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Monthly Archives: March 2010

Netanyahu Government Death Watch: Day 365

“Here’s the plan, you can move in with your sisters and raise the kids, and I’ll . . . die in the gutter.  It’s practical and within our means.” – Homer Simpson

The recent tiff between Benjamin Netanyahu and the highest officers of the United States government over the authorization of settlement construction in East Jerusalem should come as no surprise to anyone.  Such a public moment of disagreement became inevitable the instant Netanyahu regained the Prime Minister’s chair last year.  Every vaguely sane member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party bolted when Ariel Sharon, no leftist, set up the Kadima Party five years ago.  The resulting Likud Party was much farther to the right than it had been, and it got back into power just two months after Bush the Younger went back to Texas.  So you had the United States lurching to the left just as the Israeli government was lurching to the right.  Some kind of conflict was a foregone conclusion.

This has caused the usual frothing at the mouth from the usual neoconservative nutjobs.  (This was fairly typical and should more than do by way of example.)  But accusations that Obama is anti-Israel, because he doesn’t agree 100% with Israel’s main right wing party, will never gain much traction.  They’re too abstruse for the general public, and amongst politics fans the only people who will take arguments like that seriously already hate Obama anyway.  As David Remnick pointed out in last week’s New Yorker, such accusations aren’t merely a little bit untrue, they’re wildly false, bordering on clinical lunacy.

There are only two issues that Israel really seems to care about internationally, fucking the Palestinians and keeping Iran from getting the bomb.  It is only on the former that there is much disagreement.  Obama seems intent on cracking down on Iran’s probably non-existent nuclear weapons program, far more so than many of his supporters (myself included) would like.  To be fair to him, his stance towards Iran hardened significantly after last year’s “election” and subsequent government crackdown.  If that election hadn’t been so badly tarred by accusations of fraud we’d be on much better footing with Iran right now.  But it was tarred, and it’s clearly had a big effect on Washington’s official tone towards Tehran.

In terms of the Palestinians, though, there isn’t much room for compromise.  Obama and his minions have repeatedly said what every sane observer has been saying for the last decade: at the very least, settlement construction has to halt before any peace can be attempted.  Over the course of the last year, Obama signaled plenty of willingness to wiggle on this, and all he got for showing some flex was Netanyahu’s spit in his eye.  The little crisis that erupted with Biden’s visit to Israel and concluded with Netanyahu’s visit to the White House (a trip that resembled a visit to the principal’s office more than a state visit) will die down in due course.  But the fundamentals, for Israel and Netanyahu, have not changed.

Obama is barely a quarter of the way through a fixed four year term and, given the dilapidated state of the Republican Party, looks to be in good shape for another.  Netanyahu, on the other hand, can lose his job at any time, and his continued employment rests on the sufferance of right wing nutjobs, many of whom have never trusted or liked him.  You don’t need to be a Middle East expert, or even an Israel expert, to see that.  So far, Netanyahu has done an impressive job of walking the tightrope between his rabidly right wing coalition partners and the demands of Obama, but, just as it was a year ago when he became Prime Minister, it’s a task at which he will eventually fail.  Until that happens, Israel will continue to tread water, constructing a few more piddling settlements while alienating its only allies in the world, and the Netanyahu Government Deathwatch will go on.

California, Don’t Let Me Down

“I know!  Drugs are bad because if you do drugs, you’re a hippie, and hippies suck.” – Eric Cartman

This week, supporters of genuine marijuana legalization submitted enough signatures to have their eminently sensible petition placed in California’s notoriously wild and raucous plebiscite system.  That such a heretical idea can be considered plausible by its backers shows how far we’ve come from the days of Reefer Madness.  That its prospects for passage are in any doubt whatsoever shows just how far from sane we still are.

The criminalization of recreational chemical use has, quite possibly, caused more human suffering and harm than any other major government policy short of actual war.  The costs are as high as they are widespread.  Not only do we spend fantastic amounts of money in perpetually futile efforts to round up easily replaceable criminals, but we’ve shredded our own civil liberties to do it.  The result is a massive waste of every kind, from putting non-violent people in prison (which wrecks their lives and costs a ton of money) to sending talented law enforcement officials off on wild goose chases when they ought to be looking for people who actually intend to harm others.

