Bring It On

Mmm…I’m feeling warmer already:

It sounds as if Al Gore is about to deliver what could be not just one of the more significant speeches of his political career but an essential challenge to the embattled presidency of George W. Bush.

In a major address slated for delivery Monday in Washington, the former Vice President is expected to argue that the Bush administration has created a "Constitutional crisis" by acting without the authorization of the Congress and the courts to spy on Americans and otherwise abuse basic liberties…

[E]xpect Gore to make reference to Richard Nixon, whose abuses of executive authority led to calls for his impeachment -- a fate the 37th president avoided by resigning in 1974.

I love it when Al talks dirty. And check this out:

Former U.S. Representative Bob Barr, the Georgia Republican who served as one of the most conservative members of the House, plans to introduce Gore. Barr, an outspoken critic of the abuses of civil liberties contained in the USA Patriot Act critic who has devoted his post-Congressional years to defending the Bill of Rights, refers to the president's secret authorization of domestic wiretapping as "an egregious violation of the electronic surveillance laws."

Seriously—how thoroughly effed up is this administration that they’ve brought Al Gore and Bob Barr together to denounce them? Yowza.

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McCain Loves to Embrace Crap

<—— See? And he’s doing it again, only this time, it’s an Xtreme serving of hypocrisy, as opposed to a loathsome pile of self-important douchery.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) "has been a longtime advocate of strict privacy laws to restrict commercial Web sites' data collection practices" and in a statement on his Web site, McCain assures visitors that "I do not use 'cookies' or other means on my Web site to track your visit in any way." But a CNET investigation found that "visiting mccain.senate.gov implants a cookie on the visitor's PC that will not expire until 2035."

Aww. What a swell guy he is. What a brave, moderate maverick who totally exhibits independent thinking and isn’t at all a useless hackweasel for the most conservative elements of the GOP. What an honest, straight-talkin’ soul.

My only question is where he buys his trousers. It’s got to be some kind of specialty shop, because I’ve never noticed his enormous set of balls, but only a dude with gonads that could take out ten pins each could pull a stunt like this while simultaneously running a PAC called Straight Talk America.

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Shivery Horribleness

Okay, I could not have chosen a worse day to have to walk all over creation in Chicago. It’s sleeting bloody sideways, and I’ve just returned home soaking wet and with a case of the shivers I cannot shake. Brrrrrrrrrrrr. Wev squared.

My bones are rattling.

In other news, lighting a cigarette is still the best way to summon a bus from the ether.

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what's that I hear?

Is it the whaaaaambulance? Why, yes, I believe it is. Who called the whaaambulance? That would the be whiners of the Poor Persecuted Me school in Murietta, California (otherwise known as Calvary Chapel Christian School).

The Evil Christian Haters of the University of California have not certified all of the classes at CCCS as educational enough to pass UC's academic muster. Since some of CCCS' classes are not certified by UC, they do not count for credit for admission to the university--and some students from CCCS are being denied admission.

So, of course, CCCS is suing the University of California for denying them their first admendment rights:

The civil rights lawsuit filed by Calvary Chapel alleges that the 10-campus University of California is trampling the freedom of "a religious school to be religious." UC rejected the content of courses such as "Christianity's Influence in American History" and "Christianity and Morality in American Literature."

In court documents, UC says the free-speech clause of the First Amendment gives it the right to set admission standards. "What we're looking for is this: Is the course academic in nature, or is it there to promote a specific religious lifestyle?" UC spokeswoman Ravi Poorsina says.

That sounds reasonable to me, don't you think? And, really, what did CCCS expect when they use textbooks produced by Bob Jones University that state in the science textbook:

"The people who have prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second."

CCCS students (or others who have taken non-certified classes) can still gain admisson by using alternative paths to admission which including taking extra SAT tests in specific subjects to verify their knowledge.

CCCS is trying to argue the "who's next?" theory about Muslim schools or even homeschoolers. But that doesn't matter because in the end it's about if the classes are not adequately preparing a student for advanced education then they should not be considered for credit. I don't see anything remotely persecutional about that. Do you?

(cross-posted at expostulation)

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Question of the Day

How are liberals going to pull it out of the bag?

The government, the media, public perception...what's it going to take to level the playing field again? I know it's a big question; give it your best shot.

