The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Raiders of the Lost Pretty Baby’?

Posted on | March 27, 2013 | 18 Comments

Ace of Spades stumbled across transcripts of the brainstorming sessions that led to the Indiana Jones movies, and the backstory of this dialogue:

Marion Ravenwood: “I was too young, it was wrong and you knew it.”
Indiana Jones: “You knew what you were doing.”

Ace says: “I assumed it was actually Contrived Filler Dialogue To Establish That These Characters Have Conflict to Justify Their Arguing Later.” Except, no, it was worse. Much worse:

George Lucas: I was thinking that this old guy could have been the mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
Lawrence Kasdan: And he was forty-two.
George Lucas: He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.
Steven Spielberg: She had better be older than twenty-two.
George Lucas: He’s thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve. It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.
Steven Spielberg: And promiscuous. She came onto him.
George Lucas: Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? The best explanation I can think of: It was 1978, the same year that Brooke Shields starred in Pretty Baby, and so this theme might have been considered “edgy” in Hollywood at the time. Also, maybe they were snorting up lots of coke and just got crazy.

But . . . wait a minute: Remember the scene in American Graffiti — Lucas’s breakthrough film — where the underage girl (played by Mackenzie Phillips) gets in the hot rod driven by Harrison Ford’s Paul Lemat’s character? So this jailbait theme was something Lucas has used before. A generation of film critics will spend the next two decades scouring Lucas’s work for clues: Was there some kind of Woody Allen/Roman Polanski thing?

And then Lucas will finally be hailed as a genius in France.

 

Category: Hollywood, Movies

‘The Dream Is Dead’

Posted on | March 27, 2013 | 27 Comments

Ashley Judd (D-Puffy Face)

So declares Ace of Spades, and connoisseurs of fine sarcasm must join Ace in mourning this tragic news:

The much-rumored 2014 campaign by film star Ashley Judd for the Kentucky seat of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will not happen.

No more Puffy Face to mock? No months of endless lunacy as she compares everything to rape? Alas, we have been robbed:

A source close to Judd said that Secretary of State Allison Lundergan Grimes’ interest in potential race made the decision not to run easier. “The timing just wasn’t right,” said the source. …
Democratic Senate strategists have argued that Judd would be a good, if unconventional candidate, pointing to her ability to rival or even eclipse McConnell in fundraising. But McConnell’s path to victory involves savaging his opponent, and Judd’s status as an actress and celebrity would have offered him loads of ammunition.

Loads. Loads and loads. And now . . . nothing.

 

Category: Celebrities, Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, Senate

Gold Price Jumps — Unexpectedly! — as Cyprus Tries to Halt Capital Flight

Posted on | March 27, 2013 | 8 Comments

Nothing like a debt crisis to spur a run on security, and gold prices — which had lost more than 200 points off the October peak of $1,794 an ounce — have spiked up about $30 in March, as Cyprus has become the latest tip of the Euro-debt iceberg to break the surface.

Yesterday, the “good” news was an EU official saying that deposits in other countries would be raided if necessary to bail out Cyprus. Today, the “good” news is that officials are trying to prevent a run on deposits when banks reopen Thursday in Cyprus:

Cyprus is set to restrict the flow of cash from the island and may curb the use of Cypriot credit cards abroad as it tries to avert a run on its banks after agreeing a tough rescue package with international lenders.
A Greek newspaper published details of what officials told Reuters was as yet only a draft government decree to restrict outward payments to documented imports and limit how much people could take abroad in banknotes or spend on credit cards.
With banks due to reopen on Thursday after nearly two weeks, Finance Minister Michael Sarris said capital controls would be “within the realms of reason”. But Cypriots, fearing for their savings and angered by the bailout deal struck on Monday in Brussels, are expected to besiege lenders in the morning.

This is the kind of coercive anti-market measure that desperate governments enact in an attempt to defy the maxim that capital has no nationality. Investors will put their money wherever they see the best prospect of profit and the best guarantee of security. Only governments that have wrecked their own economies ever try to limit overseas transfers.

