God Hates Bigots

I haven't posted anything about the death of Natasha Richardson because, frankly, there didn't seem to be anything to say about it other than the obvious fact that it was just awful.

Well, now I have something to say.

And you know why? Because her funeral's being picketed.

Picketed? Did you say picketed?

Yes, I did. And you'll never guess who's doing the picketing.

The Westboro Baptist Church -- you know. The "God Hates Fags" people.

This is what they say on their website:

St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church - Natasha is in HELL! 15 North Avenue WHY are these really rich, really dreadfully talented, exceptionally privileged PERVERTS hiding the time of this dead tart's funeral? We shall picket outside on the sidewalk of this funeral location. Words will not hurt you, silly! We do, after all, put the "fun" in funeral. Come on, give over the time already. Seriously, if you want to get the snap-shot of this vain woman's life, from any righteous person's perspective, here it is: her first husband, Robert Fox, had a living wife when they married. So she lived in adultery with him. But her most current husband, Liam Neeson (UGLY!), has no former wife. He's just a major pedophile-catholic-worshiper, so that's how they raised their two boys. Oh, and her dad - Tony Richardson - was bisexual and died of AIDS. Hence her avid support of AIDS research. There you have it, and that is what these disgusting perverts from DOOMED america, Cancerous Canada and Ultra-filthy UK are just going bonkers over. A dead simple slut who did not have enough sense to put on the helmet (it will muss my hair), then when she DID fall and hit her head, she was WAY TOO PROUD to get help (it might be embarrassing)! Shame on the whole lot of you. But despite it all, do you fools believe that Natasha was the worst sinner that has lived? Nay, but except YE repent, ye shall all likewise perish.

There's more -- there's a LOT more -- but I'll spare you the rest.

Do you believe these fucking idiots? Because Natasha Richardson supported AIDS research they're going to picket her funeral. Anybody have a car and some baseball bats? Because I'm up for making a trip upstate tomorrow morning to teach these motherfuckers a lesson in manners.

Tom Moran

What Do We Do Now?

You may have noticed that I've been a little quiet in this blog of late.

And you may have wondered why that is.

Well, it's like this:

This blog was started in a spirit of outrage and opposition. Four years ago it looked as if the worst elements of the G.O.P. were unstoppable, and someone had to say something to oppose their reckless and idiotic policies. I advocated for another way, and for a return to progressive values in this country.

And guess what? It happened. And now I'm stuck wondering where this blog goes from here.

Do I want to be a partisan cheerleader for the Obama Adminsitration? Not particularly. It feels nice to have a grown-up in the White House for the first time in 16 years, but I don't think they need me to tell them what to do or when they're screwing up.

Should I turn it into a more social and cultural blog, inveighing against the idiocies of our time? Sounds like something out of the movie "Network."

Or should I just let it quietly die, happy in the knowledge that we've done our job and taken back the country?

I'm not sure. I'm still thinking about it.

Tom Moran

These Are The Good Old Days

Al Franken has been unanimously certified as the new Senator from Minnesota, and Ann Coulter has been banned for life from NBC.

Hot damn! Makes you proud to be an American!

Former Senator Norm Coleman said that he's going to challenge the results in court. Very classy guy, he is. Wasn't this the same guy who said that Franken should accept the results of the recount and concede? Or am I just imagining it?

And at the same time, according to The Drudge Report, hatchet-faced conservative hag Ann Coulter has been given the boot from the Today Show:

"We are just not interested in anyone so highly critical of President-elect Obama, right now," a TODAY insider reveals. "It's such a downer. It's just not the time, and it's not what our audience wants, either." Others inside the peacock network strongly deny the book's theme is at issue.

Of course, what NBC is not taking into account is that bitching and moaning about how awful liberals are is the only thing that Coulter does well -- in fact, it's the only thing that conservatives do well. God knows they've spent the past eight years proving to America and the rest of the world that they can't govern.

So let them bitch. Let them moan. They had their chance to run this country and they completely fucked it up. Now it's our turn, as we try to clean up the mess they've made of this country. Let them bitch all they want.

They're irrelevant now. And they know it.

Tom Moran

Camelot on the Hudson?

If you read the article in today's Times on Caroline Kennedy, the most interesting part comes at the end:

Ms. Kennedy came to the interview with two aides, who had reserved the back room of the Lenox Hill Diner, on Lexington Avenue near 78th Street, for several interviews scheduled on Saturday.

As things wrapped up, a reporter tried to pose another question, but she interrupted him.
“I think we’re done,” she said.

That little colloquy (or lack of one) indicates nicely the tone-deafness and arrogance that has permeated Kennedy's pseudo-campaign since day one -- and also indicates why the backlash against her candidacy has been so thoroughly warranted.

There was a famous moment in Senator Ted Kennedy's first campaign for the Senate in 1962 where his opponent said of him in a debate that if his name had been Edward Moore, instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, that his candidacy would be a joke. But Ted Kennedy has turned out to be one of the greatest of all senators. Should we give the same leeway to his niece?

I'm not so sure.

I don't really have a dog in this race. There isn't any particular candidate I would rather see in the Senate than Kennedy. But like a lot of people I do mildly resent the idea that a person of wealth and privilege thinks that a seat in the United States Senate is just theirs for the asking. And I'm starting to get the feeling that Governor Paterson might just feel the same way.

Would she be able to raise money? Yes. But does that matter? The Barack Obama campaign has totally upset the old paradigm for political findraising, so it may be possible for a dark horse to go online with a strong message and raise enough money to be competitive that way.

Does she have name recognition? To people over 50, yes. But to younger voters, the Kennedy name is more associated with date rape and inept pilots (if at all) than with the magic of Camelot. Keep in mind that Arthur Schlesinger once famously stated that the Kennedy Administration was a "damn long time ago" -- and he wrote that in the early 80s.

Also keep in mind that whoever Paterson appoints, assuming that they're not a caretaker, will have to win not one but two elections in the next four years -- and Caroline Kennedy is the worst public speaker I have ever heard. Has she gotten better lately? Perhaps. Is she good enough to win an election on her own? I doubt it.

And just the way she has handled herself over the past few weeks has not inspired confidence -- to put it mildly. Ducking the press, avoiding tough questions, Kennedy's rationale for her candidacy seems to be "Vote for me, I'm a Kennedy." And I'm not sure that works anymore. It's not 1962, after all.

So I'm not at all sure that Senator Caroline Kennedy is a sure thing. Or even that it should be. Governor Paterson is starting to resent the strong-arm tactics being use to sway his decision, and I wouldn't be surprised if he chose someone else. And that might not be a bad thing.

Tom Moran

Publishing a Dead Man, Against His Will

New books by long-dead authors seem to be all the rage these days. This year it's And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, a a 63-year-old collaboration between then-unknown writers Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Next year it will be the last, unfinished novel by Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov.

The delay in the publication of the former book is easily explained. At the time it was written, both of its authors were a decade away from publishing the works that would bring them fame -- On The Road for Kerouac and Naked Lunch for Burroughs. And the original of one of their characters and the book's inspiration, Lucien Carr, was very much alive and desirous that a fictional account of the most traumatic event in his life (the murder by Carr of his friend and stalker David Kammerer) not be published while he was alive. Only Carr's death in 2005 made it possible to publish the long-buried manuscript.

I've read And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, albeit with some trepidation, and all things considered I'm glad that it was finally made available. Both authors (Burroughs especially) are writing parodistically in the hardboiled style of Dashiell Hammett, and the novel is a fascinating time capsule of America in wartime, with classic French films playing on 42nd Street and men wanting to ship on any boat available in order to escape their fate. It's no masterpiece but it's a fun read, especially so when you know the real story involved (to which the novel cleaves pretty faithfully, with some details, like the murder weapon, changed). The book is a minor addition to the growing literature by and about the Beats, and it's worth a look if you're a fan of either author's more mature fiction.

The Nabokov is another story altogether. No matter what you may think of And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, at the very least it was a finished manuscript that the authors tried to publish at the time they wrote it, and neither man ever expressed the desire that it never see the light of day. The new Nabokov, entitled The Original of Laura, is being published by his son against the expressed wishes of its author, who instructed his wife on his deathbed to burn the unfinished manuscript (or, given that it was Nabokov, index cards).

Should she, should he obey his wishes? Tom Stoppard, speaking to the BBC, says yes: "It's perfectly straightforward. Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it." Of course, if we followed Stoppard's logic, we would lose out on a great deal of literature: Virgil's The Aeneid, Kafka's The Trial and The Castle and Eugene O'Neill's More Stately Mansions at the very least. It's clear that both Nabokov's widow and his son have agonized over this decision, which was not taken lightly. Vera Nabokov defied her husband's wishes and let the manuscript escape the flames, but apparently could not bring herself to allow for publication. Now, 31 years after its author's death, the book is being prepared for publication by his son.

