I'm So Indicted (And I Just Can't Hide It)

After days of suspense, Patrick Fitzgerald finally made indictments in the Plamegate scandal. I know I'm probably not the only person to be disappointed that Karl Rove (who was clearly the one behind outing CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to reporters) wasn't indicted. It feels to me like Lewis "Scooter" Libby is being used as a bit of a scapegoat. But the fact seems to be that Libby lied under oath, so he was easier to indict. The case against Rove might take a little longer, but he's not out of the woods yet. If anyone in this administration deserves to go to prison (besides Bush and Cheney, that is), it's Karl Rove.

It's kind of amazing how fast not only this administration but the entire Republican party is falling apart. Frist under a cloud of suspicion for fiscal irregularities, DeLay forced to give up his post as House Majority Leader and smirking in his mug shot as if it were a campaign poster, the Vice President's Chief of Staff under indictment -- what's next? Are we going to find out that Ann Coulter's really a man?

What's even more frightening to think about is that these idiots are going to be in power for the next three years, and there's not much we can do about it. I almost wish that we could have a nationwide referendum to see how many people now believe that their vote for George Bush in 2004 was a mistake. Do you think he would win a similar election today? As the Brits like to say, not bloody likely.

It looks very good for the Democrats in 2006, although that's a long way off. I believe, as I've said before, that the Democrats are going to win a big enough majority next year to begin impeachment proceedings in 2007 -- at which point Bush may well find himself represented by Harriet Miers.

And won't that be interesting!

Tom Moran

Celluloid Chickens Come Home to Roost

There was an interesting article by Sharon Waxman in the New York Times this week stating that one of the reasons for the precipitous drop at the box office this past Summer was not just that the movies released by the major studios sucked (although they did), but that the movies are being "jilted by the one audience it has pursued most ardently for at least two decades: young males."

It's ironic, isn't it? Hollywood has worshipped at the shrine of the adolescent male for at least the last 15 years, pumping out one fast-paced, high-octane piece of cinematic crap after another, only to have that audience abandon them for modes of entertainment requiring even less of an attention span than a feature film. According to the article, "young men aged 13 to 25 reported that they were busy surfing the Web, instant-messaging with friends and playing video games on consoles like PlayStation 2 and Xbox." Too busy, that is, to shell out $10 to see some over-produced, ear-shattering, mind-dulling piece of junk at their local multiplex.

Can anyone doubt that this development, as well as the forthcoming demise of the movie theater as we know it, is a good thing? Hollywood already derives fully 60% of its income from DVD sales -- and that percentage is only going to get higher. It's already gotten to the point where a film's theatrical release is (almost) considered to be nothing more than a coming attraction for the eventual DVD issue. The age of "top-down" cinema is rapidly coming to a close.

So what's will take its place? In my opinion, something that is both more democratic and more solipsistic. As "film" becomes digital, what Marx (Karl, not Groucho) used to call the means of production will be available, not just to a relative handful of highly paid people in Southern California, but to almost anyone who can afford to buy a Mac G5 and Final Cut Pro. The implications of this revolution are only just now beginning to be felt.

Think of the difference between a syndicated column in a newspaper and a blog, like this one. With the onset of the blog, journalism (or at least opinion) became democratized. You don't need a newspaper syndicate and printing presses and trucks and newsstands to be able to express and disseminate your opinion -- all you need is a computer, an ISP and a nifty website like Blogger. And bada-bing! You can tell the world what you think and some of that world might even find out about it.

That's what's coming in the world of film. The age of the what the French writer Alexandre Astruc once called in 1948 "la caméra-stylo," or the camera as pen, has arrived. With a miniscule investment relative to the budget of even the smallest Hollywood features, anyone (and I mean anyone) will be able to make a film. Of course, the quality of these films will be uneven. But they will be very personal, avoiding the mass-market, go-for-the-lowest-common-denominator attitude of the Hollywood studios, and that will be in the long run a boon for movie lovers. Especially those above the age of 14.

Of course, every gain conceals a loss -- no matter what you gain, you always lose something. When you become famous you gain notoriety but you lose privacy. When the cable revolution hit, we gained a much greater freedom of choice in television programming, but we lost that sense of national cohesion that we once had when the whole country watched the same shows on the same three networks. And the coming democratization of film will give us more personal visions from people who would not have been able to express themselves in that medium before, but we'll lose something as well. Young kids today have no idea what it's like to see a film in a genuine movie palace filled with thousands of people. Seeing a film in your home, even on an HDTV screen 40" wide, is one thing. But seeing it at Radio City Music Hall on a screen 50' high and with 6,000 people in the audience, is quite another. That experience is now almost entirely gone, and I know I'll miss it. But if it keeps us from another slew of sequels and movies starring non-actors like The Rock, it just might be worth it.