The cracks have been emerging in this system for years.  When Al Gore admitted to smoking Marijuana in during his 1988 run for President it was huge news.  In 1992, when Bill Clinton gave his famous line about not inhaling, it was lesser news.  By 2000 both Presidential candidates had admitted youthful drug use and it wasn’t a story at all.  And, of course, both our current President and his predecessor used cocaine – one of the most demonized of all drugs – when they were young.  The only difference between presidents and prisoners is that presidents were lucky enough not to get caught.

The hypocrisy of it all is staggeringly obvious, and has been so for a very long time.  After all, Don Barzini showed us the way forty years ago, “The traffic in drugs will be permitted, but controlled . . . and there will be the peace.”  Now California has a chance to begin the slow process of calming decades and decades of drug related hysteria.  Of course, the baseless fears are still powerful enough that the ballot measure has to contain a number of contortions, such as prohibiting the use in public places or just around minors.  But those are acceptable compromises to finally, at long last, get the drug laws to start recognizing reality.  According to the Times article linked above, a poll conducted in 2009 found 56 percent of Californians supportive of legalizing tetrahydrocannabinol.  Let’s hope that number is able to withstand what will no doubt be an avalanche of dishonest fear mongering coming from the hysterical old-liners.

The Hump

“Dad, remember when Tom had you in that headlock, and you screamed ‘I’m a hemophiliac!’, and when he let you go you kicked him in the back?” – Bart Simpson
“Heh, heh, heh, yeah?” – Homer Simpson
“Will you teach me how to do that?” – Bart Simpson

In the wake of the passage of the health care bill (and please don’t fuck up the last of it in the Senate, mmkay?) everyone and their sister is trying to determine if this is good or bad for the November elections.  Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly has been having particular fun pointing out the awkwardness of the Red “repeal” position.  There isn’t anything particularly wrong with these kinds of analyses, but it’s still much too soon to begin seriously looking at November.

Health care or no health care, 2010 was always going to be the hardest year for the new Blue America.  Bush the Younger, though he hovers over everything like a twisted phantasm, isn’t on television every other day to remind people of why they need to vote Democratic.  (Though he is, of course, still a creepy jerk (via).)  And 2010 is the same part of the electoral cycle that tripped up political masters Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.  The only president to have gained seats in his first midterm election in the last thirty years is Bush the Younger, and he did it by deliberately terrorizing the whole country and beating the war drums as loud as he could.  It was one of the most shameful political gambits in American history (and that says something), but it worked.  Obama doesn’t have that option.

Instead, Obama and the Blues are going to have to fight on what they’ve done and haven’t done.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Obama’s reign has been a mixed bag, but he and his fellows shouldn’t be in politics if they have any trouble comparing that record favorably to what the Reds did.  In Iraq, Obama’s already done something his predecessor failed to do: actually lower the number of American troops.  The economy remains flat, but it’s in a hell of a lot better shape than it was a year ago, and hopefully will be even better by November.  And, of course, there’s health care.

But all the euphoria surrounding health care reform ignores an obvious political reality.  As long as diseases still exist in the United States on November 2nd, unless death itself has been halted, the Reds will scream long and loud that health care has been a failure.  Tristero at Hullabaloo remained unmoved by the celebrations and called it perfectly on Monday morning:

My guess is that such naively optimistic, and thoroughly delusional, sentiments are rampant right now. They think “we” won. Even worse, they think that Republicans realize they lost and have folded. That is sheer nonsense.

Democrats fail to understand that the real fight, the one with no holds barred whatsoever, began exactly one millisecond after the gavel came down. And if history is any judge, they are completely unprepared for what is about to hit them.

Foul epithets? Teabaggers carrying guns to rallies? Members of Congress finding excuses to justify terrorism against government offices? Don’t Democrats get it? That’s what the rightwing fanatics hellbent on wrecking this country were doing when they were being polite. That’s their idea of civility. The gloves have just come off. After all, they got nothing to lose.

We can see it beginning already: secessionist rhetoric, vandalism, litigation.  And this thing’s barely been law for twenty four hours.

Which is not to say that health care will be a drag on the Democrats.  Assuming it’s implemented reasonably well (which means that a decent chunk of people see benefits right away), Obama and the rest of his party should have no trouble touting it as a campaign issue.  But it isn’t going to be easy, particularly if it has to stand alone.

