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July 26, 2009 - July 19, 2009

Saturday, September 13, 2008

MORE NON-POLITICS. So we've slipped up a couple times this week. There have been some political posts. We tried. But with one outstanding exception we're guys here. We can't always deliver on our good intentions. This hasn't been a good week for guys particularly, in terms of our public image and visibility anyway. There's been quite a lot of estrogen flying through the air (in case you hadn't noticed), and it's possible some of the guy vote is chafing about the endless chatter on motherhood, feminism, woman power, and baby-related stuff of the sort we're constitutionally incapable of listening to for more than 7.8 seconds in a row.

It feels like it might be time for a warning shot of sorts. Sure it's annoying when the whole world starts talking women and nothing but. On the other hand, they're not the only irritating sex. They're not even the only irrational, what-the-hell-can-they-possibly-be-thinking sex. The other one of these is the guy sex. I defy anyone to explain the behavior spotlighted in this post. And I warn you that if you try to explain it, you're even worse than a woman trying to explain to a man why she watches "The View." Because all the stuff here is absolutely stone crazy.

Number Five.


Professional wrestling. No. NO. Shut up! Anyone who actually watches this stuff is braindead. It's not a sport. It's less emotionally and intellectually challenging than shelling peanuts. But an embarrassingly large percentage of us still watch it. What are we thinking? Nothing. N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

Number Four.


Clothing fads. Don't mention women in this context. Of course they do clothing fads, but their fads have to do with looking good, not like some brains-in-his-buttocks moron who only cares about clothes when he can make himself look really really REALLY stupid.

Number Three.


Dumb proposals. Only a guy would even consider taking the most intimate and important moment of his life and turning it into a spectacular opportunity for public humiliation and derision. There's no need to cite all the hideous anecdotal proofs -- engagement rings buried in Caesar salads, blah blah blah -- because you all know what I'm talking about and you all know someone otherwise sane who did something just as imbecilic when he asked his girlfriend to be his wife. I don't care about the psychology, whatever it is. It sits in the hierarchy of human intelligence somewhere just below the level of "not very smart toad."


Jacked-up trucks. I hate this one. Really hate it. It's an insult to motorheads everywhere. Guys are supposed to care about driving, performance, the relationship between cars and the road. This brain disease is to motor vehicles what Double-G silicone breasts are to sexy women -- a cartoonish obscenity. Women like that can't even stand up straight without toppling over. Trucks like this can't go around a mild bend in the road without toppling over. It's so dumb there's not even the remotest possibility of a reasonable explanation. It would be much safer and considerably cheaper to buy a forehead tattoo that reads "I'm a moron. Ask me any question and I'll prove it."

Number One.


Dressing up like a jerk at sporting events. I get it. You like your team. You don't have a life of any kind apart from your team. But why do we have to suffer for your one-dimensional experience of life? Why do we have to be exposed to your Size Humongous body made exclusively of flab (yeah, I took it easy on you with this photo selection) and watch you turn it into a nauseating billboard advertising the neanderthal lowbrow-ness of men?

Note that I've also kept the commentary to a minmum to accommodate the attention span of the dumber sex.

See you Monday with more male dumbassery (i.e., our usual commentary).

LOOK... This is a wild hare of an idea. It's late at night and that's when odd notions strike. But I read this column by Mary Mitchell of the Chicago Sun-Times a couple hours ago and I can't get it out of my head:


More interesting than the column is the comments, which lambaste her for her malice and thank her for adding to Republican passion against the Obama campaign.

It makes me wonder. There's a school of thought among the frankly spiritual students of history that Hitler protected us from his madness by almost single-handedly losing his war of conquest at the brink of complete victory. Somehow, the argument goes, he knew the depth of his own evil and that it had to be defeated. So he, subconsciously to be sure, overruled the sage professional advice of his generals and contrived, through a series of fantastic errors, to ensure that his enemies would destroy him.

Is this what is happening with the Democrats? How dumb do any of them have to be not to realize that half-assed hateful smears of Sarah Palin are doing nothing at this point but helping the Republicans, feeding their passion and their coffers? Yet the bile keeps coming, so overblown that it's a fall-down laughing joke before it even hits the Internet. Mary Mitchell "hates that..." No. She doesn't hate THAT. She hates Sarah Palin. So much that she can't conceal it, finesse it, or downplay it even if the price she has to pay is the defeat of her beloved Obama. Does that make sense? Is it conceivable that a media-savvy journalist who makes her living by observing and analyzing politics would engage in such a suicidal tactic?

No. It doesn't. There are only two possibilities. They're crazy out of their minds. Or they're aware at some level that they're crazy and wrong. Tonight I'm playing with the second possibility.

It's not that far-fetched an idea. If they listen to their own policy prescriptions, they have to know that their party hasn't had a new idea in nearly fifty years. Obama is, however nouveau his appeal, the same old same old, a drab socialist who wants to grow the U.S. government and kneel to the governments of failing states in Europe who have already plighted their troth to demographic ruin. They can't abjure their tired and utterly refuted ideology, so they have to keep repeating the same stupid, counter-productive nostrums about government spending its way to paradise. But if, in some part of their psyches, they know their plans can't and won't work, they can still connive subconsciously at their own defeat.

This year there was almost no way they could have lost this election. People are mad at Bush, and eight years of MSM propaganda have convinced average voters that even if their own lives are okay, the country is heading straight to hell in a hand basket. Moreover, there hasn't been a time in the last quarter century when the Republicans were less articulate about their traditional principles of limited government, fiscal discipline, and tough foreign policy. But McCain is at least tied with Obama and possibly ahead in the polls. This isn't an outcome that could have been achieved unless the Democrats, despite all their arrogant fury, were hobbling themselves more effectively than the Republican Party is.

Think about it. The Democrats have had control of both houses of congress for the last two years, and the approval rating of Congress ranges from 9 to 15 percent positive. That's a polling impossibility unless the Democrats are somehow conspiring in the destruction of their own credibility.

I believe they are secret accomplices in the gathering storm of rejection that will hit in November. They know they can't be trusted even better than the Republicans know it. The most terrifying fact they deal with in their nightmares is that we've been a 50-50 country for at least eight years now. What could be worse than a third Bush term? Being responsible for growing the economy and protecting American citizens themselves. That's serious. And they know (deep down in the soulful places Chuck Schumer has never been) that they can't do it. Just as they knew Al Gore and John Kerry couldn't do it. They'd much rather be the superior minority, with no responsibility for outcomes or American lives, and they actually get sexually aroused by the prospect of being able to blame Republican control on racism and dumb, gun-toting, Bible-quoting hicks.

