1. Literally every District Court nomination was approved, either unanimously or by voice vote. 
2. Same with every Circuit Court nomination except for one.
3. Bush I also managed to appoint more judges in one term than Obama has to date.

Guess I don’t have much to note other than that “times change” and that It’s Different For Republicans, but it’s almost a sublime encounter when you think of how it works these days.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

I might wind up changing my mind, but I actually thought it was a substantial improvement on the prior installment. Villains that had actual, comprehensible motives for doing what they did! Not having a central plot device handled as stupidly as imaginable (so the black hole sent Spock and Nero back in time the first time, but didn’t send the explosion back, or presumably Nero back the second time?). And in comparison with its predecessor, this was a well-oiled storytelling machine, rather than one shuffling between nearly a dozen subplots and origin stories. Abrams’s strengths were present, the acting and visuals were quite strong, of course. It even managed to address one of the glaring incredulities of the last movie, that Kirk would be given command of a ship with zero experience, by turning that inexperience into the Big Theme of the movie. So points for all that.

I actually kind of liked it, I must say. Of course, Abrams is still Abrams, meaning he can’t pay anything off, and that of course means you’re in for a shitty climax like all his other movies. Seriously, just like all his other movies, as they all have the same climax. Two guys fighting on top of moving vehicles for an extended period of time? This sort of thing was done before in Mission: Impossible and Skyfall more recently, and this movie manages to do it in a much less interesting way than either film. They don’t even have to duck under the occasional tunnel, it’s just one guy punching and then the other guy punching for minute after tedious minute. Snore. With Abrams, the ramp-up is always bigger than the payoff. I mean, you might be able to remember how all the plot points were resolved in Mission Impossible III, but can you actually recall anything from the last half hour of that movie? And why should you, it was just a bunch of standard-issue chase and fight scenes, with minimal variation and creativity. All I remember was Tom Cruise tossing the Macguffin to Ving Rhames at the end, and only that because he didn’t know what was in it and tossing it like a softball seemed a little dangerous under the circumstances.

But I found it to be a fairly watchable movie overall. The prior film I’d put in C+ territory, and this one is probably more B/B+. It’s dumb, but it isn’t throw something at the wall dumb. Still an improvement, even if they’re not even close to where they need to be. But I have hope that the last scene teasing out the famous five-year mission of exploration doubles as an indication that Abrams will move onto Star Wars soon, and leave the series in the hands of a different creative team. Let’s hope.

Spoilery tidbits:

• So yeah, it’s Khan. I kind of dreaded that, but it wound up being not a problem at all. Cumberbatch was great, delivered just the performance he needed to, one that didn’t make me miss dear departed Ricardo. Now that you’ve done it well, Star Trek, can we never call back to The Wrath of Khan again please?
• I like the Deep Space Nine reference and all, but Marcus blurting out something about Section 31 isn’t right. Plausible deniability is the whole point of those guys, and while Marcus’s insane plans seem very much in the wheelhouse of what 31 would do, they’d never just reveal themselves like that.
• Carol Marcus, alternate timeline version, goes from an American civilian scientist with a disdain for military service to a British career officer? Is there any reason for this, other than to fuck with the obsessive fan contingent that keeps this whole venture afloat? I get that the structure of these reboots ensures that any continuity criticism has an automatic refutation, but the trajectory of her life up until a few years earlier should have remained exactly the same, right?

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

This post seems to draw people to the site and generate comments even years after the fact, so I might as well follow it up by commenting on the series Hannibal. Also, yes, I am deliberately writing more on pop culture since politics is so damn boring at the moment.

I think the show’s great. I really do. I hope this is correct and it gets a full or at least another partial season. The show is more in the Manhunter/Silence of the Lambs tradition than the later and less successful films, where it’s a story about a person, rather than a story about Hannibal. I like Hugh Dancy’s Will Graham, he’s a little less internal than William Petersen’s, but projects the same kind of wounded vulnerability. And Mads Mikklesen’s Lecter is restrained and utterly top-notch. Certainly a more interesting Hannibal than Hopkins’s version, more in line with Bryan Cox’s interpretation. Really, it does feel a lot like Manhunter in the best ways, with an appropriately updated style and all. 

What’s surprising about the series so far is that it’s actually succeeding in making Hannibal Lecter an interesting, deeper character than he ever has been (in the movies). They’ve actually made him capable of surprise again! The series has played coy with its advertisements and such, and it doles out information about the character only as necessary. I’m not entirely sure where along the line he is in his journey to cannibalism and complete alienation from humanity, but he’s not quite there yet, and quite often the show surprises me by having him do something, then you wonder why he did that, and then ultimately it’s revealed in a way that makes sense and defies expectations. It’s ever-so offbeat, and this is highly appreciated by me. Bryan Fuller’s accomplishment here is distinctive, but most impressive is that he’s actually made a version of Hannibal that could probably carry a show. I am happy though that it’s still Will Graham’s show, as I fear that a Hannibal-centric series would be inevitably soulless, and having a Graham or a Clarice figure really is essential to making the thing work.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Admittedly, this chart is a little propagandistic. Simply having the same elements doesn’t mean you automatically tell the same stories. First Contact was also about revenge, and a threat to destroy earth, and had one main villain for the crew to defeat. However, that movie was redeemed by the ingenious twist of making the vengeance Picard’s, rather than the Borg Queen’s. This made it a movie about the psychological battle going on within Picard’s mind, rather than a pedestrian plot to stop an unambiguously evil supervillain bent on destruction (though, admittedly, every movie in the second sextet aside from First Contact has this very story, with the most modest of variations between them). And obviously there are quibbles: Chang from The Undiscovered Country could be counted as a main villain, though I see the cross-species conspiracy of hawks to be the villain of that film, and Chang is merely their muscle. Also, trying to accomplish specific political goals is different from the mad ambition of, say, a Khan, who is uninterested in doing anything other than indulging his own grief and anger at Kirk.

