Why buy a Senate seat when you can rent to own?

• The lesson of the Blagojevich scandal is, ultimately, not going to be about the importance of integrity and the rule of law. The real lesson will be that if you have to bother to ask someone to determine what a Senate seat is worth to them, then you're really too stupid to belong in government in the first place. Blagojevich is obviously a bungler since he got caught. Obama, on the other hand, is proving to be more skillful. First Ted Kennedy endorsed Obama against challenger Hillary Clinton in the Democratic party nominating election. Then Obama nominated Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state after winning the election, and Hillary Clinton accepts. Now, Caroline Kennedy, of all people, wants to "pull an Obama" and jumpstart a political career by being appointed directly into the Senate to replace Clinton.



• In another suspicious deal, it has been reported that Eddie Murphy got cast as the Riddler in the upcoming sequel to "Batman Returns". Although, I suppose that Murphy might have been given the role because he was a good actor; perhaps "stand-up comic turned film actor who specializes in fat jokes" is a perfect fit for the role of a villain who uses mindbending puzzles to taunt and torture Batman.

A few easy pieces

• An Iraqi reporter threw shoes at President Bush during a press conference in Iraq. This is actually a sign that Iraq might be well on its way towards becoming a stable, democratic country. Think about it: here is a country that has suffered sectarian violence, street-level terror, and government-sponsored pogroms for decades. Now a reporter can throw a shoe at the leader of the free world and suffer, say, the leader of the free world laughing in his face about it. That seems like progress.
  
  Or put it this way. American Democrats have been waging a cold, civil guerilla war against President Bush from Election Day 2000 to the president. If the Democrats were to stop their relentless campaign to poison public opinion against Republicans and merely resort to throwing shoes at the President to register their disapproval, we'd be calling the Bush years another "Era of Good Feelings".



• It should be clear now that the Republican party has developed a serious case of Tyler-Fillmore disease with the rise of John McCain to de facto party leader since 2000. True conservatives knew that if Senator McCain lost the 2008 election to Senator Obama, McCain would take it upon himself, as a true Republican moderate, to enact President Obama's legislative agenda in 2009.
  
  Thus, in a sign that the Blagojevich scandal is politically damaging Obama and helping Republicans, Senator John McCain thinks that the Republicans should "lay off" of the Blagojevich scandal. That the Republicans should be doing the opposite of what John McCain advises would make a sound rule of thumb at this point.

The Blagojevich scandal

Obama is possibly implicated in an impeachment level scandal and he isn't even president yet.

Here's a game to play: ask your liberal friends about the scandal and watch them squirm. One of my liberal friends have already tried to explain to me that auctioning off a United States Senate seat to the highest bidder is just "politics as usual" because "everybody does it".

The election is over and Obama won. Let the fascism begin.

Senator Chris Dodd issues a preliminary order to GM in preparation for the upcoming auto industry diktat:

U.S. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd called on a top auto executive to resign in exchange for bailout money from the federal government.

Dodd said General Motors' chief executive officer Rick Wagoner -- who has been with GM since 1977 -- should be replaced if the faltering auto company is to receive any money from the government.

The Democrats spent a great deal 2008 patiently explaining which rights they were going to take from the people. Dictating the choice of CEO to a private corporation is just the beginning.

Every dark cloud has a silver lining.

Saxby Chambliss won re-election to the Senate in George, thus denying the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority.

The environmental movement is trying to take over the world.

Yes, it is. In a proposal that can only make a sane human being exclaim, "Hell no!", the new idea is for an international environmental court that would punish nations that don't protect the environment enough:

Stephen Hockman QC is proposing a body similar to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to be the supreme legal authority on issues regarding the environment.

The first role of the new body would be to enforce international agreements on cutting greenhouse gas emissions set to be agreed next year.

But the court would also fine countries or companies that fail to protect endangered species or degrade the natural environment and enforce the "right to a healthy environment".

Short of appointing a global economic czar -- and giving him the powers of a Romanov Czar -- its hard to imagine a more profound transfer of sovereignity from nation-states to a global governing body. Unfortunately, the proposal gets worse (my emphasis):

As well as providing resolution between states, the court will also be useful for multinational businesses in ensuring environmental laws are kept to in every country.

The court would include a convention on the right to a healthy environment and provide a higher body for individuals or non-governmental organisations to protest against an environmental injustice.

The proposal not only wants to centralize sovereignity in a one-world governing body; it wants to give the radical, Marxist, eco-radical fringe an absolute veto over the global economy. Objectively speaking, this is totally insane.

It's 2008. You can stop drinking the Clinton kool-aid now.

"The Washington Post" recently published an op-ed arguing that Bill Clinton should be appointed to fill Hillary Clinton's senate seat if she becomes the new Secretary of State. The reason for this opinion is that Bill Clinton as a senator would be the coolest thing ever (embedded hyperlinks in original):

Doing so would spare the governor the agonizing dilemma of choosing from the 20 or so Democrats already named as contenders for the junior senator's seat. Those mentioned include six sitting members of the House of Representatives (three of each sex), Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Caroline Kennedy and her cousin Robert Kennedy Jr., Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown (an African American), and Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión Jr. (who is Hispanic). In this no-win competition, Paterson has to balance claims of gender, race, ethnicity and geography. He could wind up gaining one grateful ally while alienating not only all the losers but also millions of members of the disparate constituencies that each represents.

Hence the appeal of Bill Clinton. Who in his party could question so historic and dazzling a choice? In a stroke, the appointment would provide Sen. Clinton's indefatigable husband with a fitting day job, serve the interests of a state beset by a meltdown in its most vital economic sector and offer a refreshing reverse twist on a tradition whereby deceased male senators, representatives or governors are succeeded by their widows.

Anybody who can still think that giving the Clintons more power is "refreshing" obviously has kool-aid coming out of their ears and nose by now, although the argument that appointing Clinton to the post will keep the high-level idiots in the New York State government from fighting to the death does have a certain charm to it.

As anyone evenly faintly familiar with the Clinton's knows, the level of irrational enthusiasm that the authors of the op-ed are exhibiting can only mean that the article is a "trial balloon". The conspiracy theoretical interpretation is simple. Putting Bill Clinton into the Senate would give Hillary Clinton an ubshakable legislative ally for her time in the State Department. Perhaps more importantly, it would give Bill and Hillary a New York / DC alliance to contend with Obama's Illinois / Massachusetts alliance in 2012. A Senator Bill Clinton would presumably be able to swing a large chunk of the nation's mainstream media back into a Clintonian orbit in 2012.

The suspicion is that this is a blatant political "power play" to give Hillary Clinton a "shadow government" in preparation for 2012. The proposal, as abominable as it is, thus has a silver lining to it: any proposal that potentially allows me to experience Schadenfreude at Obama's expense can't be all bad.

Some really boneheaded advice for the GOP

Armin Rosen has an article detailing five major things that the Republicans can do to become electoral victors again. Suffice it to say that there are some real problems with the list, mostly connected with the Libertarian assumptions behind the list points. Starting from the top and working our way down, the author's first of five bullet points is "oppose liberalism". He wrote (author's emphasis and embedded hyperlink):

-OPPOSE LIBERALISM: All of this talk about “the direction of conservatism” is bullshit (and yeah, I realize this is a post about “the direction of conservatism…”) . From Burke to Metternich to Gingrich, the onlyresponsibility [sic] of conservatism has been to provide a principled check on otherwise-unfettered social experimentation.

As it is, this is a good start to this list although we conservatives might have good reason to be wary. The author mostly uses it as an excuse to paper over the Libertarian/Conservative divide in the Republican party, but papering over ideological divides is, technically speaking, a potentially winning electoral strategy. Moving on, we come to point number two:

-DON’T GIVE UP ON SOCIAL CONSERVATISM. BUT DON’T EMPHASIZE IT EITHER: This is part and parcel of my first suggestion. The Rove-Palin divide-and-conquer strategy clearly isn’t a winner anymore, and conservatives really have nothing to gain from taking a hard-right stance on social issues. Then again, they have a lot to lose from giving up on them altogether. A “hate the sin, not the sinner” tack should win back to the social center that’s been voting blue in recent years: basically, conservatives should promote traditional values without championing measures that would punish those who don’t.

Here we see that the conservative's wariness is entirely justified. A Republican party that is terrified of taking a hard-Right stance is a Republican party that has conceeded control of politics to the liberals. Whatever stance we make now, no matter how moderate and reasonable and centrist it seems at the moment, will eventually become a hard-right stance as the liberals keep marching Left. It's just a matter of time.

The author's mistake is that assigning to conservatism the political role of holding the Left in check presupposes that the Left has an inherently legitimate political agenda. That's all fine and good, but what happens when the Left decides that principle, as such, needs to be eliminated from the nation's political institutions? What happens when the Left opposes conservative stances merely because any conservative stance at all is offensive to the Left?