Should it be published? Or should Nabokov's wishes be respected? These are very touchy questions. The heirs of Albert Camus had to decide whether to publish his last, unfinished novel, the manuscript of which was in the car with him when he died in an auto accident in his 40s (it took his children 30 years to decide to publish The First Man). But at least, having been cut down unexpectedly in his prime, Camus had left no explicit instructions for what to do with the book in the event of his demise. Eugene O'Neill, on the other hand, knowing he would not live to finish the plays he'd envisioned as an immense cycle of American history (the overall title of which was to be A Tale of Possessors, Self-Dispossessed), methodically set about to destroy all the manuscripts of the plays that were unfinished. A version of one of the plays for some reason escaped the destruction, and More Stately Mansions, was produced on Broadway in the 1960s in a truncated version with Ingrid Bergman in the lead. It has since been published in a far longer (and theatrically unfeasible) version by Yale University Press.

Dmitri Nabokov thinks it's relatively simple: "My father told me what his most important books were. He named [The Original of] Laura as one of them. One doesn't name a book one intends to destroy." He went on to tell the BBC that: "He would have reacted in a sober and less dramatic way if he didn't see death staring him in the face. He certainly would not have wanted it destroyed. He would have finished it." Of course he would have finished it, the devil's advocate in me replies, but he didn't have time to do so -- and, rather than let an unfinished work that didn't live up to his standards go out into the world, he preferred to see it destroyed.

I'm very much of two minds about this, but in the final analysis I have to say that I would vote for publication. Even if The Original of Laura is total crap, Nabokov's reputation is secure. I mean, if it survived his awful translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin it'll survive anything. And when we consider some of the holocausts of literature -- from the destruction of the library at Alexandria to the well-intentioned but idiotic burning of Lord Byron's Memoirs -- perhaps it's better that, to paraphrase Mikhail Bulgakov, manuscripts shouldn't burn.

Will Hillary Get It?

They're talking about it as if it's a done deal. CNN says that Obama is "on track" to nominated Hillary Clinton Secretary of State, according to Huffington Post. The announcement will be made after Thanksgiving. Everyone seems to think it's inevitable.

Why don't I believe it?

Maybe I'm just being cynical. But I just have this feeling that the deal's going to fall through -- and that Obama's people want it to fall through.

This is what I'm thinking:

The incoming administration considers Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State. This would, if it goes through, appease all of those Hillary supporters who feel as if she was "dissed" by not being named to the ticket over the summer. The most prestigious post in the cabinet, it would be a very nice consolation prize for the woman who would be the president-elect today if she hadn't run such a miserable presidential campaign.

But in offering it to her, Obama's people know -- at least according to my slightly cynical theory they know -- that she can't, and invariably won't, accept it.

Why?

Because in order to accept the position, former president Bill Clinton will have to open up his finances (specifically, the donors to his presidential library) in order to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest. And while Clinton has given what has been called an "unprecedented" amount of disclosure, there's a difference between unprecedented and total -- and I'm guessing that total is what they're looking for.

And if Bill Clinton doesn't give total financial disclosure, which they know he can't or won't give, they can use that as an entirely plausible excuse for not giving Hillary the position. And Obama gets the best of both worlds: he gets the credit for "offering" her the position, while Bill Clinton gets the blame for seeing to it that she doesn't get it.

A little too Machiavellian, did you say? Perhaps. It's certainly possible that Hillary will get the nomination in a week or so. But until then, I'm thinking that my theory is at least plausible. And I would guess that it's at least 50/50 that it'll go down that way. I'm betting Hillary stays exactly where she is.

But if she does get it, you can bet on New York Governor David Paterson appointing Bobby Kennedy Jr. to take her place in the senate. Why that is is something I'll go into at another time.

We're In, They're Out

People have been complaining that the Obama Administration has so many Clinton veterans in it that it might as well be considered Clinton Redux. But these people, as people so often do, miss the point.

What Obama is doing by hiring so many Clinton veterans is avoiding the very mistake Bill Clinton himself made when he became president -- that is, hire too many young staffers who had never worked at the White House before, which made the beginning of the Clinton Administration a chaotic, pizza-strewn mess. In fact, when Clinton turned over the White House to George W. Bush, he congratulated him on having an administration with so many people who had worked there before -- like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Peggy Noonan, surprisingly enough, makes an interesting point:

It is obvious that Mr. Obama's people have learned from the experiences of Bill Clinton and will continue to try not to begin with a gays-in-the-military, my-wife-is-revolutionizing-health-care series of errors that will self-brand them as to the left of the mainstream. They do not want to do anything that will leave the middle-right saying "Uh-oh" and begin to push away. The great question, however, is: Do Mr. Obama and his people fully understand what will make the middle-right say "Uh-oh"?

It's clear that Peggy Noonan thinks she knows. I'm not so sure about that.

Obama's choices have been pretty much made for him -- at least for the first hundred days (an expression they use at the start of every administration but that actually means something this time). Our new president's priorities have to be, in order:

• 1) The economy
• 2) The economy
• 3) The economy

There isn't going to be any great liberal agenda coming out of this White House -- not any time soon, anyway. He's going to be working too hard to prop up the economy. This, ironically enough, might bring him into Carter-esque conflict with the more left-leaning members of his own party in Congress, who will want to use this opportunity to create or revive a lot of spending programs that we don't have the money for at this time.

And what will Republicans be doing all this time? Here Noonan again makes a sort of sense. She's speaking to some fictional Young Republicans (do they really exist?):

There is joy to be had in being out of power. You don't have to defend stupid decisions anymore. You get to criticize with complete abandon. This is the pleasurable side of what the donkey knows, which is that it's easier to knock over the barn than build it.

She has a point. After all, Republicans have shown that they have no clue how to govern, so they should be happy that they no longer have to try. After all bitching and moaning is what they do best -- and now they get to do it.

And I hope they get to do it for a very long time.

Behind the Proposition Eight Ball

I've found myself posting on the My Space blogs of a number of disappointed and/or angry gay performers (and the Facebook page of an old college friend who has a lesbian daughter) who are outraged at the success of Proposition 8 in California, which overturns gay marriage in that state.

They're shocked -- shocked! -- that voters in the enlightened state of California would do such a heinous thing as to vote against something as normal and natural and seemingly inevitable as gay marriage.

Personally, I'm shocked at their naïveté. The gay community in California seemed to believe that voting "No" on 8 was a foregone conclusion, that it would go down to a resounding defeat if it wasn't for those dastardly Mormons (a protest against the Mormon Church is scheduled for tomorrow in New York -- for all the good that's going to do) and the money they put up to push the proposition through.

They couldn't be further from the truth.

The gay and lesbian community, both in California and around the country, need to face a couple of unpleasant but undeniable facts:

First, you can get people to vote for anything on a ballot initiative. And I mean anything. Did these people really thing Proposition 8 would fail? If it was on the ballot to eliminate the First Amendment -- hell, make that the whole goddamn Bill of Rights -- you could count on it passing. In 1954, if school desegregation was on the ballot, in California or anywhere else, do you really think it would have succeeded? If you do, let me know what you're smoking because I want to try some.

What California needs is a proposition to outlaw propositions.

Second, when the idea of gay marriage is put on the ballot in almost any state of the union, it's always going to go down to defeat. Gays and lesbians are completely blind to the fact that most Americans, probably an overwhelming majority of them, are simply opposed to the notion of gay marriage. By the way, so is Barack Obama. He's said so multiple times. How many gays and lesbians voted for him?

Gay marriage cannot be settled to the satisfaction of gays and lesbians by a plebiscite. It will fail every time. The only way that the subject of gay marriage is going to be decided one way or the other is if the Supreme Court rules on it. Some day a case will come to the court and they will make a decision, either as history making as Brown v. Board of Education, or as wrongheaded as Plessy v. Ferguson, and that will, hopefully, be an end of it.

But of course it won't. Because even if the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage tomorrow, that would just energize the lunatic right in this country who would be thrilled to have another cause to line up next to their anti-abortion crusade.

History does not always go in a straight line. You win battles, you lose battles. You take a step forward, then you take a step or two back. The vote on Proposition 8 is merely a speed bump on the road to legalizing gay marriage.

I think it will happen eventually. And I think it should. But the gay and lesbian community shouldn't delude themselves that it will happen tomorrow. History more often than not doesn't work like that.

Call Me Nostradamus

Looking back at my recent blog entries, I found this prescient little gem (it's dated October 8th):

Obama will win Michigan. He'll win both Ohio and Florida. He'll win Pennsylvania and New Mexico. I also think he'll win Virginia and possibly even North Carolina -- which native son John Edwards couldn't deliver for John Kerry four years ago.If the election were to be held today Obama would get well over 300 electoral votes and McCain would get less than 200.It's not going to be a landslide on the nature of 1932 or 1964. But Obama is going to win, and he's going to win decisively.