Do you have a better explanation for why they've apparently decided, en masse, that the best way out of the hole they've dug for themselves with Sarah Palin is to keep digging, deeper and more frantically, until we eventually lose sight of them in the hellish depths of their hateful id?

Sorry, Mary. I know this isn't the interpretation of your column you wanted or expected. But either you're the dumbest woman who ever lived, or you're absolutely determined to escape the responsibility that comes with winning the presidency.

Me, I don't care which it is. But this I know. I am sick to death to death of you. And we're going to find the cure.

Friday, September 12, 2008

NEXT STEPS. I know the left is deep-down vicious, but even I was surprised by the speed and depravity of the MSM/blog/Dem assault on Sarah Palin. It was over the top even for them, and though I have read many intelligent attempts to explain the irrational ugliness of the past two weeks in terms of who Sarah Palin is and is not, I think they're mostly wrong. It's not about Palin being a woman or a mother or a Christian or a conservative. It's about a light bulb that suddenly switched on in the subconscious minds of the Obama intelligentsia. As soon as she was named, they knew they had lost the election. What followed was an enormous tantrum, which hasn't stopped yet. It's true. They have lost the election. Unless McCain and his campaign staff don't see this fact or don't see why it's true. That's what I'm worried about.

I worry about the ads expressing Republican outrage about lipsticked pigs and Palin pursued by wolves. (Though I'm disdainful of ALL the pundits who profess belief Obama didn't paint the pig on purpose any more than he gave Hillary the middle finger on purpose. Grow up, naifs.) These are wholly unnecessary diversions because the election isn't about Palin. It's about McCain and Obama. And Obama is in the position of the bull in the photo above, bloodied, pierced by debilitating lances, and helpless to prevent a surgical political kill. All that's left is applying the sword with antiseptic grace in the upcoming three debates. There isn't even any need to be particularly negative from this point forward. No name-calling is required. The double-edged axe of Obama's/Palin's (in)experience doesn't have to be hauled out, only mentioned in passing. The coup de grace isn't a function of judgment, or Biden, or Hillary, or Bill Ayars, or Jeremiah Wright, or Michelle, or racism, or elitism, or the documentation of lies and misrepresentations. McCain shouldn't even have to raise his voice. Just slide the sword smoothly in at exactly the right location, and the election is over.

Unfortunately, I don't see much sign in all the heaped-up brilliance of the right that anyone on McCain's side is seeing the forest instead of a row of tempting trees. Although there is one NRO editor, Jim Geraghty, who has isolated and identified the only important fact in the woods:


Before the supposedly disastrous Biden pick and before the Democrat Convention's odd conceit that McCain is exactly the same as the president he has battled, sabotaged, and embarrassed at every opportunity, Bill Clinton actually tried to tell the Republicans why Obama is so fatally vulnerable:


Of course, his analogy was veiled, discreet, and understated, but political double-agent that he is in this election, he was sharing his political genius with anyone capable of inductive reasoning. The only part he left out is that Obama has changed his position on so many matters of fact, policy, and his own character that it's impossible to take him seriously on anything. He may believe everything he says when he says it, which is why there's no need to accuse him of lying or cynical flip-flopping. It's simply that anything and everything he says is subject to radical change and even reversal at a moment's notice whenever circumstances, as they inevitably do, change his view of our view of him.

Consider any policy issue or position that comes up in a presidential debate. If it's Obama's tax plan, McCain doesn't have to explain the economic impossibility of funding trillions in new spending on the backs of the 5 percent who have their taxes raised while 95 percent get a tax cut. All he has to do is list the number of times Obama's tax promises have changed during the 19 months he has been running for president. He wanted to repeal all the Bush tax cuts and double the capital gains tax. Now he doesn't. In fact, he's no longer sure that taxing the five percent who are rich is a good idea in a recession. But inauguration day is three whole months away. What will Obama's tax plan be by then?

The same is true of everything in Obama's continuously fluid platform. The Iraq War (immediate pullot/conditions on the ground, surge failed/succeeded), FISA (determined to filibuster against it before he voted for it), NAFTA (no/maybe/yes), the federal death penalty (no/yes), negotiations with foreign tyrants (yes/sometimes/no), the Second Amendment (no/yes/who knows?), fixing social security (let's dance), the spiritual mentor he could never disavow (father figure/disappointing stranger), drilling for oil (no/yes/maybe), nuclear power (no/maybe/whatever), etc, etc. Bringing up any of these topics in a debate is tantamount to putting the old warrior McCain into a shooting gallery filled with nothing but targets of opportunity. "It doesn't matter what the specifics of this plan are; they'll change substantially before he submits his first bill to Congress as president. He can't help it. Circumstances change, public opinion changes, and his deeply and gravely held principles will change right along with them. Nobody can show you anything he's ever stuck to against the party line."

This is where Obama's lack of experience and any substantive legislative record is no longer a political charge, but a factual proof. Supporting a brilliant young talent with virtually no experience is fine in some circumstances (Sarah!), but without a record of experience all we have to go on is words. And while 19 months of campaigning is still not a credentialing experience for Obama, it is all the experience "we the people" need to make a decision about him. No matter how much we love his eloquent words, he has given us absolutely no reason to trust his word. It doesn't matter nearly so much that we know very little about Obama the man inside the image as it does that we know nothing about where he will choose to stand tomorrow, wherever he says he stands today.

That one argument, hammered home however tactfully, is all that's required to peel away the moderates, independents, and Reagan Democrats that constitute the margin of victory in this election. It's really that simple. McCain's word is good, backed by a lifetime of documented actions in the military and in public life. Game over.

Politically acute Democrats have known this, or felt it deep in their guts, for many months now. All parts of their coalition have been disturbed by the rapidity and degree of Obama position changes since Hillary suspended her campaign. Republicans somehow failed to notice that the thrust of the Obama campaign transitioned away from Obama the Savior to McCain as a third term for Bush. Why? Two reasons. First and less important, they -- no more than the electorate -- could work up any real hostility toward John McCain, whom they actually respected without wanting to, and the illusion of running against Bush was the only way the party pros could work up some passion in their speeches. Second, and critically important, because they no longer had a real candidate, only the wildly popular image of one. Their quite reasonable hope was that the sleeping Republican base wouldn't notice, that a tired and underfunded McCain wouldn't notice either, and that the general election would be a lackluster formality -- i.e., a vision of the Obama campaign coasting across the finish line on an empty gas tank.