Of course, this is all in theory. Maybe the American people were just waiting for same-sex marriage to be enacted before launching a new golden age of conservative governance as far as the eye can see. Unfortunately for the author's case, his points get a lot worse than this. The author's third point is a major blunder (author's embedded hyperlink):

-DUMP THE DRUG WAR: Need an issue that’ll win back the youth vote while moving conservatives in a simultaneously cautious and more progressive direction? Well, you’re welcome Michael Steele, ‘cuz this is a guaranteed winner.

This is just totally insane. Unrestrained drug abuse is probably the one agent of social change in existence that is even more powerful and destructive than liberalism (look up "China" and "opium" in Wikipedia if you get a chance). If conservatism is really a political movement acting as a check on unfettered change, then why in a million years would conservatives want to unleash drug abuse across the United States?

The author's fourth point is pure political fantasy:

-RUN DAVID PETRAUS FOR PRESIDENT IN 2012

Yeah, good luck with that. Finally, we have the author's point five:

-FOUND AN OPINION JOURNAL OTHER THAN THE NATIONAL REVIEW AND THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Both have gone from being quirky voices of reason in American political discourse to being unreadable party rags.

Yes, that's right. If 2008 has taught the Republican party anything, it is that the Republican party needs more mavericks!

Staring at a movie screen all of your life apparently can damage your brain.

Rogert Ebert thinks that Batman's Gotham City is supposed to represent Chicago, not New York City.

Liberals don't want to destroy religion, they just want to make it "better".

George W. Bush had "compassionate conservatism". John McCain had "national greatness conservatism". Barack Obama has Obamianity:

The Charter for Compassion project on the Internet at www.charterforcompassion.org springs from a "wish" granted this year to religious scholar Karen Armstrong at a premier Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in California.

"Tedizens" include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin along with other Internet icons as well as celebrities such as Forest Whittaker and Cameron Diaz.

Wishes granted at TED envision ways to better the world and come with a promise that Tedizens will lend their clout and capabilities to making them come true.

Armstrong's wish is to combine universal principles of respect and compassion into a charter based on a "golden rule" she believes is at the core of every major religion.

Yes, that's right, the cutting edge of religous thought in America is yet another attempt to launch a Christianity 2.0 without a pope, a St. Paul, or a Satan.

National service and propaganda

Michele Catalano wrote an article today defending Barack Obama's national service goals. Catalano's basic argument is that Obama just wants Americans to be nice to each other for once. For example, Catalano writes

There are thousands upon thousands of high school and college students, as well as adults, doing some form of community service right now. Service to your community is an altruistic thing; it is a way of perhaps giving back to a community that has given to you. It is a way to reach out to a community, to help others who may not be as fortunate as you, to teach young adults about sharing, caring, and helping others, to do something out of the goodness of your heart that will benefit your community. This is not slavery. This is not forced labor. This is outreach. It represents values. Slavery is an act that benefits no one but the person who owns the slave; community service benefits both the giver and receiver and helps make the world a better place and leaves a general good feeling for everyone involved. It is not comparable to slavery.

Well, yes, voluntary community service is most certainly of social benefit to a nation. The point that Catalano seems to overlook is that voluntary community service can also play a powerful political role in a nation as well. Purely as an illustration of my point, consider a small part of what Michael Burleigh has written about the Nazi charities in "The Third Reich: A New History":

The Nazis sought to rectify these failings [of the Weimar Republic's welfare system] by replacing faceless and obtuse bureaucracy with remoreseless activism, and by fusing charity and welfare. Calling the resulting arrangements an aberrant apotheosis of the welfare state, or a 'racial welfare state', does not quite do justice to the subtlety of Nazi arrangements. Mass voluntarism demonstrated the national commnuity in action, while enabling the government to divert public resources to ends other than welfare.

This isn't to suggest that Obama wants to create a Nazi-style welfare establishment. This is to suggest that charitable giving and voluntary community service, as such, is not a bad thing, but that government-sponsored charity and community service can be used as a propaganda tool by unscrupulous politicians. Catalano's own article betrays Obama's propaganda game in this regard. Catalano writes that:

Obama would encourage a goal of 50 hours of community service for high school students. That’s 50 hours over the course of a year, hours that could be spent cleaning up a park, reading to the elderly, working in a soup kitchen, assisting developmentally disabled children, delivering meals, collecting clothing for shelters, or working with local community programs like Kiwanis. There are myriad ways in which the youth of America can get involved with their surrounding communities, providing a give and take that benefits both the student and the community at large.

Notice the conception of community service as primarily labor-intensive instead of intellectual work. Community service is here conceived as sacrifice instead of "selfishness", labor-intensive work instead of intellectual work, and above all action instead of thought. These are the undeniable hallmarks of propaganda, and in Obama's case, I'm pretty sure this won't end up being conservative propaganda.

Political casualties of 2008, part II

Casualty #2: Public financing of presidential elections

This report really just says it all:

The Federal Election Commission is not likely to conduct a potentially embarrassing audit of Barack Obama’s record-breaking fundraising campaign despite allegations of questionable donations and accounting.

That’s the disclosure from Politico.com, which reports that Obama will probably escape scrutiny in large part because unlike John McCain, he declined to accept $84 million in public financing.

Accepting that money automatically triggers an audit, meaning that the FEC is obligated to thoroughly audit the McCain campaign’s coffers, which will take months and cost McCain millions to defend.

Let's recap. John McCain, the honorable man, signs up for the inherently noble public financing system to obtain a corruption-free source of campaign cash for his presidential campaign. Therefore, every last penny that McCain spent in his campaign must be rigorously audited to prove that not even the slightest taint of corruption was attached to it. On the other hand, Barack Obama was more than willing to saw "screw you" to the entire system and raise gigatons of cash from anybody and everybody. Therefore, the system couldn't even less whether this was done fraudulently or illegally and won't even bother to investigate.

It is clear that the federal campaign financing system has totally failed. Barack Obama has escalated the two-party rivalry to a point beyond the ability of the current system to comprehend, much less regulate. At this point, simple political survival makes disengaging from the federal campaign financing system the sin qua non of a serious Republican presidential contender.

The only possible way to salvage the system is the Conservative position: remove unconstitutional restraints on political donations. The principle corruption problem in American campaign finance is not making sure that little old ladies and college students aren't giving too much to campaigns. It is fraudulent donations and donations from people who are not American citizens. The FEC will operate much more efficiently if it focuses on preventing electoral campaign crime instead of trying to police the public virtue.

Political casualties of 2008, part I

In a landslide vote, John McCain has been selected to succeed Bob Dole as the nation's next Viagra spokesman. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has received the consolation prize: to become the 44th president of the United States of America.

Instead of crying over spilled milk, it is the job of responsible Republicans to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it for 2012.

Casualty #1: McCain's Political Career

If the events of the 2008 campaign have proven anything, it is that John McCain has lost his grip on political reality. McCain's response to the collapse of the housing market was probably the single most inept political judgement that any presidential-level politician had made in a generation.

Simply put, the housing crash put McCain's conception of honor for a senator in conflict with his conception of honor as a presidential candidate. When the crisis hit and Henry Paulson began pushing for a major bailout, McCain reacted, as he thought an honorable senator should react, by suspending politics as usual and unifying with the president's plan. That's fine for a senator, but not fine for a presidential candidate. A presidential candidate has honor in his duty to the electorate to honorably assembling an electoral constituency to address problems.

McCain is openly contemptuous of this second possibility, of course, although McCain the presidential candidate has spent years successfully misleading the public into thinking that he was capable of both being an honorable senator and an honorable presidential candidate. With the warm glow of mainstream media approbation that he enjoyed during the second Bush's presidency, it seemed like he wouldn't have any problems maintaining appearances or escaping the consequences. In 2008, the housing crisis finally forced McCain to make the tough decision without the mainstream media's safety net, and suffice it say that McCain totally bungled it.

Update: Donald Luskin points out that the "Wall Street Journal"'s editorial page makes the same point in a defense of Sarah Palin:

We are asked to believe that Mrs. Palin was not ready for a national campaign. On what evidence from any part of this election are we to conclude that anyone on the McCain campaign team was ready for a national campaign? ...Let's remember too that the only time Mr. McCain surged ahead -- in the polls, in the volunteers, in the mojo -- was when he picked Mrs. Palin. Before that he and his staff had been flying solo, and they were losing. When the contest returned to the top of the ticket, as presidential campaigns inevitably do, Mr. McCain and his team drove their lead into the ground.

It wasn't Mrs. Palin who dramatically flew to Washington promising a legislative answer to the most important economic issue of our day -- and then, in the words of a New York Times campaign profile, "came off more like a stymied bystander than a leader who could make a difference."

A totally irresponsible conspiracy theory

There is a ninety-nine percent chance that this conspiracy theory is absolutely wrong, but I just can't shake that one percent chance that it might be true.

2008 saw the Philadelphia Phillies win the World Series for the first time since 1980. 2008 also saw Pennsylvania become the key battleground state which might decide the fate of the 2008 presidential election.

What if this is not a coincidence? What if the Phillies winning the World Series is a sign that McCain is going to win Pennsylvania (and the election)?

