Well, I’ve been thinking about watching Good Night and Good Luck again on DVD.  It’s one of the movies I bought during the first year of my girls’ lives when I couldn’t sit down and watch anything without being interrupted.  I believe I had to watch it with the volume down, and the only way I could understand what was being said was to turn on the captioning.

So, I’ve been toying with the idea of pulling it out of my collection and giving it another spin, but I wonder if its impact is important, anymore.

At the time it was released, it was one of the few mainstream Hollywood films that put the Bush administration on notice for what they were doing to us.  The McCarthy/Bush parallels at the time were incredibly strong and anyone who opposed the war or the administration was scared that some big ugly jack boot was going to drop.

But now with Bush on the way out for good, I think there’s a sense among many on the left that our problems are over.  Me personally, I’m not all that fired up about it anymore.  With the Dems in control of too houses of Congress, most of the damage to our civil liberties is now contained.

So without the specter of an all-powerful witch hunting political party hanging over our heads, does Good Night and Good Luck still work?  Maybe as a historical document, but like later seasons of Battlestar Galactica, it’s lost a lot of its potency as a work of politics.