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DVD Review: Follow the Money- The Big Buy by Birnbaum and Schermbeck
Wondering how things got to this pass?
As it happens, filmmakers Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck were in place, with video cameras, as the criminal indictments unfolded. The result is The Big Buy. The movie is available on DVD, and if you want to inspire your troops for the 2006 elections, pop some popcorn, open a couple of cold ones, and have a house party.
The whole Delay defense is predicated on saying this is all politics. That the huge corporate contributions coming in to TRMPAC that had a peripheral at most to Texas is just hardball politics and Democrats are just whining because they lost.
But Ronnie Earle, the Travis County DA who functions as a major protagonist in the film, sees it a bit differently.Earle, who is the one DA in the state of Texas with both the jurisdiction and the cojones to file charges in this case says "This is not about Democrats and Republicans. This is about cops and robbers."
The thing about political conspiracies is that they're usually not "Manchurian Candidate". They're corporate merger level boring.
That's what the conspirator's count on.
To spice up the presentation, Birnbaum and Schermbeck use a film noir conceit over the credits-angling on the Texas capitol and a blue jazz theme wailing away as if Texas Democracy were about to be revealed in a chalk outline.
Unfortunately, what this is mostly is a talking head documentary, so they don't sustain the conceit successfully-even with the flight to Ardmore that derailed the first redistricting attempt in 2003.
Even so, these are some very interesting heads-a who's who of Texas politics including Jim Hightower and Molly Ivins and current gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell. The story is a compelling one as it unfolds. I learned some details I didn't know even though I was following the redistricting fight pretty closely.
They also touch on the wide ranging and corrupting influence of Delay at the Federal level as well. Jack Abramoff even has a cameo (archive footage, not an interview).
Of course, the story's still unfolding.We'll know more about the ramifications for the current election season.
If there's one message to take away for Democrat's in Texas and all over the nation, it's actually articulated best by a bit player. Two middle-aged Republican Fort Bend belles are candid about how old Tommy boy went from legislative "furniture" to Majority Leader in the United States Congress.
"We abdicated control of the Republican Party to them. They supported candidates. They knocked on doors. They worked phone banks. They did a lot of things that we let them do, because frankly, we were too lazy to do them ourselvs."
Let that be a lesson to all of us-even more than corporations can't give money to political candidates in Texas.