This kind of thing has happened before. And the Phillies winning the World Series is considered to have theological implications by true Phillies fans.

Yet another reason why Pennsylvanians would have to be total idiots to vote for Obama.

You can just say goodbye to Pennsylvania's coal industry if Obama is elected:

Seizing on a newly released audio tape picked up by the Drudge Report, Sarah Palin took the opportunity here in coal country to accuse Barack Obama of “talking about bankrupting the coal industry.”

“He said that, sure, if the industry wants to build coal-fired power plants, then they can go ahead and try, he says, but they can do it only in a way that will bankrupt the coal industry, and he's comfortable letting that happen,” Palin said. “And you got to listen to the tape.”

The Phillies win the World Series!

They've won it twice in one lifetime. This is starting to become a habit.

An example of some pathetically bad Christian reasoning

The general election season angst has made this a slow month for political blogging for me. Fortunately, there are still some apolitical "easy targets" floating around to center a blog post on. The one that caught my eye this week was a post on a Christian web site discussing some new neurological research. The author's big point is that (my emphasis):

We often hear that modern science requires us to reject traditional Christian views of the human person. The argument goes something like this: If we can see the physical process by which ideas are associated or feelings felt or decisions made, then surely we must admit that human beings are nothing more than physical entities. The concept of a soul, so we are told, is irrelevant.

Well, it turns out that science now points us in a different direction. These days, cognitive scientists are doing experiments that use MRI technology to visualize the brain while subjects undergo experiences, solve problems, and make decisions. This approach allows scientists to see and theorize about the significance and sources of patterns in our brains, patterns that shape the way we respond to the world. We are learning about the highway system of neurological movement, which turns out to be decisive for the way our minds work.

The new emphasis on patterns of neural activity suggests an important support for the traditional Christian understanding of the soul. The cutting edge of brain science makes it clear that it is as foolish to say that our brains are just neurons as it is to say that highways are just concrete and asphalt. After all, what matters to the motorist is the way in which the concrete is organized to create an interlocking system of usable roads. The same holds for the gray matter inside our heads.

The author seems to think that this is some kind of special Christian position that materialists reject, but in reality, he conceeds the basic materialist position that the Christian conception of a soul has only metaphysical content. In other words, the author and materialism presumably agree that it is the eletro-chemical-mechanical operation of the brain that is responsible for the mind. That the author chooses to call any particular aspect of the brain a soul is purely a matter of personal discretion as far as basic materialism is concerned.

The author and materialists are therefore entirely in accord on the physical facts. The author obstinately refuses to admit this, so he spends part of the post tweaking the noses of his materialist opponents. For example, he wrote:

So much for the confident materialists who thought they had the facts on their side. Today’s science seems to confute yesterday’s scientific propagandists. As David Brooks observed in a recent column, “The momentum has shifted away from hardcore materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief, and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings.”

This is as sloppy as reasoning gets. Materialists believe that the mind is a result of the physical operation of the brain. It is hard-core artificial intelligence proponents who believe that the mind is a result of an algorithm being processed by the brain. It is entirely possible to be a hardcore materialist and to not believe in the possibility of artificial intelligence.

Spike Lee's latest film doesn't have enough wombats in it.

Spike Lee was recently in the news for criticizing director Clint Eastwood for not portraying African-American soldiers in Eastwood's recent WWII-era war films. The good news is that Lee decided to engage in a useful and productive form of criticism: making his own World War II film starring African-American soldiers. The bad news is that Spike Lee couldn't be bothered to get the history right either (italics in original):

It is a story that underpins Italy’s postwar democracy: the honour lost under Benito Mussolini was regained through the struggle of the partisans and their help for the Allies. Now the partisans are fighting for their reputation after a new film by the director Spike Lee which, they say, insults the memory of the Italian Resistance during the Second World War.

Miracle at St Anna retells the story of the massacre of 560 civilians – including women and children – in August 1944 by SS troops as they retreated northwards in the face of the Allied advance.

The film, which highlights the role of African-American soldiers in the war, suggests that antiFascist [sic] partisans indirectly caused the atrocity by taking refuge in the village and then abandoning the residents to their fate.

It even shows a partisan named Rodolfo collaborating with the Nazis. This runs directly counter to the accepted Italian version of events, which is that the slaughter was not a reprisal but an unprovoked act of brutality and that the hunt for partisans was a pretext.

Here's another big problem that I'm going to have with this film. As Spike Lee puts it:

The hardest shot in the film, we had to bayonet a baby. That was rough. The Italian stuntman who played that Nazi, his name is Georgio, he’s Italian, he’s one of the lead stuntman. That whole day, all the Italian extras, they hated him. They were spitting at him and he was like, 'I’m just an actor!'

I'm willing to bet that "Georgio" is seriously considering being credited as "Allen Smithee" for his stunt work.

The clown Congress strikes again.

This government bailout plan would have been passed days ago if the Democrats hadn't been playing class warfare games. Here's the latest joke:

Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are pushing for a new Wall Street tax that would cover the potential costs of a $700 billion bailout being negotiated by Congress and the Bush administration.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, speaking to reporters after a meeting with fellow Democrats, said the fee could be assessed after five years if the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office determined taxpayers had lost money in the bailout.

The current crisis was caused by financial institutions running out of money and going bankrupt, and for some reason Nancy Pelosi wants to raise taxes on financial institutions? That's totally insane.

The economy is on the brink and Democrats are playing games again.

What else do you expect from Nancy Pelosi's Clown Congress? From Fox News:

Scrambling for a swift deal on the $700 billion bailout for failing financial firms, key Democrats and Bush administration officials agreed Monday to include mortgage help for beleaguered homeowners but wrangled over other issues, including "golden parachutes" for executives who benefit from the unprecedented rescue.

Democrats demanded that the measure limit pay packages for executives of companies helped by the biggest financial rescue since the Great Depression. The administration was balking at that, and also at a proposal by Democrats to let judges rewrite mortgages to lower bankrupt homeowners' monthly payments.

Highly neurotic blogging

• It's always depressing when a blogger that I normally highly respect decides to go off the deep end during the election. The latest victim is an Evolutionblog that is highly offended that John McCain would dare to say that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" (embedded hyperlinks removed):

  “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” is a standard cliche politicians use when faced with a shock to the economy. It is one of those useful, empty statements that sounds intelligent and can be used to deflect political blame in the face of bad economic news.
  
  Sometimes it's even true. There are times when a shock to the economy causes short-term hardship, but the only real solution is to just ride it out.
  
  That's not this time. Even Alan Greenspan has described the recent meltdown of the nation's largest financial institutions as a once ina century event. Tim Fernholz of Tapped provides some details. Spiking unemployment. Decreased median income. Low consumer confidence. Increasing inflation. Falling markets. Exploding defiicits. Tepid growth.

  Leading economic indicators have declined to levels not seen since 2003 or so, so obviously we must be in the worst depression since the great depression.
  
  Evolutionblog concludes the post with a stunning non-sequitor:

  If McCain manages to win this election it will be the ultimate proof that the mindless segment of the population has grown so bloated that democracy is dead as a workable governing philosophy.



• Journalist Fatimah Ali predicted open race and class war if McCain wins the election:

  If McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race and class war, fueled by a deflated and depressed country, soaring crime, homelessness - and hopelessness!

  She has now refined her remarks:

  I know that putting the words "race" and "war" together is like hurling an incendiary device. But I wasn't issuing a call to arms, it was a metaphorical prediction.

  Apparently the phrase "race war" was used to indicate that individual Americans might become so enraged by a McCain electoral victory that they will find themselves writing angry letters to newspaper editors. What a relief!



• No list of highly neurotic blog posts could be complete without the latest from Andrew Sullivan (embedded hyperlink removed):

  An interesting debate has been going on out of the media limelight. Sarah Palin's decision earlier this year to have an amniocentesis to determine if her unborn child had Down Syndrome is not uncontroversial among pro-lifers. I'd be curious to find out from women readers, especially pro-life women readers, what their views of amniocentesis are, and how common it is for totally principled pro-life pregnant women to consent to having them.

Sullivan gets it wrong (again).

Andrew Sullivan points out an exchange that occured in Sarah Palin's interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson:

Gibson: The Bush Doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory defense. We have the right to preemptively strike any other country that we believe is going to attack us.

Palin: I agree that a president's job, when they swear in their oath to uphold our Constitution, their top priority is to defend the United States of America.

I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.

For some reason, Sullivan ridicules Palin for giving a correct answer:

Actually, the first priority is to defend the constitution of the United States. Palin doesn't even know the oath she is supposed to swear.

Palin is entirely correct here. The top priorities of any president must be, first, to defend the lives of the people of the United States of America; second, to secure and to defend the rights of the people of the United States of America; and third, to defend the constitution of the United States of America.

Under normal circumstances of peace and war, we as Americans believe that the best was to accomplish the first two of these priorities is by accomplishing the third. This belief is justified: the United States under its constitution has historically been supremely able to wage war and to defend itself from attack.

A thought about "Bablyon A.D."