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Conyers Strikes Again

In light of the President’s statement yesterday that hearings on the NSA domestic spying program are “good for democracy,” folk hero and Congressman John Conyers has extended invitations to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo to testify at a Congressional briefing next Friday.

The Democrats have once again requested a Capital Building Hearing room from the Republicans, who control scheduling of such rooms. They have yet to hear back as to wether they will be granted one or not for next Friday's hearings.

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“The triangle is broken and they're on their own until further notice.”

Frustrating but important piece by Peter Daou at HuffPo. Here’s just a snippet:

This, then, is the reality: progressive bloggers and online activists -- positioned on the front lines of a cold civil war -- face a thankless and daunting task: battle the Bush administration and its legions of online and offline apologists, battle the so-called “liberal” media and its tireless weaving of pro-GOP narratives, battle the ineffectual Democratic leadership, and battle the demoralization and frustration that comes with a long, steep uphill struggle.

Go read the whole thing. (Hat tip Atrios.)

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Boo Hoo

In comments, as part of the ongoing discussion of Martha-Ann’s breakdown, Pepper of Daily Pepper predicts: “You wait — there will be an expose asking ‘Have politics become too harsh?’”

We don’t have to wait. It’s already happening.

Maybe Martha-Ann Alito's tearful exit from the hearing room yesterday will do for the relentless partisanship in Washington what the Abramoff plea has done for the downward spiral on ethics: inspire introspection and a rush to demonstrate a change of behavior. Between the partisan rancor on display during the Alito hearings, and mounting examples of public servants forgetting their mandate, the time is ripe for a lot of hand-wringing inside the Beltway over how fetid the atmosphere here has become.

So let me get this straight—liberals have been cast as traitors, accused of giving comfort to the enemy, had their politics demonized as anti-American by hatemongers like Limbaugh, Coulter, Malkin, Savage, O’Reilly, Hannity, and their endless stream of imitators, and subjected to all manner of heinous eliminationist rhetoric for years now, but it's the fallacy that Democrats made Alito’s wife cry that's going to force a debate on the tenor of politics? Give me just a small fucking break.

Why wasn’t the time “ripe” for this examination when then-First Lady Hillary Clinton was accused of murder? Or when a book was published suggesting that her daughter was conceived by virtue of her husband raping her? Or any number of other vicious rightwing smears against Clinton that had absolutely fuck-all to do with her politics? Is it because she didn’t cry?

You know, I’ll bet she did—but not in front of a camera.

Spare me the contrived sympathy for the histrionics of someone who sat weeping on C-SPAN like it was a Lifetime Television Movie, and didn’t indicate the faintest inclination to leave during the entire time she was wiping her tears, reaching for tissues, or being consoled. The media has been shamelessly complicit in promulgating an anti-liberal agenda—not just pro-conservative, but anti-liberal—for at least a decade, and it’s nothing more than a bitter amusement that they’ve chosen to seize on an incident which just coincidentally happens to follow that scheme to do some woeful soul-searching about how rancorous political debate has become.

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I Vant to Get Your Vote

Yeesh:

Looking for something really, really different in a political candidate this year?

Take a gander at Jonathon (The Impaler) Sharkey, who will launch his gubernatorial campaign in Princeton, Minn., on Friday the 13th as a "satanic dark priest" and the leader of the "Vampyres, Witches and Pagans Party."

[…]

For starters, he describes himself as a "sanguinary vampyre ... just like you see in the movies and TV, I sink my fangs into the neck of my donor (at this time in my life, it is my wife, Julie), and drink their blood," he said in an e-mail.

The 13-point platform on his extensive website offers a number of conventional policy initiatives, including emphasis on education, tax breaks for farmers and better benefits for veterans.

Quite some distance from the mainstream, however, is his pledge to execute -- by impalement in front of the State Capitol -- terrorists, rapists, drug dealers, child abusers, repeat drunken drivers and anybody who preys on the elderly.

"I'm going to be totally open and honest," he said. "Unlike other candidates, I'm not going to hide my evil side."

Hmm. Strangely refreshing, yet creepy.

I suppose it goes without saying that his taking up residence in the Minnesota governor’s mansion is a long shot at best. But fear not—he’s got a back-up plan. He’s already registered as a 2008 presidential candidate with the Federal Election Commission.