You know, as predictions go, that's not bad. Obama won all seven of the states I said he'd win and he got over 300 electoral votes.

I really should play the lottery more often...

History is Made Tonight

I had my window open and when the networks projected that Barack Obama would be the 44th President of the United States, it was as if the entire neighborhood exploded -- I could hear cheers and screams from blocks away. It was worth voting at six in the morning to hear those excited voices. History was made tonight.

Americans chose hope over fear. The future over the past. And decency over arrogance. The Republicans and their soiled legacy of the past eight years have been repudiated and the Democrats will go on to run the country for at least the next four years. Or, to put it another way, tonight Barack Obama and the Democrats have accomplished everything this blog has been advocating ever since I started it over three years ago.

And yet what I feel tonight is a combination of relief and foreboding. I'm relieved that the Republicans are being kicked out of power. I'm relieved that we're going to have a grown-up in the White House. I'm relieved that we might be able to reverse some of the more sordid aspects of the current administration (and protect some rights that they weren't able to destroy, such as a woman's right to choose).

But on this night, when so many people are celebrating so joyously, all I can see when I look ahead is a grim fight. Even with all that's happened in the economy in the past two months, people still don't really have a clue how bad it's going to get in this country in the next two years. And that's all Barack Obama is going to get. If he has a mandate, it will be for the next two years to turn this economy around and disentangle us from two wars abroad. He's got the votes in Congress and he's got to deliver, because if he doesn't, the Republicans are quite capable of roaring back in 2010 and taking back the Congress.

So feel good tonight, all you progressives out there. You've earned it. We all have. But when you wake up tomorrow morning keep in mind that the real fight hasn't even started yet. Remember: we've got to keep this guy alive for the next eight years. And a lot of people out there in America are going to be oiling up their guns tomorrow.

A Tale of Two Film Lists

I thought I'd be nice and post something on here, even this close to the election, that's not political for a change.

Now you people who have been reading this blog for a while now (and both of you know who you are) know that I have a thing about lists. Doesn't matter what kind. You could post a list of the best left-handed Latvian baseball pitchers and I could find fault with it. But the fact is that most lists, and especially most cultural lists, are just pathetic. The people involved don't put enough thought into them, they just reel off the first things they can think of (which means the last things they've seen and/or read) and the end result is invariably lame.

Well, Empire Magazine has proven this thesis right yet again. They recently published a list of what they consider to be The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time.

Take a look at just the top 50:

1. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)
3. Star Wars Episode V: Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)
4. Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994)
5. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
6. GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
7. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
8. Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952)
9. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
10. Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)
11. Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
12. The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)
13. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
14. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
15. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
16. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
17. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
18. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
19. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
20. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
21. The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
22. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977)
23. Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
24. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001)
25. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1967)
26. Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
27. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
28. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
29. Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)
30. Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)
31. Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)
32. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969)
33. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
34. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003)
35. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991)
36. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1969)
37. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
38. Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
39. The Matrix (Andy & Larry Wachowski, 1999)
40. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
41. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
42. Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)
43. The Big Lebowski (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1998)
44. Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
45. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
46. On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)
47. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982)
48. This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984)
49. Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1987)
50. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

Gives you a pretty good sense of who reads Empire Magazine, doesn't it? A bunch of retarded fanboys badly in need of girlfriends would be my guess.

Empire Magazine's list is a joke, but I recently stumbled over another list that isn't. Cahiers du Cinema (whose readers presumably aren't the same retarded fanboys who read Empire) published a list of what they call The 100 Most Beautiful Films in the World.

Here's their list:

Citizen Kane - Orson Welles
The Night of the Hunter - Charles Laughton
The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) - Jean Renoir
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (L’Aurore) - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
L’Atalante - Jean Vigo
M - Fritz Lang
Singin’ in the Rain - Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
Vertigo - Alfred Hitchcock
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) - Marcel Carné
The Searchers - John Ford
Greed - Erich von Stroheim
Rio Bravo - Howard Hawks
To Be or Not to Be - Ernst Lubitsch
Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu
Contempt (Le Mépris) - Jean-Luc Godard
Tales of Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari) - Kenji Mizoguchi
City Lights - Charlie Chaplin
The General - Buster Keaton
Nosferatu the Vampire - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
The Music Room - Satyajit Ray
Freaks - Tod Browning
Johnny Guitar - Nicholas Ray
The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) - Jean Eustache
The Great Dictator - Charlie Chaplin
The Leopard (Le Guépard) - Luchino Visconti
Hiroshima, Mon Amour - Alain Resnais
Pandora's Box - G.W. Pabst
North by Northwest - Alfred Hitchcock
Pickpocket - Robert Bresson
Casque d’or - Jacques Becker
The Barefoot Contessa - Joseph Mankiewitz
Moonfleet - Fritz Lang
The Earrings of Madame de… - Max Ophüls
Le Plaisir - Max Ophüls
The Deer Hunter - Michael Cimino
L'Avventura - Michelangelo Antonioni
Battleship Potemkin - Sergei M. Eisenstein
Notorious - Alfred Hitchcock
Ivan the Terrible - Sergei M. Eisenstein
The Godfather - Francis Ford Coppola
Touch of Evil - Orson Welles
The Wind - Victor Sjöström
2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick
Fanny and Alexander - Ingmar Bergman
The Crowd - King Vidor
8 1/2 - Federico Fellini
La Jetée - Chris Marker
Pierrot le Fou - Jean-Luc Godard
Le Roman d’un tricheur - Sacha Guitry
Amarcord - Federico Fellini
La Belle et la Bête - Jean Cocteau
Some Like It Hot - Billy Wilder
Some Came Running - Vincente Minnelli
Gertrud - Carl Theodor Dreyer
King Kong - Ernst Shoedsack & Merian J. Cooper
Laura - Otto Preminger
The Seven Samurai - Akira Kurosawa
The 400 Blows - François Truffaut
La Dolce Vita - Federico Fellini
The Dead - John Huston
Trouble in Paradise - Ernst Lubitsch
It’s a Wonderful Life - Frank Capra
Monsieur Verdoux - Charlie Chaplin
The Passion of Joan of Arc - Carl Theodor Dreyer
À bout de souffle - Jean-Luc Godard
Apocalypse Now - Francis Ford Coppola
Barry Lyndon - Stanley Kubrick
La Grande Illusion - Jean Renoir
Intolerance - David Wark Griffith
Partie de campagne - Jean Renoir
Playtime - Jacques Tati
Rome, Open City - Roberto Rossellini
Senso - Luchino Visconti
Modern Times - Charlie Chaplin
Van Gogh - Maurice Pialat
An Affair to Remember - Leo McCarey
Andrei Rublev - Andrei Tarkovsky
The Scarlet Empress - Joseph von Sternberg
Sansho the Bailiff - Kenji Mizoguchi
Talk to Her - Pedro Almodóvar
The Party - Blake Edwards
Tabu - F.W. Murnau
The Bandwagon - Vincente Minnelli
A Star Is Born - George Cukor
M. Hulot’s Holiday - Jacques Tati
America, America - Elia Kazan
El - Luis Buñuel
Kiss Me Deadly - Robert Aldrich
Once Upon a Time in America - Sergio Leone
Le Jour se lève - Marcel Carné
Letter from an Unknown Woman - Max Ophüls
Lola - Jacques Demy
Manhattan - Woody Allen
Mulholland Dr. - David Lynch
Ma nuit chez Maud - Eric Rohmer
Nuit et Brouillard - Alain Resnais
The Gold Rush - Charlie Chaplin
Scarface - Howard Hawks
Bicycle Thieves - Vittorio de Sica
Napoléon - Abel Gance

Now, I'm not going to say that I agree with every film on this list (I don't), but it's intellectually respectable. Which is more than you can say about the Empire Magazine list. In fact, if you wanted to know more about film, you could do a lot worse than plow your way through ther Cahiers du Cinema list.

My John McCain Problem

I'm going to make a strange admission. Particularly strange, coming from me. You may not even believe it -- especially if you've been reading this blog for the past three-and-a-half years. But I swear to you that it's true.

I like John McCain.

I know -- isn't that weird?

Weird but true. This is the first presidential election since 1976 where I didn't loathe the Republican nominee (with the possible -- no, make that probable -- exception of 1996). I watched McCain on Saturday Night Live last night and I thought -- I like this guy. You have to admire a guy who knows he's going to lose, might even go down to a humiliating defeat, and who can make fun of his own campaign on national television.

That doesn't mean I want him to win. I want that noted for the record. But I like John McCain.

Tuesday is going to start a new era in this country. We're going to start digging out from under the mountain of debt and bullshit that the Bush Administration has poured on us, and life will start slowly getting better in this country for the majority of Americans.

But I suspect that, after the euphoria of Tuesday night, as we move into what looks almost certain to be an Obama Administration, the first people who are going to be disillusioned with Barack Obama are going to be the very liberals who worked so hard to get him into office. They're going to expect a great progressive agenda and there isn't going to be one. The New Deal Part Deux just isn't going to happen.