This is probably going to be known to history as one of the most stupid Hollywood films of 2008. The basic premise is that a Russian mafia boss hires a mercenary (played by Vin Diesel) to smuggle a young girl from a monastery in Mongolia into the United States. Along the way, we eventually learn that the girl has a virgin pregnancy with twins who are thus enormously powerful and potentially messiahs. Vin Diesel's character must therefore make every possible sacrifice to keep this girl from falling into the clutches of the New Age church that is trying to take over the world.

Let's think logically about this for a minute. The whole point of a virgin birth in Christianity is the fact that it is miraculous in nature. Ergo, it follows that producing a pregnant virgin by any type of rational, scientific means is, by definition, not a miraculous birth at all. That any Christian (or for that matter, anyone who isn't an idiot) would ascribe any religious implications at all to a technically virgin woman who had been inseminated by a supercomputer or a robot is utterly inexplicable. The characters in this film even live in a future where you can find cloned Siberian tigers in cages in the middle of Kazakhstan, but supposedly a virgin birth is still mysterious and profoundly theological to them.

This takes us to the fundamental premise of the film, which is the sloppy Hollywood assumption that whatever the Hollywood filmmaking class thinks about American culture circa 2008 will be the commonplace, unremarkable way of life circa 2017 and beyond. It therefore makes perfect sense for a religious establishment of the future to make a bid for global domination by attempting to fake a virgin birth. Surely the Hollywood consensus is that American Christians are more than stupid enough to fall for it.

Palin Derangement Syndrome is spreading.

The internet can be a real pain sometimes. Yesterday, Jim Emerson's scanners::blog was by far the most awesome film blog on the internet. Today, it turns out that the author has a full-blown case of Palin Derangement Syndrome. He wrote:

I had just begun working on a piece about how comedy is the the only adequate response to the modern world, and the most profound approach to exploring and understanding the modern human psyche... when this [the Palin Vice-Presidential annoucement] happened. The folly and tragedy of human existence, and the indifferent and inhospitable relationship of the universe to human needs and desires, can be plumbed only by the sharpest and most penetrating comedy, without which tragedy loses its meaning and its deepest pain. And sometimes it just happens without comedy writers needing to make anything up. Or is it the other way around? Miss Congeniality. Elle Woods. Tracy Flick. Could this be an example of life imitating comedy?

The opinion here is apparently that McCain is so stupid that he thinks he can put a woman in charge of the country and not screw it up.

Look, everyone knows that liberals believe that any women who gets between a prominent Democratic Party man and power is a slut, trailer trash, or an airhead (or, in the case of Hillary Clinton, a ball-busting harpy). We get it. It's not funny.

Sexism, plain and simple

Senator McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his presidential running mate has unleashed a firestorm of blatant sexism from liberals. The sexist statements coming from her new political enemies is so disgusting that even we conservatives are offended. For example, Andrew Sullivan wrote this:

A reader writes:

Not knowing anything about the Republican field, I heard about the pick this morning and looked up the stories on her.

My first thought was: Trophy Candidate.

The visuals were strange. She looked like the promising student that an older professor admires (and has a bit of a crush on). When she called McCain her "partner," it sounded odder still. He comes off as her guardian or foster parent.

Why is it that any woman who gets in the way of the ambitions of powerful, Democratic men is automatically portrayed to be a slut, a prostitute, a stalker, trailer trash, an airhead, a trophy, or in this case, some kind of immature schoolgirl?

Bidenfreude

Senator's Barack Obama's selection of Senator Joe Biden to be his vice-presidential running mate is already producing some handsome dividends for the Republicans. Andrew Sullivan's reaction is a case in point.

Sullivan is unashamedly of the opinion that the Dick Cheney vice-presidency has been a total disaster for the Republic over the last eight years. This is a criticism not just of Dick Cheney himself but of the "Dick Cheney model" of the White House in which a powerful, experienced, eminently well-connected vice-president acts as a "fixer" to compensate for a weak, inexperienced president. Today, Sullivan is making the case that Obama needed a "liberal Dick Cheney" all along:

The biggest emerging problem with the Obama campaign is Obama's reluctance, lack of talent and lack of will to get into lively, feisty, pissing matches with his opponent. This was brought home in the Saddleback forum. What he needs is a plucky, fun, free-wheeling attack machine, with the necessary gravitas to express adequate contempt for the Bush administration's fatally misguided foreign policy without in any way seeming defensive.

Senator McCain will be laughing all the way to the White House, starting tonight.

Conservatives across the country are going to be popping open bottles of champagne tonight because Senator Barack Obama picked Senator Joe Biden to be his vice-presidential running mate. If you still need proof that Barack Obama doesn't have the judgement or the intelligence to be president, this pick is it.

Why is the comic book film hitting it big now?

The amazing commerical success of this year's film "The Dark Knight" has certainly prompted many to pose the question. Personally, I see the answer within a generational shift from Baby Boomer nostalgia to Gen-X nostalgia.

The comic book films, so to speak, of the late 70s and early 80s were the "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" franchises along with "Superman". In the case of "Star Wars", one might suspect an origin partly in the space adventure serials of the 40s and 50s, although it seems equally clear that George Lucas was drawing inspiration from the post-World War II golden age of science fiction (especially the novel "Dune"). Indiana Jones was deliberately modelled on the more conventional (perhaps boy's adventure) serials of that era. Superman, of course, was one of the stars of the Golden Age of comic books in the late 30s and early 40s.

In other words, Baby Boomers in their thirties were getting to see film versions of some of the pulp media that they would have been exposed to as children. Flash forward to the present decade and we see the same process happening again. This time, the comic book characters that are hitting it big are the comic book characters from the Silver Age of comics that Gen-Xers in their thirties would have read about as children. Marvel comics is hitting it big this time around because Marvel comics innovated its slate of Marvel Universe characters -- The Fantastic Four, the X-men, Iron Man, the Hulk, etc. -- in the 1960s. DC is also doing well by basing movies on the "gritty Batman" theme -- Ra's al Ghul, a psychotic Joker, and the dark, determined, vigilante Batman -- that emerged in the 1970s.

Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell pose the question and attempt to answer it, but in their distrust of the zeitgeist explanation, they don't overtly point to a generational shift in Hollywood:

Not all genres are created equal, and they rise or fall in status. As the Western and the musical fell in the 1970s, the urban crime film, horror, and science-fiction rose. For a long time, it would be unthinkable for an A-list director to do a horror or science-fiction movie, but that changed after Polanski, Kubrick, Ridley Scott, et al. gave those genres a fresh luster just by their participation. More recently, I argue in The Way Hollywood Tells It, the fantasy film arrived as a respectable genre, as measured by box-office receipts, critical respect, and awards. It seems that the sword-and-sorcery movie reached its full rehabilitation when The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King scored its eleven Academy Awards.

Welcome to August in America!

The summer of a presidential year is the typical time for the most utterly moronic political commentary to make it into the discussions of supposedly serious people. This year is turning out to be no exception (hyperlink in original):

A revealing bloggingheads exchange between Bob Wright and Ann Althouse. Both realize that McCain's vow to "defeat evil" at Saddleback was both asinine machismo - like we haven't had enough of that after eight years of Cheney - and deeply unChristian. There's no way a president of the United States or any country can "defeat evil." Evil is everywhere and always for Christians - until the Second Coming. Particular manifestations of evil can be defeated, but not evil itself. That endures, and is part of us too.

Dude, someone who believes that he or she can totally obliterate evil in the present is called a "liberal". McCain is a conservative. Hello, McFly?

Anti-intellectualism in a book about anti-intellectualism.

One of my pet peeves is when I buy a serious, non-fiction book on a serious, important topic and it turns out to have a stupid blunder within the first couple of pages. This has happened to me before.

The latest example is in "The Age of American Unreason" by Susan Jacoby. For a book about unreason, it has some really dumb statements in it. Consider the following excerpt from pp. 9-10 (reference to footnote in original):

[Current president] Bush, after all, called himself the "education president" with a straight face while simultaneously declaring, without a trace of self-consciousness or self-criticism, that he rarely read newspapers because that would expose him to "opinions."*

The footnote reads:

On September 22, 2003, the Associated Press reported that President Bush scans headlines but rarely reads entire newspaper stories, which would expose him to nonobjective "opinions." He prefers that White House staffers provide him with a more "objective" digest of the daily news.

The inference that we are presumably supposed to draw is that president Bush is an unreflective, anti-intellectual moron because he reads briefs prepared by his ideologically biased staffers instead of the objective public news media. That the author of a book criticizing American anti-intellectualism can write this without the slightest trace of self-consciousness or self-criticism is itself proof of such a book's premise.

In any event, the behavior that President Bush is displaying could very well be entirely rational for a president to adopt. First, it is actually quite common for newspaper readers to skim over all of the stories of a newspaper while reading only the headlines. The reason for this is that many newspapers are written with strict adherence to a style that is extremely efficient at conveying a propaganda message to the reader. The reason why newspaper readers skip over the articles and read only the headlines is because that actual articles are absolutely unnecessary for conveying the intended propaganda message. The headlines alone are enough to produce the intended propaganda effect in the reader; one might even suspect that the articles are written to deter people from reading them in order to concentrate attention on the headlines.