Don’t you think people in other EU countries, seeing how officials are dealing with this Cyprus crisis, are shifting more of their assets to gold?

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 


Category: Economics, Europe

Vote Democrat! ‘Your Slave-Holding, Murdering, Adulterous, Baby-Raping, Incestuous, Snaggle-Toothed, Backward-A**ed, Inbreed, Imported Criminal-Minded Kin Folk’

Posted on | March 27, 2013 | 26 Comments

A guy named Eddie Maxwell e-mailed Alabama state legislators to express his concern for preserving the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. It was an open-CC e-mail, and what ensued was a flaming open-CC’d response by Alabama state Rep. Joseph Mitchell, whose colleagues and constituents were shocked by the venomous hostility.

Uh, no comment from Sean Penn’s son.

Category: Alabama, Democrats, Racism

The Fanatic Disciples of Equality

Posted on | March 27, 2013 | 19 Comments

The top 13 threads this morning at Memeorandum are about the Supreme Court arguments over same-sex marriage — the latest items being by Dana Milbank and Megan McArdle — and it’s tedious beyond words simply because it’s so far above our pay-grade.

This is a pageant of the elite. Once the Nine Robed Ones agreed to hear these cases, anything that you or I might think about the subject ceased to matter. The Supreme Court has in recent decades become the antithesis of democracy, the weapon employed by those who, unwilling to work patiently to change law by the usual processes, instead seek to have their opponents’ views ruled unconstitutional.

A 5-4 decision = “shut up.”

What’s a blogger to do? It’s not as if anything I write here will be footnoted in the court’s ruling. My opinion is entirely moot, as is yours.

We could examine the bogus presumption of superior wisdom invested in the Supreme Court, the idea that the justices are more enlightened than the rest of us, simply by their tenure on the bench. But this is easily disproven, merely by citing the absurd pretzel logic of Justice William Douglas’s infamous 1965 argument in Griswold:

In other words, the First Amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion. . . .
The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen.

Any honest person can see that Justice Douglas began with the object of achieving a desired result (i.e., nullifying Connecticut’s law restricting contraceptives) and then went rooting around in court precedents to improvise some justification for this conclusion. A similar process was at work in 2003 when Justice Anthony Kennedy decided to strike down the Texas sodomy law, and improvised this ridiculous gibberish:

The Nation’s laws and traditions in the past half century are most relevant here. They show an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.

Ah, yes — the “emerging awareness” principle, forever enshrined in our hearts, right next to the “penumbras, formed by emanations,” as the defining quality of what America is all about. For these intellectual abstractions, patriots marched bleeding through the snow at Trenton.

We are too accustomed to this decadent age described by Yeats:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

What the intensely passionate desire is that the Nine Robed Ones will overturn “Prop 8,” the California referendum passed by a narrow majority in 2008. I wrote about the reaction that year:

Taking to the streets in furious indignation, activists created an “enemies list” of those who had contributed to support the measure, targeting them for boycotts and protests.
The elderly co-owner of a Mexican restaurant, who had given $100  to support the referendum, was  driven to tears as she confronted “60 members of Los Angeles’ LGBT community” who demanded an apology and an equal contribution to a proposed effort to repeal the referendum. . . .
One activist who helped compile the enemies list told Time magazine: “My goal was to make it socially  unacceptable to give huge amounts of money to take away the rights of one particular group, a minority group.” Of course, the  restaurant owner’s $100 contribution to the “Yes on 8” cause was not “huge,” but the principle is the same.
As the California activists spewed their fury — allegedly vandalizing Mormon temples, making terroristic threats toward Catholics, and hurling racial epithets at African-Americans (who voted 3-to-1 in favor of Prop 8, according to exit polls) — their vitriolic rage highlighted how the progressive rhetoric of “rights” undermines and destabilizes political consensus. . . .