That's why the Biden pick for VP actually made great good sense. He would be the excitement, the comic relief, the buffoon that people still had to take seriously because he was a Democrat Party elder regardless of his dumb blunders, and he would therefore reinforce the last remaining element of the Obama mystique, his aloof, above-all-the-nonsense gravitas. It was the exact right move for a campaign that had lost all its substance even before the nominating convention. (Hillary would have deflated the Macy's balloon gigantism of the Obama brand.)

Then came the Palin selection. In political terms, it was a nuclear explosion. Not because of who Sarah was but because of what her nomination did to the Republican base and the candidate. They all woke up, so suddenly that to Democrats it must have seemed a miracle in reverse.

That's why they immediately launched the carelessly self-destructive nuclear counterstrike against Sarah Palin. It was an act of projection and displacement. Mad at Sarah? Yeah, maybe, on general liberal fascist principles. But the specific personal vituperation was so psychotically vengeful that it couldn't have been inspired by a total stranger. Psychologically, the real target of their rage was Obama himself. Obama, the no-experience guy, the exotic life story from left field, the seductive mirage that caused so many to lose their senses and stupidly abandon the one real candidate whom they had rudely shoved out of the way. The more the Republicans embraced the inexperienced but sexy new unknown, the more their rage swelled and twisted their hearts. They wanted to destroy her in revenge for the fact that her race and gender opposite/apposite had cost them the White House a third time in a row. The hatred on open display was also self hatred. Is self hatred. Particularly for the MSM, which lives exclusively in the realm of what happens on TV and other media; they have a vivid nightmare image of just how bad the Obama-McCain debates might be. And what fools they will feel for having used all their prodigious power to create such a humiliating scenario for themselves.

What does this mean for the McCain campaign if they are smart enough to see it? Forget about forcing Palin to run any gauntlet of media accreditation. She owns the base, no matter what. Quit defending her. Quit tossing her into baited traps. Take the fight to Obama, but not in the way they have been doing the past few weeks. Produce and run ads that contrast, without much explanation or leading commentary, the fact of Obama's countless changes of position in every conceivable area. Deliberately withhold the charge of flip-flopper. Don't make any charge at all -- just statements, dates, documentations of the only change we can count on Obama for, the change in his own mercurial positions on everything that matters to the American people. Save the punchline for the debates. Then use the sword cleanly.

Do I think they'll do it? No. That's why I'm worried. I think they'll try to slug it out issue by issue, accepting each new Obama position as final, and thereby enable the cipher ZERObama to hide his nonentity in the weeds of detail.

Somebody please reassure me.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

MRS. IP REMEMBERS. A few days ago, I mentioned this memory.


Today, I would like to recount the events of 9/11 as I experienced them and as the people with me experienced them.

I have been working in industry on Department of Defense contracts for more than 20 years. My work requires coordination and collaboration with members of my own organization, other corporations, and our end military customer. So it was that four of us (three with a different company) left New Jersey on September 10 to attend a meeting at a base in Virginia scheduled for the morning of September 11. We left early in the afternoon in two cars because one of our group was staying over a second night to attend a meeting in Washington, DC, the next day. I took my cell phone with me primarily so we could communicate between cars during the drive.

We checked into our hotel and went out to dinner. Several others who had also traveled in for the meeting decided to go with us, so about ten of us caravanned to the Olive Garden. We had all worked together for a long time, and our table was full of lively spirit, conversation, and camaraderie. Like all such occasions, we were our own island of shared experiences and comfortable laughter. After dinner, our group of four returned to the hotel and decided to meet in the lobby at eight-thirty am to drive to our meeting in one car.

Every one of us still remembers that amazingly clear and beautiful morning – the brilliant blue sky, the shining sun, the crisp air – as we made the brief journey to the base, passing through the gate staffed by what looked to be a rent-a-cop.

Everything went as usual. Until shortly after ten o’clock. The woman who broke into our meeting was terse and stiff. She told us the Twin Towers had been struck, the Pentagon had been struck, and the White House was on fire. Everyone was stunned to whispers. You just couldn’t absorb it. I felt as if I had entered an alternate universe and was suffering from transporter shock. One of the staffers operating the computers in the conference room said he would acquire the satellite so we could see what was being broadcast. That proved impossible. Imagine it – U.S. military personnel on their own base unable to link a satellite. Within minutes we were hustled out of the building. As we exited the base, we saw that the rent-a-cop was gone, but the armed squad of soldiers at the gate looked like nothing more than empty bluff. Nothing they could do about miles of undefended cyclone fence if war was coming their way. Once past them, we talked dully among ourselves about what to do next. No cell phones were operating. We were completely isolated and far from home.

Three of us had checked out of the hotel that morning, but one still had a reservation for that night. So we figured out, slowly, eventually, that we needed to head back to the hotel. Still no cell phones. We turned on the car radio and learned that the towers had collapsed, the Pentagon had been struck by a plane, and the White House was not on fire but a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. Washington, DC, was closed to all traffic. Reporters inside the beltway were talking to people parked in their cars on the highways. I heard one man interviewed who’d been approaching the Pentagon at the moment of impact and had actually seen and heard the plane which crashed there. Still no cell phones. We felt adrift, lost in surroundings that used to be familiar and utterly ordinary.

When we got to the hotel, we decided to try for home. It was the only emotion we could actually recognize and so it trumped all others. We couldn’t contact anyone. They were probably all where they belonged, safe and sound, but who knew? We didn’t. Couldn’t. While we waited for our last person to check out, we saw the broadcast of the Twin Towers collapsing on the lobby televisions. It was an impossible sight that crushed us with its inevitability.You couldn’t pull your eyes away from it. And it ran over and over and over.We needed the constant repetition to make us believe it. The neutral background of a franchise hotel is a surreal place to be at such a time. It feels like a nightmare, but everything around you is too ordinary to let you suspend your disbelief. It’s happening. It’s not that last dream before waking.

When we were finally ready to leave, we solemnly decided where to stop for lunch, as if it were important, hoping the restaurant would be open. The radio kept flooding us with more chaos -- announcements that all planes had been grounded, bridges were being closed, and the Coast Guard was being sent to protect river mouths and bridges. Still no cell phones. We were 25 miles from Washington and almost 200 miles from our families and homes. We looked at each other, talked with each other, nodded, and acted as if we were together. But everyone was inside his own bubble of confusion, dread, that bright light of unreality which dimmed our own voices when we spoke, and we were only bumping against one another without touching.