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I Hate My Governor

Note: This is a post about Indiana politics—and the havoc currently being wreaked upon Hoosiers under the leadership of Mitch "The Blade" Daniels—but it's indicative of how horribly conservatives govern in general.

I may have mentioned before that I'm not fond of my governor. This total dipshit, who earned his nickname "The Blade" as Bush's first budget director in 2001 when he spearheaded the massive tax cut plan, is now solving all the resulting budget problems in Indiana by regularly raising taxes on Hoosiers. In 2004, the average per capita income for Hoosiers was $30,094—$2,843 less than the national average. We have fewer people who benefit from the federal tax-based welfare for the rich designed by Governor Asshole than many other states, but we're broke as shit, and so now he's raising our taxes—again. This time it's just on cigarettes, which, even though I'm a smoker, I can hardly argue with. If you've got to raise taxes, a statewide vice tax makes more sense than raising property taxes, except they've already done that in large parts of the state. As I've mentioned before, ours nearly doubled last year. Of course, Daniels won't say whether the additional revenue will be used to reduce property taxes—of such grave concern that both parties are making it a priority.

Among Daniels' other brilliant ideas:

Deregulating Telecommunications. I won't go into the whole history of telephone monopolies and the resulting sorry state of affairs in Indiana (because it's the same as everywhere else and because it's boring, but suffice it to say, I don't even have a landline anymore), but now Daniels is seriously suggesting that telephone companies be removed from state oversight, which will likely only make the problem worse.

Government Consolidation. Daniels has endorsed rerouting the responsibility for property tax assessments from local townships to county assessors. Aside from this not remotely solving the problem of Hoosiers who are already experiencing extraordinary property tax increases (some people in the county over from ours experienced 1000%—no, that's not a typo—property tax increases), this also means that 178 elected township assessors would lose their jobs and 830 township trustees who also do assessments would lose those responsibilities, meaning that in townships where trustees primarily do assessments, they’d lose their jobs, too.

Transportation Privatization. This is my personal favorite. We'll raise revenue by selling off some Indiana highways to private firms. Now let's do a little logical extrapolation here. If Indiana State is making $100 an hour on its toll roads after deducting maintenance and other costs, to increase revenue, they'd have to lease it for more money. So let's say they lease it to ScrewU Inc., a subsidiary of Halliburton, for $150 an hour. Now ScrewU Inc. has to charge enough to make back the $150 an hour they're paying to lease the road, plus enough on top of that to pay for maintenance and other costs. My 50-cent toll in Hammond just doubled, at least. The best part about this is that it will primarily affect Northern Indiana, but revenues will be used to pay for "the long-awaited extension of I-69 from Indianapolis to Evansville" in Southern Indiana. Daniels says that the plan will "trigger tremendous job growth using in large part a very handy tool: Other people's money." Ho ho ho. You see, Daniels claims that "the increased tolls on the road would be mostly paid for by out-of-state motorists," but apparently he's never been on the Indiana Toll Road. It's mostly used by people who drive to and from Chicago every day for work—people who are already paying state income tax in both Indiana and Illinois, because Illinois got sick of providing jobs to Hoosiers with no payback. Once the mills collapsed, Illinoisans were left with little reason to travel to Indiana for work, so it became a one-way street. And that one-way street is the Indiana Toll Road.

So now the price of working in Chicago, which is really one's best option, unless—as it was put by the host of the Indiana unemployment seminar I just attended—you're a nurse or a truck driver, is being taxed by two states on your income and—coming soon!—outrageous tolls. Or you can, like Mr. Shakes, take the slow-ass train, which makes for three hours of commuting a day and costs almost two hundred dollars a month.

People here are stuck. Stuck without decent jobs, stuck in homes they can't sell because of regionally-inappropriate property taxes, stuck with a shithead of a governor who only makes things worse. Welcome to the failure of conservative governance.

(Hat tip Political Wire.)

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Compromise the Safety of the Troops? Sure!

If it lets me bash Hillary Clinton in the process, why not?

So says Michelle Malkin. (WARNING: Link will take you to Townhall.com. You'll find most of the text here; click over if you must.)

You know, Coulter had better watch her back. Malkin is definitely nipping at her heels for the title of "Completely Batshit Crazy Loathsome Conservative Female Columnist that will Say Anything to Get Attention."