But nonetheless, I think this chart does say a lot. For one thing, it’s not fair to blame J.J. Abrams alone for the problems with Trek movies, those started even before his Felicity days. If anything, he’s found a better way of combining all those elements so that they’re more entertaining to watch, even if he can’t payoff anything to save his life, such that every movie he’s ever made has had a shitty climax. In the first six movies, pretty much every movie represented a change in tone, theme and content from what came before. The only two that really resemble each other are The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country, i.e. II and VI, which happened to have the same writer-director and thus a lot of the same preoccupations, such as aging. But even in that case, the aging theme was updated and developed. Khan was a movie about adapting to middle age, while Country was about adapting to old age. That’s moving the ball forward, not stagnating. And it told a different kind of story: Country was all about politics, and Khan was not. But other than that, about half the movies kept the spirit of the show alive by often centering around dealing with different kinds of life from us, and all featured at least some sort of moral or ethical dilemma. Admittedly, some of those were more sophisticated than others. Also interesting to note that the two original cast movies with main villains and the two in which Earth was threatened were not the same movies. The more recent half-dozen, on the other hand, present the audience with a simple moral situation where it’s not even a question of who’s right or wrong, and then it’s all about taking out the bad guy. Really, it just makes a person appreciate First Contact more and more–problematic as the script to that movie was, it fundamentally told a human story, one that made some logical sense and was pretty compelling, and presented us with at least some kind of challenging questions about our characters. I doubt we’ll ever see its like again.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

In fact, I’m convinced that we’re living in a post-scandal world for the most part, within and without politics (but especially when it comes to politics). The scandal fixation among the press is obsolete, frankly. Since the ’70s and ’80s, political polarization has become an immutable fact of life, one of the few areas left where Americans are allowed to be proudly, unrepentantly tribalistic (sports team rooting is another). In both of these areas, this tendency is taken to silly extremes, but if you basically assume that people are tribal creatures and that our society gives very little space for expression of this fact, it kind of makes sense. Back in the Good Old Days*, all manner of racial, religious, ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation tribal hooks were considered more or less fair game. Now, none of that is acceptable in polite society, only in the realm of dog whistles. And let’s not act as though tribalism is entirely a right-wing phenomenon–though it does appear stronger there due to unending pseudopopulist appeal from talk radio and FOX News–in fact, a lot of liberal tribal identifiers from long ago have not really aged as poorly, as it’s still quite acceptable to reduce large parts of the country as being as ignorant and religiously fanatical as Republican politicians tend to be, while this is an exaggeration of a more complicated picture. In any event, my point is that if you accentuate these tribal instincts–and conservative attempts to do so will wind up working both ways–you come into a place where loyalty to parties and leaders essentially become cultural attitudes and aren’t really porous to things like scandals. Dubya held onto his base for his entire time in office, though he lost literally everyone outside of it due to utter incompetence in nearly every conceivable domain. Obama is not going to lose much from a scandal that doesn’t even go all the way to the top of the IRS, probably just some low-info types who aren’t likely to vote in a midterm anywhere. Really, short of a double-dip, there’s no reason to be especially worried.

*For White Men

Add a comment | View 4 more comment(s).

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

This afternoon Senator Reid asked unanimous consent to go to conference on the concurrent resolution on the Budget. Senator Cruz was unavailable to be on the floor at this time to object. Out of respect for the long tradition of comity in the Senate, Senator Reid withdrew his request.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

How awesome.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

The GOP’s sacrificial lamb might well be one Abel Maldonado, former Lt. Governor, failed candidate for Congress and my state senator once upon a time. I’ve often called Marco Rubio an overrated commodity, someone without the brains to govern effectively and probably without the guts to do it either, and almost certainly lacking the mythical minority-converting Republican Jesus powers that his party desperately hopes he has. But Rubio, at least, is able to play politics at a national level, cultivating an image and taking on some responsibility for passing immigration reform. This is vastly more than one can say for another heavily hyped Hispanic GOP politician, who seems to think that the best way of winning California in 2013 is to play to white conservatives’ ancient fears:

Former California Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, the Republican running to challenge incumbent 3-term Democratic Gov.Jerry Brown in 2014, filed papers Wednesday to form a committee in support of a ballot measure to end prison realignment. [...]

The issue of realignment and early prison release has been a hot button for Brown since a federal court order was issued mandating the move to alleviate state prison overcrowding.

The order demanded California reduce its prison population to 110,000 inmates by the end of 2013. The order cited needed improvements in treatment of sick and mentally ill inmates in the state’s 33 prisons for adult inmates.

Putting aside the politics for a second, let’s get real about this. California has a huge prison problem. Too many prisons, which cost a lot of money, is the gist of it. And all those prisons are crowded to the max, to the extent that the state was sued in federal court over it and lost. That money has been siphoned off from schools to a large extent, godawful symbolism to be sure. Jerry Brown won my vote with his strong, perceptive attacks on this very trend, and if you read my prior posts on him, I’ve noted how he’s paid close attention to this problem, stopping a billion-dollar prison project in the state. He cares about education a lot, has identified this specific problem, and he’s taken steps to fix the problem.

So, essentially, it’s deeply irresponsible for Maldonado, often referred to as one of the brighter bulbs in the state’s GOP (heh), to attack Brown for trying to comply with a court order and fix a very real, costly problem. What’s especially interesting is the timing. Maldonado’s attack would have been par for the course in the 1980s or early 1990s, back when Deukmeijian and Pete Wilson (an alleged moderate) decided it would be just swell to lock up as many people as possible for as long as possible. (Shocking that another of California’s intractable problems is due to something the GOP did back in the day, huh?) But the state’s politics have changed since it voted for George H. W. Bush in 1988, and so have the politics of the GOP. One of the very few positive developments in the Republican Party in recent years has been a much deeper skepticism toward old “tough on crime” policies, reflecting a decreased crime rate and spending that is wasted by definition (if necessary to some extent). And in this state, the public has shown a greater understanding of the problems wrought by overincarceration. Last year the electorate defanged the Three Strikes Law here, and very nearly repealed capital punishment outright. The electorate in this state gets that this is a problem, as the media has covered the crisis well. There is little indication that Brown has jumped too far in front of the public on these issues, and it’s unlikely he will do so since it was exactly that which caused such problems for his 1982 Senate race, and allowed the GOP to take his seat in Sacramento as well. He’s cautious but deliberate on this. It’s not really a weakness.

