Customer Reviews

The Hunting of the President

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

One reason I recommend this DVD is simply because it shows how the media has become a big business, driven by ratings and not by unbiased hard facts. How the media goes with the hype and looks at stories more as red meat rather than media worthy. The movie opened this week in Sacramento, CA at the Crest Theatre, and I hope it comes to Stockton CA which is easier for me to get to for a return showing. And its a college town.

It is also a cautionary tale of a movie (read the book for more in-depth reasoning) of how special interests can have a seek and destroy at any cost mentality. Whitewater being the case in point. According to the General Accounting Office (GAO) the cost of the independent counsel's 4 1/2-year inquiry of the president and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton came to $39.2 million. And they got nothing.

Susan McDougal, is shown (correctly) as being targeted by right wing extremists who assumed that being from Arkansas that she could be brought down easily, and that it must have come as a surprise when she stood her ground and being innocent was willing to go to jail for contempt rather than hell for lying.

And the movie shows both sides fairly in my opinion, with the main focus being on the evils of what actually happened and a warning IMO that if it could happen to the Clintons, beware it could happen to anyone. The book and then the movie made me dig out my copy of Niccolo Machiavelli's THE PRINCE, which is must reading for any thinking person.

Now this is what I find interesting as a moderate voter, the conservative hacks went after Hillary because she had an initial
investment of 1k when she did some trading of commodities. Yet the whole dang Bush family has made millions off of a simple friendship with the Saudi Royal family with the payment being made in blood by our patriotic military men and women. Yet where is the outcry?

And for those who think the media is liberal one need only read the book and see the movie to see that when the Clintons were basically exonerated by the final Special Prosecutors findings that this was reported in few if any major newspaper.

Remember when Hillary Clinton was mocked for claiming that she and Bill were the victims of a "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy?" Well, it turns out, there really was a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, and The Hunting of the President names names (as well as dates, places and times). When you think about the millions wasted on investigating Clinton's sex life, and see the rampant misdeeds going on, unvestigated, in the Bush White House (hello, Halliburton), it's enough to make your blood boil.

Like Josef K. Clinton was drawn into a prolonged, surreal, and nightmarish trial. Like Macbeth, every time he thoguht he had made it clean Starr threw in an extra surprise. In the background Gingrich, Murdoch, and Scaife were playing the parts of the witches on the moor, pulling all strings of his destiny. And like Hamlet, he must have felt like he was fighting a sea of misery!
They could not have done without the media so obediently jumping on any juicy piece of gossip.
This film is biased, but everything is backed up by facts. Why can't it be biased? The present adminsitration is not well-known for their strict adherence to facts and fairness.
The sad thing is that the media moghuls will order the networks to give this film the silent treatment, when everyone should she it, and start asking questions why there are no similar investigations into the activities of the present administration.

I have not yet bought the DVD, but I had occasion to see this film at a theatre in Little Rock, one of two such venues in the country. Less a vindication of Clinton than an indictment of the press, "Hunting" provides a timely commentary on the excesses of journalistic zeal that almost brought down a presidency. I was especially moved by the story of Susan McDougal, aka Joan of the Ozarks, who was treated like a serial killer during her near-two years in prison, after she ran afoul of nasty-minded Ken Starr and his minions. I also liked the brave and witty portrait of ex-Arkansas Governor Riley's wife, Claudia. The facts presented here may seem all too familiar by now, but we can thank authors Joe Conason and Gene Lyons for unearthing a good number of them. Students of history will long debate the merits of the Clinton presidency, but the incompetence of the press is now an established fact.

This expose by Harry Thomason, friend of Bill Clinton, is biased but authoritative -- believable primarily because it is filled with first-person accounts of the efforts to bring down the Clinton presidency. We hear from former right-wing hatchet man David Brock, Arkansas residents familiar with the disreputable sources who would say anything to hurt Clinton or get a stay in a fancy hotel, Paula Jones' lawyers, participants in the Arkansas Project, editors and journalists, and many others.