Second, one might suppose that the President of the United States has access to slightly better sources of information than the newspapers possess. If the President wants to find out about, say, recent political developments in China, he could read "The New York Times" or he could just call the United States Ambassador to China and ask for a briefing. Given a choice between reading about the CIA in "The L.A. Times" or having breakfast with the Director of Central Intelligence every morning, what would you choose to be well informed?

Finally, it is well known that the information flow to the President is of critical importance, especially in a crisis. While it is entirely possible that decisions are being made within an atmosphere of "groupthink", or some other form of compromised environment, it is also entirely possible that the system is proving the right information to the right decision makers at the right time. In the absence of evidence, the a priori assumption that President Bush is being fed daily lies by his political handlers is unwarranted. Of course, this also suggests that the White House could be correct to rewrite information from newspaper sources into some other written form. The information priorities of effective Presidential decisionmaking are not necessarily the priorities for presenting information to the public possessed by newspaper editors.

Has Russia gone completely insane or what?

Here is the latest diplomatic note from Russia to Poland:

Moscow lashed out at Washington and Warsaw on Friday, saying the plan to site a US anti-missile defence shield in Poland would undermine the global balance of power and put Poland at risk of nuclear attack.

Washington and Warsaw reached a preliminary agreement on Thursday to build part of the missile defence shield in Poland, station US Patriot missiles there and bolster the two countries’ military co-operation.

The US claims the shield in Poland, as well as a radar tracking base to be located in the Czech Republic, is designed to defend against “rogue states” such as Iran.

Russia is basically telling Poland, "Stop building your anti-nuclear defenses, or we'll nuke you." Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Who is to blame for the Russo-Georgian war?

Andrew Sullivan blames Bush:

The point here is not that the invasions [the Russian invasion of Georgia and the American invasion of Iraq] are obviously morally equivalent. The point is that the line between American actions in the world and Russia's are no longer as stark as they once were. Once you trash the international system, declare yourself above the law and even the most basic of international conventions against war crimes, you have forfeited the kind of moral authority that the US once had. Bush and his cronies speak as if none of this has happened. Their rigid, absolutist denial even of the bleeding obvious allows them to preach to the world about international norms that, when they would have constrained American actions, were derided as quaint and irrelevant. You really cannot have it both ways.

Americans - and Georgians - are now living with the consequences. And I'm angry about it.

It seems clear that Sullivan's "conservatism of doubt" is really just another form of liberalism. In this case, a liberalism that assumes that the one remaining barrier between mankind and heaven on earth is the Bush/Cheney/Rove axis of evil. On the other hand, Barack Obama, being omnipotent and omniscient*, obviously would never have allowed this situation to develop had he been president since 2001.

Vox Day is throwing some of the blame at the Jews:

At this point, the Georgian attack on South Ossetia appears to have been a terrible miscalculation by the Georgians and their US and Israeli advisors, who have been trying to solidify control over the oil pipeline in recent months. As some observers have noted, there's even some reason to believe that the foreign advisors may have been in the forefront of the attack, based on the appearance of the troops and their gear in pictures of the earliest action. (I don't have an opinion on this; I didn't see the pictures myself.) In overreacting to the obvious provocations from the Russian-backed South Ossetians, the Georgians handed Russia the excuse it was quite obviously waiting for.

* Some philosophers believe that this is conclusive proof that Barack Obama does not exist.

Thoughts about "The Dark Knight"

"The Dark Knight" is really good relative to the other comic book films that have been made. In absolute terms, it has a number of problems.

• The most serious flaw in the film is well explained by James Bowman in his review of "Minority Report":

  This is the Spielbergian idea of entertainment — and, to be fair, one that an awful lot of people are willing to go along with — first you create some kind of preposterous scenario to do with aliens or time travel or real-seeming hallucinations or some combination of all three and then, when people have adjusted to it, you remind them at unpredictable moments that none of these things exists.

  In "The Dark Knight", the premise is that Batman's efforts to fight crime in collaboration with the Gotham City police are so staggeringly effective that the city's criminal gangs are on the verge of being checkmated when the film begins. The film then proceeds to reveal that this was actually a staggeringly ineffective way to fight crime. By exerting himself to the fullest in crusading against crime, Batman has done nothing more than drive the criminal gangs into a desperate last resort: unleashing the supercriminal terrorist mastermind "The Joker" against Gotham City.



• A related problem with the film is that the Joker is given a Spielbergian level of resources -- multiple cubic meters of pure cash worth -- to devote to his terror crusade against Gotham City. For example, the Joker has access to infiltraters hidden within the police heirarchy to the point of absurdity. At one point in the film, a bomb is detonated within the police building while the Joker, having escaped his cell, is holding the police at bay by threatening a hostage. When the dust clears, all of the police -- hostage included -- have completely vanished, apparently leaving the Joker at liberty to escape.
  
  The bomb is not an accident, of course. The Joker also has a magical ability to instantly materialize a bomb of any size in any place at any time without anyone noticing until it is too late. Just get used to this if you watch the film.



• The Spielbergian ethos doesn't end with the Joker. It turns out that the film essentially innovates an entirely new theory of Bruce Wayne's psyche to explain why he fights crime.
  
  The original motivation for Bruce Wayne's career of crime fighting is that his parents are murdered in front of his eyes when he is a child. We further postulate that Bruce Wayne possesses the resources of body, mind, and wealth to be an especially effective crime fighter in a city menaced by an especially intractable criminal element. It thus seems particularly plausible -- in fact, not even that unusual -- that Bruce Wayne would devote his life to crusading against the criminal element. Throw in the costume and you have a Batman.
  
  That might have worked in the 1930s, but today the mass audience expects Batman to be "one sick puppy" perhaps a step removed from the Joker himself. In "The Dark Knight", the implication of the story is that Batman fights crime out of a deep-seated sense of masochism. The Joker, as you might have expected, makes full use of this knowledge, since the Joker knows that his full-spectrum assault upon Gotham is perhaps the ultimate turn-on for Batman. Ultimately, this mars the ending of the film rather severely (unless film masochism appeals to you).

The single most disreputable economic proposal of campaign 2008 to date (or, Obama really f***ked up this time).

You might want to read about this plan while it still exists because it's only a matter of time before Barack Obama disavows all knowledge of it. In his current plan, Barack Obama endorses political confiscations on behalf of "the people" (embedded hyperlink removed):

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Friday announced an “Emergency Economic Plan” that would give families a stimulus check of $1,000 each, funded in part by what his presidential campaign calls “windfall profits from Big Oil.”

Barack Obama seems to think that high gas prices more than justifiy an economic plan that would make perfect sense for Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. I'd call Obama a Marxist if I didn't suspect that this comparison would be unfair to Karl Marx.

Everything is better with Klingons.

D&D goes where practically every other RPG ever invented has already gone before (my emphasis):

Anyways, the Dragonborn ecology hit the bullseye with me. The race’s emphasis on ancestors and honor and action filled what I saw as a missing gap. For sure I could play a character of any race who reveres any or all of those things. It’s just nice that there’s a race to fill the space between the corruptible humans, flighty elves, dour dwarves, impish halflings, and brooding Tieflings. The Dragonborn certainly give me the perfect race for samurai character type I so love to play.

WWBD?

I'm developing a new blogging game called "What would Brezhnev do?" One simply pretends that Barack Obama is a total stooge of former General Secretary of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev. Whenever Obama is faced with some kind of upcoming choice or policy decision, write a paragraph describing Brezhnev's "orders" to Obama and then see if Obama follows them.

For example, Obama is giving a speech at Berlin's Victory column tomorrow. What would Brezhnev order Obama to say?

Brezhnev answers as follows: "The ongoing crisis in Iraq continues to prove that Western imperialist military traditions are a serious threat to progressive movements around the world. Therefore, you are hereby ordered to undermine Western military morale by appropriating symbols of Western imperialism and militarism as agents of pacifistic progressive goals. Use the opportunity of your German speech to link the Victory column with, for example, victory in the fight to preserve the environment against global climate change."

UPDATE: I was one the right track. Obama did say the following:

Here, at the base of a column built to mark victory in war, we meet in the center of a Europe at peace.

From the department of "not getting it"...

Here, Matt Yglesias expresses some American independence skepticism (author's italics):

My sense every July 4 is that I could get more jazzed up about independence if it were more plausible for Americans to work ourselves up into a fury of anti-British sentiment. In the real world, however, America's two closest allies are the former colonial power and the segments of British North America that didn't join in our rebellion. Ultimately, I think the United States is a pretty awesome country but it very plausibly would have been even awesomer had English and American political leaders in the late 18th century been farsighted enough to find compromises that would have held the empire together.

