Wonkette Movie Night: Wait For Election Results Without Looking At Chuck Todd’s Stupid Face

First, GO VOTE!

You've done your civic duty and voted Donald Trump out of office, along with all his Republican cronies. You deserve more than watching Chuck Todd say stupid crap. Why would you do this to yourself. Wonkette will have a liveblog with cussing and election results. Plus 100 percent no Chuck Todd!

As you wait for returns to come on, along with some small vindication that not everyone in America is fascist-adjacent, pour yourself a glass of your favorite non-denominational beverage and binge watch movies. Here are some recommendations and Chuck Todd's not featured in any of them.

1994's Speechless is a pleasant reminder of a time when people from different political parties could have fulfilling relationships, with banging and everything, because they're both well-off cis white people for whom elections have the same impact as a sporting event. This fantasy period never actually existed, though. Your Republican besties and drunk hookups were still dismantling public schools, gutting unions, and smacking around the marginalized.

 Speechless stars Michael Keaton, Christopher Reeve, and Geena Davis or Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman if the movie studios hadn't failed us. Reeve plays a shallow reporter and during interviews promoting the film, he discussed how the media doesn't always live up to its responsibilities.

Alexander Payne's Election from 1999 (one of my favorite years in cinema) is the story of a mediocre white man (Matthew Broderick) so frustrated by his own lack of achievement that he's obsessed with preventing an ambitious, smart woman (Reese Witherspoon) from becoming class president. It reminds me a lot of 2016.

I know I reference  The American President  a lot it still gives me chills whenever Michael Douglas as President Andrew Shepherd declares that he'll “go door to door" if necessary to convince Americans to let him grab all their guns.

Writer Aaron Sorkin's work on "The West Wing" can seem charmingly quaint if not absurdly naive, but Shepherd's description of Republican Senator Bob Rumson is a prescient summation of Trump-ism.

I've known Bob Rumson for years. And I've been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn't get it. Well, I was wrong. Bob's problem isn't that he doesn't get it. Bob's problem is that he can't sell it!

We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.

But not this time, right? Please, NOT THIS TIME.

My wife and I are both "West Wing" fans, and I think what I still appreciate about the series is Sorkin's belief that well-intentioned elected officials exist and want to serve the public not their own interests. Not everyone's Mitch McConnell or Marco Rubio. If we let Republican obstruction and corruption make us cynical, we give up our power to stop them. We don't vote. We don't enter politics ourselves.

The Netflix documentary "Knock Down The House" details the 2018 Democratic primary campaigns of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Amy Vilela, Cori Bush, and Paula Jean Swearengin. Ocasio-Cortez was the only one to win a congressional seat, but Bush successfully ran again in 2020. 

Donald Trump and the GOP has tried demonizing Ocasio-Cortez and fellow House representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, but they won't remain silent, nor will the more than 100 women serving in the House, all of whom — except for a common Tulsi — voted to impeach the motherfucker last year.

Today, 298 women are running for House seats and 204 of them are Democrats. Women voters are anticipated to reject Trump in record numbers, and many of them will do so in honor of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We lost so much in 2020. Did it have to include her? We all wished she'd lived to see America make a better choice.

RBG - Official Trailer    www.youtube.com 

It's perhaps bittersweet viewing but I still recommend the  RBG documentary, which is available on Hulu, and On The Basis of Sex , a biopic dramatizing a young Ginsburg's legal battles that advanced equality instead of defending the powerful and ... oh screw it, I'm mad again, so I'm just gonna go watch 1969's Sweet Charity . There's gotta be something better than this. Don't let me down! Go vote.

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