It's a long title, but very coveted.

Move over, Joan Rivers. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is vying for the title of undisputed queen of the cosmetic makeover. Having undergone a cultural warrior collagen injection with her recent crusades against violent video games and flag-burning, Hillary has traded in her ratty black pantsuit for a new politicized accessory to enhance her electoral figure:

Body armor.

Last week, a group called Soldiers for the Truth leaked results of an unpublished Pentagon study that reportedly found that as many as 80 percent of a random sample of Marines killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor. On Friday, the New York Times seized on the study. Faster than you can say "quagmire," Hillary landed on ABC's "Good Morning America" to lambaste the Bush administration as "incompetent" and its failure to provide more armor "unforgivable."

Now, I'm not one to back up Hillary's ridiculous video game/flag burning fights, but what exactly is this shit? 80% of this sample of Marines could have survived if they had more body armor. Eighty percent. Is this important? Is this unforgivable? You bet your sweet bippy it is. Oh, and that Joan Rivers crack... superb. And not dated or tortured at all. Top notch. As Stewie would say: "Have any Titanic jokes for us? As long as we're hitting these things at the height of their popularity?" Egads.

So what, pray tell, is Malkin's problem with all of this?

Hillary bashed President Bush and Vice President Cheney for callously letting troops die and said she was "just bewildered as to how this president and this vice president continue to isolate themselves from different points of view."

Well, I am bewildered, too. Bewildered at how such a supposedly brilliant and savvy woman -- who is supposedly in tune with American troops -- can so blithely ignore the grave trade-offs involved in this matter.

You want different points of view? Listen to soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division's 3rd Brigade, who must don some 40 pounds of protection and gear while fighting in the desert heat. Capt. Jamey Turner, 35, of Baton Rouge, La., a commander in the 1st Squadron, 33rd Cavalry Regiment bluntly reminded the Associated Press: "You've got to sacrifice some protection for mobility. If you cover your entire body in ceramic plates, you're just not going to be able to move."

Second Lt. Josh Suthoff, 23, of Jefferson City, Mo., said: "I'd go out with less body armor if I could."

So, these guys don't want it, so let's not give it to them. Nice. (Bolds mine)

There is a legitimate debate to be had about the Army's supply system, military procurement, and contracting squabbles over body armor. However, challenging the leaked study's premises, Spc. Robert Reid, 21, of Atlanta, commented: "It's the Army's responsibility to get soldiers the armor they need. But that doesn't mean those deaths could have been prevented."

Well, of course the armor isn't a guarantee that solders will not be killed. But that doesn't change the fact that it is the Army's responsibility to get soldiers the armor they need. A fact that you state yourself, Michelle, and a responsibility that has been shirked. But should we let that bother us? Hell no, not when there's a Clinton to bash!

A military blogger at Baghdad Guy who serves in the U.S. Army, 101st Airborne Division, 506th Infantry, sums it up:

"Body armor has saved numerous lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and it will continue to do so, especially as it is modified to better meet the threat we face. However, there are limitations as to how much armor you can add onto an individual and maintain his effectiveness as a soldier: when I step out the gate I am wearing on my person body armor, a kevlar helmet, my M4 rifle with a few hundred rounds of ammunition, my M9 sidearm with another hundred rounds of ammunition, 2-3 quarts of water, a portable radio, night vision equipment, and numerous other odds and ends ...

" ... Too much weight means a soldier moves slower, tires more easily, [maneuvers] less stealthily and spends more time feeling sorry for himself instead of focusing on the mission. And then there's the bulkiness that becomes an issue as you move through tight space and wedge into the seats of military vehicles that were not designed with comfort and/or legroom in mind. All these tradeoffs must be addressed before you make the decision to add armor, it must be determined that the armor will be effective, and then it must be designed in a way that minimizes impact on our ability to do our job."

Alas, fund-raising, spotlight-grabbing, 2008-planning Hillary isn't interested in sober analysis of trade-offs on the battlefield.

Sober analysis?? How about checking with soldiers that would gladly wear a little extra weight if it meant keeping their intestines from being blown out through their spinal column? How about analyzing exactly why and how extra body armor has been kept from soldiers in the first place? How about analyzing why soldiers that may not want to be wearing extra body armor are driving unarmored vehicles? How about calling for analysis and development of lighter, cooler body armor?