Essentially, Maldonado is working against two trends here, both within his party and within the state’s electorate. And it makes Maldonado’s candidacy for governor ironic. I basically assumed that the idea was something concocted by GOP consultants so that way they could run another minority for high office, as the guy wasn’t even able to win an election for Lt. Governor against Gavin Newsom (and had severe difficulties fundraising in that race as well). He has no base, his ideology is too moderate for the state’s GOP, and the Marco Rubio argument seems utterly hilarious in light of this announcement. Minority voters are unlikely to be won over by a “tough on crime” politician regardless of a skin color, as they bear the brunt of these unsuccessful policies. It makes me think that he’s a very silly, unperceptive person with poor political instincts and little awareness of the state. Of course, this makes him pretty much like every candidate the GOP has run for governor since Pete Wilson, so it’s not a shocker.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

So, with respect to guns, I do feel some sympathy for Obama, since he’s clearly damned either way. Victory ain’t up to him, and indulging activists’ feelings isn’t really feasible either.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

There appears to be a new rash of arguments out there about how we’d all be better off if Barack Obama had just read his Robert Caro a little more closely. The broader arguments have already been made elsewhere. I’m sure I’ve probably made such arguments myself in moments of high emotion too. But the more I think about it, I just see this particular theory–that with some combination of cajoling, bullying, and pleading, Obama could pass his agenda over a stone-crazy GOP House and a filibuster-prone Senate–as not that compelling. So I’d advise proponents of it to make a more sophisticated argument: that Obama has already failed to be LBJ. Specifically, that the decisions he made in 2009-2010 ensured that Democrats would lose Congress and that he’d thus lose the ability to pass big, important legislation. I think this is actually a plausible argument, though I don’t fully believe it. Johnson had been a Washington legislator for over two decades when he became president, while Obama had really only done the job of a day-to-day U.S. Senator for two years upon getting into the White House. It’s been exhaustively documented that Obama cared much more about policy than politics and was insistent about bipartisan outreach, leading to a situation where he led the banks out of crisis by taking extensive political damage, and taking over a year to pass health care while the economy was pushed to the back-burner. The public got fatigued by the debate, the Tea Party made a stronger narrative about the ACA than the White House did, and so on, which led to Scott Brown and the rest of it. This is a plausible argument and I could go either way on it depending on the weather and so forth, but it’s not exactly ironclad when one remembers just how hapless those large Democratic majorities were, and even a second stimulus wouldn’t probably have staved off significant losses in 2010. But you could make more of an argument there.

For my money, the only moment where Obama needed to show that mythical LBJ/FDR spine of steel and didn’t was the first time the debt ceiling was threatened. Sequestration is turning out to be a policy disaster for the liberal project and a political disaster for Obama, the original sin from which (nearly) all others entered our world. He damned himself by not putting himself and his presidency on the line to shut down this disaster, and given that the Republicans folded like a 2-7 hand in Texas Hold ‘Em in March when it came up again, there’s even less reason to assume that Obama made the right call back then. Frankly, it almost doesn’t matter what he does now since that decision set the environment perfectly for austerian Republicans to turn the tables on him. It was one of those defining moments you hear about, and Obama flat-out flunked the test. Since then there’s been little opportunity to reverse that catastrophic decision, so complaining that Obama isn’t being tough enough now is beside the point.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

In retrospect, how was the 2008 primary contest not a big farce? I supported Obama because I cared much more about energy/climate issues than healthcare (and he had stronger proposals and gave more emphasis to them), because Obama was much more critical of hawks and had a better record on such issues, and because of Clinton’s bad judgment when it came to certain staffers (such as, you know, Mark Penn). Given that the administration we got was uninterested in the former, delegated foreign policy to Hillary Clinton for the most part, and now apparently is just picking obnoxious people for cabinet posts because Obama is friends with them, I sort of wonder what the point of going through all this was in the first place. If anything, the intervening years have mostly proven Clinton’s circa-2008 perspective on Republicans indisputably correct, while Obama’s still fervent outreach increasingly smacks of an inability to change his opinions when confronted with facts not congenial to them.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Conservative Man: Allowing gays and lesbians to marry will destroy the institution of marriage!

Liberal Man: No it won’t.

Conservative Man: It’ll destroy traditional marriage and the nuclear family!

Liberal Man: Yeah, that’s never happened. And if it was going to happen, we’d have seen signs of it by now in all the places it’s legal.

Conservative Man: Come on, it goes against God’s wishes!

Liberal Man: Irrelevant, and debatable besides. American laws aren’t based on Biblical law. Adultery is perfectly legal, for example. So is capitalism.

Conservative Man: If we do this, then my church will be forced to marry gays, and that’ll put us out of favor with the Lord!

Liberal Man: See, that’s just craziness altogether. Literally nobody wants that, and the Constitution wouldn’t permit it beside. You know what your problem is?

Conservative Man: What?

Liberal Man: You see marriage as just one homogeneous thing.

Conservative Man: DAMN RIGHT I DO.

Liberal Man: Oh, get a dictionary already. You think it’s just one thing: The Institution of Marriage. ‘Cept it’s not. All we care about in this conversation is the civil, legal side. The religious side is not really relevant to this debate. You know what, let me get some help here to explain it to you. Hold on a second. [opens door, brings in someone else]

Conservative Man: Who are you?

Stranger: Hey! Look, it’s me from ten years ago! You didn’t tell me about…

Conservative Man: What’s going on?

Liberal Man: Could you explain about marriage?

Older Version of Conservative Man: Yeah, I’m the future you, and I’m saying don’t sweat it. Look, we lost that battle, but it didn’t matter. Nobody forced our church to do anything. The state started issuing marriage licenses to gay people and we just decided to ignore them. No biggie.

Conservative Man: But how can you just change the defintion-

Older Version of Conservative Man: I’ll just stop you there. The definition of marriage is complicated. Like our friend says, you have the civil, you have the religious, and these two have a lot of tensions between them. But the civil side is just bureaucracy, just for the law and all that.

Conservative Man: Just bean-counting.

Older Version of Conservative Man: Right. You can still keep the religious definition as it always was. Which is what really matters to us, right? What do we care what some bean-counters get to fill their charts a little differently? As if we care about them anyway! [laughs]

Conservative Man: I’ll have to think about this. [leaves]

Liberal Man: Well said, though you left out the part about how your church started performing same-sex marriages two years after it became legal. And how you supported it as deacon.

