‘Weiner’ most relevant documentary

Documents show different medal count on ‘American Sniper’

LOS ANGELES, May 26, (Agencies): “Weiner”, the juicy, exciting, and revelatory new documentary about Anthony Weiner’s 2013 campaign for mayor of New York City in the wake of the scandal that torpedoed his political career, is the story of an addiction — but not the one that you think. Okay, it’s about that addiction too: the one that drove Weiner, as a Congressman, to tweet sleazy messages and photos of himself to would-be groupies. But that’s old news; we hardly need Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s enthralling filmmaking to relive the photo seen ‘round the world. As “Weiner” begins, the scandal is behind him (or so he thinks), and the mayoral campaign looms as his shot at redemption.

Igniting

It’s startling to see the Weiner campaign actually catch fire, igniting crowds of New Yorkers in a way that Bill de Blasio’s did not. It may be part of the primal nature of movies that we get caught up, almost in spite of ourselves, in the whole Comeback Kid scenario, which is fueled by Weiner’s bellicose, truth-telling-in-shirt-sleeves liberal-activist style. The film reports that the driving force behind his decision to leap into the race was his wife and campaign consultant, Huma Abedin (the long-time adviser and right-hand woman of Hillary Clinton, which she still is), who could no longer face being a “pariah.” The campaign was designed to make the scandal into yesterday’s news, and that would happen whether he won or lost. Either way, the couple were spinning themselves into the future.

For a while, it looked like Weiner might win. In his addled and noodgy and fingerpointing way, he’s a born political rock star, and it’s a kick to see his dweeb-on-rye charisma magnetize crowds. He has to deal with constant questions about the scandal, but he brushes them off, and the strategy seems to work. Until, that is, the second wave of scandal crashes down: the breaking news that he continued to do this stuff after his resignation from Congress, after he’d already made a public show of contrition and said, in essence, “I’ll never do it again.” At that point, the air leaks out of his balloon. The issue becomes not sex but lying, the voters turn away from him, and the film starts to play like a Tom Wolfe novel come to life.

It’s here that the real theme of “Weiner” — and the film’s highly charged relevance — emerges. Kriegman and Steinberg brilliantly capture the media house of mirrors, with sound bites magnified into headlines refracted into entertainment inflated into global chatter. The mystery that still surrounds Anthony Weiner’s behavior is: How could he have done it...again? After he’d been caught and shamed? In the movie, the Weiner we see is an actor playing an unrepentant character who may just be himself.

Scandal

Even after that second wave of scandal, he jokes and dissembles and compartmentalizes, referring to what he did as “the thing” or “the dumb thing”, as if he’d been caught smoking a joint or deceiving voters about his taxes. He treats his transgressions as a triviality. After the famous MSNBC interview in which Lawrence O’Donnell asks him. “What is wrong with you?”, Weiner watches a replay of the interview on his laptop, smirking with pleasure at his own defensiveness. He thinks it’s one of his greatest hits! So what is wrong with him?

In “Weiner”, what’s wrong with Anthony Weiner is that he won’t just do anything to save his career. He’ll say and believe anything. He’ll deny, deny, deny — and believe his own denials. His real addiction is to the postmodern maelstrom of media politics, in which every moment is an act of image management, to the point that image management becomes the essence of the campaign, and its substance too.

The most fascinating figure in the movie is Huma Abedin, who starts off as radiant and intensely supportive of her husband but winds up skulking in the background of scenes, visibly unhappy at what she calls the “nightmare” they’re going through. Even then, she’s eerily cool, calm, and collected, so the question lingers: Is she talking about a personal nightmare or a political nightmare? Or are they one and the same for her? At one point it’s reported by New York magazine that Hillary Clinton has offered Abedin a Sophie’s choice: either divorce Anthony or recuse herself from Clinton’s budding presidential campaign. The rumor is that Clinton can’t afford that baggage, and it’s easy to see why, since the baggage dovetails with her own.

The dizzying rush of “Weiner” is that the phenomenon it captures — a political culture in which candidates are round-theclock addicts of image control — becomes, by the end, a powerful premonition of the current presidential campaign.

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Documents show the number of medals slain Navy Seal and “American Sniper” author received for his military service is different from what he indicated in his best-selling memoir about his four tours of duty in

Navy documents show Kyle earned one Silver Star and three Bronze Stars with valor, instead of the two Silver Stars and five Bronze Stars his book says he received.

The documents were obtained by online magazine The Intercept through an open records request, and the Navy on Wednesday confirmed the contents of the documents to The Associated Press.

The Silver Star is the third-highest military combat decoration. The Bronze Star is awarded to members of the Armed Forces for heroic or meritorious achievement or service in a combat zone.

Lt a Navy spokeswoman, told the AP that Kyle’s military personnel file states he received one Silver Star and three Bronze Stars with valor. Kyle’s discharge paperwork, known as a DD214 form, indicated that he had received two Silver Stars and at least five Bronze Stars, which is what he wrote in his book.

“The Navy considers the individual Service member’s official military personnel file and our central official awards records to be the authoritative sources for verifying entitlement to decorations and awards”, Pau said in a written statement. “The form DD214 is generated locally at the command where the Service member is separated. Although the information on the DD214 should match the official records, the process involves people and inevitably some errors may occur.”