Remember that this was a twice-elected president, and taxpayers had to foot the bill for multiple investigations that lasted over 5 years and cost over $50 million, and NOTHING WAS FOUND AGAINST CLINTON EXCEPT LYING ABOUT AN AFFAIR. We should be outraged, not at Clinton's behavior (as bad as it was), but that conservatives tried to impeach an elected president! This happens in banana republics, NOT in America, right?!

The film also gives Susan McDougal her due. A victim of heartless ideologues, she was told she would go to prison unless she cooperated and made statements against Clinton THAT WOULD BE SUPPLIED FOR HER. They put her in death row garb so that she would be abused by the other inmates, and disobeyed a judge's order to move her to another prison; in the meantime, Ken Starr went on to become president of Pepperdine Law School, funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the fanatic who financed much of the vile anti-Clinton campaign. Who is more corrupt here?

Amazingly, in the disk's only extra (other than a trailer), a 43-minute talk by Clinton at the film's premiere, he tells supporters that we should not use the same techniques, that we should not try to personalize attacks, but that we should insist on a civil debate of the issues, because we will prevail. As in the 90s, the Clintons show more class than the conservative ideologues could ever dream of having.

The film can be heard in English and subtitled in English or Spanish.

The Hunting of the President is a film that every American should see. It is such a pity that Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11 is getting all the notoriety, because this powerful film, adapted from the book of the same title by Gene Lyons and Salon.com columnist Joe Conason, details with staggering accuracy, the right wing conspiracy to bring down President Clinton from his first days in office. And this film, like Michael Moore's is just as important and topical. The big revelation in The Hunting of the President is that the conspiracy was so enormous, that it lasted for so long throughout most of Clinton's presidency, and that so much of the taxpayer's money was spent on it. The scheme emanated from a fairly small faction of Republican millionaires, lawyers and ideologues who had the money and the venom necessary to do whatever it took to try and depose the sitting president. The film postulates that from the outset, the Republican establishment never liked Clinton, labeling him as white trash and in Washington to upset the status quo.

The film revolves around interviews with a list of commentators such as James Carville, Paul Begala, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, The New Yorker's Jeffery Toobin, and Susan McDougal. All give their opinions on the Whitewater scandal and the efforts to discredit the President through his suspected extra-marital affairs. The film also explains how Ken Starr and Ted Olsen along with the legal team representing Paula Jones had extensive ties to conservative groups like the Federalist Society. More shockingly, the film shows the efforts of hundreds of FBI agents and private investigators as they swamped Arkansas, looking for the slightest scrap of unseemliness and impropriety by the President. Ken Starr is portrayed as an evil Machiavellian character stopping at nothing to scandalize Clinton.

The most tragic figure in this documentary is not President Clinton - who is never actually interviewed - but Susan McDougal the former wife of Jim McDougal, the mentally ill, fiscally irresponsible man who embarked on the failed Whitewater deal with the Clintons. McDougal was offered a pardon from prison if she assisted the federal prosecutors in verifying their fabricated stories about the President. She refused, and spent two years in jail with women convicted of killing their children. The Hunting of the President lacks style and is obviously low budget and partisan, but nonetheless the film is an ardent and commendable account of an anti-democratic scandal that was deliberately conniving and underhanded. Mike Leonard July 04.

The abuse of power portrayed in this film is absolutely despicable and should be a lesson to us for the future. Even if you despise Clinton, you owe it to yourself to see what was done to the innocent people around him all because of a partisan fight for washington. The film is NOT an apology for Clinton; the film is a civics lesson, especially the speech at the end in the special features. If more people don't see the truth of what happened with the office of independent council and how horribly the constitution was trampled on, it will happen again. ...in fact, the next one could be you or me. Wake up!!