You can read the rest at The American Spectator, but it’s not as if it matters. Justice Kennedy will decide what result he wants and then gin up an argument to justify that 5-4 decision and, whatever the result may be, the fanatic disciples of equality will continue using terroristic threats to intimidate all who might disagree with them.

 

Category: Supreme Court

Can the Shoe Leather Fund Send Me to South Carolina? O, Ye of Little Faith!

Posted on | March 27, 2013 | 21 Comments

OK, I never heard the name “Curtis Bostic” until last week, when he finished second to Mark Sanford in the South Carolina 1st District primary. Now, Bostic has been endorsed by Rick Santorum and polls show Bostic doing better than Sanford against Stephen Colbert’s sister.

So it’s obviously time for a road trip and, with the GOP runoff next Tuesday, it looks like I’ll spend Easter weekend in South Carolina.

This will be the first road trip in my new role as Editor in Chief of ViralRead, which is kind of appropriate in that I first met Ali Akbar during the now-legendary NY-23 Doug Hoffman campaign that started this whole gonzo campaign-trail trip that has since taken me as far as Alaska, to provide on-the-scene coverage. And so Ali double-dog dared me: He’s created a special ViralRead shoe-leather account and challenged me to raise $1,000 to cover this trip.

Can our readers do it? I have no doubt.

There have been times of doubt these past five years. The morning I left for Alaska in 2010 — on a one-way ticket, counting on readers to make sure I got home — my wife was in tears. But I told her, “This is what the readers are paying for, honey. It’s show time.”

A few days later, I was watching Todd Palin read stories to Trig in their living room in Wasilla. Readers were amazed — heck, my wife was amazed — but the thing that amazes me is that people don’t believe miracles can happen. Our entire lives are miraculous, if you think about it, and our doubt is actually ingratitude for God’s many blessings.

Think about this: On July 1, 1863, my great-grandfather was in the opening fight at Gettysburg. An illiterate farmboy, a private in the 13th Alabama, he was captured when the Union’s Iron Brigade turned the right flank of Archer’s brigade just east of Willoughby Run. Pvt. Winston Wood Bolt spent the next two years as a prisoner of war in Fort Delaware, where the inmates ate rats to survive. But if he had not been captured, I might not be here.

Two days after my great-grandfather was captured, the 13th Alabama, as part of Pettigrew’s Division, took part in what became known as Pickett’s Charge. The regiment went over the wall at Cemetery Ridge and suffered devastating casualties in that conflict.

A miracle, you see? And my own father — grandson of Private Bolt — was wounded within an inch of his life by German shrapnel while fighting the Nazis in France. The rest of his life, he bore that scar on the back of his neck, and you could see that if the shrapnel had penetrated another inch, he would have died that day in 1944, but when they got him to the field hospital, the medic told him, “You got a million-dollar wound, Mack.” It wasn’t bad enough to kill or permanently maim him, but he wouldn’t have to go back into combat again.

If my very existence is a miracle, why should I ever doubt that, if there is work for me to do in South Carolina this Easter weekend, our readers will make it happen? There are signs and omens, my friends. This runoff in South Carolina is important, or I never would have noticed it. And if Ali doubts you can send me there, let him doubt no more.

Contribute what you can — $5, $10, $25, whatever you can afford — and help make another miracle happen. This gonzo experiment in reader-supported journalism has only just begun, and the five most important words in the English language are still . . .

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

 

Category: Shoe Leather Fund, South Carolina

The Power of Prejudice

Posted on | March 26, 2013 | 20 Comments

Rule One of “How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog” is shameless blogwhoring. Think of it as an existential philosophy: In the New Media environment, that which is not promoted does not exist.

“I blogwhore, therefore I am.”

So, after I was the first to report Rick Santorum’s endorsement of Curtis Bostic in South Carolina, I sent out an e-mail promoting the exclusive to several friends and was quite taken aback when one friend replied with a rant informing me that “gay marriage is going to happen,” that opponents “are on the wrong side of history”and that Republicans will “never win again until they move the f–k on.”

It was like the Monty Python “Argument Clinic” sketch. It was shocking because the article I sent hadn’t said a word about same-sex marriage. I was reporting the news, not pushing an opinion. From the standpoint of pure blogwhoring, my friend could hate Rick Santorum’s guts and be voting for Elizabeth Colbert Busch. Just link me, damn it.

The opinion-driven way of thinking is another existential reality of the New Media age. Because we all have the “means of production” at our fingertips, there is a tendency to make our engagement with the online world a function of our own personal preferences: We consume only what interests us or what we find agreeable, and our production of online content is geared toward obtaining hegemony for our worldview.

In fact — and if you haven’t noticed this, you’re not paying close enough attention — we increasingly treat sources of information as if we were choosing them as our personal companions. The question that determines our choices is not whether someone reports useful facts or provides pleasurable reading, but whether we like them, whether we view them as “good” people, as being “on our side.”

The correct word for this is prejudice.

Why did my friend react instantaneously to my e-mail about Santorum’s endorsement with a rant about gay marriage? Why did my friend think I was in need of a lecture about this? I don’t know, but it struck me as evidence of a prejudiced attitude.

My own prejudice has always been in favor of underdogs. There is nothing like an upset — David slays Goliath, FGCU makes the “Sweet 16” — to make for a great story. So on the morning after the March 19 South Carolina primary, I took a look at the result and said, “Hey, maybe this Bostic guy could pull off a surprise.” It’s a long-odds proposition, but the thing about a situation like this is that if you thought about the odds against it, you would never bother paying attention at all. And I try to keep in mind that when Whittaker Chambers quit the Communist Party and became a conservative, he thought he was joining the losing side.

Oh, yeah — almost forgot — the latest poll out of South Carolina shows Curtis Bostic doing better than Sanford against the Democrat.

But I’m prejudiced, remember?

UPDATE: This moring, I found myself compelled by circumstance to link the infamous Will Folks. Now? I find myself linked by Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post, whose cheerleading for Mitt Romney in the 2012 primary campaign didn’t endear her to many conservatives. This shows the impermanence of political alliances and also human sacrifice! dogs and cats living together! mass hysteria!

 

Excepting only Mardi Gras in New Orleans, there is nothing in this world wilder than a South Carolina Republican primary.

 

Category: Blogging

‘We Record What Is to All Known’

Posted on | March 26, 2013 | 36 Comments

The Fall of Man (or, Adam and Eve), Hendrick Goltzius, 1616 (detail)

“The true origin of marriage, venerable brothers, is well known to all. Though revilers of the Christian faith refuse to acknowledge the never-interrupted doctrine of the Church on this subject, and have long striven to destroy the testimony of all nations and of all times, they have nevertheless failed not only to quench the powerful light of truth, but even to lessen it. We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, and having breathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep. God thus, in His most far-reaching foresight, decreed that this husband and wife should be the natural beginning of the human race, from whom it might be propagated and preserved by an unfailing fruitfulness throughout all futurity of time. And this union of man and woman, that it might answer more fittingly to the infinite wise counsels of God, even from the beginning manifested chiefly two most excellent properties — deeply sealed, as it were, and signed upon it — namely, unity and perpetuity. From the Gospel we see clearly that this doctrine was declared and openly confirmed by the divine authority of Jesus Christ. He bore witness to the Jews and to His Apostles that marriage, from its institution, should exist between two only, that is, between one man and one woman; that of two they are made, so to say, one flesh; and that the marriage bond is by the will of God so closely and strongly made fast that no man may dissolve it or render it asunder. ‘For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be in one flesh. Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh. What, therefore, God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.'”
— Pope Leo XIII, “On Christian Marriage,” 1880

 

Category: Family, Marriage, Religion
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