We'll get out of Iraq, either more or less messily. We'll start to put our fiscal house in order, with all the attendant pain that implies. We'll repair our standing in the world. But people who are expecting (or fearing) a socialist utopia in the United States are going to find out very quickly that there isn't the money to do the kind of things they want done. And they're going to blame Obama for not doing what can't be done.

In the meantime, John McCain will go back to the Senate, knowing that his dream of becoming president of the United States will never come true. And even though I'm not going to vote for him, I can't help feeling that he might, in another time and under different circumstances, have made a good president. After all, how many presidential candidates have read Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire even once? McCain's read it twice.

McCain is a tragic figure -- undone by how own ambition and the compromises that his ambition led him to make on his way to the nomination. And I suspect he'll spend some time in the next few months wondering what could have been. Maybe we should, too.

What Makes Franken Run?

Jonathan Chait has a piece in Slate about Al Franken and his run for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota which, in the wake of a possible Obama win, might just be successful.

The piece is sort of so-so until he gets to the end. Then, in my opinion, he blows it:

Franken has an infinite faith in the power of reason. Time and again, he tries to present his adverseries with detailed rebuttals and gets nowhere. One book has a small moment of triumph, in which he badgers House budget committee Chairman John Kasich into admitting that Republicans were employing a misleading measure of their plans to cut Medicare. "I took a few victory laps around the table," he writes. Franken doesn't write, however, that Kasich and his fellow Republicans continued to brandish the misleading statistic anyway.

I would guess that Franken is running for the Senate because he thinks he will have moments like these, when the superior force of his reason will carry the day. I have never seen or heard of a successful politician who thinks like this. I can't imagine he'll find politics anything but a crushing disappointment. But I'm eager to see him try.

Chait couldn't be more wrong. Franken's reasons for running for the Senate aren't reason-based. They're strictly emotional. And deeply personal.

Franken was a friend and admirer of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash in 2002, only 11 days before the election that would have given him a third term in the Senate. Former Senator and Vice President Walter Mondale replaced Wellstone on the ballot at the last minute, only to be narrowly defeated by Republican Norm Coleman.

Anyone who was, as I was from its inception in 2004, a devoted listener of Franken's radio show on Air America, knows what an emotional subject this was, and is, for him. Franken's campaign, although he is too shrewd to say so, started out as a Quixotic quest to regain Paul Wellstone's seat in the Senate for the Progressives -- as well as payback for the man who would have lost that 2002 election if Wellstone had lived. At the time Franken announced, he was a longshot -- now, thanks to Barack Obama, a downturn in the economy and the worst administration in the history of the republic, he's got a real shot at winning the election and becoming, not only Wellstone's heir in the Senate, but the 60th Senator needed to supply the Democrats with a filibuster-proof liberal majority.

Somewhere, Paul Wellstone is smiling. And if Al Franken, as I hope he will, wins a week from now, expect to hear an emotional reference to Paul Wellstone from the newly elected Senator from Minnesota in his victory speech.

The Worst Case Scenario

Republican operative Bill Greener in an article in Salon.com makes a case that Barack Obama needs to be at over 50% in the battleground states because he is convinced that the so-called "undecideds" are going to break disproportionately for John McCain:

As you look at the polling data in the homestretch of this election, pay close attention whenever you see any numbers, be they statewide or national, where Sen. Obama is below 50 percent. So long as there are more than a handful of voters describing themselves as undecided, I will maintain that Sen. McCain is very much in the race. Even if Sen. Obama were to open a larger lead, my basis for analyzing things would remain the same. Are there enough undecided voters in crucial states to bridge whatever gap exists in the head-to-head? If so, don't be shocked if on Election Day, Sen. McCain is your winner.

If this analysis is true, then based on the one poll that I examined, that would mean that McCain will win both Ohio and Florida, as well as North Carolina and Nevada. Obama would win New Hampshire, Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Could this be another long Tuesday night? We'll see in eight days.

Keep Your "O" Flag Flying!

Barack Obama gave a speech in Toledo the other day. Here's a piece of it from YouTube:







Notice anything, well, unusual about the background?


Certain conservatives did. Certain really fucking stupid conservatives.


Conservatives like Bob Grant. Here is a transcript of Grant's show from October 15th (courtesy of Media Matters for America):

GRANT: Let me ask you this question, since you are aware of patriotic symbols. Maybe you don't know the answer. I'll be frank. I don't know the answer to this one, but what is that flag that Obama's been standing in front of that looks like an American flag, but instead of having the field of 50 stars representing the 50 states, there's a circle? Would someone please tell me what that is? Is the circle --

CALLER: Well, I thought it was our new flag.

GRANT: -- the "O" for Obama? Is that what it is?

CALLER: I thought it was our new flag. I thought we now instituted a new one under Obama, because we're going to change everything, and none of it is gonna be positive. And do people's mindset that Palin would be any kind of an adverse person around nuclear weapons, when you have somebody who has absolute deceived everybody from his onset of his life --

GRANT: All right, Sue. I want to thank you very much for your call. It's a pleasure to hear from someone who's paying attention to what's going on out there.

But really folks, did you notice Obama is not content with just having several American flags, plain old American flags with the 50 states represented by 50 stars? He has the "O" flag. And that's what that "O" is. That's what that "O" is. Just like he did with the plane he was using. He had the flag painted over, and the "O" for Obama. Now, these are symptom -- these things are symptomatic of a person who would like to be a potentate -- a dictator. And I really see this in this man.

Hey, I could be wrong. But I wouldn't say this on this great radio station if I didn't think there was some merit in this conjecture. And I stress conjecture. And so much of what we talk about is conjecture, is theory, is opinion based on intuition, based on some facts, based on some history.

I don't want to overdramatize this. Being dramatic, I must confess, does come easy to some of us, because, maybe that's why we're in this business. It is show business, is it not? I know some of my colleagues don't want to admit that, but they are the greatest showmen in the world. And I tell you this. I tell you this quite seriously. I am alarmed at the prospect of his election. I -- I would hope that if he is elected, that I could come before you one day and say, "Hey, there was no need to be alarmed, I was wrong."

Because I care about the United States of America and what future we may have much more than I care about being right or being wrong, having my candidate win or having my candidate lose. I want to know how many of you people think about the significance of the election.

I almost can't type this because I'm laughing so hard.


How stupid are these people? How clueless? How frightened? How threatened?


What Obama is standing in front of, of course, is the state flag of Ohio:

The white circle denotes Ohio's being "The Buckeye State."

But you have to admit, this was a beautiful illustration of how lunatic the lunatic right really is. It just goes to show that John Stuart Mill was correct in the Victorian Era when he stated that, while not all conservatives are stupid, all stupid people are conservatives.

The Right is Terrified (And They Should Be)

The sound you hear is the Right shitting in their pants.

They can't believe what's happening. Not so long ago -- when this blog was begun, for example -- they seemed to have everything under control. The radical right had Congress in a headlock, and were looking towards (as one author put it) a Permanent Republican Majority.

Now everything they hoped for has come crashing down around them, and it very much looks like the Democrats will be in power, either in the White House or Congress or both, for the next 20 to 30 years.

That's what The Wall Street Journal is concerned about. In an opinion piece entitled "A Liberal Supermajority," they claim that:

If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.

I like the sound of that. Don't you? Certainly the Republicans liked it when they had control of the Congress. But now that the shoe appears to be slipping onto the other foot, all of a sudden this is something to be terrified of.

They continue:

Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven't since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s. If the U.S. really is entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy, Americans at least ought to understand what they will be getting, especially with the media cheering it all on.

Here's where the facts stop and the bullshit posturing begins. You gotta admit, though, the term "unchecked left-wing ascendancy" sounds awfully good. Just like pie.

Let's take a look at the facts:

• When Roosevelt and the New Deal came into power with an overwhelming Democratic majority in 1933, the country was flat on its back. Roosevelt restored confidence and saved capitalism from itself and in the process created the FDIC (for which bank depositors are eternally grateful) and Social Security (which the Republicans have been trying to kill ever since its birth, in a sort of legislative late term abortion).
• When Lyndon Johnson had an overwhelming Democratic majority, he was able to push through any number of progressive legislation, including Medicare, on which so many senior citizens depend and which keeps them a hell of a lot healthier than they'd be without it.

I'd take unchecked left-wing ascendancy like that anyday. We should be so lucky.

Republicans, what's left of the radical right and The Wall Street Journal should all stop whining. They had the goverment for eight years -- and they totally fucked everything up. We've had untrammeled, deregulated laissez-faire capitalism at home and fuck-you-to-the-rest-of-the-world interventionism abroad. And it's all blown up in our face.

There's no way that the Democrats could possibly do worse than the Republicans have done over the past eight years.