How about just giving them the fucking body armor that could save their lives, and let the soldiers decide what to do with it?

But no, Malkin would rather just not give it to them in the first place. And she'd rather ridicule Clinton for suggesting that, you know, maybe that eighty percent of soldiers didn't have to fucking die.

She is too busy playing dress-up to listen to the troops she says she cares so much about now.

Don't you even fucking think about going there, Malkin.

Update: As commenter Alex said over at Tbogg (where someone had the same Bush dressup thought that I did.. damn! and I thought I was so clever!):

The report cites Marine deaths. Michelle quotes 101st Airborne, Army. Why does the U.S. Army hate the Marine Corps?

Well, she is absolutely accurate when she says the study of Marine fatalities doesn't prove that any Army personnel were killed because they lacked the vests.

To coin a phrase, Heh, indeed.

More Update: Malkin is still a hypocrite, and still hasn't responded to David's six part criticism of her latest "book." Coward.

(Energy Dome tip to Tbogg, who has quite a way with words.)

(Sugar...honey, honey... you are my cross-post girl... and you got me wanting you)

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Letterman

I haven’t watched Letterman with any regularity for years, but last night, I flipped over and saw him do a snide segment about Alito, and then his Top 10 list was Signs Your Boss Is Drunk, with #1 being “He does stuff like this,” and then showed the video of Bush being totally discombobulated by locked doors on a set in Japan China (thanks, Gene).

Does anyone watch Letterman frequently? Between this and the O’Reilly kafuffle, he certainly seems to be getting uncharacteristically political. Pretty cool, if he is.

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Oops

Scalito.

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Breaking News: Vapors Outbreak in Capitol

An outbreak of The Vapors is gripping D.C. today, with overcome Washingtonians swooning at the slightest upset, leaving the sidewalks littered with carefully strewn bodies. “At first we weren’t sure what was going on,” said Dr. Richard Head, of the Jackie Collins Center for Emotional Research, “but then we noticed that all the patients were coming in with their forearms draped across their foreheads, and then we knew—it’s The Vapors.”

The CDC has identified Martha-Ann Alito as the Typhoid Mary of the epidemic. Currently, she and all other female sufferers have been quarantined at the Jackie Collins Center. Doctors Without Ethics are flying in from the coasts to perform emergency hysterectomies, in the hopes of stemming the scourge before it moves beyond the Beltway. Male sufferers have been released with a pat on the back.

The Department of Homeland Security has recommended all D.C.-area residents stock up on duct tape and smelling salts.

In related news, Congress has passed legislation requiring at least one fainting couch be made available at all future SCOTUS nomination hearings.

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Roe Thoughts

Interesting piece in Broadsheet today commenting on a Chicago Tribune feature about an abortion clinic in Granite City, IL, just this side of the Missouri border. The Hope Clinic for Women has:

…encountered "many difficult situations" ever since neighboring Missouri passed a law allowing civil litigation to be brought against those who "cause, aid, or assist" Missouri minors in getting abortions -- anywhere -- without parental consent. (Shades of CIANA, coming soon to a Senate near you.)

While Illinois does not require parental consent -- making it a "magnet state" for abortions, quoth the bill's sponsor, Missouri state Sen. John Loudon -- at this point, it might as well. After some legal wrangling, the clinic finally announced that it would no longer provide abortions for Missouri minors without parental consent. (Almost 200 of the 5,400 patients the clinic served in 2005 were pregnant minors from Missouri.) "I think it's very disturbing that one state can have such a chilling effect on another state's laws," Hope Clinic executive director Sally Burgess said. Yep.

This is exactly why the argument that overturning Roe might be “a good thing,” so that abortion can go back to the states and “Red Staters will get what they deserve” is a bad, bad argument. Aside from the obvious fact that it ignores not everyone who resides in a Red State is a conservative (the counterpoint most often invoked in response when the “good thing” argument has been raised in comments here and elsewhere), it’s predicated on the fallacy that every state’s abortion laws will exist independently from all others. The assumption is made that women in Red States who want an abortion will have to travel to Blue States, but rarely do we consider whether those women will be able to travel to Blue States. Financial concerns are, of course, one issue; laws like that passed in Missouri add a whole other level of restriction.

