Recommended Rerun

I had a lazy spurt this past weekend and spent part of Sunday sprawled in a patio chair with a dog in my lap and my portable DVD player on the table beside me. A few weeks ago I had picked up the "Special Edition" of All the President's Men, a movie that came out in 1976. I was a senior in college that year and my roommate Lanu and I made an impulse drive from Belton to Austin one evening to see the movie when it was in the theater. I'm not sure what prompted us to do such a thing, since neither of us was at all interested in politics at the time. All I can figure is it had something to do with sitting in the dark and drooling over Robert Redford.

I can remember how much I enjoyed that movie. The story involved events that were only a few years old, but I'm sure I had little awareness of the investigative reporting that had caused the downfall of the presidency until I saw it unfold on the movie screen.

It had been a long time since I had sat through the movie. I found myself just as caught up in the story these many years later as I had been that night in the theater. I also enjoyed the DVD extras, which included a vintage "making of" feature and a second featurette wherein Redford, Hoffman, Hal Holbrook, Jane Alexander, and Ben Bradlee reminisced about the events of the time and the challenges of presenting the story on the big screen. This DVD issue also had a feature on the man who just recently revealed himself to be Deep Throat. It is all in all a very enjoyable package of movie and extras.

And along in there somewhere you get slapped in the face with how eerily familiar the whole thing seems. After all, the whole thing centered on the secrecy of an administration that felt it was above the law. It dealt with dirty politics and Republicans who did their best to destroy the checks and balances of democracy. Deja vu.

I usually leave the topic of politics to little brother, but permit me a bit of a rant here. There's nothing I hate worse than lies and that is the reason why I despise the current administration, who wouldn't know truth if it bit them on their collective butt. How I hope that some budding Woodward and Bernstein are chipping away at the foundation of all those lies, but I somehow doubt it.

Do yourself a favor. If you get a chance to see All the President's Men, give it another watching. And see if you don't catch the similarities. History does have a way of repeating itself.

LSW