Frankly, as I've said before in this blog, I don't expect a huge, New Deal-like wave of progressive legislation from the next Congress or from a potential President Obama. For one thing, he won't have the money. He'll be relegated to doing what Democrats have been relegated to doing for the past 30 years -- being the schmuck with the broom walking behind the elephant in the circus parade. They make a mess, we clean it up -- that's been the story of the past 30 years.

But whatever the Democrats do with the power they're almost sure to have after November 4th, I sure am looking forward to it.

Bring it on!

Is It Over?

Did the campaign end tonight?

John McCain did better in this last debate -- at least at the beginning of it -- than he's done in either of the other debates.

It wasn't enough.

I recently heard from a person who told me that they thought that Obama had a good chance of winning their home state -- of Texas.

Conservatives like Christopher Buckley (son of the founder of National Review) are endorsing Obama. People are starting to talk about a landslilde that will transform Washington.

And here I am trying to figure out how Obama and the Democrats are going to blow it.

I can't help it. I'm old enough to remember the Humphrey administration. Not to mention the McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry administrations. I've seen the Democrats yank defeat from out of the jaws of victory time after time.

I don't want to get my hopes up. I watch the talking heads on Charlie Rose (while noting that Doris Kearns Goodwin made a mistake in calling FDR "The Happy Warrior" -- that was Al Smith) and I don't want to believe them. I want to think that it's going to be close, and that it can still get away from us.

I'll watch the next 20 days very carefully. Because I get the feeling that November 4 is going to change the country. And I want to hope -- in spite of history.

McCain and "That One"

It's the only moment from the second presidential debate that they'll remember.

When John McCain referred to Barack Obama as "that one."

The sheer contempt that McCain has for his fellow senator and the nominee of the Democratic party for president of the United States was suddenly, painfully, viscerally obvious.

It was not a pretty moment.

John McCain is an angry and a desperate man at this point -- and he's got a lot to be angry and deperate about. After all, if Barack Obama by some miracle of atrocious luck were to lose this election, he's got a lot more chances. 2012, 2016, 2020, 2024... you name it. Consider the mind-boggling but very real fact that in 2032 Obama will be younger than McCain is now.

Time is on his side.

Time, however, is not on McCain's side. This is his last shot at the White House. It's do or die for him -- and at the moment it very much looks like die.

I sat down with an electoral map provided by AOL and tried to figure out a way for McCain to win this election -- and I couldn't do it. I don't think there's a way for him to do it. All Obama has to do is hold onto the states that Kerry won last time and add New Mexico and he's the next president. McCain's job is a lot harder. He has to win all the states that Bush won last time and that's not even remotely possible.

Obama will win Michigan. He'll win both Ohio and Florida. He'll win Pennsylvania and New Mexico. I also think he'll win Virginia and possibly even North Carolina -- which native son John Edwards couldn't deliver for John Kerry four years ago.

If the election were to be held today Obama would get well over 300 electoral votes and McCain would get less than 200.

It's not going to be a landslide on the nature of 1932 or 1964. But Obama is going to win, and he's going to win decisively.

And a new era could begin in this country. A better era than the one we've been dealing with since Ronald Reagan asserted so piously in 1981 that government wasn't the solution to our problems, it was the problem.

We know better now. And we're going to prove it in less than a month.

Where Are We?

Things aren't looking too good right now.

It seems like we might be on the verge of, not just an American financial catastrophe, but a financial catastrophe of global proportions. The stock market is plummeting, people are frightened and are looking to the government for answers.

And Andy Sullivan thinks the presidential election could end up in a tie.

Oh, really?

Andy Sullivan (not to be confused with Andrew Sullivan, who's gay and supposedly conservative) wrote an article for Reuters yesterday floating the possibility that the 2008 election could be a draw:

A handful of battleground states are likely to determine the November 4 U.S. presidential election and it's possible that Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama could split them in a manner that leaves each just short of victory.

If that happens, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives would pick the president but it's unclear whether Democrats would have enough votes to send Obama to the White House.

Does anyone really think this is going to happen? Or was it just a slow news day yesterday?

Sullivan elaborates:

If McCain wins Virginia, New Hampshire, Florida and Ohio but loses Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa to Obama, both candidates could end up with 269 electoral votes.

Other, less likely scenarios -- McCain losing Virginia and New Hampshire but winning Michigan, for example -- also could result in a tie.

I don't want to seem flippant, but the way things look right now (and keep in mind that the election is a month away and there's always the possibility of an October surprise) the only way that the Democrats could lose this election would be if Osama Bin Laden were to release a tape of himself and Barack Obama having sex.

Something tells me that's not going to happen.

What is likely to happen (given all the caveats I've stated above) is that this is going to be a transformational election, akin to 1932 and 1980.

Take a look at the record of the last 76 years:

• Between 1932 and 1968 (not counting the latter) there were nine presidential elections. The Democrats won seven of them (Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 being the exceptions).
• From 1968 to 2008 (again, not counting the latter) there were ten presidential elections. The Republicans won seven of them (Carter in 1976 and Clinton in 1992 and 1996 being the exceptions).

I'd say that it's logical to assume that the pendulum is going to swing back towards the Democrats -- possibly for a generation.

The economy is not a winning issue for Republicans -- and everything is about the economy right now. McCain and Palin know this -- which is why they're flinging mud so furiously at Barack Obama right now, hoping against hope that they can drive up his negatives enough so that they'll have a chance to pull even in the polls. It's not going to work -- not with the Dow taking a dump it's not.

Meanwhile McCain is pulling out of Michigan, Virginia Republicans think the state might go Democratic for the first time since it voted for Lydon Johnson over Barry Goldwater 44 years ago, and McCain pretty much has to run the table of states that Bush won in 2004 in order to win. Even Karl Rove thinks Obama's going to win. Karl fucking Rove.

I don't want to say what I think. I'm afraid to jinx it. But I'm getting more certain every day.

I'll give you a hint. It begins with "l" and it rhymes with "grandslide."

Republican senators (like Elizabeth Dole) are almost certain to lose their seats to Democrats. It's entirely possible that Obama might not win, but that he might win by a huge margin and take a shitload of Democratic senators and congressmen with him into office.

It's almost intoxicating to think about -- at which point I find myself muttering under my breath, "President Mondale... President Dukakis... President Gore... President Kerry..."

Sarah Barracuda Strikes Back!

Sarah Palin exceeded expectations in the vice presidential debate on Thursday night -- by which I mean that she didn't vomit on herself. The bar had been set so low for her performance that only copious projectile vomiting could have made her look worse than she has lately.

All things considered I thought it was a draw -- which means that, arguably, Palin wins. The same way that, in the presidential debate, it was also a draw which meant that Obama won. McCain needed to land a knockout punch on Obama, and he didn't lay a glove on him. Palin didn't need to land a knockout blow Thursday night. All she needed to do was stay on her feet and not make an utter fool of herself. And by that standard she was successful.

But is that how it's going to seem in a day or two? Will anyone care in a day or two? The House is supposedly going to vote again on the -- well, whatever they're calling it Friday. I doubt they're calling it a "bailout" because people don't seem to care for that term. But whatever they're calling it, they're voting on it tomorrow, and that's all people will be talking about.

I was favorably impressed with Joe Biden, however, who had to perform an interesting (and easy to overlook) form of rhetorical jiu-jitsu against Palin that was, I think, largely successful. He referred to her solely as "The Governor" which I thought was perfect. He didn't correct her when she made mistakes because it would look condescending and sexist and because he knew that the media would later do it for him. He was respectful and yet he didn't give an inch. But in many ways he was more impressive for what he didn't do than for what he did.

Because what did Sarah Palin do? If you ask me, she sabotaged the ticket. And he just stood there and let her do it.

How did she do it?

By consciously espousing the old, tired, discredited Ronald Reagan philosophy that government isn't the solution, government is the problem. With the economy going into the toilet and people worrying about a recession if not a depression, that's not what they want to hear. They want to hear that government is on their side and has a solid plan to fix what's wrong -- not that they're on their own in a cold, cruel, dog-eat-dog world. All ther "darn its" and "you betchas" in the world can't hide the fact that the philosophy that the McCain-Palin ticket espouses is history -- and they will be soon as well. By 2010 Sarah Palin will be a question in "Trivial Pursuit."

With McCain pulling out of Michigan and Obama pulling ahead in the polls, it looks like this is going to be Obama's election, and that Obama is the man for these times, just as Roosevelt was in 1932 and Kennedy was in 1960. But things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, and I suspect that, sometime in 2009, Obama may be tempted to say to McCain what Kennedy once reportedly said to Barry Goldwater:

"You want this fucking job?"

Tom Moran

The Lady Doth Protest Too Much

I have been pretty much an agnostic on the subject of Oscar winning screenwriter Diablo Cody. I've written about her (or, more specifically, the passions she inspires) in this blog before. In that blog entry (no links -- we're not about links here, but it was around the time of the Oscars if you want to search for it) I profess my incomprehension at the ire she arouses in what otherwise might seem to be sentient human beings. Why the fury? Why the hate?

