Not that my first inclination today is to post about race, but circumstances necessitate it

There's the rodeo clown embarrassment.  There's the still-fresh Zimmerman acquittal, kept so by the four different "we-are-Trayvon" covers of the current issue of Ebony. There's the O'Reilly-Sharpton feud.

And now comes this new movie, The Butler.

Get ready to be subjected to a barrage of gushing about its powerful honesty and unflinching look at America's flaws and testimony to the steadfastness of the human heart from the usual sources.

Look, the script was inspired by a 2008 Washington Post profile of an actual White House butler named Eugene Allen, who worked there from 1952 to 1986.  Director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong (of Palin-bashing Game Changer fame) have used that actual person as the launching point for creating the fictional protagonist Cecil Gaines, and the departure from the inspiration becomes immediately complete.

But The Butler is not really about Eugene Allen; that much is clear from the opening seconds, in which the camera drifts over a Georgia plantation while Forest Whitaker intones with quiet majesty, “The only thing I ever knew was cotton.” Never mind that Allen was actually born in Virginia.

Never mind, either, that Allen’s mother and father were notrespectively raped and murdered by a cartoonishly brutal white landowner — or that such depredations would not have been casually dismissed in the early 1920s, even if carried out against black sharecroppers.

Sounds like it's going to be unabashedly cheesy and vulgar, too:

Strong’s script offers not so much a plot as a row of clichés, arranged with such appalling neatness that the mind aches for something, anything, original. It is almost refreshing when the narrative occasionally swerves from bromidic NPR progressivism into something a bit nastier — as when Martin Luther King Jr. explains that he opposes the Vietnam War because “the Viet Cong don’t call us niggers,” or when Cecil equates American slavery with genocide: “America’s always turned a blind eye toward what we’ve done to our own. We’ve heard about the concentration camps; but these camps went on for 200 years right here in America.”

Even the score is hackneyed: Classical piano concertos by Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Schumann fill the White House, while the Gaines family and the other black characters in the film groove to the strains of James Brown, Shorty Long, and the O’Jays. With due reverence to the Godfather of Soul, might not the real Allen family have put on a Schumann record too, once in a while?

And, of course, the fact that Gaines' tenure extends into the mid-1980s provides Daniels and Strong with the perfect opportunity to latch onto a contortion of fact to make Ronald Reagan look like, at best, indifferent and, at worst, a bigot:

Though Dwight Eisenhower (played by Robin Williams) is favorably portrayed in The Butler, fellow Republicans Richard Nixon (John Cusack) and Ronald Reagan (Alan Rickman) are thrown under the bus because the modern Left is obsessed with the fiction that Republicans are enemies to black people.

Reagan, in fact, is denounced as having damaged or dismantled all Civil Rights policies in the country — an absurd claim that the movie doesn’t even attempt to justify.

The only Reagan-related racial issue that The Butler can muster is his veto of sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa, which wasn’t even a U.S. Civil Rights issue and which Reagan believed would worsen conditions for blacks in that country. The movie portrays this entirely understandable decision (which was overridden by Congress) as simple heartlessness toward black people. 

Mike Flynn at Breitbart makes plain the chasm between fact and fantasy regarding the relationship between the historical Allen and the historical Reagan:

This is pure fiction. A Washington Post profile in 2008 noted that Allen and his wife kept framed photos of Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy in their living room. Pictures of the other presidents Allen served were hung in the basement. Why would the real-life Allen keep pictures of Reagan in the most prominent place in his home if he had quit his job over policy disagreements with the Administration? 

The closeness between Allen and the Reagans is evidenced by another anecdote in the profile. Allen was the first butler to attend a state dinner as a guest. The Reagans invited Allen and his wife to attend a state dinner for West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.  

I'm glad I had ample warning before I had any occasion to subject myself to this garbage.  About a year ago, my wife and I, searching iTunes for something to watch on the iPad one evening, rented The Help, and that was enough Hollywood racial-guilt-mongering to last me for a good long while.

One of our times' principle frustrations is the futility of pointing up the disconnect between real-life post America and the fantasy world the Freedom-Haters strive so mightily - and, often, all too effectively - to convince us that we inhabit.  The Most Equal Comrade is richly deserving of all the derision that is ever heaped on him - by rodeo clowns, talk show hosts, me, or anyone else.  He is the worst president in US history.   He has not a patriotic bone in his body.  He is deliberately dismantling America's leadership role on the world stage, and dismantling economic freedom and its resultant prosperity at home.  The FHers' only hope of preventing a critical mass of this nation's citizenry from seeing that is to immediately infect all conversation about it with the accusation of bigotry.

Is it vulgar and childish?  Of course, and that says much about how far we have fallen from our peak as a civilization.  You don't just "get away with" such a position; it's quite easy to depict it as the norm, departure from which is, in this portrayal, indication of an irredeemable character flaw.

There's only one thing to do.  Keep reporting what is actually going on.  Keep reminding all who still have free minds just how late in the day it really is.