Giving the health care bill a companion major domestic achievement is the next step, and the Blues are absolutely correct to move directly to financial reform.  The banks may indeed own Capitol Hill, but putting the chains on them is about as politically popular as a thing can be.  The excuse for those hideous bailouts and the ongoing theft of federal money is that there was/is an emergency.  A better time to pass laws to prevent that from happening will never come again.  Even in the likely event that financial reform ends up like health care (not as much as it should be, but much, much more than we had), it’d still be a major triumph, and one that, like health care, ought to be easy to sell come fall.

If there’s one lesson to be learned from the 180 degree swing in media perceptions of the two parties over the last few days it’s this: breathless 24-news, who’s up/who’s down style coverage is cheap.  It comes and goes with startling speed and who had the better day in March doesn’t mean a damn thing come October.  Yes, the health bill is a good thing, practically and politically.  Yes, it will help in November.  But “health care” is less good than “health care & other stuff”.

The overarching thing to keep in mind here is not a few days of good press.  It’s that the prize waiting on the other side of November 2nd is a fantastic one; and the most effective work that can be done right now is passing more pieces of popular legislation.  Winning Congress four years ago was good, and getting back into the White House two years ago was better.  But holding Congress by workable margins (you can lose a few seats, it’s okay) would be the best.

That would mean that those other elections weren’t flukes, it would mean that they weren’t just a rejection of an unpopular president.  It would put the Reds on a three cycle losing streak heading into a presidential year with all the advantages of incumbency.  Badly fucked as the country still is, it would mean that things are undeniably going in the right direction for the right reasons.  That’s the hump the Blues have to get over if they want to be a stable majority party.  But there’s a lot of ugliness between here and there, and it’s much too soon to celebrate.

Seven & Up

“Homey, how long do you plan to do this?” – Marge Simpson
“I don’t know.  How long do horses live?” – Homer Simpson
“Thirty years.” – Marge Simpson
“D’oh.” – Homer Simpson

Friday was the seventh anniversary of the beginning of our misbegotten adventure in Iraq.  It’s probably still too soon to properly situate March 19th, 2003 amongst the worst dates in American history, but it’s surely bucking for top tier status.  For though the war may finally conclude at the end of next year, its effects will be with us for a very long time.

During the madness that was the 2004 presidential election, at the height of the baseless smearing of John Kerry, I read something by an old time Washington journalist.  (The name and publication escape me at the moment.)  Trying to put these decades old attacks into perspective, he wrote that the Baby Boomers were never going to let go of Vietnam.  They would be clobbering each other over it all the way to the retirement home.

I think about that passage often, especially when talk turns to the Iraq War.  The numbers of dead, especially on the American side, are a lot lower this time around.  There’s no draft anymore, so the politicians of the future won’t have to explain how they escaped combat service.  And yet the political fight that Bush the Younger began is still raging, and shows no signs of abating just because the war itself seems to be in its last throes.

That little more than confusion and panic happened in the Gulf of Tonkin on 4 August 1964 has never really penetrated into the popular consciousness.  Will the same be true of the deliberate dishonesty that got us into Iraq?  It is a question of life and death importance because how this war is remembered will have enormous effects on how we get into the next one.

As well documented and well established as the Iraq lies have been, Newsweek still ran a cover that read “Victory At Last” for the March 8th issue.  In what kind of pre-March 19th mindset does that headline writer operate?  How can anything that wasted so much money, caused so much destruction, killed (and ruined) so many people, for no reason ever be a good thing?  When it comes to Iraq the only way the word “victory” can ever be honestly used (by an American) is directly following the word “Pyrrhic”.

And yet that delusional pre-March 19th mindset is widely prevalent.  What’s worse, it is frighteningly similar to the “we could’ve won in Vietnam” mindset, which still had enough juice left to sink John Kerry thirty years after the war ended.  Both operate within extremely narrow conceptions of war.  They deny, outright and totally, that anything but the war itself has any value.  The events leading up to the war, the reasons for going to war, even the costs associated with fighting the war, have no place in these arguments.

That is why any Iraq outcome that falls short of an anti-American theocracy will be hailed by idiots as “victory”.  For them the unnecessary deaths don’t matter, the enormous sums of money wasted don’t matter, the damages done to our civic institutions don’t matter.  The important thing is that there was no photo of a helicopter ferrying people off a rooftop.  And since that’s all that matters to them, they will, almost inevitably, blunder us into another unnecessary war.