Some of my less political-minded girlfriends used to respond to my alarmism about Roe being overturned by saying, “It will never be overturned.” Now that it looks like a distinct possibility, I hear, “Abortions will still be legal in most states.” I get the distinct feeling that losing the protection afforded by Roe will leave a whole lot of people utterly gobsmacked by what happens in its void, and realizing you really don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

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GOP Governors Donating Abramoff Dosh

Mr. Fedora sure got around:

Days after calling on his party to exhibit higher ethical standards, Gov. Mitt Romney said the Republican Governors Association would donate to charity $500,000 in contributions it received from a donor entwined in the investigation of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Romney, a potential 2008 presidential candidate and the newly elected chairman of the RGA, said the association will give the money to American Red Cross chapters in five hurricane-ravaged states. The RGA had received donations in that amount in October 2002 from a public affairs company owned by Michael Scanlon, Abramoff's business partner.

"When influence peddling is alleged, a political institution like the Republican Governors Association wants to be above any possible shadow of complicity," the governor said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press.

One of my top-secret anonymous informants has told me that if this doesn’t work to stave off scandal, Romney plans to run out of a courtroom crying.

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Three-Ring Circus

In case you haven’t heard yet, Mrs. Martha-Ann “Red Dress” Alito burst into tears and left the room toward the end of questioning yesterday, only to return a few minutes later after sobbing in an anteroom. The story is being spun that the mean old Democrats, who had the nerve to try to get a straight answer from a SCOTUS nominee about his membership in a bigoted organization, made her cry, even though she started to “sniffle audibly” while her husband was being defended by conservative Lindsey Graham.

This just stinks to high heaven. Might Mrs. Alito have genuinely been overcome with emotion? Yeah, maybe. And maybe monkeys will fly out of my ass, too, but I think it’s unlikely.

Of course, it’s just too mean to consider that it might have been a ridiculous stunt, or too unsympathetic to expect that she keep her shit together, instead of turning a SCOTUS nomination hearing into an episode of Dynasty. And it’s just too tempting for the idiotic media to play on stereotypes of hysterical women and dutiful wives, uncritically reporting that she was overcome as a result of the Democrats picking on her husband. Whatfuckingever.

[UPDATE: I see I’m not the only heartless wench who thinks Mrs. Alito is an outlandish specimen.]

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Question of the Day

If President Numbnuts had a blog, what would it be called? And/or what would his screen name be?

I'm thinking something along the lines of "Prezniting is Hard Work," authored by WRoxxx.

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Action Heroes and Unlikely Heroes

Mannion’s doing an interesting multi-part critique on Hollywood’s Right Wing Agenda, which starts here and continues here. (I really encourage you to go read it all, because I'm commenting on such a small part of it, and it deserves to be read in whole.)

Star Wars is almost unique among the blockbuster action-adventure movies of the last generation in insisting that there is a code that the Good Guys have to follow and they can't break that code without becoming villains themselves…

But although Star Wars begat countless action-adventure movies, it begat no more Lukes.

Instead for the next twenty years we had Rambo, the Terminator, Steven Sagal, the Die Hard movies, and Indiana Jones.

In all these incarnations, the hero isn't bound by any code. He isn't even defined by his virtues. He is good because he is the hero and the bad guys want him dead. (Yes, I remember that in the first Terminator movie, the Terminator was a bad guy. I'm really talking about Schwartzenegger in most of his movies, of course.) Evil is very clearly defined as the work of monsters, but Good is defined only by its hatred of Evil and the violence it uses to stomp it out...

For a generation Hollywood has been selling us the idea that Heroes are angry, brutal, violent, and Right. Good is what they say and what they do. This is an extremely Right Wing notion, that law and order are what the authoritarian strong man says they are and that not only are we to accept this, we are to applaud it and fall in line to cheer the strong man on.

I think Mannion’s spot on, although I see some evidence of more complex heroes beginning to emerge. (It also might just be that Christopher Nolan, Sam Raimi, and Bryan Singer have been given jobs that traditionally have gone to the Michael Bays of Hollywood—but then again, such decisions may themselves be indicative of a shift in the wind.) I commented at his place:

“One of the notable exceptions to this … are the recent reimaginings of comic heroes, most notably Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man (‘With great power comes great responsibility’) and Christian Bale's Batman (‘It's not who I am underneath, but what I do, that defines me’), both of whom wrestled with their identities specifically within respective code of ethics modeled for them by men they felt the need to live up to. They each face an option between virtue and apathy—which is, in some way, even more interesting (in its realism) than good vs. evil.