Older Version of Conservative Man: One step at a time.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Incidentally, it’s interesting to see this shift occurring at about the same time that pretty much everyone has given up on the Obama Administration’s ability to operate on budgets. I actually see this as a positive sign, a very positive sign in fact. It means that liberalism is indeed capable of overcoming the hero worship seemingly inherent in presidential rule, and instead taking a realistic appraisal in the Administration. Republicans would have been much better off if, in 2005, they’d just admitted that Dubya had zero ability to manage U.S. foreign policy. But they couldn’t, since too much of their party’s identity was tied up in the heroic heroism of George W. Bush to see what a morass Iraq and Afghanistan have become. It was all they talked about in ’04, after all. Democrats have less invested in Obama as an economic miracle worker, I suppose. But much of Bush’s coalition was perfectly happy to excuse the disasters on his watch because he was taking aggressive action against the horrific affront to humanity that is Islamofascism*–they were happy with the basic thrust and didn’t need to hear about all those small details–while Obama’s miscalculations mostly involve a complete inability to understand his opposition and make sound decisions on that basis. He never learns and he never gets better. The basic flaw here, again and again, is the thing in Obama that makes him assume that his opponents approach problems from the same basic way of thinking (if not the same assumptions) as he does, and if he just takes care of the substantive issues they have, then a big deal ought to happen. They don’t have that philosophy, and to the extent that Obama gives in on their substantive demands, they’ll just demand more outrageous ones. Virtually everyone from the center leftward gets this except for Barack Obama, and I have little confidence he’ll learn it anytime soon.

* How did this not become a meme? Just toss fascism onto whatever thing you don’t like. Still, this does make for an interesting parallel. Bush’s disasters were supported by his base because they liked the aggressiveness directed at a target they hated. Obama’s critics frequently wish for a more assertive, tough, practical governing philosophy. I don’t really think toughness and aggressiveness alone would accomplish more of his objectives, though the lack of it has dampened enthusiasm among his base for sure.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

One possible explanation for [Bush's failures] would be that he’s dumb. Or alternatively that he’s incredibly lazy. The president of the United States has a tough job, after all, and it’s totally possible to imagine a person with roughly correct ideas to nonetheless screw it up through incompetence and blundering. But if conservatives want us to believe that the United States blundered through a major terrorist attack, two major failed military adventures, dismal economic performance, and then finally an epic economic collpase all while under the watch of a very bright and attentive leader then it seems like a much deeper failure of the movement.

Intelligence and ideology were major causes of Bush’s disastrous reign, though there were many others.

I actually think it’s possible to make the scope argument here: that the presidency has grown so ridiculously large and unwieldy that it’s impossible not to find several areas to specialize in and pay only cursory attention to the rest. I definitely think you see this with the Obama Administration, where some areas of public policy are just completely delegated because there’s too much to do. Problem with that is much of that growth has been due to shifts in the scope of foreign policy since WWII, and Bush was absolutely horrible at managing foreign policy. Apart from the wars that sapped any post-9/11 goodwill in the Arab world, Bush managed to tank relations with Russia and much of Europe (with the exclusion, of course, of Poland), allowed Hamas to gain official power in Gaza, and so on. Bush had little foreign policy preparation before entering office–substantially less even than Barack Obama, with those couple years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee–and while he seemingly spent more than the appropriate amount of time on that subject for a president, to the detriment of domestic policy. What with the floods and bridge collapses and all that.

I think the other factor, aside from intelligence and ideology, that led to Bush’s disastrous tenure was character. Bush was no judge of it in others, and his flaws were so apparent that it made it easy for tougher, cannier men in the White House to handle him and turn him to their views. I’ve written in the past that you can make the argument that Bush grew a little bit during his time in office, and that he eventually learned his lesson and stopped letting Rove and Cheney and Rumsfeld jerk him around so much. But ultimately, a president who hadn’t been born to George and Barbara Bush would never have been able to rise to the top without finding ways to keep those flaws in check. Dubya basically went from nothing to a weak governor job to president, and never had to confront his own failures and make changes. There’s no real substitute for it in growing personally and careerwise. This is, perhaps, why the Bush years were so frustrating, because the guy had never really had to grow up.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkWt84F7FY0

This, from the typically sharp Dave Weigel about a New Hampshire Senate poll showing Scott Brown down double-digits against the incumbent senator, doesn’t make much sense:

That’s… really not a horrible first test. In Massachusetts, where Brown’s actually from, he got 46 percent of the vote in a 2012 Senate race. Brown scores better than some actual New Hampshire politicians, including two former members of the state’s congressional delegation. (New Hampshire only has two House seats, so serving in that body means representing half the state.) [...]

[H]e could certainly run as a generic Republican moderate who’d undo as much of the Obama record as he could. Why shouldn’t he?

Obviously, nobody can stop him from doing so, but there’s no reason to think that it would be anything other than a self-indulgent waste of time. Comparing Scott Brown to a few obscure officials and former officeholders is a strange test. Brown is a national political celebrity. His win in the 2010 special election was a major national news story. And he just ran an extraordinarily expensive campaign in the same media market as much of the state he now wants to represent. Comparing him to a one-term former Rep. who won in the 2010 election and yet another of the endless Sununu clan doesn’t quite fit in either case. In any event, while Brown would not lose by 11 points to Jeanne Shaheen finally, due to partisans inevitably returning to the fold for the general election, she’s already over 50% against him. Really, a better metaphor would be if in 2010 John McCain had ditched Arizona and run for Senate in Nevada instead to avoid a primary, or if Bob Dole had tried his luck in Oklahoma after losing the presidency in 1996 (I rather wish he had, but that’s another thing altogether). It would have appeared as though someone couldn’t live without having a Senate office and staffers and Meet The Press gigs, which would have been undoubtedly been true in every one of these cases. With Brown, the story seems clear enough. He declined a winnable but difficult bid for John Kerry’s seat and figured he could keep up his profile by throwing out some hints about running for governor and taking a Fox News gig. That would keep up the buzz! Within weeks, he became completely forgotten as Republicans found new handsome macho men with shoulders you could land a plane on. How can Scott Brown compete with Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz? So suddenly, Scott Brown desperately tries to find some way back into elected office, and comes off like Norma Desmond, with New Hampshire as Bill Holden, and the 2014 Senate race as the unfinished treatment of Salome. Being as I am, ahem, not much of a fan of Brown’s, I’m torn between wanting him to just go away (I’m fine with him just doing segments on FNC, cause I’ll never hear from him again that way), or go through another humiliating defeat. Okay, I choose the second one. Fuck that chump for ruining the most productive Congress in fifty years.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

