Fox Guest Challenges The Butler’s ‘Simplistic, Unfair’ Portrayal of Reagan
Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley appeared on Fox News Monday afternoon to criticize Lee Daniels’ The Butler, an Oprah Winfrey-produced biopic of the White House butler who served under numerous presidents, a film that is drawing heat from conservatives over its portrayal of Reagan.
Most objectionable to Shirley and others is the film’s take on Reagan’s refusal to sanction South Africa over Apartheid. “It’s a very complex issue, and it was presented in a very simplistic fashion,” Shirley said. “It’s accurate to the extent that Reagan opposed the sanctions, but not accurate as to why he opposed the sanctions.”
Shirley argued that Reagan was constrained by Cold War politics:
“Everything in the Reagan administration has to be judged in the context of the Cold War. We were in a Cold War, engaged with what he called an Evil Empire. The only strongly anti-Communist nation on the African continent was South Africa, but they also had a policy of Apartheid, which we found equally repugnant. The sanctions would have hurt, according to Reagans briefings, the least affluent among the South Africans at the time, the blacks. The Zulu tribe, representing 6 million South African blacks, was vehemently opposed to sanctions…When you take a complex issue like South Africa and present it as somehow racist, it’s unfair to the subject matter and to the subject of that portrayal.”
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He also questioned the politics of the screenwriter behind the film.
“You have to go to motive,” Shirley said. “The screenwriter for this movie did write the screenplay for Game Change, which a lot of people thought was grossly unfair to Sarah Palin. And he also wrote the screenplay for Recount, which again a lot of people thought was a retelling of the history of the Florida recount, in a way that made the Bush forces look very bad and devious, and made the Gore forces look saintly and good. And that wasn’t what happened in Florida, or happened in the case of Sarah Palin.”
Watch the full segment here, via Fox News:
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