’s Joy Behar Show on HLN, host Behar seemed to suggest that seeing poor whites might make Republicans more compassionate toward the poor as she hosted filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi to talk about her upcoming HBO documentary on the homeless who live in Orange County, California. Behar asked Pelosi – daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – if the reason she interviewed only whites for her film was to "make more of an impact" on Republicans:
JOY BEHAR: Did you deliberately only interview white families?
ALEXANDRA PELOSI: Well, they just happened to be at the school where I was interviewing, that`s who was there.
BEHAR: I`m only asking that because maybe you felt that that would make more of an impact on Republican congressmen and people who tend to, you know, veto any kind of help for people on the, you know, because the, oh, you know what I`m saying.
Pelosi later blamed the existence of the homeless problem in Orange County on Disneyland for not pushing the government to build more public housing:
The left wing liberal media have always been a real close-knit family.
But most of the American people don't believe them anyway, you see.
The Alexandra Pelosi (daughter of Nancy) documentary, "Right America: Feeling Wronged," premiered on HBO last night. One word perfectly describes it: "tedious." Over and over and over again, Pelosi tries to hammer home the point that conservatives are angry because they just don't know what is best for them. And what is best is Obama...at least in Pelosi's opinion. Overall, her documentary offers very little insight except for the fact that Pelosi thinks socialism is misunderstood by the "unenlightened" yahoos. However, a Salon.Com interview with her about the documentary reveals quite a lot of insight into the incredible elitism of one Alexandra Pelosi and it's not a pretty sight. So suspend your gag reflexes as Pelosi the Younger puts her elitism on display. First off she blames blogs for much of the current political climate (meaning angry conservatives from the Pelosi POV):
I think that the blogs have poisoned the political atmosphere in such a way that I never saw this kind of anger and hatred in 2000. In 2008, I was impressed by how angry it got. But you know elections have gotten nasty. I do think that blogs have really given people a place to, I don't know, maybe it's therapeutic for them. But it’s really gotten them fired up in a way. They talk to each other online and then they get worked up and then they go meet each other at rallies. And I just feel like the Internet has really changed the climate at the political rallies. Because I remember the Bush rallies as being fun. But you know, a lot's happened. 9/11 and all that poisoning the well. The whole partisan Bush years and the war poisoned the well. A lot of other things contributed. You can't just blame the blogs.
One need look no further than the NewsBusters archives on fashion critic Robin Givhan and TV critic Tom Shales to see that the Style section for the Washington Post is hardly immune from the liberal bias that plagues much of the paper's A-section.
But for a change we're happy to note when a Postie in the Style section casts a critical glance at something in the popular arts that unfairly skewers conservatives. Such is the case today with reporter Michael Leahy's withering critique of Alexandra Pelosi's [file photo at right] newest documentary, "Right America: Feeling Wronged -- Some Voices From the Campaign Trail":
It's drive-by journalism, to put it charitably, a string of stupefyingly brief hit-and-run interviews with a bunch of unidentified people who we know are going to say nothing that will surprise us. By then, we've already figured out they're going to be fried by Pelosi's camera. We know they're going to sound like yahoos, often goaded, always reduced to sound bites and caricatures.
Leahy, recalling his impressions of conservative voters from his own campaign reporting, continued by dismissing Pelosi's documentary as a cheap excuse "for a snarky laugh track" at the expense of center-right Americans (emphasis mine):