In response, the blog "Freespace" defends the awesomeness of the American Revolution (embedded hyperlink in original) :

It should not surprise us that Yglesias would say such a thing, however. Elsewhere he writes of the difference between liberals and conservatives that “liberals do a better job of recognizing that much as we may love America there’s something arbitrary about it—we’re [sic] just so happen to be Americans whereas other people are Canadians or Mexicans or French or Russian or what have you.” But this, of course, is getting the deal exactly wrong. These other nationalities are based on ethnicity and chance, while American nationality is based on choice and the assent to certain basic principles that make up our nation.

The only response to this point is "duh". This in essentially the defining principle of being an American liberal, so of course a liberal blogger like Matt Yglesias knows this.

Observe that Yglesias's point is actually quite similar to what the Democratic-Republican party of Jefferson and Madison would have believed. Jefferson and Madison were insistent that the cult (for lack of a better word) of, for example, July 4, the American flag, and General Washington was a lot of false patriotism designed to camouflage the neo-monarchical intentions of the Federalist party. Jefferson and Madison would probably have been very sympathetic to the view that July 4 is the day for Americans to rage against the enemies of the people (remember that Madison led America into the War of 1812 in order to "defend the revolution").

Presumably, what Yglesias is advocating here is not a political settlement on Britain's terms to avoid an American revolution, but one on America's terms. That is, a Britain that would have immediately embraced progress in the 1770s instead of drifting in the direction of progress over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

The swiftboating of McCain continues.

The hypocrisy of the Democratic party is truely and utterly astonishing. It's as if the Democrats think that they have this country so totally screwed that they don't even have to care what you think anymore.

During the 2004 presidential race, the Democratic party was openly proclaiming to the world that only a combat veteran of the United States military was qualified to be president, that clearly Senator John Kerry was qualified to be president on the strength of his war-time military service alone, and that rich, frat boy George W. Bush couldn't even be bothered with his cushy Air National Guard job without going AWOL. Democrats openly mocked and taunted Republicans for nominating a presidential candidate with such a weak military record as George W. Bush for the single most important job in America.

Now it's 2008 and its the Republican nominee who has the impressive military service record while the Democratic nominee didn't serve a day in the military. Now the Democrats are telling us that we shouldn't talk about military service because it's not important for a presidential candidate:

"I think what we really need to work on over the next four, five months, and it goes back to the speech that Sen. Obama gave [Monday] and this little fight that I've been watching and that is, we need to make sure that we take politics out of service," Webb said. "People don't serve their country for political issues."

He continued: "And John McCain's my long-time friend, if that is one area that I would ask him to calm down on, it`s that, don't be standing up and uttering your political views and implying that all the people in the military support them because they don't, any more than when the Democrats have political issues during the Vietnam War. Let's get the politics out of the military, take care of our military people, or have our political arguments in other areas."

Blatant Democratic party hypocrisy

In previous election years, Democrats have typically tried to camouflage their true beliefs in order to win elections. This year, the Democrats feel so assured of victory that there are openly admitting what believe. Part of what they believe is that totally blatant hypocrisy is entirely justified when it comes to attacking Republicans.

In 1996, the Democratic party's line was that President Bush had committed a crime of near-fascist proportions by "swiftboating" (i.e. launching a smear campaign against a person's honorable military service) his opponent, Senator John Kerry. Now it's 2008 and, as far as the Democratic party is concerned, it's time for the "swiftboating" of Republican Senator John McCain to begin:

With Senator Barack Obama planning to visit the Middle East and Europe in an apparent effort to burnish his foreign policy credentials, the credentials of his likely presidential rival, Senator John McCain, came under sharp attack Sunday from a man considered a possible Democratic vice presidential candidate.

The retired general Wesley Clark said McCain had not "held executive responsibility" and had not commanded troops in wartime.

McCain's experience in Vietnam, where he was a prisoner of war for five years, has seemed at times almost to grant him invulnerability to criticism of his security background. But on Sunday he was assailed by a fellow military man, a highly decorated one who was once the NATO supreme commander.

McCain frequently points out that he led "the largest squadron in the U.S. Navy," but Clark said on CBS television that that was not enough to support a claim to the presidency.

Here's hypocrisy for you. Clark thinks that McCain doesn't have enough military service to qualify him for the presidency -- depiste the fact that McCain is a more highly decorated and longer serving military man than John Kerry. On the other hand, Clark thinks that Obama would make a great president despite the fact that Obama's military service is exactly squat.

EW's 100 new classic films

Entertainment Weekly has a new feature: the 1000 best pop-cultural products of the last 25 years. The 100 new classic films list is particularly depressing. I'm not sure if Hollywood has made 100 films I'd want to even watch again, much less recommend to anyone else.

Some of these films would have never made a top 100 list in a sane world:

1. Pulp Fiction (1994): Everyone knows, deep down, that this film was a critical and popular success only because it was marketing perversion and kink to mainstream America.

25. Shrek (2001): The voting process used to compile these lists will typically let a few bad apples through. That "Shrek" made the list tells us that the voting process obviously failed quite badly. Look everyone, Shrek made another poopie joke! Ha ha!

If you ever want film proof that our culture is becomming progressively more decadent, these two films are it. It's unthinkably depressing that a non-trivial fraction of our film culture is devoted to perfecting the fart/excrement/anal sex joke.

31. Brokeback Mountain (2005): Is it possible that "Brokeback Mountain" made the list to prevent Entertainment Weekly from being sued by one of its key demographic groups?

46. Children of Men (2006): The basic premise of this film is that, in the near future, men are no longer able to impregnate women. Since men can no longer oppress women by saddling them with unwanted children, men decide to set up Orwellian police states instead. Then men decide that Orwellian police tactics are so much fun that, given a choice between (a) having children again and saving humanity from extinction; or (b) beating up dissidents with truncheons while dooming humanity to slow death; the men mostly decide to choose (b).

In other words, you can practically see the Marxism oozing out of the screen when you watch this film.

53. The Truman Show (1998): "The Truman Show" makes it painfully obvious that it is a film about a man who has lived his entire life surrounded by actors inside of a giant, life sized television set. "The Truman Show" literally drops a klieg light out of the sky into the title character's face to definitively establish that, yes, this guy has lived his entire life inside of a television show. Then, since the film still isn't sure that you get the point, it stops the narrative and switches into documentary mode so it can literally tell you that this guy has lived his life inside of a television show!

57. There’s Something About Mary (1998): The Greatest Generation has the singing of "La Marseillaise" in "Casablanca" as one of its greatest film moments. Gen Y has Ben Stiller getting his penis stuck in his zipper.

63. Big (1988): This was the exemplar of a brief burst of Baby Boomer nostalgia films that starred infantilizing body-swap films. The only reason that I can think of to put this film on the list to knock one of the even worse Robin Williams films off of the list.

85. The 40 Year-Old Virgin (2005): Think of this as the anti-"Big". Here the premise is that, if you're not having sex all of the time, then you must be bad, demented, crazy, stupid, or evil.

100. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999): Yay, more fart jokes and curse words!

"The Happening" is not happening.

M. Night Shyamalan's latest film "The Happening" is apparently producing some highly negative reviews. For example, Jim Emerson has some strong remarks about it:

Shyamalan seems to have devoted all his talent and skill to bringing off five or six images/effects in the entire film. The rest of the time, he either doesn't know or doesn't care what he's doing, though whether it's due to laziness or lack of interest is unclear. The compact between movie and audience known as "suspension of disbelief" has nothing to do in this instance with the film's otherworldly (or all-too-worldly) apocalyptic premise. We are ready, willing and able to believe that something in the air is mysteriously causing people to lose the will to survive. "The Happening" has more fundamental problems. It doesn't know how to make you believe that people are getting off a train, or standing in a field, or sharing a meal at a kitchen table -- commonplace scenes that should require no suspension of disbelief but are so badly bungled here it's... unbelievable.

I haven't seen the film, but from Roger Ebert's glowing review, I'm willing to offer some speculation about what went wrong. As Ebert points out, the film is another environmental apocalypse:

Elliot [the main character] meets a man who talks about a way plants have of creating hormones to kill their enemies, and he develops a half-baked theory that man may have finally delivered too many insults to the grasses and the shrubs, the flowers and the trees, and their revenge is in the wind.

If you calculated that the plotline is basically trying to capitalize on liberal guilt, you might be correct. Ebert writes:

Most of the other people we meet [in the film], not all, are muted and introspective. Had they been half-expecting some such "event" as this?

I know I have. For some time the thought has been gathering at the back of my mind that we are in the final act. We have finally insulted the planet so much that it can no longer sustain us. It is exhausted. It never occurred to me that vegetation might exterminate us. In fact, the form of the planet's revenge remains undefined in my thoughts, although I have read of rising sea levels and the ends of species.

The apocalyptic tale derives it force from striking at the deeply held fears and guilts of its audience. In effect, the apocalyptic tale becomes more believable for its audience when it is made more horrifying. It follows that one of the major flaws of "The Happening" is that it undermines itself by rather blatantly "pulling its punch".