A similar example is the world of the X-Men, which is also not a straight good vs. evil (or an us vs. them) scenario. It could easily have been mutants pitted against non-mutants, but instead, it's mutants (aligned in some cases with sympathetic non-mutants) against other mutants—and each has a clearly defined agenda. And, yet, on some occasions, the opposing mutant groups (X's and Magneto's) have allied themselves together to work against a non-mutant threat to all mutants. It's a complicated and interesting world that relies on ethics and politics—and, as an aside, happens to be one of the rare examples of a network of characters that also features multiple good and bad female characters.”

What strikes me when I consider the difference between The Action Hero—Rambo et al—and The Unlikely Hero—Luke, Maguire’s Spider-Man, Professor X—is that the former are meant to be superhuman, though mortal, and the latter are thoroughly human, in spite of their midi-chlorians or wacked-out DNA. And it’s impossible not to draw the parallels between a fortunate son who evades responsibility but plays the hero, and those who rise to the challenge and care about the less fortunate, though they’ve every opportunity to avoid both.

When I reviewed Batman Begins, I noted (finding, as did Mannion, the last great Unlikely Hero among the ranks of the Rebel Alliance):

For those who prefer their superheroes on a pedestal, to be admired and regarded as having broken the bounds of mere mortaldom, the opportunity is left intact, but as those of us who were raised on the flawed and fallible, inimitably human, heroes populating a galaxy far, far away are coming into their own as filmmakers, we are given the chance to relate to our heroes as well. Far from taking anything away from our heroes, instead behind this door left ajar for those who want to venture inside, we find that seeing ourselves in our heroes elevates us all, and encourages us to be our best selves, too.

There is a time for perfect heroes who are handed powers of someone else’s design and never doubt their destinies, but this is not it. This is a time of self-made heroes who take on more than they might have been meant, and who do the right thing not because it is easy, or because there is glory to be had, but because we are defined by what we do, and so doing nothing is not an option.

Maybe we’re getting tired of watching perfect heroes with presaged destinies who come out of battles unscathed. That might be too much to hope, but a girl can dream, can’t she?

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Blah Blah Blah

Bush is in Louisville today, jabbering disjointedly at some unfortunate audience about winning the war on terror. And he’s got a few thoughts about those upcoming hearings we’ve been promised on whether he had the authority to instruct the NSA to launch a secret domestic spying program without official judiciary oversight.

"There will be a lot of hearings to talk about that, but that's good for democracy," he said. "Just so long as the hearings, as they explore whether or not I had the prerogative to make the decision I make, doesn't tell the enemy what we're doing. See, that's the danger."

WTF is he babbling about? I’ll bet any one of the corn-fed, semi-literate, doped-up meth cooks in the small town I live in is smart enough not to discuss the goings-on at his trailer/lab over the blessed phone, and Bush thinks that people sophisticated and patient enough to take flying lessons so they can use airplanes as rockets might not be one step ahead of figuring out we’re listening in? For crying out loud.

“Just so long as the hearings don’t tell the American people what we’re doing,” is more like it, because terrorists don’t give a good shit whether he’s got a warrant or not—but the voters do.

In his opening remarks, he defended the global war on terrorism and the U.S. effort in Iraq. He said insurgents in Iraq were trying to drive the United States out through violence and bloodshed but he declared, "They're not going to shake my will."

Ooh, the will of someone who sends other people off to die will not be shaken. Tough talk, Bonzo. You’ve really got a backbone of fucking steel.

While saying he wanted to bring American troops home, he said, "I don't want them to come home without achieving the victory."

In a question and answer session, Bush was asked about Iraq, education priorities, immigration, the economy, health care and other subjects. He said the war on terrorism would not end with an enemy surrender, as was the case in World War II. "I don't envision a signing ceremony on the USS Missouri," Bush said. "The peace won't be the kind of peace we're used to."

No word on what kind of peace, exactly, it will be—or how we’re going to determine precisely when “the victory” has been achieved. I guess “political expediency” doesn’t poll well, so it’s best to leave it up in the air.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!