In the car, we continued trying to call spouses, children, co-workers. No dice. We couldn't even communicate with our colleagues in the other car. Conversation in ours was strained. We all wanted others to relieve our bafflement, knowing none of us could. “Change the station.” “Go back to the last one, I thought I heard something.” The skies were eerily empty of airplanes. The radio reports kept coming, but everything was a rehash of still unconfirmed speculations.. No one knew how many people had died in the towers. 20,000? 40,000? Was the president safe? We didn’t know for sure. We crossed a bridge over the Potomac River (thankfully not closed) – no boats navigating there either. Hardly any traffic on the highway. It was like a scene from the The Road Warrior, empty roadways as far as the eye could see. We didn’t know where everyone had gone.

We arrived at the restaurant and found other travelers like us, confused and trying to reach home. I thought briefly of the restaurant the night before, all those little islands of comfortable conviviality. This time the whole building was its own desert island, and all the castaways were immediately intimate, sharing shreds of fact and fancy as if together we could make it all add up to something. We couldn’t. What we had in aggregate was not information but alarm. And rumors. A different one on every tongue. Still no damn cell phones. I had a calling card and -- there was a pay phone. Amazingly, I got through to the office. I let them know we were trying to get home and were all okay. One of my travel companions was desperate to call his wife so I gave him my card. By the time he hung up, he was in tears. Meanwhile, everybody in the place was talking to everybody else, trying to listen but helplessly talking over everyone else anyway, because we knew they didn’t know any more than we did and expressing our own opinions was the closest we could get to control of the situation. “I’m thinking about it, therefore I am not totally helpless.” Amid the clamor, I saw something wondrous. One man was actually talking into a cell phone. The real world was still there, out there, somewhere. And as was to happen again and again in the time after the attack, he offered us use of his phone. We left while the line was still patiently waiting to take advantage of the lifeline he offered.

We traveled the many miles of near deserted highways and finally made it home to the suddenly strange familiarity of New Jersey. Somewhere along the way, our phone calls started getting through and we plugged into a stream of up-to-the-minute reports from the car radio and people at home. The news was a thudding series of blows to the stomach. Stories about the loss of firemen, policemen, thousands of civilians and WTC employees. Deaths. There were dead. In the thousands. We kept talking and talking about the events – AND WE GOT MAD. Who had done this? Why? How quickly could we retaliate? And most of all, we felt and reiterated our utter conviction that these people, whoever they were, had absolutely no idea what they had awakened. We would be swift and harsh and righteous and merciless in response. By the time we actually got back, I think all of us would happily have manned a machine gun if we knew where to aim it.

Everything we thought we knew was gone. We were more vulnerable than we could ever have imagined. Terrorists no longer wanted to kidnap airplane passengers; they were making planes into missiles. They weren’t attacking military targets; they were targeting civilians. Not just Americans, but anyone in America or participating in our way of life.

So when President Bush went to Ground Zero and announced through his bullhorn that the world would hear from us, we all cheered along with the heroes who were working there. And they did hear from us. Do none of you Bush-haters remember or take any any pride in that kept promise? I do. We have taken the fight to them, and though it’s never been reported this way, they haven’t drawn an easy breath since America decided to take their war to them.





UPDATE. A deeply moving remembrance in pictures of the towers and that tragic day, courtesy of IP commenter Peregrine John. Give yourselves a quiet and uninterrupted ten minutes in which to watch the whole thing.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

No Politics Week (Hopefully*)
 

THE EVILS OF CABLE. If you're an uncritical supporter of the Media Research Center and allied organizations, prepare to be riled. It's no secret that a lot of conservative groups are united in condemning the Showtime series Dexter:


Everything the PTC is quoted as saying about the series is true, but only up to a point. There really is considerable artistry involved in this unusual dramatic offering, and I am inclined to defend it not just as entertainment but as a fascinating discourse on morality, human nature, and the human condition.

Longtime readers of this site will be aware that I was no fan of HBO's The Sopranos, and the superficial similarities between The Sopranos and Dexter -- glorifying criminal behavior by depicting it as a metaphor for run-of-the-mill family dysfunction -- is obviously sufficient for the most righteous among us to look no further. But that's my problem with hard-line Christian watch groups generally. They're happiest when painting with a broad brush, and if we left entertainment of all kinds up to them, we'd all soon expire of boredom and mediocrity. Their preferred music would consist of those sickly-sweet Christian boy band CDs advertised on the Hallmark Channel, and all movie and TV production would likely be terminated in favor of "Murder She Wrote" reruns and rereleases of the oldest, most banal of Dean Jones Disney movies.

Just as the behavior and politics of contempoary Hollywood stars is a legitimate flashpoint for conservative anger at the excesses of the left, the repressive, humorless, and appallingly prudish demands of the MRCs and PTCs are the single most legitimate cause of liberal paranoia about the crypto-fascist tendencies of the right.

So let me make a case for Dexter as a show that adult Christians might find intriguing and thought provoking if they can get past their kneejerk prejudice against anything that isn't saccharine, preachy, or continuously uplifting (uh, boring).

Yes, Dexter is a serial killer. His cover is a job as a forensic blood expert in the Miami police department. And he kills quite often, with no sign of remorse. (And miraculously, no sign of David Caruso.) But he has less in common with Tony Soprano than he does with Raskalnikov, the protagonist of Doestoevski's Crime and Punishment. His character is a brilliantly conceived contradiction in terms -- an admitted sociopath raised by a man who drummed this terrible fact of his nature into him and taught him how to channel his worst impulses into areas that would do the least damage to the innocent and to his own prospects for survival. Which means, above all else, that Dexter has been educated as an observer of so-called ordinary people, as a painfully self-conscious alien in camouflage trying always to understand what he sees in order to better accommodate his behavior to what is normal and accepted. He is also -- due to his father's unrelenting instruction -- a highly disciplined person with an absolutist (imitation of a) moral code. He is driven to kill. But he cannot kill unless his victim is guilty of heinous crimes against the innocents whom Dexter is sworn not to harm himself.

This is a very complicated moral universe. And for the viewer, it can be a completely unexpected bonanza of insight. We are given the opportunity to watch humanity, i.e., ourselves, from the outside, from a perspective which openly declares that it doesn't have and doesn't understand human emotions and human responses to love, fear, injustice, hurt, and  the desire for happiness, however conceived. All Dexter has is a father who bequeathed to him, well, commandments stipulating what he can and cannot do. The people he watches with such unflagging curiosity and bewilderment are making that stuff up for themselves, as if their own fathers (and mothers) were merely some starting point, a kernel they carry within and grow themselves and their behaviors out of, as they see fit. I don't want to overdo it, but it's entirely possible to see Dexter as an Old Testament kind of guy getting a good long look at all the baffling individual interpretations of the heirs of the New Testament.