What’s bizarre about House of Cards is that it’s theoretically a drama, but it’s not very dramatic. There aren’t any “edge of your seat” moments in the series, because there isn’t really any suspense. After a few episodes you know that Frank Underwood is going to want something, he’s going to do whatever it takes to get it, and he’ll be completely successful doing it. There will be no ramifications or unintended side effects. He’s always going to win. Inevitability doesn’t make for good drama, quite the opposite. Underwood is clearly the creators’ version of a ruthless politician, but he’s somehow less than that. Applying “ruthless” to a politician implies further attributes and characterization. Like Mitch McConnell, who aptly deserves the term as an palpable source of incredible and inexplicable anger and bitterness. Or Lyndon Johnson, whose climb out of desperate poverty created a character so restless, so corrosive and clinging, that he just couldn’t stop himself from making the mistakes that tanked his presidency. You could also toss in Richard Nixon, another poor child driven to a large extent by hatred of condescending swells who looked down on him. The sorts of men this term is applied to help shape the connotations of the word, make it suggest a broader theme of character, of darkness and negativity manifest.

In the case of House of Cards, it doesn’t. He’s “just” ruthless, in that he doesn’t care about how his decisions affect people other than himself, and he has no scruples. This is more like full-on psychopath territory than standard Tony Soprano-inspired antihero stuff. Tony was selfish and inconsiderate, and a violent killer besides, but he wasn’t identifiable as a genuine psychopath until the tail end of the series. Underwood more or less starts out that way. Where else can you go with this character if that’s the start point? You have to give the audience some reason to root for the protagonist. With Tony Soprano, the major reason is because all of his rivals were far worse than he was, and also that he tried to be a good father as well as his version of a good husband (which did not include sexual fidelity, of course). And he had other intriguing attributes as well: he was genuinely curious about certain things, like history and animals, for example. He had depth. If The Sopranos had begun with the version of Tony we saw in the last season, it would have tanked. And yet, this is precisely what House of Cards does with Underwood. Having him be the final iteration of this character would have been inspired. The initial version, eh, not so much.

Of course, his predecessor was very different from all that. Francis Urquhart rocked the UK series for a number of reasons. He was a master of the political game, cheerful and cynical. But he was also an arrogant man with an impulsive streak, which often got him into trouble. Sometimes he’d underestimate his opponents and pay a price. Sometimes he’d overreact to a threat and get into trouble from that. The basic story of the UK series is a man trying to hold his conscience together while maintaining power, but the drama often revolved around his matching wits with opponents with different philosophies than his own, but of the same political caliber as he. So he had to resort to desperate measures to secure victory. These things had the effect of creating something called suspense. On one level, you know that Urquhart is most likely going to win, because he is the show. But on the other hand, because of well-managed stakes and strong characterization, how this happens is a mystery, and it always comes with a cost to Urquhart. Urquhart isn’t an antihero, he’s really just a decent guy who keeps trying to make his values fit with his desire for power, often fails to do so, and slips ever further into melancholy, self-hatred and grief. Meanwhile, you have Frank Underwood just winning all the time and flashing a smile. Why we should care is unclear.

Ultimately, House of Cards just depresses me, and makes me worry we’ll never get a great US politics television series (though I do have high hopes for Veep). The instinct to pander to the audience is simply too extreme in US political shows, it would appear, to really tell the truth about what the problems with our politics are. And it’s time we called out the backstabbing politician who is only looking out for himself for what it is: a Hollywood cliche without much basis in reality. Even the shallowest knowledge of politics makes a person realize that this is almost a complete fiction, that getting such a reputation is a career killer because nobody will want to have anything to do with you, and getting elected Speaker of the House, let alone President of the United States, requires the support of lots and lots of people. The real work of officeholders is about building relationships, doing favors, continually accomplishing gradual progress. Politicians are self-interested and ambitious as a group, but there’s only very little one person can do alone out of 435. It’s depressing to see such cliches just thrown around, especially since I think the public largely has this image of politicians too. It’s the equivalent of the evil businessman in movies, though it has less of a basis in truth as there are some businessman who do such things (though usually more in bullshit and denial than in movielike gleeful self-awareness). But both mislead as to where the real dangers in those professions lie.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

After all, being nice worked for Dalton.

This Times article is simply horrible. The article implies that it’s some deep failing that Obama was unable to twist enough Democratic arms on background checks, ignoring the fact that even with every Dem on board the filibuster would have ensured it wouldn’t have mattered. So the idea of whether Mark Begich feels intimidated or not is moot. With only four GOP votes, the venture was doomed to failure. People looking for a place to vent ought to focus either on the filibuster or the power of the NRA, not on Obama. This one really isn’t his fault.

Admittedly, a lack of fight has been a problem for the Obama Administration in places. But it’s been a very small problem in the grand scheme of things. The major problems do not include a lack of fight so much as poor assumptions and lousy priorities. The former comes in the form of baseless assumptions that Republicans are always close to pulling the trigger on a grand bargain and thus must always be placated and not have their feelings tweaked, and the latter comes in the simple reality that, with some exceptions*, if it won’t reduce the debt, the White House simply doesn’t care all that much. Put these together and they account for most of the teeth-gritting, frown-generating moments of the Obama Era. Endless health-care delays? Negotiating strategies that even little kids could outwit? The Smoot-Hawley-esque Budget Control Act of 2011, which included sequestration? Letting Tim Geithner guard the henhouse of FinReg? Shrugging at a climate bill? That’s most of them, and they’re all easily explained by one or both of the two flaws. Toss in an inexplicable fear of conservative talkers and a misguided attempt to placate coal country and you get a few more, like the Plan B decision, delay of climate regs, the indefensible SMOG decision, and so on. But really, between fear, assumptions and priorities, there’s really not much failure unaccounted for. Additionally, in those situations, Obama was in a position to act, and his actions were flawed. With gun control, Obama was in no position to act, making blaming him silly.