Lest you think I’m being paranoid about that, consider the extremely warlike nature of post-World War II America.  We got directly involved in five major wars (Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq) from 1945-2003 plus nearly innumerable smaller conflicts.  Not a single decade since the 1940s has passed without American troops dying in the hundreds or thousands.  Andrew Bacevich, a man who knows something about the military and the sacrifices it sometimes requires, counts only three unambiguous wins in that time, all of them in our traditional stomping grounds in Latin America and the Caribbean.  That is not a record of which to be proud.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the Iraq War (other than the obvious one: never trust a neo-conservative), it is that we ought to take military involvement much more seriously than we currently do.  The people who remain proud, ignorant of our mixed war record, are the ones who are always eager to get involved in the next one (and make no mistake, there will be a next one).  If a catastrophe like Iraq is to have any positive consequences, at the very least one should be to lessen the number of people chomping for another.

Reality Returning

“Think hard, Elvis.  You’re not really the king of rock ’n roll.  You’re a fat, stupid, worthless policeman in a small town, mmkay?” – Mr. Mackey
“Oh, thank you from a fate worse than death, counselor!” – Officer Barbrady

We are still living in Bush the Younger’s America.  That hideous little man warped the politics and the political attitudes of this country to such an extent that the arguments taking place at the end of his reign would’ve scarcely seemed possible at the beginning.  Advocating torture and unprovoked war became mainstream positions.  Wanting to listen to respectable people, be they foreign leaders, scientists or other non-Washington D.C. types, became a snigger worthy position.  It was all very odd, but it always came down to a simple, albeit psychotic, idea: that a good enough talking point could alter reality.

No reason to invade a country?  Surely we’ll find one when we get there.  Supply side economics trashes the federal budget?  Not if we say it doesn’t and damn the numbers.  I could go on, but it would be a waste.  Remember, this was a political force that openly sneered at “discernable reality”.  The hold this insane notion has on our politics is waning, but ever so slowly.

Happily, we can see another manifestation of that waning in the recent spat between the Israeli and American governments and nowhere is it made clearer than in this piece Juan Cole wrote for Salon.com.  Cole, who dared to stay sane in public during the darkest of the dark years, has experienced plenty of vicious attacks from people who believe in the reality altering power of talking points.  This particular dustup is over Cole’s position (a very common one) that the policies of the Israeli government over the last ten years have done very serious damage to Israel’s long term survival prospects.

Those policies, which included ineffectually attacking Gaza and Lebanon, walling up the Palestinians in a squalid ghetto, and planting settlements atop every halfway decent piece of land in the West Bank, were backed to the hilt (and then some) by the Bush Administration.   But the days of complete American acquiescence to the most right wing of the Israeli government’s fantasies are over.  Not everyone got the memo, however.  All the Obama Administration did was ask the Israelis to stop building new settlements, the universally acknowledged first step towards untangling the mess Israel has made for itself over the last forty years, and a minor shitstorm erupted.

Cole’s piece, which is worth reading in full, is about his own little part in that shitstorm, and it concludes with a simple question that the talking point believers cannot answer:

Does Goldberg have a plan “B”? Because his two-state solution is so 1993. The problem is, it is almost certainly past the point where any such thing is possible, given the size and extent of Israeli colonies in the Palestinian West Bank. Goldberg admits that the only two likely outcomes of the current policies of Binyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman are Apartheid or a one-state solution.

Would Cpl. Goldberg like to specify which he would prefer, in case it comes to that (as it likely already has)?

That’s the crux of this particular issue, but it illustrates a broader trend as well.  The days of magical thinking as policy are passing.  It’s too pervasive and seductive a philosophy to go out of style all at once, but if you want to participate in adult discussions, denying reality isn’t something you can do scot free any longer.

Double Standard

“Dozens of people are gunned down each day in Springfield, but until now none of them was important.” – Kent Brockman

Note: This was not the post I had planned for today.  But even a website on as rigid and infrequent a schedule as this one can sometimes be topical.

The big news today was the murder of American diplomats in Mexico.  The genuinely awful details need not be repeated here.  And unseemly as it may be to write such a thing before the bodies are cold, ultimately these victims will roll away unremembered, just a few more corpses for the massive and ever growing pile created by the illogical criminalization of recreational pharmaceutical use.