It is in the conflict between these two mentalities that all the drama of Dexter originates. The long arc of the series is that Dexter keeps moving toward the experience of "normal" humanity as his camouflage embeds him deeper and deeper into the contexts of family, romance, and parenthood. He imitates behaviors and, in fact, experiences real human emotions he cannot appreciate because he has been so effectively taught to believe these are beyond him. In other terms, he is so gripped by his belief in the Original Sin of Dexter that he cannot even contemplate the possibility of salvation or what salvation might feel like.

A few words about production before I continue. The part of Dexter is played by Michael C. Hall, whose performance is worth a whole row of Emmies. His wry voiceover narration captures both his remoteness from others and the metronomic relentlessness of his curiosity about what it is that makes others good while he struggles to survive against his own model of himself as purely evil. The writing is also incredibly sharp. Most of the scenes seem to end a line before any character utters the next, obvious, expected banality. The direction and cinematography never editorialize; we, like Dexter, are somehow part of the staging -- detached observers of all kinds of behaviors, from the virtuous to the vile, and never invited in close enough to feel like participants in the human (non-Dexter) circus. No lingering closeups, no sentimental pauses, no protracted reaction shots. But no jump-cut, fake-suspense hurry, either. Paced by Dexter's spartan narration, the scenes keep marching along. We see treachery, violence, sex, flirtation, the mixed messages of love-hate romances, and professional infighting as a mere sequence of events that leads ultimately to consequences, some of which are precipitated by Dexter and some of which are not.

Now. Back to the question of salvation. Contrary to every impression I might have given, this show is neither nihilist nor devoid of hope. There is nothing overtly religious about Dexter, but its modern nature-versus-nurture argument is neatly embedded in Dexter's biography as an easily comprehended stand-in for the oldest debates about original sin. There is an absolutely horrifying seminal experience responsible for Dexter's pathology, so vivid, so revolting and unspeakable that it effected the same dehumanization of his biological brother, which leads to an agonizing evocation of Cain and Abel. Moreover, Dexter himself not only battles his worst impulses but, impossibly for a true sociopath, continues to advance in the direction of his only fear, the chaos and dangerous complications of getting ever more deeply involved with the others: those unpredictable -- and frequently nasty and selfish -- ordinary human beings he knows could bring about his death by lethal injection. Multiple times in the course of the series he risks his own life and well being for others, including his stepsister and near total strangers. Along the way, he begins to recognize that he might indeed possess some moral sense that is not automatically inferior to the human beings he lives with.

That's why we root for him and hope he escapes to live another day, another season. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the series ends with him settling into the chair of his execution, but by the time that happens, I would be surprised if Dexter hasn't realized that some power exists which is capable of forgivng his sins because he does belong to the world of human beings, regardless of what he was taught to believe about himself in childhood.

On top of all that, the dialogue is funny, the characters sharply and realistically drawn, the acting beyond reproach, the plots intricately woven and beautifully paced, with subplot arcs nested within the grander conflicts that provide minor resolutions which sometimes merge with mighty cliffhangers, and the whole reacquaints us all with the nature of the sin within ourselves, because when we share the satisfaction of Dexter's obsessive justice, we are reminded that his original sin is ours, too, which may be the real reason the hard Christian right hates this masterpiece of a TV series so much.

Rent it on DVD. If you find you despise it, so what. If you like it, maybe you'll have helped the rest of us avoid the specter of 392 Hallmark channels on our Hi-Def cable TVs.

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

No Politics Week (Hopefully*)

ENTERTAINMENT. Just kidding. We all need a breather from politics, don't we? Not that we're going to get it. Or even deserve it. This is our quadrennial duty, after all. Still, we've got plans to talk about other things for a few days. If something comes up, we'll deal with it. But in the interim we got to thinking of simpler schemes, where good battles evil in  the most direct possible terms. Which led us to wondering which of all the thousands of western gunfights that have occurred in the movies were the very best. Any such list is largely subjective, though if you think the one up top belongs on it you're an idiot and should go away.

The hard part is coming up with a Top Ten that isn't all or even mostly Clint Eastwood. John Wayne rarely played the role of the man who walks onto the street (or into the saloon) to gun down a villain via the fast draw, and truth is, he was so big and bulky that a six-gun mostly looked like a toy on his hip. And the fast draw is what we're concerned with here, which is why we had to exclude classic westerns like the Magnificent Seven, whose climax involved other kinds of intense exchanges of lead.

And, yeah, we know that this is the kind of ranking that starts fights. Great. At least they're fights that don't involve McCain, Obama, taxes, and earmarks. Well, not those kinds of earmarks anyway. So here's our list of the ten greatest gunfights, from tenth best to Numero Uno. Feel free to disagree. Unavoidably, Clint is on the list multiple times, but he's not the majority, and (gasp) he's maybe not even the grand prize winner. That's our small nod to suspense.

First, some Honorable Mentions. It's unthinkable to leave John Wayne completely out of the mix. Or Jimmy Stewart. That's why we have to give a nod to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Even though the gunfight wasn't really a gunfight but a kind of put-up job. There was also Jimmy Stewart's painful showdown with Henry Fonda in Firecreek, which violates every rule of fast-draw gunplay but still produces a certain dramatic impact. (Stewart did get his licks in in Destry Rides Again and other westerns, but nothing that belongs on the Top Ten list.) And after his shoddy treatment in Liberty Valance, Lee Marvin does earn a tip of the hat for his comedic, and Oscar-winning, role as the drunken gunslinger in Cat Ballou. Anyone else? Well, we'll always love the sawed-off Winchester rifle Steve McQueen carried in his holster in Wanted: Dead or Alive, but that was a TV show and we can't remember a single individual showdown, so it's just an asterisk. Now for the real contenders.

Number Ten.

The pacifists will love this one. Nobody got killed, which is why it comes in so low on the list. But this scene from Tombstone is still an iconic reminder of just how close to death gunfighters (and gamblers) lived. It's funny and nerve-wracking simultaneously, as well as charmingly subversive of the notion that cowboys were all illiterate idiots. Doc Holliday versus Johnny Ringo:


Number Nine.

I know a lot of you are thinking of the spaghetti westerns. I looked at Fistful of Dollars. It's still highly entertaining, but it's got nothing that belongs on this list, as I think you'll agree if you give it some objective scrutiny. Clint's victims for the most part are reminiscent of small boys pretending to be shot, cartoonish and enjoyable but hardly convincing if you're not a native Italian. On the other hand, Bruce Willis's remake of Fistful (which was itself a remake of Yojimbo, so don't be a snob about it) contains an outstanding rework of Clint's response to the humiliation of his mule. If you haven't seen the whole movie, do so. Last Man Standing is dark -- in lighting as well as tone -- but it's got Christopher Walken in addition to Bruce, and it all winds up being great grim fun. It would rank higher but for the fact that it's been updated to the 1930s and therefore can't qualify as a true western. (That won't happen again on this list, promise.) Bruce versus the guy who vandalized his Model A.


Number Eight.

I admit I'm not a big fan of the next movie, Unforgiven. I understand why Clint made it, and I don't have any particular objection to his theme. The idea is interesting, and it's the most ambitious of his trilogy of reinterpretations of classic westerns (the other two being High Plains Drifter (High Noon but darker) and Pale Rider (Shane but darker). Unforgiven, unlike the other two, is nothing close to a remake of its inspiration, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but a very dark examination of the same subject, the popular mythologizing of wild west violence. My only problem with the movie is that I don't think it's a very good movie. It's long, dull, and a definite slap in the face to Eastwood's own fans. That's why it earned so much praise in lefty Hollywood and its Oscar represented Clint's acceptance into The Club of Serious, Socially Conscious Directors, where he already belonged. I have called it in other contexts "The Last Western," because nobody's made the kind of movie that made Clint a star since.

Still. The climactic gunfight has real power and cinematic stature, if only because it represents Clint Eastwood's final bow as the deadliest gunslinger ever to appear on the silver screen. Here it is. Clint versus Gene Hackman and his supporting thugs.

Number Seven.

I know, I know. This one should rank below the previous one. Take it as a measure of my irrational dislike of a movie that for me remains stubbornly "unforgiven." Quigley Down Under isn't even set in the American west, but in Australia. I like it, though. When it comes on, which it does often in our cable universe, I watch it. There have never been more than a couple dozen movies I can say that about (On the Waterfront being the all-time champ). So I suspect it of being a better movie than the two stars it gets in the listings. It has excellent performances by Alan Rickman, Laura San Giacomo, and, yes, Tom Selleck as the nineteenth century equivalent of a world-class sniper. His weapon  is a state-of-the-art long rifle requiring special shells that enable him to shoot the wing off a fly from a mile away. He comes to Australia from America in response to an ad promising big money for his skills, only to learn that he is expected to shoot aborigines like, well, flies. His villainous employer is, in a clever twist, a wannabe American gunfighter himself, and the final showdown between them is curiously satisfying. Maybe it's the totally unexpected reference to another favorite of mine, Zulu, that occurs after the climactic gunfight. (Not shown in this clip. Sorry.) Tom Selleck versus Alan Rickman and his two sidekicks.


Number Six.

Time for a spaghetti western yet? Yes. For a Few Dollars More. But the showdown isn't one of Clint's. You fans may not have not have noticed this, but the unpleasant fact is that Clint's spaghetti trilogy -- all eight hours worth -- contains only one gunfight that has any real emotional subtext. It's the one between Lee van Cleef and El Indio, the psychotic bandit who raped and murdered Lee's sister. The siblings were close; each owned an identical chiming gold watch, and Lee carries his everywhere as a reminder of his loss, while El Indio is demonically obsessed with the sister's watch he took from her body as a trophy. Clint does wind up playing a key role in the final confrontation, but not as a shooter. Rather, he chimes in as a, um, timekeeper... Lee van Cleef versus El Indio.


Number Five.

By now you may be starting to understand the criteria. A gunfight really shouldn't be just about killing. It has to have meaning in some context if it's to be really great. (Mostly.) The movie in which Clint finally enters the countdown is The Outlaw Josie Wales, which is the closest Clint ever came to making an epic western. It's the beginning of his increasing ambivalence, as a director, toward six-gun justice, and he does a brilliant job of reinvigorating the cliche of the burned-out gunfighter who wants to settle down peaceably but can't. This scene presents that bitter fate as a kind of kabuki dance. The big name gunfighter can't stop defending himself against glory hounds and bounty hunters, and they can't stop pursuing him. So they perform the necessary, stylized ritual. Josie Wales against a no-name hunter.


Number Four.

This one's here because it just can't not be here. For the last forty years it has reigned as the all-time, iconic, operatic gunfight. You know the one I mean. Never mind that there's no real reason to care who wins. All three are there for the money, disdainful of even the American Civil War through which they wander back and forth as if it were no more substantial than the shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave. Underneath the macho glamour and the sensational music, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is probably one of the most despicable westerns ever made. But there is this scene. Clint versus Eli versus Lee.


Number Three

Clint again. This time for Pale Rider, his interesting remake of Shane, deliberately uglified in its depiction of violence and even in its major characters. The people who need saving are not homesteaders but gold miners, many of whom are seeking the easy score rather than roots and a life on the land. And Clint's character, The Preacher, doesn't ever seem to bond as completely with his charges as Shane. He has his own score to settle with the posse of villains who threaten the miners. The scene in which he does so, however, represents a striking blend of the mythic Eastwood image with vivid physical and period realism. How many hundreds of times in the movies has it seemed that the giant-caliber .44 revolvers of the wild west killed without generating more than a sharp pain in the tummy and a neat little spot of blood. Not so in Pale Rider. (To be fair, Altman tried something similar in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which may well be the better movie, but it's just too depressing to watch.) What happens to the Marshal is not pretty. Nor should it be. The Preacher versus the Marshal.


Number Two

Pale Rider was a remake. This is the real thing, a masterpiece of cinematography, scene composition, and poetically spare dialogue. Shane can be hard for young people to watch, I suppose, because we never learn how good Shane is until the very end. Despite its violent theme, it contains remarkably little violence. But there are compensations of the sort Clint Eastwood failed to provide in Unforgiven. Shane is an essay on life, the value and costs of dreams, the difficulty and unfairness of the decisions life sometimes requires of us. The real test Shane passes is not his showdown with Wilson, but his honorable choice not to consummate his love for Jean Arthur (unlike Clint's 'Preacher'). When he leaves the valley, it's not because his work and justice have been done; it's because he knows he doesn't belong there. But all that aside, the gunfight itself is still extraordinary -- brief, shockingly sudden in such a lyrical movie, and by the standards of its day, realistically violent. It's our only glimpse of the old Shane, the one he so yearned to lock away in a trunk forever. But it's all we need to see of him. He was a pro, a killer, and someone to be feared. Shane versus Wilson.


Number One.