Since a lot of critiques of this argument involve Aaron Sorkin, I think it’s time to identify the flaw with Sorkin’s politics. There are different kinds of liberals out there. One kind believes that all you have to do is put the best argument out there and you will win (this assumes that dreaded cliche, the “free marketplace of ideas” along with the supremacy of reason, a curious Victorian idea whose time has long since passed). That’s it! If you don’t win, it’s because you didn’t put the idea out there enough, or didn’t phrase it right, or whatever. Sorkin obviously believes this, and so do quite a few (most?) liberals. But it’s completely wrong and glib and stupid and probably damaging too. Making the big speech is merely the beginning. After that comes organizing, action, and all the other hard work of molding public opinion. I do think the background check episode will wind up having helped. No, we didn’t win, but things will be different from now on. The NRA is never going to command the same prestige it used to. They don’t own the issues, they own the politicians, and politicians change. The NRA were revealed to be extreme, unctuous nutcases whose vision of a world in flames doesn’t have any appeal outside the Right. It’s never going to be the same again. I think so, anyway, and I’m not usually the “find the silver lining” type.

* I actually think Obama played gun control about right. Immigration is the other major outlier here–you could make a bankshot case that making undocumented workers legal, taxpaying citizens would have some impact on the deficit, but that’s a long way off. I think Obama’s support for it is partly political and partly out of social justice concerns, with a small fraction about possible long-term revenue gains.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Still from Amadeus, a big ’80s hit that didn’t involve dump trucks beating the shit out of each other.

I found this article about how Chinese folks are getting bored with American big-budget CGI explodarama brainless action quasi-epics to be pretty funny. The capper about how Chinese audiences want to be challenged is somehow perfect, especially since the big studios have gone all in on these fucking things doing huge business in China because fewer and fewer people in the U.S. give a shit about them. Reminds me of the news media, which made a different but similarly disastrous choice to base their brands on access rather than providing brilliant content or sharp analysis (presumably because access is much cheaper to obtain). Both decisions made their respective industries’ decline much worse and quicker than it otherwise had to be.

I’ve been thinking recently about movies from the ’80s, which was sort of an underrated decade for film. Sure, the highs weren’t as high as the ’70s, but if you look at the really successful films of that decade, there’s a level of baseline competence and quality to even the middle-of-the-road and lesser films that nowadays you struggle to find at all. Dirty Dancing and Lethal Weapon are good but not great movies, but both have a surprising amount of edge considering that they were big mainstream hits–the former centers around a story about abortion, the latter includes a character whose jagged, depressed desperation actually feels human–and both told satisfying stories of their respective genres without indulging in too much cliche. Back to the Future and the Tim Burton Batman are considered classics even though neither one has great artistic statements to make (though the former does have a lot of fascinating, non-canned observations about both time periods it takes place in). But both are, in very different ways, highly entertaining films. Hell, even a mostly-bad schlockfest like Footloose still has a few things going for it. John Lithgow’s character is the real protagonist of the film, and while he’s wrong he’s not evil, just a decent guy doing the wrong things for the right reasons. The movie is, really, about his journey, and that element of the movie is satisfying (less so the idea that corporate rock is where real rebellion is taking place, kids!).  Generally speaking, during the ’80s there was usually (not always, as this was the decade that brought us Field Of fucking Dreams!) some level of assuredness in handling the story in hit movies, many include some fairly edgy concepts and characters with just a hint of damage or desperation to them, and if you look at all the movies I mentioned, you notice that they’re all over the map in terms of genres. Hell, one of the biggest hits of that decade was two middle-aged women singing to each other about having cancer, or something. (I’ve honestly not seen much at all of Beaches, though my significant other assures me it’s not essential viewing.)

I just don’t think Hollywood has it in itself to replicate that track record. They’ve gotten lazy on relying on CGI and fat publicity budgets to do most of the work for them, and the ability to tell a satisfying story has atrophied. Yes, I know the economics have changed since the 1980s and there are a ton more entertainment options available than just going to the theaters. This is a chicken-and-egg problem to some extent. But if the China option doesn’t work out for them, they really ought to take a second and rethink what they’re doing. For example, I just watched Dredd, the latest movie based on the Judge Dredd character that came out not so long ago. Now this movie is not going to change anyone’s life. But it was about as good as an action movie can be. There’s a strong concept, a story that moves and characters that are interesting, and the violence was frequently portrayed in offbeat and stylistic ways, and even with some ambivalence at the end. It’s really a pretty solid movie of its type, distinctive and engaging. But what it really made me think about was how unusual it was to watch a mainstream movie that actually kind of fulfilled the expectations you might have for it. That’s why it stuck out: it’s the exception where it used to be the rule. We’re stuck with robots punching each other and Shia Laboeuf from now on.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

“The story here is a Republican filibuster,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy after the vote. “The filibuster stopped it. That’s hard to explain to these senators, why a majority in the Senate doesn’t prevail. I don’t think you can explain this filibuster just based on the influence of the NRA. There’s a significant portion of the Republican caucus who are gun control Darwinists. They just believe everyone should have guns, and the good guys should shoot the bad guys.” And what explained the Democratic noes? “A lot of ‘em had concerns about the impact of the bill in rural areas. We thought we solved that. I’ll be interested in the reactions they get when they head back home.”

I’m not sure this gets quite at the nuances in play though. I grew up in a place with a fair amount of gun nuts, and the analogy I heard more than once was that of the Wild West. As in, if everyone has a gun, then the possibility of massacres dips extremely low. The flipside of this is that there’s some larger level of ambient violence because of all these guns, but this is a tradeoff they’re more willing to make.

Of course, I tend to see this as a false choice. Fewer guns around in general can mean less ambient violence and fewer massacres. Won’t end murder or anything like that, but the psychological resistance to killing a person with a knife, say, is much higher than with a gun, so it won’t help but result in fewer deaths. But I tend to think that the conservative vision of society in general is sort of an idealized Wild West, one more rooted in television programs from the ’50s and ’60s rather than any sort of reading into history and what really went on then (hint: desperate poverty, unceasing danger, extreme boredom). Actually, that does sort of overlap with the gist of their policy outcomes, come to think of it.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

No

Now that the wheels are falling off the Sanford for Congress wagon, to the point where he’s a likely loser in a safe GOP seat, the Republicans’ campaign committee is dropping out of the fun. This might seem less urgent now, but Democrats really ought to make a big investment in the district for the following couple of reasons:

1. House math. It’s going to be really tough for Democrats to claw back the 17 seats needed to take back the House. Colbert Busch would have a difficult time holding the seat in 2014, but any incumbent is a better bet than almost any challenger given incumbency rates. An investment now (when it’s arguably not needed) could strengthen Colbert Busch and make a stronger and broader first impression upon the people she needs to hold onto in a year and a half. And the best part is that, given Sanford’s fumbling campaign, you could stay positive and exclusively define Colbert Busch positively, which would pay great dividends.
2. Despite the odds, she’s the best bet of holding the seat. SC-01 is a staunchly Republican district, but it’s more fiscally- than socially-conservative. So Colbert Busch, a social liberal but pro-business fiscal conservative, isn’t the worst fit for the district. The odds of her winning a full term would have to be strongly against her, but then again, Mark Sanford had six opponents for the Republican nomination and they fell around him like a house of cards. It’s not unheard of that sometimes parties get complacent in their strongholds and fail to maintain a strong bench for safe seats–Hello Martha Coakley! These are, admittedly, reasons full of caveats. However, barring a wave, the way to taking back the House seems to lie in defeating lots and lots of incumbent Republicans, a difficult task. Any way to get around that…
3. Establishing a bench in South Carolina. The state is actually not as out of reach as some might think: Obama got 45% of the vote there, though it’s not an elastic state. It’s more like the GOP equivalent of Pennsylvania than, say, Vermont. But being competitive requires running actual, credible candidates for things, and Democrats don’t have many of those in the state. For sure, if Teahardist Nikki Haley gets shown the door, a Democratic governor could jump-start this, thanks to cabinet appointments and such. That, however, is speculative for the moment. Colbert Busch wouldn’t be all that formidable as a part-term incumbent, but if she won again in 2014, she’d be very credible for a statewide race.
4. Narrative setting. Special elections don’t tell you all that much about the national mood. Democrats won a bunch of them in 2009 and 2010, and then got wiped out. They also won one in 2011 in Upstate New York that revolved around the Ryan Budget (which mostly served as a wake-up call for Republicans to muddy the waters and dissemble about said budget), while the GOP won one in New York City centering around frenzied anger about the “9/11 Mosque” that faded right afterward. Neither of these elections predicted anything. But both got quite a bit of coverage, and what those elections “meant” to any extent a person can tell did in fact shape the discourse for a time. Even if all we get out of SC-01 is “Mark Sanford is an idiot and a pig” that’s one less day spent on discussing, say, a grand bargain. Politics is zero-sum and a Sanford loss could be a political boost.

Also, isn’t just tearing through Mark Sanford’s personal foibles and awful politics like Bruce Campbell with a chainsaw a reward in and of itself.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Add a comment | View 1 more comment(s).

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Now, to be sure, it’s easy to read too much into this. And you could argue that these folks quietly support Obama’s bargain in concept but don’t want to get nailed for saying it publicly. Could be! But I’m not sure that fits best. That might account for, say, Max Baucus, who is up for re-election next year and would be in trouble from both sides if he enthusiastically supported and worked on the project. But not for the others. I mean, Hoyer isn’t going to be primaried like ever (though that wouldn’t be the worst idea I’ve ever heard), and it’s actually more noticeable that he isn’t commending the president for his serious, bracing vision than if he’d put out a pro forma statement that said nothing. Is he afraid the whip job would be imperiled if he gave it a hearty cheer? Or could it be even too far for him? One wonders.

I don’t know what it means, but my guess is that the highly vocal intramural resistance to chained CPI has not gone unnoticed by officeholders. My working theory is that there’s significant Democratic resistance to this idea, but keeping quiet avoids breaking with the White House over a deal that will most likely never come to pass in any form. This is perhaps why Obama feels the need to go so far to the right with his proposals, as there’s not much support on the left for this kind of bargain. Of course, there’s not much support for it on the right either. In any event, the pattern is pretty interesting.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Add a comment | View 1 more comment(s).

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Paul devoted almost none of his speech Wednesday at the historically black college in Washington, D.C., to explaining the GOP’s thorny relationship with black voters over the last fifty years, and most of it arguing that “the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights and voting rights.” His history lecture focused almost entirely on the period before 1964, when the GOP began to champion the states rights arguments of southern whites. Echoing apopular conservative talking point, Paul repeatedly reminded the audience that Democrats passed Jim Crow laws in the south and that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, as were the first black legislators and the founders of the NAACP.

The talking point here is popular, however, it’s asinine as well. Somewhere along the line, Republicans who like to use it to excuse nearly a half-century of “benign neglect” of these issues forgot that it was a silly little propaganda line and started to think that it was actually something they could use to win arguments and persuade people. Michael Steele built his black outreach program around it. Bruce Bartlett even wrote a book about it, and he’s not an idiot! This is a problem because it isn’t very persuasive, especially not to present-day black people who are engaged enough in civic life to know what’s what, but it’s also dubious to anyone with a sense of history. Yes, Lincoln was a Republican, and so was Grant. Both had pretty good records on this stuff. Then came about six decades of mostly GOP governance in which nothing was done. And nothing much was done during the New Deal/Eisenhower era either. There is something of a myth that the GOP was pro-civil rights during this era, but it wasn’t really the case. Some individuals and groups were–the great Earl Warren, some Senators like Jake Javits and Margaret Chase Smith, and actually a fair number of Eisenhower staffers like Sherman Adams, Ike’s Chief of Staff, and Attorney General Herb Brownell, who together pushed Eisenhower to get serious about the issue despite his palpable lack of enthusiasm toward it. For the most part, though, Republicans of the time represented Midwest and Interior West states that had few black people in them, didn’t care much about the issue, and didn’t want to jeopardize their alliance with Southern Democrats over it. See Caro’s third LBJ book for more on this. Eventually, Republicans came around for political reasons, when they realized that Adlai Stevenson’s ties to Southern Democrats eroded black support for Democrats and saw an in to grabbing that support. Richard Nixon’s support for civil rights was entirely opportunistic, and it was discarded once going the other way was better politics. In any event, Warren, Javits, Smith, Adams, Brownell and all the rest of them were all stereotypical RINOs who would have been drummed out of the party sometime in the 1990s if they were our contemporaries.