Tom Moran

The President's New Clothes

Are you enjoying the controversy over President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court as much as I am? Nothing so pleases the heart of a progressive as watching conservatives devouring their own -- it is, after all, what they do best.

The most amusing part of the whole thing is to see the scales falling from the eyes of these conservatives as they finally realize, five years into his administration, that Bush really is the asshole that we on the left have been saying he was all these years. To read Ann Coulter saying that:

"Unfortunately for Bush, he could nominate his Scottish terrier Barney, and some conservatives would rush to defend him, claiming to be in possession of secret information convincing them that the pooch is a true conservative and listing Barney's many virtues — loyalty, courage, never jumps on the furniture ... "

is to know a rare kind of bliss. Just who do you think has been in the White House since 2001? you're tempted to say, Harry freakin' Truman?

Bush's choice of Miers has shown conservatives who Bush really is. When Charles Krauthammer writes that:

"...nominating a constitutional tabula rasa to sit on what is America’s constitutional court is an exercise of regal authority with the arbitrariness of a king giving his favorite general a particularly plush dukedom."

he's only saying what progressives have known all along. Movement conservatives (the ones who worship Ronald Reagan and thought in 2000 that George W. Bush was going to morph from a mediocre drunk into Ronald Reagan redux) are appalled, partly because the choice of Miers is so undistinguished, and partly because it is so revealing, not only about the kind of person Bush is (his cronyism, his lack of intellectual rigor and unwillingness to look past his own nose), but it also plays up how Bush has played them (and the rest of the country, for that matter) like chumps for the past five years.

Possibly my favorite comment on this whole debacle has been from Wiliam Kristol, in The Weekly Standard, who took Bush's choice of a lemon for the Supreme Court and constructed an entire lemonade stand from it:

"But the reaction of conservatives to this deeply disheartening move by a president they otherwise support and admire has been impressive. There has been an extraordinarily energetic and vigorous debate among conservatives as to what stance to take towards the Miers nomination, a debate that does the conservative movement proud. The stern critics of the nomination have, in my admittedly biased judgment, pretty much routed the half-hearted defenders. In the vigor of their arguments, and in their willingness to speak uncomfortable truths, conservatives have shown that they remain a morally serious and intellectually credible force in American politics."

You get the feeling that, if Bush does get impeached in the next two years, as I think likely, that some conservatives will be secretly glad when it happens? After all, Bush has done to them what Clinton did to Monica Lewinsky. And it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people.

Tom Moran

Bill Bennett's Big Mouth

Recently, former cabinet member, recovering gambler, current talk-radio host and full time right-wing blowhard Bill Bennett got in trouble with what people like him like to call the "mainstream media" because of comments he made regarding race, crime and abortion.

Bennett's exact words were that "you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." He was smart enough, however, to immediately backtrack by saying that it would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do."

His politically correct caveat notwithstanding, Bennett has been strongly criticized by many of the usual suspects on the left -- from Al Sharpton (gee, what a shock that is!) to Howard Dean. Colby King, the Washington Post’s Deputy Editorial Page Editor and columnist, referred to Bennett as "the poster child for racism,” adding that that “there's no way you can parse his words and get away from what he said. What he said was morally reprehensible. He has said, in effect, that blacks have a predisposition for being criminals.”

Well, not exactly. What Bennett said (in what he called a "thought experiment") was that if you aborted every black baby the crime rate would go down. And there's a problem with this statement that his critics on the left have failed to recognize.

The problem is that he's right.

Bennett's "thought experiment" is basically a rip-off of the analysis in the bestselling book "Freakonomics" that pointed out that everywhere abortion was made legal in the United States, the crime rate went down. Of course, there's a bit of a time lag -- close to twenty years, in fact -- but basically the fact that America is safer from crime now than it was in the 1970s is due in large part to the availability of safe and legal abortion.

This means two things. First, Bennett is right -- but he didn't take his "thought experiment" far enough. First of all, you don't have to abort all the babies of a given ethnic group to make crime go down -- just the boys. The vast majority of the violent crime in any society is committed by young men aged 15 to 25. So why pick on the girls? If you eliminated the black boys from a society, the crime rate would, eventually, go down. But what Bennett didn't say was that crime would also go down if you aborted the males of any other ethnicity. If you let the black boys live and aborted the white boys, crime would go down as well. Let the white and black boys live and eliminate the Hispanic boys, crime would also go down. So Bennett's comments, while technically correct, were incomplete.

The second thing to ponder, while we await the first session of the Roberts court this week, is that Roe v. Wade is, at least in my opinion, sure to be overturned in the next decade to a decade and a half. Make abortion illegal (as some states would be sure to do if Roe is overturned), and the states that criminalized abortion would see their crime rates skyrocket in the next twenty years -- exactly the way it did in the mid-1960s.

Will this actually happen? No one can tell for certain, but check back with me in 2035 and we'll find out together.

Tom Moran