There’s no way to lessen the tragedy here, nor is there any way shape or form to justify or exculpate the actions of the murderers.  But understanding why a thing happens, especially a fatal one, is important.  It helps us prevent it from happening again.  And this particular tragedy is compounded by the fact that it was completely unnecessary, we should’ve learned this lesson long ago.

Mexico has a very serious drug problem.  It is one that we caused and one we continue to burden them with.  The cost of our righteous indignation at people taking pleasure in chemistry is usually borne, nearly silently, by the poor.  Last night it reached out and touched people who weren’t poor, and it’s international news.  The hypocrisy couldn’t be more obvious.

The money that paid to kill those diplomats came from America.  Whether each individual dollar came from cocaine, heroin, marijuana or anything else is irrelevant, we paid to kill our own.  Our President’s anger serves only to highlight how ridiculous things are.  He is, after all, our second consecutive chief executive to have used cocaine and our third to have used drugs in general.

Think about that, everyone in this country under the age of eighteen, the children so frequently cited as the reason drugs are illegal, has spent their entire lives living under drug using Presidents.  All the anti-drug campaigns in the world cannot conceal that fact.  And as long as those desirable chemicals remain illegal deaths like the ones that occurred last night will continue.  Even arresting the killers won’t matter; should they, or even their paymasters, be captured others will take their place.  Outrage is indeed justified, but any honest accounting of it would see the majority directed at ourselves.

Damage Done

“He’s violating Seabreeze!” – Carter Pewterschmidt
“No, no, he’s just awkwardly positioning himself-now he’s violating Seabreeze.” – Peter Griffin

Dan Quayle once got into some hot water with the press because of allegations that his wealthy and well connected family had pulled some strings to get him into the National Guard, where he’d be protected from the draft and the Vietnam War.  The hypocrisy was pretty obvious: there was a war on and it was being fought largely by conscripted kids whose families were neither wealthy nor well connected.  This was in 1988, very shortly after Bush the Elder selected Quayle as his running mate.  The story ultimately died down and the Reds won the election handily, but it was a major story.

Twelve years later Bush the Younger was running for President.  The fact that his father had pulled some similar strings around the same time was considered a non-issue.  It didn’t come up much in the campaign and Bush the Younger eked his way through the back door of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, right past a man who had indeed gone to Vietnam.

Obviously a lot changed in the intervening years, and despite their similar mental handicaps the press always gave Bush the Younger a wider berth than it ever gave Quayle.  But actions that had caused a big, booming scandal in 1988 barely rated a whisper in 2000.  (And with the subsequent defeats of Johns Kerry and McCain it now seems quite probable that we will never have a Vietnam veteran in the White House.)  One of the big reasons for the change was that an issue that had previously been seen as one of honor and fairness, an issue about which the rules had been as clear as they were unspoken, had become muddied.  The byline brigade concluded that the public didn’t give a shit if rich kids got preferential treatment when it came to the war.  That issue was forever neutralized because there was no longer any presumption that such a thing should be scandalous.  The damage had been done.

We can see a similar degradation at work in the Obama Administration’s open admissions (via Greenwald, who has the must read analysis here) that the decisions on where to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed and others are political ones.  Once upon a time putting any kind of overt political pressure on the Justice Department was considered taboo.  It led to Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, it led to Ken Starr.  Now it’s not even an issue that the Obama Administration is using ostensibly legal and non-political decisions as political bargaining chips.

(It should also be noted here that this is another example of the relative viciousness of the parties.  When the Reds interfered with the Justice Department it was to do things like fire prosecutors who were unwilling to drum up corruption allegations against Blue politicians or manufacture non-existent voter fraud cases.  When the Blues interfere with the Justice Department they do it to curry Red support.)

The late and utterly unmissed Bush Administration spent eight years turning the supposedly non-political Justice Department into a campaign arm of the Republican Party and flagrantly ignoring American law on any number of subjects, including the detention and trial of suspected criminals.  The result of those gross violations of the spirit and letter of the law was relatively minor: the scalp of one Attorney General who has never so much as faced a serious criminal probe despite there being ample evidence for one.