Overlooked among the plethora of anti-Bush DVDs currently on the market before the election, this documentary takes an intriguing look at the purported plot to destroy the career of Bill Clinton by what Hillary claimed was a "vast right-wing conspiracy". Given that this was co-directed by famous "Friend of Bill" Harry Thomason, along with Nickolas Perry, one can hardly expect a completely impartial view of its subject. Consequently, it is unlikely to change the minds of any staunch Republicans out there already critical of the Clinton presidency. At the same time, the film does provide important context for a lot of the more unsavory details surrounding his case than some of the more conservative media would have you believe. The result is an intriguing examination of a President scrutinized with unprecedented zeal.

Although the film begins with Clinton's early days in Arkansas state government, its focus is on two of the more damaging episodes in his political career, the Whitewater scandal and the attempted impeachment trial based on his sexual escapades before and during his White House years. Many of those involved in both scandals are featured here through news clips with a few of them newly interviewed. Surprisingly the events do not reflect an overly biased perspective, thus showing a warts-and-all portrait of a flawed man though a reconstruction of sorts. Whether or not you agree with what is presented, the filmmakers do a convincing job of backing up their portrayal with some less than flattering footage of the Clinton years. The use of dramatic re-creations and clips from a variety of Hollywood movies sometimes undermines the film's seriousness, but they don't minimize the points raised. Some of the higher profile personalities in the anti-Clinton camp come off poorly but according to the evidence presented, justifiably so - Paula Jones is seen as a fame-seeking narcissist, while Kenneth Starr is portrayed as a ruthless opportunist obsessed with his agenda and indifferent to the damage his tactics incur upon his duty in serving the public trust. On the other side, former Clinton advisor James Carville sums up accurately the documentary's main question, i.e., how much money should be spent on a clearly partisan effort to pull a virtual "coup d'état" against an elected American president? Probably the most telling moments belong to Susan McDougal, whose refusal to cooperate with Starr on the Whitewater case led to her serving two years in a maximum-security prison. She recounts her prison experiences with piercing and often horrifying detail.

Unfortunately, the Monica Lewinsky affair is given short shrift in the film, a sad omission, as this was the one development that expedited Clinton's fall from grace. Nevertheless, the film also illustrates his amazing resilience in rising above the political fray. In fact, Clinton himself provides clear evidence of this in an interesting supplement to the DVD, a videotaped segment that shows him introducing the documentary on stage at its premiere. For 45 minutes, he discusses with candor and a sense of humor, the historical context of the events that take place in the film as well as their impact on him. Highly recommended as a fascinating record of a most unusual presidency.

Highest praise to the filmaker who produced this (at times stunning) exposition of the incredible story of people's obession and fixation on destroying their shadow, Bill Clinton. It brings home the magnitude and depth of how hatred can drive people. The film clips are powerful witnesses to this disgraceful campaign. I am grateful that someone has told the story so well.

More sleazy backwater characters than a James Lee Burke novel, however, this is not the Bayou, and unfortunately, it's not fiction either. What becomes apparent early on in this film is that the vast right wing conspiracy doesn't necessarily have to be all that vast, or even a full-blown conspiracy for that matter, particularly if your enemies already share a common mindset. And evidently, Bill Clinton had several well-funded, highly motivated enemies prior to his arrival in Washington. Using interviews with some of the key players in this sad saga, Hunting of the President goes a long way toward exposing the who's, how's and why's behind the eight year quest to destroy BIll Clinton. Standouts among those with speaking parts are Susan McDougal, David Brock, Paul Begala, Jeffrey Toobin, Claudia Riley, and too many others to mention here, many of them familiar names and faces stretching from one end of the country to the other. The film is as much an indictment of the enormous amount of power concentrated in the hands of the American media, as it is a commentary on the overall state of the political process today. One has to wonder why, if the media is so "liberal," do we have to wait for documentaries to reveal the essential facts that the press has seemingly omitted.