Anyway, you know all this. But every once in a while someone talks about how Republicans will eventually flip on marriage equality and start to talk about gay rights as if they’ve always been for them, which doesn’t quite seem right to me. Republicans have, at various points, strongly supported civil rights as a party. Those points have happened to come at high points for the popularity of civil rights as an issue, so to the average person who is disposed to vote Republican, that record seems just about right–doing the important things, while avoiding the “excesses” like affirmative action and reparations and so on. This is why they’re able to get away with it. But Republicans have never been in favor of gay rights. There’s no real ambiguity there. The only thing I can possibly think of is that Reagan opposed the ballot proposition to forbid LGBT from becoming schoolteachers in 1978, but that’s awful thin, and Reagan’s own record is hardly positive in this area. You can’t posit Reagan as a hero of gay rights with that whole “not doing anything about AIDS” record. I guess you can add in Barry Goldwater’s support for LGBT to serve in the military, but Jesse Helms more than compensates for that. There’s no counternarrative to build here, really, and although there is some chunk of the GOP that supports civil marriage, the average person who is disposed to vote for the GOP thinks the party’s record on this stuff is just about right. That is, that full-scale opposition to marriage equality is the right thing in their opinion. The fact is that nearly all Senate Republicans voted for the 1964 CRA, and nearly all Senate Republicans voted for a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage in 2004. People who came of age during these times will always have “antigay” as a first impression of the GOP, and it will actually take hard work to reverse that.

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Red Dawn. Or, “Greg’s Dead! Who gives a damn?”

The source material is mostly noted for being gloriously cheesy and deliberately tongue-in-cheek, and as such has aged fairly well. John Milius might well be the prototypical right-wing loon politically, but he’s a savvy filmmaker who knew the difference between what he could take seriously in a film (American will, determination, and individuality defeating Soviet coldness and collectivism) and what would be better played for laughs (the whole America getting invaded idea). It’s aged well because it wasn’t the result of panic, but rather sort of a satire of panic. The remake is not nearly so clever, it’s merely a paean to commercialism. From the credit sequence that recycles scary news footage and graphs from the past couple of years, often out of context, the movie utterly fails to apply any kind of spin onto the premise of some cabal of North Korea, China and Russia launching a joint invasion of both American coasts. The original film was poking fun at a certain kind of fever dream that was, crazy or not, quite common at one time, and one which the filmmaker understood quite well. “Yeah, sure, this is crazy, but what if it actually happened?” This movie is about a fever dream that nobody really has, so it mostly spends its time trying to propel its nonstarter of a premise toward credibility. Which is to say, this movie ought to have “no fun allowed” stamped on the poster.

Really, Red Dawn didn’t have to be as bad a movie as it is. There’s probably a cut of this movie that’s mostly just boring instead of incomprehensibly crazy. But why would we want that? Firstly, the pacing in the movie is nuts. It throws us a bit of a head-fake by lingering too long on a high school football game that doesn’t really mean that much to the story, and then proceeds to rush through every other story beat throughout. The timing for everything is just way off–Hemsworth is giving inspirational speeches when he (and the other survivors) ought to be paralyzed by grief and fear, and it seems like they finish their training to live as guerrilla fighters in about twenty minutes before launching about four bombing attacks in rapid succession with minimal downtime. The entire movie is edited like an ESPN highlights clip! Most movies have natural rhythms, downtime follows climax. In this movie–which barely clocks in at over an hour and a half but seems to have about two hours’ worth of story that stubbornly wouldn’t be hacked out during post–everything happens so fast that little things like character development, backstory, and escalating tension are simply not included. Speaking of the latter, there’s a plateau of tension rather than constant escalation–the North Korean regime, awash in Nazi-esque imagery for some reason, doesn’t do a thing to stop the terrorists short of a few rallies, until they finally just launch some napalm into the woods and kind of get lucky and hit their hideout (this single setback nearly destroys our heroes’ resolve, by the way). Incidentally, the movie’s setting has shifted to Eastern Washington State, presumably because young audiences could more easily relate to suburban teens from Spokane than Real Americans. Would it kill them to set one movie in rural America? Anyway, the Wolverines are hell-bent on attacking Captain Cho, the prefect of Spokane who seems out of his depth for the entire film, unable to control the situation, and with little knowledge of how to combat urban guerrilla tactics. This makes sense since a captain of infantry commands a company of men, which is about 200-300 people. That’s a big jump to running a large urban military district, and Cho is clearly not up to it, which makes their intention to target him baffling. They should have (unlike North Korea) just kept attacking strategic targets, and counting on the lassitude of their foe to help them. Then again, what if they’d turned this particular trait into something? In a different film, Cho could have been an immensely sympathetic character. He just wants to sit behind his desk, not work the field! Maybe he’s ambivalent about the mission. Maybe he catches some American TV and decides to work against his own guys! Sadly, this movie doesn’t develop his, or any other, character.

Red Dawn is not a good movie. But it didn’t have to be a terrible one. Some elements are irredeemable, like the score, which telegraphs every single emotional beat in the film. I think the composer actually wrote a Chris Hemsworth inspirational speech theme, and trust me, it gets a lot of use. Others aren’t as lousy. But the movie can’t stop moving, ever. It brings to mind such cheesefests as X-Men III: The Last Stand or the brilliantly damaged Mr. Brooks as closest comparisons. Both had way more story than they knew what to do with, and potentially strong material was lain wasted because the filmmakers were unable to zero in on the key parts of those stories. But Red Dawn isn’t as perversely entertaining as Mr. Brooks, which at least wins points for inventiveness and audacity. Whatever the flaws of that movie, it was someone’s fully realized vision. Red Dawn is nobody’s idea of a worthy remake, a straight-down-the-middle adaption to a weird, quirky, frankly sui generis film that’s itself utterly generic. (I can’t really talk about the actors since they’re given little to work with here. None seem actively terrible, though.) Plus, there’s a sequel setup so egregious that it doesn’t even bother to resolve its own situation. Yep, it’s Lost In Space‘s ending all over again, folding franchise fever into the catalog of contemporary corporate sins committed by this movie. Again, I come back to the tone of seriousness. A campier, sillier tone would have been a more natural fit for this movie’s scenario, it could have functioned as a sendup of pants-wetting alarmism in a similar way that the original did. But this film takes everything deathly seriously, when everything–from the concept, to the CGI effects, to the Inspiring Speeches–inspires ridicule. Half the characters’ names you only learn when they die! Then someone will note that, “Greg’s dead!” as if that matters to us. Long live Greg, we hardly knew ye. Seriously…

Add a comment | View 1 more comment(s).

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

Add a comment

by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook