The Other McCain

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

Ed Said Nix Flick: Odd ‘Squad’ Cop Flop, Mugs Thugs With Lame Gang Bang-Bang

Posted on | January 13, 2013 | 20 Comments

Ed Morrisey pans the new movie Gangster Squad as an all-star ripoff:

Contrast this with The Untouchables, which I think is overrated but at least addressed the moral issue of crossing the line between law enforcement and thuggery.  For that matter, skip The Untouchables and watch the infinitely superior L.A. Confidential , which dealt with the same issues in nearly the same time and place — but put the thugs in the right moral position, and managed to get the Cohen story more accurately than this movie did even as a subplot.

L.A. Confidential is one of the few movies of recent years to come close to capturing the film noir feel, and especially the moral tension that Morrissey finds woefully missing in Gangster Squad.

The classic film noir set-up requires a flawed protagonist who finds himself trapped in a situation where right and wrong are not clear, where sinister individuals are trying to deceive him, and he must rely on his wits to survive. Also, there is usually a dame involved in the problem.

The 1947 noir classic Out of the Past (Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Jane Greer) was successfully re-made in 1984 as Against All Odds (Jeff Bridges, James Woods, Rachel Ward), but it is otherwise difficult to find good recent examples of the genre.

Why was that particular sensibility so distinct to a certain period of time? It’s hard to explain, but notice this: The producers of Gangster Squad, while making a movie set in Hollywood during the same era of the late 1940s — and quite conscious of the visual elements of the noir style — neverthless can’t capture the moral element. Ed Morrissey observes:

This film does nothing but glorify violence, not just as stylish entertainment but also as the answer to crime and social problems.  It’s an almost-unending series of bullet eruptions that numbs much more than it excites. . . .
It’s not appropriate for children of any age, and I’d argue not really appropriate for anyone else, either.

Film noir is never just a shoot-’em-up. The danger of violence — a sense of menace — is very real in film noir, but the movie is not about violence.

 


Category: Ed Morrissey, Movies

New Year, New Awesomeness: Jimmie Is Ready for His Instalanche, Professor

Posted on | January 13, 2013 | 6 Comments

Jimmie Bise Jr. describes improvements to his Sundries Shack blog, including “a new webhost that will give me a lot more bandwidth so that the next time Glenn Reynolds wants to Instalanche me, my blog will withstand the traffic onslaught like Lieutenant Dan strapped to the main mast.”

Two words of advice, Jimmie: Dog sex.

2012 was all about elections and “issues.” 2013 . . . dog sex.

Category: Instapundit, Jimmie Bise Jr.

WaPo’s Cillizza Says Political Party Power Dying for GOP, But What Does it Mean?

Posted on | January 13, 2013 | 32 Comments

Guest Post by Warner Todd Huston

In a recent item at The Fix Blog, Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza focused on the apparent waning power of the Republican Party among the center right coalition. Cillizza makes some good points, of course, but I do have at least one warning to our side over the points Cillizza makes.

Cillizza’s focus is on the recent departure from the Senate of South Carolina’s Jim DeMint who abruptly left a high profile political career to take the top spot leading the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Cillizza doesn’t mention it, but DeMint wasn’t just any old faceless senator. He had made himself an important voice in conservative circles even going so far as to become a major national player in elections whereby candidates would make a pilgrimage to his offices to seek his endorsement.

So, when DeMint left the power of the Senate behind, it was a big shock to conservatives who had hoped he’d continue to be a major conservative voice inside Washington.

Anyway, Cillizza quotes DeMint as saying that the “election taught conservatives that we can no longer entrust political parties to carry our message.” This, DeMint explained, is why he left politics proper to sign on as head of the Heritage Foundation. He felt he was going to a place where he could do far more for conservatism than he could while wrapped in the straitjacket of elected office.

Cillizza says:

As we wrote at the time, DeMint’s decision to walk away from the Senate–long considered the pinnacle of power and influence in American politics–was, in and of itself, a potent symbol of the broader shift away from traditional political parties and toward outside interest groups.
And, DeMint’s opinion piece represents a broader sentiment within the conservative movement, that its establishment leaders simply lack the ability to point a way out of the political wilderness.

Yes, this rings true. Such as it is.

But why do we conservatives feel this way?

It isn’t because there is any lack of conservative talk in Washington, really. In actuality, an increasing number of Senators and Representatives on the GOP side of the aisle pay fealty to conservatism. It is inarguable that the center right in Congress has grown more rightward over the last 30 years in both rhetoric and often in votes.

But the problem is, Democrats have gone even further to the left than Republicans have gone right. This drags the final outcomes of the political debate too often to the extreme left and too many Republicans feel it is their job to “compromise” and arrive at that vaunted middle ground with the increasingly far left Democrat Party.

It is a myth, of course, that compromise is good merely because agreement was reached. There were compromises for decades upon decades that kept slavery in existence, after all. Principles are principles for a reason and today we have Democrats that care nothing for America, its traditions or its mores and with that Republicans simply should never compromise.

But, with all that said, here is the thing. It is far easier to be a member of Americans for Tax Reform and concern yourselfonly about your one, pet issue: taxes. It is easier to be a member of Americans for Prosperity and worry yourself only over budgetary issues or the occasional other single issue that you work on there. It is easier to be a member of the Heritage Foundation and worry only about advocating strictly for your conservative principles on whatever issue is at hand. It is easier to do all of this than to have to go to Congress and actually work with an enemy that wants to materially damage this country (I’m looking at you Barack Obama) and be forced to record an actual, meaningful vote on issues that affect your constituents–people you are accountable to for those votes.

See what I am saying? It is easier to stand with Heritage, AFP, or ATR and be staunch in your positions than it is to have to get down in the weeds and actually govern.

That is and has always been the biggest problem with the right. It is easy to plant your feet, throw out your hands, and say “here but no farther” than it is to actually do the messy work of governing. Easier to stand outside the system and carp about what should be than to actually take the reins in your hands and do the guiding from the driver’s seat.

So, now we get to my real reason for writing this. Are we excluding ourselves from any possibility of pulling the levers of power by running off to Heritage or AFP, et al and abandoning party politics?

One has to say yes and one also has to keep this in mind going forward.

Now, I won’t try to claim that I am smart enough to determine how to meld the two needs; that of advocating good policy along with getting said policy enacted. But we must not run from elected office and party politics merely because it is so hard to get our ideas enacted in the messy world of Washington D.C.

It would be a self-defeating mistake to think we can win solely by advocacy alone. All the organizations I mentioned above are important and worthy groups (and I have worked with all of them and will do so in the future). But they just can’t get the job done without politicians who agree with their issues and vote their way.

Finally, remember this: if elected officials don’t feel they will get support from a group, they have no reason at all to cater to that group. If all we do is advocate, but we don’t then move to support, we will be talking ourselves blue in the face–or red in the face, as the case may be–and we won’t win a single vote if no politicians are beholden to us for any material, real world support.

(Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter)

Category: Republicans

Michael Moore’s Politics of Prejudice

Posted on | January 12, 2013 | 37 Comments

Tonight, surfing around the channels, I happened onto Current TV — the progressive network that environmentally concerned Al Gore just sold to the oil-rich sheikhs of Qatar — and the network was showing Michael Moore’s 2009 documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story.

Watching it, I noticed that Michael Moore wasn’t really trying to explain what caused the mortgage meltdown. No, he was telling his audience who (and what) to blame for the mortgage meltdown.

A preference for blame over understanding is a hallmark of prejudice. There’s not really that much difference in hating “the rich” and hating any other group of people.

Using loaded language about “greed” and labels like “Corporate America” isn’t any less prejudicial than talking about how Mexicans are sneaking over the border to take away American jobs. As a matter of fact, Democrats spent a lot of time the past year talking about “outsourcing” and “shipping jobs overseas,” which is really just another method of xenophobic blame-shifting: The Foreigners! Are Taking! Our Jobs!

Why don’t we recognize the language of the Left as expressions of prejudice? Why is demonization of “the rich” accepted as a substitute for actual understanding of how the economy works?

While we’re asking rhetorical questions, here’s another one: Why are liberals afraid to mention that Michael Moore’s movie sucks?

Capitalism: A Love Story stinks to high heaven. Never mind Moore’s deliberately dumbed-down approach to economics. It’s just a bad movie.

Moore is supposed to be one of the world’s finest documentary makers, but I’ve seen one-hour specials on CNBC that had better production values than Capitalism: A Love Story.

Subtlety? Nuance? No, Michael Moore imagines an audience full of idiots who need to be told what to think, and who must have every point made for them explicitly, then have that point pounded into their dull brains over and over and over again.

Such tired clichés of ignorant left-wing populism! Wall Street is likened to a casino and mortage lenders are compared to Mafia loansharks.

You won’t really learn anything from Capitalism: A Love Story, except that Michael Moore hates rich people and Republicans, but you knew that before the movie ever started, so it’s really just a colossal waste of time. And the same is true of the politics of prejudice of which Moore’s movie is such a typical example: Vote for people who appeal to your ignorant hatred — The Rich! Are Sending! Our Jobs! To China! — and you’ll find that their policies don’t really solve your problems.

What is it that Michael Moore wants? Well, he wants a lot of protests and strikes — the Workers (yea!) against the Rich (boo!) — without much thought as to how this will generate demand, or attract capital investment, or do anything else that will actually lead to . . . well, jobs.

In the end, Michael Moore’s solution boils down to (a) nostalgia for FDR, and (b) resentment about Katrina and New Orleans.

No — really. This is the peroration of his sermonette, and then he does an idiotic stunt, rolling out crime-scene tape around big Wall Street bank office buildings and shouting through a megaphone that he’s there to make a “citizen’s arrest.”

But the real crime is Michael Moore’s lousy movie.

He reportedly got a budget of $20 million from Harvey Weinstein’s production company and, evidently, spent the majority of it on jelly donuts. It sure as hell doesn’t look like a $20 million movie.

Having paid himself handsomely for delivering this craptastic ripoff of a movie — financed by capitalists — Moore wants you to know that “capitalism is evil” and must be eliminated.

A colossal waste of time, like I said.

Category: Economics, Movies

Messed-Up People Make Bad Choices in Disastrously Dysfunctional Relationships

Posted on | January 12, 2013 | 25 Comments

Instapundit had this headline:

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS:
My Ex Posted “Revenge Porn” Photos Of Me.

OK, so this was intriguing, but the whole “revenge porn” theme was forgotten as soon as I started reading the article by the (obviously pseudonymous) “Rhoda Kelly”:

I started dating Rob toward the end of high school. He was five years my senior.

Whoa. Full stop. Isn’t this a gigantic red flag? I’m not saying that it is impossible for a 17-year-old and a 22-year-old to have positive romantic experience together, but it was like the first clue (besides the headline, of course) that this story wasn’t going to end happily ever after.

He added me on Myspace, and we talked online occasionally. Then, after hanging out in real life only a handful of times, he insisted that we become a couple.

See there? That’s three warning signs right away:

  1. Older guy dating teenager.
  2. Meeting via online social-networking.
  3. Guy insists on quick rush into “couple” status.

Just on the basis of that, I figure there’s not only something wrong with the guy, but there’s something wrong with this girl, too.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned. Maybe I don’t “get” the whole online-dating thing. But it seems to me that, unless the girl was of the lonely/desperate misfit/oddball type, she’d be meeting guys through the regular real-life routines — a guy from school, someone she met through an after-school job, “friend of a friend,” whatever. When somebody asks, How did you meet your boyfriend? and your answer is, He added me on Myspace, excuse me for thinking there’s something wrong with you. So I keep reading and find out, yeah, my hunch was right:

I liked him. He played guitar in a punk band and was a gifted graphic designer. He was quiet and cynical, but sweet to me.
Fast-forward three years, after the initial sweetness diluted considerably, and what was left was a controlling, territorial, sardonic, and deeply troubled man who I knew I had to leave, but who by then was like an extension of me. We both struggled with psychological disorders: I was diagnosed with major depression when I was nineteen, and he would have such severe depressive episodes that he couldn’t get out of bed to go to work many days. Or he’d stay awake for two weeks straight because of his recurring nightmares about being abducted by aliens. Once, believing me to be an alien, he lay in my bed sobbing uncontrollably. Later, I looked up alien-abduction dreams and found that many studies pointed to childhood sexual abuse as a cause; after we broke up, he told me that he had in fact been molested as a child.

OK, you can go read the whole thing, and you’ll eventually get to the part where she gets drunk and lets him take a video of them having sex,  then finds out he’s posted it online as an act of revenge after they broke up, but that’s not what the story is really about.

What the story is really about is a vulnerable misfit/oddball chick who has trouble attracting a boyfriend in her real-life environment, and instead hooks up with some weirdo she meets online.

Insufficiently aware of her own vulnerability, and apparently incapable of recognizing that Mr. Controlling Older Guy She Met Online might have problematic “issues” of his own, Little Miss Oddball is therefore shocked to find that this leads to a Harmful Relationship That Ends Badly.

The “revenge porn” thing may be the hook that sells the story, but more important is the lesson about How Not to Find Healthy Relationships.

If you’re in that lonely/desperate situation where you’re willing to accept “He added me on Myspace” as an invitation to romance . . .

Do I even have to finish that sentence to explain why it’s a signal that you might be vulnerable to a bad relationship?

Seventeen-year-old girls aren’t always good judges of character. This is why, in ancient days of yore (i.e., when I was a kid), parents made it their business to keep an eye on their 17-year-old daughters. And the default parental position was, Keep Away From My Daughter, Creep.

Lots of bad things happen to people who stray from the wise ways of the ancient days of yore, and being victimized by “revenge porn” is certainly one possibility. All things considered, though, “Rhoda Kelly” should be thankful she’s alive to tell her story. A lot of stories like hers end up with headlines like, “Woman Slain by Obsessive Stalker Ex-Boyfriend.”

 

Category: Crime, Instapundit, Sex

What Depression Is, and Isn’t

Posted on | January 12, 2013 | 29 Comments

Thursday evening my wife came home and said, “Hey, I bought coffee!”

I just stared at her, in kind of a fog.

“No more drinking decaf,” my wife said.

“What? We’ve been drinking decaf? Since when?”

“All week. We ran out of regular coffee Monday, but  I just made decaf and didn’t tell you, because I figured it would only depress you.”

Damn. So that’s it. Here I’d been feeling bummed out, listless and unmotivated for three days, and was worried I was slipping into depression. Instead, I was just suffering from caffeine withdrawal.

Depression is a mental illness, a mood disorder, which psychiatrists say is caused by an organic malfunction of neurochemistry. Depression isn’t just about feeling bad because something bad happened to you.

Kids don’t understand this. You made a “C” in algebra, your boyfriend broke up with you and you’ve got a pimple on your nose — no, sweetheart, that’s not “depression.” Your life just sucks.

Over the course of time, everybody goes through phases where their life sucks. And feeling bad about that is just normal. No pills are necessary to treat a normal reaction to the objective reality that your life sucks.

This is something that should cheer you up: Your life sucks? Good news! You’re not suffering from clinical depression!

On the other hand, if you’re actually suffering from clinical depression — good news! Your life doesn’t suck as bad as you think it does.

This is something that came to mind when I saw the news via Memeorandum about a computer whiz kid who committed suicide:

Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday, Jan. 11, according to his uncle, Michael Wolf, in a comment to The Tech. Swartz was 26.
“The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true,” confirmed Swartz’ attorney, Elliot R. Peters of Kecker and Van Nest, in an email to The Tech.

According to various sites, Swartz was a teenager when he wrote the software that basically made Reddit possible. He was a good-looking kid and a genius and probably would have been a gazillionaire, except he decided to kill himself. Via Mashable, a clue:

A blog post from 2007 on Swartz’s website reveals a possible cause for taking his own life: depression. In the post, Swartz describes his experiences with severe depression, as well as several other health issues, including migraines.

Also, Swartz was being hassled by the feds because he illegally downloaded some stuff that should have been free to begin with. Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection discusses that.

Did Swartz actually suffer from depression? I don’t know. Despite his legal hassles, it would be hard to say his life objectively sucked, and his future was one of great potential — until he decided to kill himself, that is. Killing yourself pretty much guarantees it won’t get better.

Try drinking more coffee. And not the decaf kind. Just sayin’ . . .

 

Category: Uncategorized

Nobody Really Likes @LenaDunham, and Deep Down Inside She Knows It, Too

Posted on | January 12, 2013 | 72 Comments

“It’s a little fat girl . . . and she keeps taking her clothes off and . . . I don’t want to see that. . . . I learned that this little fat chick writes the show and directs the show and that makes sense to me because she’s such a camera hog that the other characters barely are on.”
— Howard Stern

Maybe you know somebody like Lena Dunham. In a way, it’s hard not to feel sorry for people like her. She’s not really that fat or that ugly, but she just can’t get over the fact that she’s not pretty and skinny.

She can never manage to recover from some deep psychic wound, a sort of juvenile ego-trauma that left her with such a profoundly damaged personality that she spends the rest of her life trying to get revenge against the world for bad things that happened to her years ago.

Anyway, if you know somebody like Lena Dunham, you understand what she’s doing: “I’m fat and ugly and unpopular, but maybe if I add ‘cruel’ and ‘obnoxious’ to the list, I can pretend like people who don’t like me are intimidated by my intelligence and courage.” This isn’t really an effective compensation, but it provides her an excuse — a rationalization, a defense mechanism — she can alternately cling to as a crutch or wield as a weapon, harming others without actually helping herself. The damage is never healed, because her inner feelings of worthlessness are so intense, she scorns as contemptible anyone who wants to help her: “If you like me, there must be something wrong with you.”

All of which is a necessary preamble to the latest manifestation of Lena Dunham’s tendency toward vengeful cruelty: People complained about the lack of diversity on Lena’s Not Very Popular HBO Show, so she decided to bring on a black guy . . . as a Republican villain:

I want to start with the fourth scene of the entire season, which is you, topless …
… on top of Donald Glover.
Having sex.
Yes.
Which is pretty much a summary of every single thing that people complained about in season one. How conscious was that?
We always wanted to work with Donald — he’s the cutest and the funniest, and why would you not want to kiss him on TV? But I think that when we shot that scene, there was both a feeling that it was the appropriate place for the character to be and a sense that it would, for people who had been paying attention to the backlash, at least evoke some sense that we were in a dialogue with our audience. It definitely wasn’t a “Fuck you, haters!” That’s not really how I tend to roll my game. But at the same time, it was a pretty clear statement that we are comfortable, that there isn’t a political agenda against having black characters in the show.
Why make him a Republican?
We liked the idea of a Republican entering their universe. And Hannah doesn’t really have a clear sense of why you shouldn’t date a Republican; it’s kind of just like the same reason why you shouldn’t date a Nazi: You just shouldn’t.

Real-life black Republican Ali Akbar observes:

Dunham spends a lot of her time associating sex, bad sex, lack of sex, with . . . you guessed it, Republicans. . . .
So to avoid the show looking racist — Dunham creates a black character that she’ll teach her audience to love to hate.

Hey, her ratings might finally beat Honey Boo Boo . . .

UPDATE: Donald Douglas at American Power:

This is interesting because I was just reading about Lena Dunham at the Los Angeles Times, “Review: Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls’.”
“Maybe I’ll check it out,” I was thinking to myself.

Don’t bother. It’s just another reason why HBO isn’t worth the premium. If you like watching unhappy women try to cope with their self-loathing, just cue up an old Kathy Griffin special.

UPDATE II: Twitchy:

Did we mention Dunham was named one of 2012’s “Brave Thinkers”?

 

 


Category: Celebrities

FMJRA 2.0: Modern Love

Posted on | January 12, 2013 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

If ‘Crazy’ Were a Political Philosophy, Its Spokesman Would Be Alex Jones

A Soldier and Two Marines: Sworn to ‘Support and Defend the Constitution’

The Incident at St. Aloysius: 911 Call in Illinois Raises Questions for Church

‘Learning French,’ IYKWIMAITYD

FMJRA 2.0: Beautiful World

Hey, GOP: The IRS Is A Substantial Reform Target

Damn It, Jim, I’m a Blogger!

OBAMA’S THIRD TERM? Democrat Proposes Repeal of 22nd Amendment

Rule 5 Sunday: Les Chants Magnetiques

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.07.13

Illinois: Fire Department Official Accused of Attacking Woman With Knife, Duct Tape and ‘an 8-Inch Sexual Device’

Mandates, Regulation and ‘Rights’

#RMFT: You WILL Click This Link

The Nick Saban Approach to the Problem of Chuck Hagel: ‘Make His Ass Quit’

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Has A Point: Having Aborted Common Sense, Babies Should Be Easy For Charlie Crist

Alabama Wins Second Consecutive BCS Title, Humiliates Notre Dame 42-14

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.08.13

Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Middle Class’ Looks an Awful Lot Like Occupy’s ’99 Percent’

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.09.13

Everybody Hates Gawker’s @JohnJCook and It’s About Damned Time, Too

Leave Brent Musberger Alone!

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 01.10.13

When Your Gun Is Not Your Gun

Liberal Ethics: If It’s OK to Kill Babies, Why Is It Wrong to Molest Children?

Shorter Joe Scarborough: ‘Who Do You Think You’re Calling Chauvinistic, Bitch?’

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.11.13

AR-15 Saleswoman of the Year?

A Lesson from Lindsay Lohan

Friday News Dump: D.C. Won’t Prosecute David Gregory’s Clear Violation of Law

Rush Limbaugh Is Right: The Academic Pro-Pedophile Movement Is a Real Danger

Top linkers this week:

  1. Rick’s Rants (11 the hard way)
  2. Daley Gator (6)
  3. Hogewash (5)

…and this week we had a bunch of folks who missed the cutoff by that much. Well, there’s always next week, and speaking of next week, the deadline to submit your links is Friday, January 18. Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!

Category: FMJRA Award
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