annual_review Archives

Holiday Reprint: Nostradamus Predicts

Editors Note: Over the holiday week I've been posting entries from the past year and since everyone is now putting up their annual predictions, I thought I'd start with my predictions from last year and then get on with my post for predictions of the new year.

This piece was originally posted on July 1st.

No matter who is chosen by the President to replace Justice O'Connor, both sides will find a good reason to hate the new Supreme Court Justice. They will also not shut up about it for years.

We will watch a series of good people who have worked their lives in public service to the nation have the private contents of lives thrown into the dumpster of politics so that a bunch of not-so-good reprobates can feel politically relevent. So much for the honor of public service.

Hollywood actors will stand on stage and pontificate about subjects of which they no nothing, (like potential Supreme Court nomimees for example )yet they will get the bulk of the sound bites on network news as if they did. Strangely, these sound bites will occur just prior to a shocking expose on "whats wrong with our culture?" presented by the live-at-5 team for channel 7 ABC news. No one will find this odd but me.

Thanks to the political orientation of the news that interrupts the radio twice an hour with what they consider valid headlines, I will have to hear the following question asked by my children, "Daddy, whats abortion?". Thanks to Network news and the public education system, my kids now think the Supreme Court performs abortions, our current president is a time travelling chimpanzee named " hitler" who escaped from Germany in 1945 to the modern world, who no one likes but got elected anyway because Fox tv controls our minds and if you say his first name, "Bush", some people will fall on the ground and froth at the mouth, and the last President had a secretary who lived under his desk and who left her blue dress over his house by accident. If I've told them once I've told them a thousand times, please stop watching CNN...

The first nomination, whoever it is and no matter how qualified and generally outstanding as a Jurist, will not make it through the nomination process, eventually being forced to drop out 'for personal reasons". The second will go into meltdown over a trival molehill sized personal issue blown up to Mount Everest proportions and will politely withdrawl ( on a Friday, after 3:00 Pacific). The third, who will also be the worst of the three nominations will make it through not because of qualification but because of the fatigue of the aged infirmed members of the Senate simply running out of gas.Two weeks later, Chief Justice Rhenquist will resign. Walter Reed Hospital will run out of B-12 shots and Supplemental Oxygen for the Members of Congress.

Howard Dean will say something really,really dumb. John Kerry will also, only none of us will be able to make sense of what he says,except the part where he thinks we are all rubes for voting for Bush.

Nancy Pelosi will lose her train of thought in mid rant against the Bush Administration and its policies. No one will notice.

Harry Reid will not provide the cunning gutter level leadership or backstabbing ruthlessness we came to expect from Tom Daschle. Network news will interview Tom Daschle as if he were still in the Senate.

Senator Chuck Schumer will at some point during his never ending monologue for no one but himself,over the top of his glasses, question one of the nominees on their stance on the second amendment,acting as if it the Second Amendment really wasnt in the Constitution. But wait, thats not the prediction, the prediction is he will do it while he impersonates the voice and manner of Vincent Price, only without the madhouse giggle at the end of his questioning.

Ann Coulter will say something to inflame the Democrats. I will laugh intensely. I will wonder who she has to sleep with to get a Supreme Court nomination. I will feel ashamed at even thinking such a thing. I will work on my inner dialogue...

Glenn Reynolds will say 'indeed' at least once in the next 30 days and reference Tom Maguire daily, if not hourly as the upcoming circus unfolds.

Robert Byrd will remind us all every single day why 'foghorn leghorn' was such a funny Warner Brothers cartoon, and yet still managed to make more sense than the Jurassic Senator from West Virginia.

Posted @ December 31, 2005 01:51 PM | annual_review | Comments (3)

Holiday Reprint: Parallel Parking In Hollywood

[Editor’s note: during the holiday week, I am republishing classic articles while I do site maintenance and catch up on paperwork(and babysit the houseguest!).

This article was originally written in October 2004. It does seem like a million years ago, doesnt it?]

My buddy Ray gets at least partial credit for this post, but in all fairness, I was already running down this road when Ray threw the shopping cart out in front of me, so here goes...

I think we all know by now that "Our Man JFK" gets under my skin pretty fast. I've always thought he was the weakest of all candidates that have been put forth by the Democrats in a very long time, It's not that I dont think that Bush could not have been beat this time, Its just that I've been very sure that hes not going to get beat by John "Fredo" Kerry.

Ray got me thinking about Science Fiction movies in relation to what movie character Archetype Kerry reminds me of the most. And then I had it:

This is a picture from one of my favorite movies, "The Thing From Another World". In this movie, We see many of the great 1950's movie stereotypes at play.

"The Thing" fuses Science Fiction and horror into a platform that would be replicated many times over during the morality plays of the movies ofthe 1950's. This film is more than just a do-or-die played out with big sticky bug eyed aliens, the central conflict of the film itself is actually between academic and martial culture, embodied by the good and world weary view of "Marlboro Man" - Captain Hendry, and the academic knowledge and refined lifestyle of "Metrosexual Man" - Dr. Carrington.

On one end of the story is "The Good Captain" whose duty is to protect his troops and the civilians under his protection from the alien, and on the other side, is "The Doctor" who is more than willing to let a few of the little people die in order to acquire knowledge for what he's sees as the betterment of humanity. To Dr. Carrington, the violence that the alien uses is just a misunderstanding between the clearly older and wiser alien culture and the lesser and more inferior human culture.

Dr. Carrington assumes that the creature is in fact, "more wise" than the puny humans that discover it and at one point in the movie he says:

We owe it to the brain of our species to stand here and die... without destroying a source of wisdom.

It's in the interplay between the characters of Hendry Vs. Carrington that we see Common Sense in competition with intelligence. Captain Hendry has duties to perform where Dr. Carrington looks only towards his own basking in the reflected glory that comes from the worship of knowledge. Captain Hendry is in "The Service" whereas Dr. Carrington serves no one but himself. In several scenes in the movie, Dr. Carrington proves that although he may be smarter than Captain Hendry and the rest of the "puny civilians", he is also not trustworthy. Not because he is not smart, but because he does not value the lives of the average person. To Dr. Carrington, human life is not as valuable and worthy as the expansion of scientific knowledge. Dr. Carringtons Self-loathing has overridden his common sense and basic humanity.

To whom do you trust your children? Captain Hendry or Dr. Carrington?

Posted @ December 27, 2005 07:44 PM | annual_review | Comments (2)