But recently Cody (whose real name is Brook Busey) wrote a blog entry on her My Space page that explains a lot about her personality and her feelings about her life and career. An article in Variety discusses the ridiculous enmity that both she and her "Juno" star Ellen Page arouse and Cody elaborates on that subject at great length. I find her post to be very revealing (sometimes unconsciously so) and, as I tend to do here, I thought I would break it down and analyze it so that people can get a glimpse of what's really going on beneath her persona:

A while back, there was a thoughtful article in the above-mentioned publication about Ellen Page and myself. The article was mostly about how passionately some people hate me. As I explained to my therapist the following day (ha) it's kind of weird to read something like that about yourself. On one hand, you feel defensive. On the other hand, you feel puzzled. You feel compelled to identify what it is about you that might inspire such vitriol. (I personally suspect the hate isn't that widespread; it's just loud.)I thought about it. For months. I even wrote a screenplay on the theme. And then, finally, I figured it out.

There's a lot going on in this one passage. I find particularly revealing the defensive "(ha)" when she reveals that she's seeing a therapist -- as if such a revelation will somehow threaten her tough-chick persona so she has to laugh off the fact that, apparently, she feels that she has issues in her life that need to be addressed in a theraputic context. The parenthetical statement is revealing as well -- it's as if she's willing herself to be more popular than she is, like a high school girl who wants the cool kids to like her. It's not really the case that most people hate her -- they're just a very loud minority (as opposed to the silent majority who thinks she's a genius -- it's a very Nixonian rationalization).

I have a response to those who are still boring enough to lob insults in my direction. (Those of you who are friends, fans, enablers, or dislike my writing for legitimate, rational, nonpersonal reasons can tune out now if you like. This isn't for you.)

This is a common ploy on Usenet -- whenever you're discomfited by a particular criticism, profess to find it deeply boring. It doesn't work there and it doesn't work here. However idiotic the people who hate Diablo Cody might be, they're clearly getting to her.

Anyone else? Bend thine ear:I am not Charlie Kaufman or Sofia Coppola (much as I supplicate at their Cannes-weary feet.) I'm not Paul Thomas Anderson. I'm not even Paul W.S. Anderson. I am middle-class trash from the Midwest. I'm a competent nonfiction writer, an admittedly green screenwriter, and a product of Hollywood, USA. I am "Diablo Cody" and if you're not a fan, go rent Prospero's Books again and leave me the fuck alone.

How to unpack this very dense and enlightening passage? From the faux-pretentious language (and just for the sake of the argument, when does faux-pretentious language cross the line and become actually pretentious?), the mention of other screenwriters to whom she clearly feels inferior, the self-contempt apparent in the expression "middle-class trash," the quotation marks around "Diablo Cody" -- it all points to a feeling of, if not exactly unworthiness (although that's clearly there as well), then a feeling of blatant self-inauthenticity.

The following passage points that up, as well as it sets up what follows and makes it more apparent:

I may have won 19 awards that you don't feel I earned, but it's neither original nor relevant to slag on Juno. Really. And you're not some bold, singular voice of dissent, You are exactly like everyone else in your zeitgeisty-demo-lifestyle pod. You are even like me. (I, too, loved Arrested Development! Aren't we a pretty pair of cultural mavericks? Hey, let's go bitch about how Black Kids are overrated!)

Whether it's original or relevant to slag on "Juno" is beside the point, whether Cody realizes it or not. The film is either good or it isn't. If it is, then all the attacks won't matter. If it's not, it doesn't matter either, because they're merely kicking a dead horse. And the sentence "You are even like me" might be the most revealing sentence in this very revealing piece of writing. The questions is not whether her critics feel Cody hasn't earned the awards she's won.

It's whether Cody herself believes that.

The defensiveness reaches fever pitch in what follows:

I'm sorry that while you were shooting your failed opus at Tisch, I was jamming toxic silicon toys up my ass for money. I get why you're bitter. I took exactly one film class in college and-- with the curious exception of the Douglas Sirk unit—it bored the shit out of me. I also once got busted for loudly crinkling a bag of Jujubes during a classroom screening of Vivre Sa Vie. I don't deserve to be here. We've established that. But I'm here. Five million 12-year-olds think I'm Buck Henry. Accept it (Incidentally, if you were me for one day you'd crumble like fucking Stilton. I am better at this than you. You're not strong enough, Film_Fan78. Trust me.) I'm sorry to all those violent, semi-literate fanboys who hate me for befriending their heroes. I can't help it if your favorite writer, actor, director, or talk show host likes me. Maybe you would too, if we actually met. I know my name is fake and that it annoys you. What, do you hate Queen Latifah and Rip Torn, too? Writers and entertainers have been using pseudonyms for years. Chances are, you're spewing bile under an assumed screen name yourself. I'm sorry if you think I'm like some inked-up quasi-Suicide Girl derby cunt from 2002, but I like my fake name. It's engraved on an Oscar. Yours isn't.

Is it my imagination, or is there a truly extraordinary amount of self-loathing packed into this passage? What I find most interesting about it is the extent to which Cody has clearly internalized her hate-mongers to the extent that she actually identifies with them (as in the "we" in "We've established that"). As Auden once said of Yeats that "He became his admirers," it seems that Diablo Cody has become her critics. Or, as they say nowadays, her haters.

It seems to me blatantly obvious that Cody is suffering from an advanced case of The Imposter Syndrome. Here's how it's defined (I snagged this off a Caltech website):

Imposter syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in face of information that indicates that the opposite is true. It is experienced internally as chronic self-doubt, and feelings of intellectual fraudulence.

It is basically feeling that you are not really a successful, competent, and smart student, that you are only imposing as such.

I think they mean "posing" instead of "imposing," but you get the idea.

It is very common for people who become suddenly and unexpectedly famous to feel as if they are a fraud on the verge of being exposed -- and Cody clearly feels that way. It really comes out in the following passage, which sounds like a genuine cri de coeur. Here Diablo Cody practically begs her critics to understand her (and, possibly, love her?):

Listen: I've been telling stories my whole life. Even when I was a phone sex operator, I was the Mark Twain of extemporaneous jerk-off fiction. I took every perspiring creep on a fucking journey. I don't know how to do anything else.I'm going to make more movies and shows. I doubt they'll all be good, but that's the nature of this life. Even though the public only knows me from one book, one movie, and several aborted blogs, I've spent the last few years hustling like Iceberg Slim out here to prove myself professionally. The people I currently work for, and with, are more than pleased with my post-Juno output. My pilot was so good (thanks, Toni Colette!) that it got picked up for series. That is rare, children. That is blue-rare. In summation: you try it.This is the last I have to say on the subject, unless I'm provoked by a journalist in which case I'll gladly reload. With relish, as Betty Rizzo might say. That said, I'm a 30-year-old woman with a dwindling interest in blog culture, and I don't have time to address this bullshit every time one of my projects comes out. I'm in love, I just bought a house, and my boss made E.T. I kind of have to focus on reality.And drinking. I have to focus on drinking.

The last two sentences speak for themselves. When you feel like a fraud, drinking helps to hide it. Until that becomes even more of a problem than your feelings of fraudulence. I don't know when that will happen to Diablo Cody but I'm pretty sure it's inevitable.

So what do I think of Diablo Cody? I think she's a moderately talented writer. I found Candy Girl, with its let's-see-how-many-inane-pop-cultural-references-we-can-stuff-into-one-sentence prose style, to be a little annoying. And I thought I would hate "Juno," but much to my surprise I didn't. I thought it was an overblown ABC Afterschool Special that didn't deserve to win an Oscar (which was more a tribute to the money it grossed and the perversity of Academy voters -- let's not forget, this is the same Academy that voted Stanley Shapiro the Oscar in 1960 for writing "Pillow Talk" over Ernest Lehman for "North by Northwest," Ingmar Bergman for "Wild Strawberries" and Francois Truffaut for "The 400 Blows"), and I found its politics to be both mildly racist and more than a little reactionary, but the woman clearly has talent. How much talent, and whether she will write anything that has permanent value, has yet to be determined.

But the kind of whining and self-pity that her blog entry represents is really beneath her -- beneath anybody, for that matter. It's just unseemly (and the "my boss made E.T." stuff is just pathetic). It reminds me of that outburst that the novelist Howard Fain spews at Youngblood Hawke in Herman Wouk's novel of the same name. Cody would do well to read that book, if only for the sake of that passage. In it, Hawke and his publishers have convened a meeting to discuss how Hawke should defend himself against a vicious attack by a famous and influential critic who has a grudge against him. Into the meeting walks (or, more accurately, staggers) fellow novelist Howard Fain, who, in the words of the old song, is all lit up like a Christmas tree. He tells the group that "Of course he's been unfairly attacked!" and then goes into a pages-long rant that I think Cody should not only read but learn by heart. It might help her get through this passage in her life with her dignity intact.

I don't have the book on me, but I'll boil the rant down to its essentials:

Keep writing, and don't bother to answer your critics.

To which I would add one personal comment:

Stop drinking. Now. Before you do something you'll regret.

Tom Moran

The Other Fellow Just Blinked

John McCain will be coming to Oxford, Mississippi tonight to debate Barack Obama after all. What a shock.

It seems that, after suspending his campaign to pretend to be a working Senator for the first time in two years, McCain realized that he wasn't helping the negotiations (and was probably getting in the way) while at the same time he risked giving Obama an hour and a half of free air time on all the networks and the cable stations to talk to the American people without anyone there to respond to him.

Now, you gotta admit, that shows great judgment on McCain's part. The same kind of judgment that caused him to blow off Letterman -- and we know what that got him.

So after thinking it over (and, I would guess, having half his campaign staff scream at him to get on the damn plane), McCain caved and will be at the debate. Who knows what the fuck is going to happen with the bailout. A lot of smart people are saying that it really doesn't matter -- that the economy's screwed no matter what happens, and that we're in for another Great Depression.

I wouldn't go that far -- not yet, anyway. But it seems pretty clear that things are going to get worse before they get better, and that it's going to take someone of great prudence and great levelheadedness to run this country for the next four years.

Does anyone really think that John McCain is still that man?

That's all for now. More after the debate tonight.

The Era of Little Government is Over

Does this quote sound familiar?

"The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we've had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Those words come from Ronald Reagan's first inaugural address in 1981. They have been more or less the guiding philosophy of the Republicans for the last three decades.

And now, somewhat belatedly, the G.O.P. has decided that they are a lie. In fact, they are proving even as I write these words that their entire political philosophy is based on a lie.

The lie is the idea of "let the market prevail." The notion that a free market economy, let undisturbed by government, is the best possible economic system. Laissez faire, dog-eat-dog capitalism.

Because in this present crisis, with less than two months to go before a presidential election, the Republicans are looking to bail out private companies to the tune of more than a trillion dollars in what has been called "Wall Street socialism."

Kevin Philips sets the scene well in a blog on Huffington Post:

We're not just looking at a real estate mess. Over the last quarter century, the total of public and private credit market debt in the United States -- most of it, in fact, is private -- has more than quintupled from $8 to $48 trillion, the biggest such orgy in world history. Over that period, domestic financial debt - the money borrowed by the financial sector for expansion, consolidation, empire-building, leverage, exotic mortgages, gambling, you name it - swelled from just $1 trillion to some $14 trillion. Employing these economic steroids, the financial sector ballooned itself from 14-15% of what back in the mid-1980s was the Gross National Product to 20-21% in 2004 of the newer Gross Domestic Product calculation. In the meantime, the once-dominant manufacturing sector fell far behind, dropping to just 12% of GDP. In a nutshell, the economy has been hijacked in recent decades by the very groups who now purport to have remedies - Wall Street, from whence Paulson emerged, and the money-bubbling, don't regulate the dangerous practices Federal Reserve Board, from whence Bernanke comes.

In other words, we don't really make anything anymore, are awash in debt, and in general we are in shit up to our eyebrows.

And when the going gets tough, the Republicans abandon their core beliefs and rush to suckle on the government tit for a trillion dollars worth of corporate welfare in a last desperate attempt to save failing financial instuitutions (not to mention the presidential election).

Philips points out that at least some Republicans are being intellectually consistent in this matter:

Ironically, the best hope for resistance comes not from the left but from free-market elements of the Republican Party. I have not had much good to say about the GOP for years, but recent events may hint at their political and ideological renewal. Sometime back, when Congress passed the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bail-out program, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, ultimately voted against it. He had worked on its early stage, but ultimately voted no because seeing a pay-off to "Wall Street and K Street (the Washington lobbyist corridor)". Then the Republican National Convention, in a rejection of Bush, Paulson and Bernanke, put an anti-bailout section in its 2008 platform. A few days ago, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, Richard Shelby of Alabama, called on the Fed to reject bail-outs and allow the markets to work even if the consequences are "brutal." And on September 18, a hundred Republican members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Paulson and Bernanke requesting that the two men "refrain from conducting any additional government-financed bail-outs for large financial firms."

These guys may end up being the last rats left drowning on the sinking ship of laissez faire capitalism, but at least they get points for consistency. Unlike the vast majority of Republicans, who at this point would be willing to do pretty much anything to keep these private financial institutions afloat.

The Republican Party is bankrupt. They have no ideas, no guts and no idea what to do except to throw government money at the problem. They are completely discredited.

It's time for the Democrats, as they did in 1932, to get into power and, ironically enough, save capitalism from itself. Like the old song says, we did it before.

And we can do it again.

Republican Socialism

Didn't know that Republicans were socialists, did you?

Well, life throws you a few curves every now and again.

It turns out that the party dedicated to laissez-faire, dog-eat-dog capitalism is now begging en masse to be allowed to suckle on the government tit! Who knew?

It seems that if an ordinary citizen gets overextended on his house payments it's "Fuck you, buddy -- you're foreclosed!" But if it's a company like Bear Stearns or AIG and they screw up, well, they're just "too big to fail."

Sense a bit of a double standard here?

Consider the ramifications of the lead paragraph from Mike Allen's piece on Politico.com:

Congressional leaders said after meeting Thursday evening with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that as much as $1 trillion could be needed to avoid an imminent meltdown of the U.S. financial system.

That's one trillion dollars. With a "t."

And yes, he did use the word "imminent meltdown."

Still want to vote for the Republicans because you think Sarah Palin's hot?

To continue with the Politico.com piece:

Paulson announced plans Friday morning for a "bold approach" that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. At a news conference at Treasury headquarters, he called for a "temporary asset relief program" to take bad mortgages off the books of the nation's financial institutions. Congressional leaders had left Washington on Friday, but Paulson planned to confer with them over the weekend.

"We're talking hundreds of billions," Paulson told reporters. "This needs to be big enough to make a real difference and get to the heart of the problem." [...]

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” said lawmakers were told last night “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications, here at home and globally.”

“What you heard last evening is one of those rare moments — certainly rare in my experience here — was that Democrats and Republicans decided we needed to work together, quickly,” Dodd said.

Are you scared yet?

It seems that the G.O.P.'s fiscal chickens are coming home to roost -- just in time for the election.

And it's time to ask some rhetorical (but important) questions:

Which party is better equipped to deal with this imminent financial meltdown? The party that got us out of the Great Depression? Or the party that got us into it? The party that ran up huge deficits, not once, but twice in the past 30 years? Or the party that turned one of those deficits into a surplus?

The answer's pretty clear. At least to me. Because voting Republican at this point in time is like hiring an arsonist to put out the fire he set.

Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Sarah Not-So-Straight and Not-So-Tall

I don't know who the hell this Michael Seitzman guy is, but I have to admit that I agree with every word of this:

Now, I want to be clear and speak directly to those of you who LOVED that Palin interview. You're an idiot. I mean that. This is not one of those cases where we're going to agree to disagree. This isn't one of those situations where we debate it passionately and then walk away thinking that the other guy is wrong but argued well. I'm not going to think of you as a thoughtful but misguided person with different ideas who still really cares about the country and the world. No, sorry, not this time. This time, if you watched those interview excerpts and weren't scared out of your freakin' mind, then you're mentally ill, mentally disabled, or mentally disturbed. What you are NOT is responsible, informed, curious, thoughtful, mature, educated, empathetic, or remotely serious. I mean it.

He posts on Huffington Post (no links -- we're not about links here). On the other hand, he also claims that he finds her sexually attractive and wants to sleep with her, and if that's true then I think that he's either mentally ill, mentally disabled or mentally disturbed.

Because that woman is creepy. Deeply creepy.

Some of the squadrons of reporters flocking to Alaska to find out about Sarah Palin are starting to find out the truth about her. The New York Times has a story on the front page today that shows that, when you get right down to it, Sarah Palin really isn't all that different from George W. Bush:

Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages. [...]

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records. [...]

Half a century after Alaska became a state, Ms. Palin was inaugurated as governor in Fairbanks and took up the reformer’s sword.

As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments, those with insider credentials were now on the outs. But a new pattern became clear. She surrounded herself with people she has known since grade school and members of her church.

Mr. Parnell, the lieutenant governor, praised Ms. Palin’s appointments. “The people she hires are competent, qualified, top-notch people,” he said.

Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people.

“I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ” said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get some help.’ ”

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

You have to admit, the bit about the Wasilla High School yearbook archives is priceless. It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic. This is exactly the same kind of cronyism that called FEMA to fall down during the days after Katrina. Do we really want more of that?

In the interests of fairness, though, I have to point out that there seems to be one glaring error of fact in the Times's reporting. They claim that Palin became governor of Alaska fifty years after it became a state, when Alaska became the 49th state in 1959 -- so it hasn't been 50 years yet (Hawaii became the 50th state later that same year).

So you see? We can be fair and balanced here. It's just that sometimes we choose not to be.

Sarah Speaks!

The McCain campaign has held Sarah Palin in virtual purdah since McCain named her as his running mate -- she's given lots of speeches, in which she has stuck strictly to the text, but absolutely no interviews. No extemporaneous comments. No diverging whatsoever from scripts written for her by others.

And now we know why.

Tonight Sarah Palin gave her first interview since being named to the Republican ticket, to Charlie Gibson of ABC News (full disclosure: I worked briefly for ABC News). Even with extensive coaching, she still came off as someone who -- how shall I say this politely? -- is no Hillary Clinton.

Sarah Palin can't even lie convincingly.

Here is what I felt was one of the most interesting parts of the interview:

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God." Are we fighting a holy war?
PALIN: You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote.
GIBSON: Exact words.
PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln's words when he said -- first, he suggested never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words. But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that's a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side. That's what that comment was all about, Charlie.

Do I really have to point out that Governor Palin was lying through her teeth? Not only that, but she can't even lie convincingly. It's one thing to be a liar. It's another thing to be a bad liar.

First she tries to wriggle her way out of it by claiming that she didn't say what she said (only to be shut down by Gibson, who reminds her that it was an exact quote). Then she tries to claim that what she said was only what Abraham Lincoln had said before her.

The only problem with that is that it's a bald-faced lie. What Governor Palin said was the exact opposite of what Lincoln said -- and anyone who knows the Lincoln quote knows it. And she doesn't even get the quote right.

This, according to Jim Wallis, the author of God's Politics, is what Lincoln said:

"Our task should not be to invoke religion and the name of God by claiming God's blessing and endorsement for all our national policies and practices—saying, in effect, that God is on our side. Rather, we should pray and worry earnestly whether we are on God's side."

For those of you who are into irony, John Kerry quoted the same lines of Lincoln in his acceptance speech at the Deomcratic convention in Boston four years ago.

Now, anyone who can read and is capable of comparing the two statements knows full well that Palin was not "repeating" Lincoln's words -- if she'd wanted to do that, she just could have quoted him, the way John Kerry did.

She said the exact opposite of what Lincoln meant. And thinks the American people are too stupid to know the difference.

I'll skip past the part where she encourages Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO, serenely ignorant of the fact that such an alliance with those two countries would oblige us to go to war with Russia if Russia attacked either one of them. And I'll move on to my favorite part -- so far (there's going to be more on various ABC News shows in the next day or so):

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?
PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?
GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be?
PALIN: His world view.
GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.
PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.
GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?
PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.

Did you get it? The woman didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was -- and she's running for Vice President of the United States! And by the way, don't you love Charlie Gibson explaining it to her: "as I understand it" -- that was really priceless.

Sarah Palin makes Dan Quayle sound like Thomas Aquinas. And it'll be interesting to see what the G.O.P. does with her after this. Do they stick her back in purdah, away from those nasty beasts in the mainstream media? Or will Americans buy the bullshit that she's selling?

I guess we'll find out soon.

"My Muslim Faith"

Guess what? Barack Obama's human.

On "This Week With George Stephanopolous" he made a mistake. Not a big mistake, more of a verbal slip, but it's one that the right-wing bloggers are already obsessing about, trying to make it into a big mistake -- and it's one that we're going to be hearing a lot about in the next few days.

I guarantee that Rush Limbaugh and the boys at Fox News are going to be jumping on this one like a horny football player on a slutty cheerleader.

What did he say?

He said that John McCain had not attacked "my Muslim faith."

Ooooops!

Was it just bad phrasing? Or was it a genuine Freudian slip? I believe it was the former, the right-wing bloggers are already claiming that it's the latter.

What he meant to say is pretty obvious -- that McCain has not so far been one of those people falsely accusing him of being a Muslim. It just came out wrong. I suppose he could have used an expression like "my alleged Muslim faith" or "my so-called Muslim faith" but that would have been seen as being demeaning to Islam.

I see this hitting the mainstream media by Tuesday at the latest. Did Obama make a gaffe -- which is Washington is defined as the moment when a politician accidentally tells the truth?

After all, the right-wing has nothing better to talk about. They can't run on the record of the past eight years (and Sarah Palin on ice skates can't run away from it fast enough), so all they can do is mock Obama for being "community organizer" (although if you think about it, as one poster on the ABC News board put it, so was Jesus Christ) and imply that he's some kind of a scary Muslim.

Will it work? The last 28 years of American history would seem to indicate that we would be distinctly foolish to assume that it won't.

Noun, Verb, P.O.W.

John McCain talked about his personal story tonight in his acceptance speech on the last night of the Republican convention. He did so because there's nothing else he can talk about.

He heads a discredited party whose president couldn't even show his face at his own party's convention because it would turn off swing voters who distrust him when they don't despise him. He'd rather talk about being tortured himself in the 60s than admit the fact that the leaders of his own party have condoned torture of people who are being held in secret places without being charged with any crime. He'd rather allow his running mate to attack Barack Obama in carefully chosen code words (whenever either she or Rudy Giuliani used the words "community organizer" it sounded like those scenes in films like "Grand Illusion" or "Mean Streets" where we can tell that a character is anti-Semitic just by the way they pronounce a Jewish name) than to accept the fact that a party whose convention delegates are 93% white can no longer be said to represent America.

John McCain and the Republicans are the past. Barack Obama and the Democrats are the future.

Can John McCain run on the record of the past eight years? Of course not -- which is why he ran away from it as fast as he could. Are we better off than we were when Bill Clinton left office? Of course not -- which is why George W. Bush couldn't show his face at his own party's convention.

That's why you heard about John McCain's story ad nauseam during this convention. That's why we heard over and over again about how he was shot down and how he was tortured (but not about how he signed a confession) and how he came home with injuries that he carries to this day.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, wars are not won by P.O.W.s. And while McCain's service is impressive, and his courage is laudatory, it has no bearing whatsoever on the choice Americans have to make in November. After all, you never heard Franklin Roosevelt say, "Vote for me -- I have polio!" He told a country in the worst crisis it had faced in 68 years that he had a new deal for the American people. He spoke about optimism in the face of misery -- and he won in a landslide. John McCain, and his party, act as if it's 1980 and all it takes is a promise to cut taxes on the rich and boost military spending to get elected.

He, and they, are going to find out differently in about two months.

McCain's Problem

I don't know about you, but I'll bet that, for a lot of Republicans, Joe Lieberman is looking pretty damn good around now.

John McCain is sending a squadron of operatives to Alaska to find out what else they might have missed about Sarah Palin -- besides the knocked-up teenage daughter and the husband with the DUI arrest, that is. A bit like closing the barn door after the cow's gotten out, if you ask me.

This is starting to look a little like 1972, for those of you whose memory of politics goes back that far. George McGovern chose Senator Thomas Eagleton to be his running mate, only to discover that Eagleton had mental health issues that were considered at the time to be disqualifying, and which caused him to drop out of the race.

But the funny thing is that McCain is really fucked. In theory, he could replace her now -- after all, Palin hasn't even been officially nominated by the convention -- but in a very short time Sarah Palin has become the "ooomph girl" of the rabid right, the very base that McCain most needs to shore up if he wants to have any hope of winning in November. If he drops her now, he alienates a part of the Republican party that he just can't afford to offend. If he doesn't drop her, he runs the risk of alienating everyone else.

McCain better hope (pray is more like it) that nothing else pops up in the near future about Sarah Palin's past (and keep in mind that the woman is already under investigation -- something that McCain's people knew when he picked her). What else have they missed? What other skeletons does she have in her closet? Because anything else just might prove to be fatal.

But let's be clear about something. I feel bad for Bristol Palin (not least because she has a mother who's stupid enough to saddle her with a name like "Bristol"). A 17-year-old girl from Alaska who's suddenly thrust into national prominence because a teenage hockey player and self-professed "fucking redneck" was too stupid to put on a condom deserves our compassion, not our scorn. The issue here is not the daughter.

The issue is McCain's judgment.

Naming a vice president is the most important decision that a candidate has to make, and it's pretty obvious that McCain made a hasty and ill-informed decision. What does that say about his qualifications to be president? That's the issue that the left has to keep hammering away at -- that McCain's choice of Sarah Palin is indicative of serious flaws in the way John McCain makes decisions -- flaws that could have serious if not deadly consequences should he get into the White House. And we can't afford to take a chance like that at this point in our history.

You have to wonder if the McCain camp is second-guessing themselves and quietly wondering who else might be available if they have to bail on Sarah Palin. The problem is that if they do, the campaign is pretty much over. For better or worse, they're stuck with her.

Sort of like a shotgun marriage. Appropriately ironic, don't you think?