For example, the chief selling point of the "The Happening" (as we can tell from Ebert's review) is that Earth's vegetation creates a neurotoxin that is fatal to humans when humans aggregate in sufficiently large numbers. This is good because it hits at one of the chief anxieties of modern political culture: that a corrupt mankind is out of harmony with nature. This is bad because the mechanism operates in an entirely passive, natural way. By emphasizing that the film's indictment of man is an entirely natural phenomenon, it allows mankind to escape moral indictment. If you think about it, one might as well argue that it is our romantic attraction to nature that is the true problem here. Perhaps New York City would have never been attacked by the plants, if only New Yorkers had had the foresight to ruthlessly exterminate all plant life from their streets and parks.

Another way in which the film pulls its punch is by demonstrating that the neurotoxin causes its victims first to lose the power of speech, then to become disoriented, and then simply and calmly to kill themselves. This acts to drain some of the horror from the act of suicide, since our inference is that the suicides do not understand and do not consciously experience what they are doing to themselves. Instead of overdosing mankind with pain and humiliation like a good apocalypse, here "The Happening" is making an extra effort to be merciful to man.

How to lie with statistics

In this post, Andrew Sullivan appears to be blaming modern conservatism for the entire post-Vietnam era rise in the national debt held by the public. The chart that he uses to illustrate his point is available here. Sullivan's brief analysis obscures a number of important points.

• First, one major reason for the rise in spending is the federal government paying for the growth of the welfare state. Let's look at things from the historical perspective. Crudely speaking, the Democrats dominated the presidency from 1932 to 1968 and used that power to contruct a massive revenue bomb: the welfare state. After 1968, the Democrats mostly abandoned the presidency to the Republicans at about the same time as the welfare state began to explode.
  
  Let me rephrase my point. The welfare state was created in the post-1932 golden age of liberalism! Modern conservatism didn't have any political power during those years. Modern conservatism was considered a neurotic mental disease durning those years. Now the moment the welfare state starts going totally apes**t, it all becomes modern conservatism's fault?



• Notice the big trillion dollar drop in the publically held portion of the national debt in the years between 1996 and 2000. In these years, President Clinton was forced to divert tax revenues from new spending to deficit reduction in order to politically protect the government's ability to increase spending in the future. This singular achievement was accomplished by modern conservatism: Newt Gingrich and the Republican revolution of 1994.



• Let's think about the graph more abstractly in the light of some simplifying assumptions. Assume that government spending would remain fixed (in the sense that the hypothetical changes to funding regimes aren't changing the historical year-by-year outlays) from 1968 onwards, so that the only political question becomes how to pay for the spending. Also make the (perhaps too simplifying) assumption that only the rich pay taxes or hold the public portion of the national debt.
  
  In the light of these assumptions, the graph tells a different story. The rich as a class are still paying for the modern welfare state, but the terms of the payment could have changed. Under the Democrats, we can assume that borrowing from the rich would have much less after 1980, but that taxes on the rich would have been much higher. Under the Republicans, taxes rates are a lot lower than the Democrats wanted them to be, but borrowing at interest is much higher than the Democrats could tolerate. In other words, the Republicans paid for the welfare state by capitalizing it instead of confiscating wealth for it.
  
  You could think of the federal borrowing regime as a reverse "cap and trade" market for the financial burden of the welfare state. The interest payments on the federal debt represent, under the simplifying assumptions here, money being paid by rich people to other rich people. The interest payments are, in effect, rich people with a low tolerance for holding debt giving "welfare state offsets" to rich people with a higher debt tolerance.
  
  The reason why government would do something like that is simple. The net effect would be to encourage class harmony by reconciling the rich with the welfare state.

Is Indiana Jones a fellow traveler?

James Bowman makes a devastating point about "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull":

McCarthyism, too, gets a mention, by the way. For in spite of liking Ike, Indy gets blacklisted and persecuted by FBI agents who conform to the movie stereotypes of today — being vicious and stupid — rather than those of the period for FBI agents. His nervous university dean (Jim Broadbent) tells him that he himself will have to resign as he can’t be embroiled in "that kind of controversy in this charged climate." He tells Indy that "I hardly recognize this country anymore. The Government has got us seeing communists in our soup" — which you might think an odd sort of complaint to make of the government in a movie that begins by showing a gang of non-imaginary reds taking over an American military base on American soil. Disgusted, Indy says he might go off to Leipzig to teach. Presumably it has slipped his mind that that would have made the government’s case for his being a subversive, since Leipzig was in communist East Germany at the time.

Yet more Obamastupidity

A month ago, liberals were complaining that Hillary Clinton was a totally ignorant fool for suggesting that lower gasoline taxes will lead to lower gas prices (embedded hyperlinks removed):

The gas tax holiday doesn’t help “ordinary Americans.” The supply of petroleum during the summer months is essentially fixed, and the oil companies will charge what traffic will bear. If taxes are lower, they will simply charge the same amount and pocket the difference. Clinton’s proposal includes some weird end-around in which the oil companies pay extra windfall profits taxes so that the idea is purportedly revenue-neutral; which means the whole scheme is precisely meaningless, as the same amount of tax is being paid either way.

Now, the liberal theory is that higher taxes are the key to lower gas prices:

Senate Democrats on Wednesday called for a windfall profits tax on oil companies and a rollback of $17 billion in oil industry tax breaks as part of an energy package. The proposal also would impose federal penalties on energy price gouging and calls for stopping oil deliveries into the government's emergency reserve.

Here's the argument for why this would reduce gasoline prices:

Democrats characterized the proposal as attacking "the root causes of high gas prices," although it wasn't clear how today's high oil costs _ set in a global market _ or gasoline prices edging toward $4 a gallon would be appreciably affected.

As you might have expected for a proposal that seems like a no-brainer to Barack Obama, this proposal only makes sense from a hard-core Socialist standpoint. The operating theory here is that oil executives raise prices only because they hate poor people, profit from price gouging them, and actually enjoy the screams and moans of despair as poor people are driven to madness, sickness, and death by ever-higher prices. In the Obama universe, the only thing keeping oil executives from raising oil prices to infinity per barrel is the determination of Democrats to really f**k the oil companies if they raise prices to high.

Thus, the price of oil is not set by a balance of supply with demand but by the "balance of terror": the balance of the oil company's greed with the ability of the Democrats to wage class warfare against them.

Brain damaged commentary about Iraq

Senator Barack Obama seems to have this magic power for convincing otherwise sane people to believe absurdities. The latest example comes from David Corn (via Andrew Sullivan):

So what might happen to the McCain candidacy if the talks [governing the future of U.S. troops in Iraq]--which are supposed to lead to an agreement by the end of July--fail and Iraq gives Bush the boot? McCain won't have a war to promote any longer. And he won't be able to depict Barack Obama as a defeatist surrender-monkey who will yank out troops precipitously and endanger every single family in the United States. In other words, half of McCain's campaign will be gone. (On the Today Show this morning, McCain said that "General Petraeus is going to tell us" when U.S. troops can be withdrawn from Iraq. McCain seemed oblivious to this recent news and the possibility that Iraqis may tell the United States when to withdraw.)

This is seriously and profoundly flawed reasoning. Consider, for example, the charge that "McCain won't have a war to promote any longer" if the Iraqi government calls for American troops to leave Iraq. In late 2006/early 2007, the Democrats considered Iraqi to be in a state of out-of-control violence, total political failure, and civil war. The Democrats blamed these conditions on Bush's conduct of the war. In response, Senator John McCain called for a change of strategy, namely the "surge", and President Bush agreed and went ahead with it.

Now it's two years later. The violence in Iraq has dropped dramatically. The government of Iraq is becoming increasingly stable and effective. If the Iraqi government asks us to withdraw our troops now, it's because we have achieved victory(!!!) to the satisfaction of Iraqis! To think that this would be some kind of killer argument against the McCain campaign is totally insane.

Trust me, if the Iraqi government does call on the United States to withdraw its troops from Iraqi, the political situation will be exactly the opposite of what David Corn believes. If that happens, George W. Bush and John McCain will be proclaiming success from the nation's rooftops while Barack Obama and the Democrats will be complaining that our troops needed to stay in Iraq (until after the election, that is...).

The first rule for being a hatchet man...

...is not bludgeoning yourself with the hatchet. Here's what Senator John Kerry had to say about John McCain's remarks on the "Today" show this morning:

John Kerry, who's served in the past as Obama's heavy-hitter on national security, expressed incredulity at McCain's remark this morning that the timing of troops return is "not too important."

"It is unbelievably out of touch and inconsistent with the needs of Americans and particularly the families of troops who are over there. To them it’s the most important thing in the world when they come home," he said. "It’s a policy for staying in Iraq."

John McCain spent more than five years being tortured in a Vietnamese prison camp, yet according to Kerry, McCain doesn't understand what it is like to be an American serviceman stationed abroad for a long period of time.

A clueless conservative

Mona Charen, like many conservatives before her and many conservatives to come, asks the critical question of our time:

Do American Jews really love Israel, or just Democrats?

The big-name conservative pundits have spent the last six months telling us that the Republican Party needs to be destroyed in order to purge it of a sinister, liberalizing influence (commonly known as "them"). They also can't figure out why Jews love Democrats so much? Gee, I wonder why?