What would make one movie gunfight the best? It would involve characters we have come to know something about, neither wholly good nor wholly bad, a mythic context perhaps involving some degree of historicity, drama but not melodrama, realism without voyeuristic reveling in gore, and a terrible, close-in intensity that makes the confrontation inevitably a fight to the death. Well, here it is. It's the other shoe dropping after the initial encounter we showed you in Number Ten above. Val Kilmer's performance in Tombstone was brilliant. In fact he steals the movie from Kurt Russell and Sam Elliott. And this scene is a movie in miniature of the complex character of the wild west's most famous consumptive. Doc Holliday versus Johnny Ringo, Part II.


There you have it. Your first day off in a while. We'll see if we can't muster a few more along the way to November.

*Unless we can't help it.

Monday, September 08, 2008

Commenter Peter recently launched another of his commercials for Ron Paul in response to a TruePunk post about the Republican Convention. Peter has commented before, and both InstaPunk bloggers and some of our more able commenters have sought to reason with him about his, uh, convictions. This time, though, he seems to have stepped in it. He made Mrs. IP mad, which is hard to do and never a good sign about your writing and thinking ability. At such times, we all know the best thing to do is stand aside and hope the high winds and lightning don't take us out, too, by accident. Sorry, Peter. You have had it coming for quite a while now. And Mrs. IP always did like McCain. A word of warning to everyone who doesn't want his ass kicked in print.

THE THINGS THEY SAY. Peter. I read your comments and take great exception to what you’ve said and your use of this forum to make such statements with not a single example. It seems to me that you have indulged in the same type of smear tactics you object to in the media.  So I have made some responses in boldface to individual paragraphs of your comment. I have also added a brief statement of my own at the end.

I was MN as well this past week, but at the other event across the river. There people like Gary Johnson, Grover Norquist, Bruce Fein, Tom Woods, and Doug Wead talked about the country's problems, the GOP's problems and solutions for both. Theirs were familiar pleas for the party to listen to the movement, for once, and for the movement to actually take its role, power and mission seriously. They had their opportunity in the primaries. What you fail to understand is that your movement failed to be convincing or even persuasive to more than a splinter group of delusional fanatics.

Yes, Barry Goldwater, Jr. came out and said that the direction Ron Paul suggests is the best thing the movement has going. Then Ron Paul came out and expounded with the usual. You may disagree with policy suggestions, but that's all the substance that came out of Minnesota this week. The majority does not agree. Again, this is what primaries are for. As for citing Barry Goldwater, Jr., I feel for you. I, personally, have always admired Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the Great Emancipator, who  lived up to the legacy of his father by committing his mother to an insane asylum.

I want to like Sarah Palin. I want McCain's compelling story to make a difference to me. Likewise, I want this website's writers' insight into McCain's deepest motivations, and their self-projections onto his candidacy, to win me over and to make me feel good about not just voting for McCain, but working to get others to do so as well. But I'm not sold. It seems to me that John McCain’s own words should be what must convince you, not someone else’s interpretation. It also seems to me that the only input which ever sells you on anything is your most recent exposure to Ron Paul. Unfortunately, I dare say McCain and Palin know that about you, too. The one thing Paulistas have made abundantly clear to everyone is that nothing anyone can say to them will ever convince them to take their heads out of the sand and look at the world as it is. Which makes you quite a bit like the hardcore Obamaniacs. A door long slammed shut against common sense and garden variety logic.

What about policy? This must not be discussed. We know Barack Obama will be bad for the country. McCain's personal story and Palin's small-town cred are not answers to that, though. Policy is not discussed because there would be no fundamental difference between either administration. No fundamental difference between either administration? That’s ridiculous. Indeed, it’s preposterous, In point of cold fact, the only way to begin the kinds of reforms libertarians claim they believe in is with the “veto pen” McCain referenced in his speech. Without that pen as a first step toward slicing the lard out of existing government, every plank of Paul’s reform platform is as much a naïve fantasy as his belief that the U.S. can turn its back on the world without crippling consequences. John McCain’s record on reducing federal spending speaks for itself. Your bald assertions to the contrary are offensive.

This is because they share a love for big government, an imperial presidency and the arrogance that the elite in this country know what's best for not only every person in each American town and neighborhood, but for every 'global citizen' and their nations. As President, Obama or McCain know they have to answer to no one regarding their dealings with other nations. If you took the time to actually check John McCain’s record, you would know what a malicious falsehood this statement is. I’m wondering if you understand the structure of our government. Does the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a check and overseer of “imperial” executive foreign policy decisions ring a bell? Again, you fail to discern the obvious. If the Congress had a real rather than strictly political case to be made against the Iraq War, that war would be over. They could have defunded it any time in the last two years. They didn’t. Not because their mattresses were bugged, but because they don’t have an alternative foreign policy that effectively addresses what even they know is a serious terrorist threat. I truly believe you are becoming a monomaniac on this issue.

Just like with Jindhal, I'm worried that what could have been a great thing for Alaska will be a Sarah Palin as VP remade into what is best for the DC establishment, of which McCain is certainly a part - at least once election season is over. The great thing about being a paranoid is that wherever they look they see evidence of their worst nightmares. Must be hell.

National political conventions used to be days, sometimes weeks long. There party activists and officials actually debated and did battle with members of their own party to best define it and elect the best candidates who will represent the ideas for which that party is a vehicle so that it would be united against the opposing party. And who do you think the delegates were? They did debate, and they had some acrimonious fights. Easy to miss that if you decided ahead of time that it didn’t happen. And your nostalgia for smoke-filled rooms is quaint to the point of infantile. Today’s party reps can communicate and argue and resolve issues without necessarily being locked in one room for a few weeks. Have you heard about recent developments like cell phones, email, video conferencing and chat rooms? If you haven’t you might find them exciting if you opened your eyes long enough to escape from the 1880s.

This is no longer the case. The entirety of this event was a media show, of course, but it was a show in which the delegates, and thus the rank-and-file Republicans who elected them at their caucuses and county and state conventions had no say. There were no resolutions, no debates, no motions, no voting. Only a coronation to look good for the media. Wrong. These things didn’t occur on the convention floor because the media is watching and filming the convention floor 24/7. It all happened behind the cameras, in un-smoke-filled rooms, but it happened nonetheless. You’re free to disagree with a platform that doesn’t call for total unilateral disarmament and abandonment of the world to apocalyptic Iranian Jew-haters, neo-Soviet adventurism, and suicidal European socialists, but that doesn’t mean your ignorance is proof of some kind of imperialist conspiracy.

In fact, the media's presence is the main argument for this scenario. However, if the media's main goal was to make Republicans look bad, even among the delegates there were ample opportunities and people I know that were on the floor, and were interviewed, who highlighted the corrupt nature of the event. This paragraph doesn’t even make any sense.