The result is the sad situation in which we find ourselves, where basic American concepts like the rule of law are subjected to polling and electoral calculus.  Make no mistake the existence of this sorry situation is 100% the fault of Bush the Younger and his cadre of fanatics.  But, starting with last year’s decision to continue the Star Chamber military tribunals, Barack Obama is compounding his predecessor’s follies in a way that will make them much harder to fix.  These decisions will be haunting us for years (and possibly decades) to come because it’s no longer an issue that generates political heat.  It’s been damaged.

The Worst Movie (I’ve Actually Seen) To Ever Win Best Picture

“It’s chocolate!  Now I want one more than ever!” – Jay Sherman

The Oscars are tonight and I couldn’t possibly care less.  I never watch them, I don’t think it matters who wins, and really, what difference does it make?  One of the reasons I don’t care who wins is that I can discern little correlation between the quality of a movie and its chances of getting one of those little dildo statues.  Lots of people like to point to Gladiator as an example of that, and it’s true that Gladiator was a pretty nontraditional Best Picture movie, but at least it was a good movie.  It wasn’t particularly smart or believable, but as popcorn movies go it was well done (if a bit long) and it gave us some enjoyable catchphrases (“Are you not entertained?”).  With those points in its favor I’ve never minded that it won an Oscar.

There was, quite recently, a far less deserving Best Picture winner.  This movie should’ve been held up for unlimited ridicule and contempt, it should’ve been awarded nothing but Razzies.  I would go so far as to say that the fact that it won four Oscars exposes the entire Academy Awards selection process as farce.   I am speaking of the 2004 winner of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best Actress: Million Dollar Baby.

I heard about the ludicrous plot twist that leads to the haplessly melodramatic ending when it came out but I didn’t bother to actually watch the film.  I wasn’t surprised when it won Best Picture because it had Oscar bait written all over it, but figured it was just another forgettable “serious” movie and really hadn’t given it much thought since.  But then last year I saw it crop up in a number of different “Best of the Decade” type pieces and decided I had to watch it.

I am both sad and glad I did.  I’m glad because it is a first ballot lock for the Unintentional Comedy Hall of Fame, by the end I was laughing so hard I nearly passed out.  I’m sad because if this piece of shit can be passed off as a quality movie then there may indeed be no hope whatsoever for American filmmaking.

This video is a pretty good summary, but doesn’t have the time to delve into the terribleness of this film.  And make no mistake, it is terribleness incarnate.  For starters Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood spend much of their time trying to see who can speak the raspiest.  As if that weren’t bad enough, Eastwood owns a boxing gym that, it goes almost without saying, is filled with lovable scamps.  I don’t know the history of this movie’s development but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was originally written as a pilot for a workplace sitcom and took an apocalyptic turn on about the seventeenth rewrite.  A couple of these characters are even given subplots, though I use the term loosely because they’re only shown twice.  They appear at the beginning, vanish for almost the entire movie, and then magically reappear at the end so the movie can have yet another of the cloying, melodramatic vignettes it tries to pass off as entertainment.  The gap between their appearances is so wide that when they showed up the second time I had all but forgotten they were even in the movie.

But those are minor complaints; the real horrorshow is the main plot.  I lack the strength of will necessary to recount its every “Hallmark Hall of Fame” twist and turn but you really have to admire a “serious” movie whose central premise is a plot hole.  I’m not even exaggerating when I say that.  The first scene is a boxing match where Eastwood is the manager for a big dude who we later find out is being given a shot at the title.  (The same guy later ditches Eastwood for another manager and then wins the title, just another dump truck’s worth of schlock for Plot Feces Mountain.)  This is a big event in a big arena.  Hillary Swank is on the undercard, we even see her in one of those boxer’s robes with the big hood.  She is a professional boxer.

Fast forward ten minutes and she shows up at Eastwood’s gym not knowing how to box - at all.  She doesn’t even own a speed bag (the movie makes much of this).  If that weren’t glaring enough we’re then treated to pages of expository dialogue about how she dreams of becoming a boxer.  For a moment I thought there had been a flashback or a flashforward.  Nope.  I cannot overemphasize the balls of this, it’s like the movie is daring you to call it on its bullshit.

Needless to say Eastwood doesn’t train “girls” but Swank’s heart and determination and atrocious Missouri accent win him over.  Do I need to mention that he has an estranged daughter?  Or that Swank’s family is a pack of redneck stereotypes that would make Jeff Foxworthy blush?  Or that Eastwood is Catholic and will need to make a decision about helping Swank die?  (His priest is yet another minor character who disappears for most of the movie only to make a jarring return in what passes for the third act.)  No door to the audience’s tear ducts is left unbattered.

Which brings us to the ending.  Swank gets paralyzed in a title fight.  (Needless to say the way she gets paralyzed is riddled with phony significance.)  This is also where the movie doubles down on its earlier bet that you wouldn’t notice that its main premise is a plot hole.  Swank is paralyzed by a punch – from behind and after the bell – that would’ve resulted in her opponent’s disqualification.  Swank would’ve won the title by default.  In fact, literally seconds before it happens the referee had warned Evil Boxing Villain Girl That We Only See Twice In The Whole Movie that he would disqualify her for such a thing.  This is worth pointing out because twice in the course of the movie’s ridiculously drawn out ending we’ll be clubbed over the head with the information that Swank lost.

That may seem like a small point, but it is central to the movie’s conclusion because Swank and Eastwood’s relationship is based on both of them being tough as nails, no bullshit type people.  To show how no bullshit they are they even talk – post paralysis – about how she lost.  So not only is the main plot a plot hole, but the ending, the sad ending that everyone praised and that won this movie a boatload of awards, is also a plot hole.

The unbelievable contempt this shows for the audience is its own kind of achievement.  My cynicism finds it more than a bit amusing that you can fail utterly at even the most basic parts of movie making and still pick up Oscars galore provided that you have a) Clint Eastwood growling, b) Morgan Freeman narrating and c) Hillary Swank overcoming things.  Million Dollar Baby is a masterpiece of critical bamboozlement and sheer testicular fortitude.  The next time you hear someone complain about Gladiator winning Best Picture, and this is the season for it, point them to this movie and ask them to explain how it makes any sense.  All the faux heartbreak in the world is meaningless when the movie doesn’t even bother to tell a coherent story and Million Dollar Baby is orders of magnitude worse than Gladiator.

Resistance is Vital

“Stand back!” – Eric Cartman
“Cartman, stop it.” – Stan Marsh
“I . . . am going . . . to Casa Bonita.” – Eric Cartman

Iraq is going to the polls this weekend.  At long last the oft postponed election, the stated reason that our combat troops are still there, is finally going to happen.  (As usual the best insight and coverage can be found at Juan Cole’s website.)  How the election will turn out is anyone’s guess; whether it will even be considered “fair” in any basic way is anyone’s guess.  But regardless of the outcome it is vitally important that we, to borrow a phrase, stay the course and get the hell out of there.

There will be plenty of bleating and complaining as we do so.  Indeed, it’s apparently already begun.  The important thing now is for the President, backed up by everyone who thinks this war is a waste, to resist any and all such calls, categorically, without exception, and with a lot of conviction.  The Iraq War is easily the biggest folly (in terms of cold, hard cash and cold, dead bodies) upon which the United States has embarked since Vietnam.  As such it has a bizarre hold on a lot of imaginations, getting out means finally admitting that it was a waste, that no good ever came of it, that no American military foothold has been established, that no free market paradise will come to pass, that the oil spigots will not be opened for America’s exclusive consumption.

That is a sad but necessary realization, and it is one that not everyone has gone through yet.  Once the election is past and the actual troop withdrawals begin the denialists will have their last refuge of make believe shattered.  For them, the ones who think we can still be useful to that country and the ones who have never accepted that we would someday leave, the temptation to spin the Iraq wheel one more time hoping for luck will doubtlessly rear its head.  They will be loud and they will be persistent and they must absolutely not be heeded.

Up to this point Barack Obama has done a marvelous job of keeping the Iraq War off the front burner.  Partly that’s a result of the economy; partly it’s a result of Afghanistan.  But make no mistake the Reds are feeling their oats these days, they’ve got visions of 1994 in their heads.  If American troops are coming home and Iraq isn’t a perfectly functioning state (spoiler alert: it won’t be), they will call the President a coward, they will charge him with “losing” Iraq, they will insist that Bush the Younger left things in great shape and now this faggoty Democrat is pissing away the hard won accomplishments of all those brave young men and women.  That none of those things are true in the least will not matter.

Get ready.

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