LOST season 4 sucks!

I finally broke down and watched most of LOST season 4 this week. I had assumed that the season 3 finale would be a "jumped the shark" moment. In reality, LOST didn't just jump the shark; it started dancing the Charleston on the rim of the shark tank. Thoughts about what went wrong will accumulate here.

• The first thing to realize about LOST season 4 is that the producers of LOST hate LOST. The mass extermination of plot elements that took place in season 3 only gets much worse in season 4. Season 4 doesn't just toss nearly all of the surviving "mythology" into the trash bin; season 4 kicks the main characters off of the island and then *MOVES THE ISLAND* so they can't get back to it.



• The point of LOST season 4 is that LOST, from this point on, is going to be an entirely new show. This new show, which we might call "The Benjamin Linus Chronicles", involves LOST season 3 supervillain Benjamin Linus becoming Benjamin "Danger" Linus, international man of mystery. In season 4, Benjamin Linus finally decides to leave the island in order to become a world-bestriding colossus who uses his vast wealth (never seen) and influence (never seen) to wage a global war on terror against industrial titan Charles Widmore (i.e. the rich, evil, old white guy).
  
  The island, on the other hand, is pretty much worthless now that Ben has become Blofeld. Locke inherits it as his consolation prize.



• At this point, you must be assuming that season 4 explains the remaining mysteries surrounding the island. Season 4 tells the audience squat about the island! It also shows the characters who do know the secrets of the island making it clear that you are too stupid to understand them, even if they told you. Characters who know the secrets of the island even threaten each other with violence in order to prevent the slightest scraps of information from leaking out to the viewer.
  
  News flash: you, the viewer, are not going to be told the answers to any of the island's mysteries, ever. The producers obviously assume that you are some kind of mouth-breathing idiot for even bothering to care about the show's mysteries.



• Another of the serious problems of season 4 is that the producers apparently came down with a case of "Seinfeld"-itis when they were planning it. For example, season 4 makes heavy use of flash forwards (the opposite of flashbacks) with the twist that the flash forwards are in a rough reverse chronological order between successive episodes. In other words, half of season 4 uses the "Seinfeld" trick of telling the story "backwards".
  
  Another example comes near the end of the show when the six Flight 815 survivors who make it back to civilization (i.e. "the Oceanic six") give a press conference to a legion of eager reporters. The reporters start asking the survivors some unpleasant questions which become extra unpleasant for the six survivors because they are shamelessly lying in their answers. The effect is to echo another notorious "Seinfeld" innovation: putting the star characters on trial for the crimes and misdemeanors that they've committed in previous seasons.



• There is one real trial presented in season 4: fugitive/murderer Kate Austin is put on trial for her crime spree before crashing on the island. In defiance of the near-universal expectation that Kate would get a totally inexplicable presidential pardon in advance of the proceedings, the prosecuting D.A. actually manages to plea bargain Kate up to a slap on the wrist.

Barack Obama might not make it to November.

Republican presidential nominee presumptive John McCain may not have entirely solidified his base as of yet, but he is doing the next best thing by making his presumptive general election opponent, Barack Obama, look like an idiot. An example of this came just this week when McCain invited Obama for a joint trip to Iraq this summer:

Republican John McCain on Monday sharply criticized Democratic rival Barack Obama for not having been to Iraq since 2006, and said they should visit the war zone together.

"Look at what happened in the last two years since Senator Obama visited and declared the war lost," the GOP presidential nominee-in-waiting told The Associated Press in an interview, noting that the Illinois senator's last trip to Iraq came before the military buildup that is credited with curbing violence.

"He really has no experience or knowledge or judgment about the issue of Iraq and he has wanted to surrender for a long time," the Arizona senator added. "If there was any other issue before the American people, and you hadn't had anything to do with it in a couple of years, I think the American people would judge that very harshly."

This attack on Obama is absolutely devastating. The accusation here is that Obama is not only completely wrong on Iraq, and not only deliberately misleading the American people about Iraq, but that he is deliberately misleading himself(!!!) about the conditions in Iraq by refusing to visit. McCain's position, on the other hand, is entirely enviable. Essentialy, McCain is saying that conditions in Iraq have improved in the last two years, that anyone who can be bothered to care about his own country's actions would have to be a total fool not to recognize it, and, as is well known, that it was McCain's visible and staunch leadership that contributed greatly to the success.

There is another reason for the joint trip, of course. McCain is suggesting that if Obama visits Iraq on his own with nothing but his sycophantic Democratic allies, Obama will just lie about what he sees there. You can't trust Obama to tell the truth unless McCain comes along to keep him honest.

As you might have expected, Obama is at least smart enough to realize that all of this is true, which is why he might visit Iraq this summer, but not with McCain:

Barack Obama is considering a visit to Iraq this summer, his first since becoming a presidential candidate.

Obama revealed his plans to The New York Times. He has been under criticism from Republican rival John McCain for failing to visit Iraq since 2006. Obama also declined McCain's invitation for a joint trip, saying he didn't want "to be involved in a political stunt," according to a report Wednesday on the newspaper's Web site.

It should be no surprise that Hillary Clinton is not quitting the presidential nominating process given that her chief opponent, if elected, would likely be the single most-inept foreign-policy president since Franklin Pierce.

The single most fake-looking Tudor portrait ever

Showtime's miniseries "The Tudors" chose the "I could snap your neck in a second" pose for their iconic image of the English King Henry VIII. Suffice it to say that the real King Henry VIII would have never been caught dead being painted in the ready-to-throttle mode; his real preference was for the "package shot" (notice the conspicuous absence of a "muscle shirt" in the historical portrait).

Liberal Guilt (Possibly part I)

Ron Rosenbaum has written a deep meditation on liberal guilt at slate.com. Consider his starting point for the discussion:

When did "liberal guilt" get such a bad reputation? You hear it all the time now from people who sneeringly dismiss whites who support Obama's candidacy as "guilty liberals." There are, of course, many reasons why whites might support Obama that have nothing to do with race. But what if redeeming our shameful racial past is one factor for some? Why delegitimize sincere excitement that his nomination and potential election would represent a historic civil rights landmark: making an abstract right a reality at last. Instead, their feeling must be disparaged as merely the result of a somehow shameful "liberal guilt."

Here Mr. Rosenbaum hurts his case by conflating the two distinct emotions of guilt and sincere excitement into one. Sincere excitement that an African-American man has won a United States Presidential election is, in my view, entirely natural and justified. I think that both conservatives and liberals can agree on this point. However, this emotion is also the exact opposite of guilt.

We thus come to a line that runs through every human heart. Is excitement over a single electoral victory enough to dispel guilt over the failures of the past? We might as well ask if doing happy things can keep us from feeling sad or if succeeding at work can keep us from feeling inadequate. The best answer to the question that I have, on the face of things, is "maybe". Here Mr. Rosenbaum inadvertantly suggests that "maybe" is much to optimistic an answer:

Since when is shame shameful when it's shame about a four-centuries-long historical crime? Not one of us is a slave owner today, segregation is no longer enshrined in law, and there are fewer overt racists than before, but if we want to praise America's virtues, we have to concede—and feel guilty about—America's sins, else we praise a false god, a golden calf, a whited sepulcher, a Potemkin village of virtue. (I've run out of metaphors, but you get the picture.)

There are two ways of interpreting this passage that lead us to the same conclusion. It might be suggesting that it is correct for the individual American to ascribe to himself culpability and thus guilt and shame for acts of other individual Americans that could have no possible association with himself. Another way of interpreting the passage is to see it as suggessting that it might be correct for the individual member of the American demos to ascribe to himself culpability and thus guilt and shame for acts of the American demos as a whole that could have no possible association to himself.

You can grapple with those interpretations as you wish, but if you accept either of them, then you are going to have some serious problems with achieving redemption. The reason should be clear: if you accept personal blame for the actions of others, then there is no possible way that your personal actions can achieve redemption for yourself. Voting for Barack Obama might make you feel better, for a while, but it won't rewrite history for you and it won't change your memories.

At this point, Mr. Rosenbaum's article jumps the rails:

Guilt is good, people! The only people who don't suffer guilt are sociopaths and serial killers. Guilt means you have a conscience. You have self-awareness, you have—in the case of America's history of racism—historical awareness. Just because things have gotten better in the present doesn't mean we can erase racism from our past or ignore its enduring legacy.

Here Mr. Rosenbaum compounds a rather drastic error that he alluded to in the previous excerpt. In reality, guilt is most definitely not good. The emotion we should be correctly be experiencing through historical awareness is not guilt but empathy. Our ancestors committed some titanic crimes, but some of them also achieved some precious knowledge about the human condition despite the horrendous cost.

Of course, by treating the problem of historical guilt as an individual emotion, I've managed to exclude a big chunk of liberal opinion upon the subject, namely, that none of our current problems would be in existence if it wasn't for those damn conservatives. I'll leave this aspect of the article aside for a future part II.