Two major reasons none of these accounts are aired or printed, in my opinion, is first that the media and its establishment has no interest in allowing the public to consider, if even for a second, that these conventions and the meat of the political process are centrally controlled and not in our best interest (as most probably already know), but that every aspect of the political process the public can easily take total control over, wresting power from the few and returning it to their neighborhoods. See comment about paranoids above. Of course the media would have an interest in exposing the lunatic conspiracy you describe with no evidence whatsoever. That’s the kind of story that makes journalists rich, networks more powerful, and restores vanishing circulations to newspapers. For someone who claims to believe in capitalism, you appear to have zero understanding of how it works.

The other is that greater media scrutiny and individual involvement would cement for the public the similarities between the two parties (at least their DC wings), thereby shutting down the horse race the people eat up which makes the whole charade possible. Thank God there’s you, the one supremely brilliant person on earth who sees through all the lies being perpetrated on the American public. It’s absolutely staggering how well you can do this at such a distance from everything that’s going on, while surrounded by certifiable crazies who haven’t understood anything that’s happened in America since 1932. Hats off to your genius.

Please, go become your GOP precinct committeeman. Get on your county GOP central committee. Get on your GOP state committee and work to get actual conservatives as your State Chairman and national committee members. We can write and yell all we want, but politicians and party hacks know they don't have to change because our votes are in the bag. Actual involvement starting at the precinct level is the only way to change this party and what its elected officials do with the mandate we give them. No more.  You forgot to tell us where we should send our checks, money orders and credit card payments to Ron Paul to fund the most doomed political campaign since Pat Paulsen ran for President.

That’s your say. Here’s mine. Your wandering, ahistorical, data-free assertions are no longer cute. Not to me, anyway.

I have known about John McCain for decades. I remember his capture, his long captivity. I remember the talk when the last POWs were released by North Vietnam. No one was sure he would be released. Because of his father’s position, we were afraid he would be kept. Photographers and reporters scoured the buses to find him. I remember his return. The next time John McCain crossed my radar was his involvement in reestablishing relations with the Vietnamese. I asked myself what sort of man who had suffered all that he did at the hands of such a cruel enemy would want to be part of this. I also followed some of his career in politics as he hit the headlines from time to time.  For you to blithely lump him in with Obama as part of a vast monolithic sameness that is perceived only by you and your wannabe revolutionary co-zealots is actually disgusting to me. American politics is not a video game. It’s a flesh-and-blood reality where personal character, biographies, and decades worth of political positions and records are more important than rigid ideologies.

It sounds as if you’d prefer the parliamentary systems that are slowly strangling personal liberty, capitalism, and vigor in the European nations you want us to stay away from. In the U.S., we don’t vote for local ideologues who pick a party leader to lead the nation. We choose a president whom we trust to make hard decisions, including decisions we may not always agree with and which cannot be punished by an immediate ideological vote of no-confidence. It seems you have failed – for all your vain constitutional talk – to understand this central identifying characteristic of the most successful democratic republic in human history. I feel sorry for you on that count.

The critical point for me in presidential politics is actually believing what I’m being told by each candidate and trusting that the person will do what he says and that what he does is in the best interests of Americans. On September 11, 2001, I was at a meeting in a closed conference room on a Navy base. Suddenly, the door opened and we were all informed of what was happening. The base was being shut down and all civilians were ordered to leave. As we left, we drove out on the road alongside the base to get back to our highway. I was immediately struck by how little protection there was. A relatively short cyclone fence, just like what you would have in your backyard, was all that closed the perimeter. Anyone with a pickup truck could have driven right through it.

I realized just how open a society we are – so confident that our way of life is preferable to any other that we can’t even formulate a scenario where we would be under attack. Some still also believe that our oceans protect us.

I believe we are still struggling with the methods needed to protect ourselves. I see weaknesses everywhere. But there certainly have been improvements since we have not come under such an attack again. I am thankful George W. Bush understood that a nation as free as ours cannot fold in on itself for defense like an armadillo. He understood that the only way a society as free and open as ours can defend itself against the treacheries of terrorism is to seek out the enemy and attack him in whatever non-domestic battleground can be found.

Nobody tried to lynch FDR for joining battle against the European conquests of the Nazis by fighting them first in (huh?) Saharan Africa. (Damnit: shouldn't we have gone immediately for the Eagle's Nest [scroll]?) Bush, and McCain, too, found their own desert in which to confront al qaeda, and because there were no invisible mountain redouts like the ones Afghans have used for centuries to bleed invading armies (Brits, Russians, etc) to death, the United States Army and Marines have killed more al qaeda troops in Iraq than they’d ever have seen in the Barbaristans. And that’s why that frail Home Depot cyclone fence still hasn’t been breached in all the years since 9/11.

There was a time when I was convinced that a civilian president was the best choice for Commander in Chief.  We are, after all, a nation of citizen warriors. I have since changed my mind. In a world of terrorists who wish all of us dead, we need a person who understands the complexities of both the Department of Defense and the military structure. For all his good intentions and perseverance against fierce domestic opposition, George Bush could never overcome this lack in his own experience. It took McCain to sell the necessary Surge ito the administration and the congress, which he did by a heroic refusal to take the easy political out.  That’s a sterling example of why your glib ideological rantings aren’t worth the tidal wave of alphabetic characters you waste on them. And if you’re paranoid about a militarist dictatorship as well, go (re)read your American history. The record shows that previous Republican presidents who had prior military careers were anything but militaristic or imperialist (HINT: Do a Wiki search for Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower. They had their weaknesses, but tyranny wasn’t one of them).

When our nation must call on its military in a time of need – as we must now, regardless oif your willful and juvenile blindness -- I want someone who has shown some skill and comprehension about how best to use it. John McCain has proven he has that understanding by calling for the Surge long before anyone else and defying his own party and his president to win his case. You might recall that he received a lot of criticism at the time and even well after positive results were being achieved. Today, the Surge is a huge success acknowledged by all but Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Even Obama conceded late last week that it has been successful beyond all hope, even though he still refuses to admit he was wrong to oppose it. Character does matter, young man. The one thing Obama’s character can never permit him to do is acknowledge an error or a mistake. That’s a sign of narcissistic egomania. I would never vote for such a person for president, and I would advise you to consider what your own persistent refusal to face the obvious holes and errors in your political views might mean about yourself.

I will have more to say as the fall campaign continues.  For now, I suggest that Pete and others like him do a great deal more homework before they attempt to condescend to the rest of us again.

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