Quick Hits

Odds and sods:

• The reason I had light posting for the last few days was because of a documentary project I've been working on called Walking On Dead Fish, the story of a high school football team in La Place, Louisiana right after Katrina, who took in 20 displaced players and tried to balance winning games with rebuilding their lives. It really got me thinking about how we've still largely forgotten the good people of the Gulf Coast. It's a good story, well told, and it's supposedly being converted into a feature film as well.

• Ladies and gentlemen, the next President of the United States, Rudy Guiliani!



Actually, this would make me consider him as a candidate more, at least he has a sense of humor about himself. Sadly, not this image but what it represents, and by extension Rudy's beliefs on gays and abortion, will likely disqualify him among the far-right base for the Republican nomination. I'd have disqualified him because he was a pretty shitty mayor until 9-11.

• More 2008 stuff: I agree that former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack's entry into the race largely makes the caucuses irrelevant. Whether that's good for Hillary, however, is debatable. Edwards has a lot of staff in Iowa, and even if he made it close against the favorite son, it'd be seen as a victory. And the two new early primary states have built-in advantages for him (South Carolina was his birthplace, Nevada has a heavy union membership).

• The President thinks we should all be thrilled that he allowed elections in a time of war. I'm thrilled he even lets me write this blog without being thrown in jail! Thank you, Dear Leader!

• Lots of HuffPo links in this Quick Hits. In this one, Tony Hendra (yes, Ian Faith from Spinal Tap) makes the audacious claim that Borat won the midterm elections:

Whether it was the sweet-pertater-pie cooing of bourgeois Southern morons trying to coach Borat in the niceties of social intercourse or the Pentecostal pseudo-Christians ululating gibberish to bamboozle the gullible into 'cures for Jeezus', this movie was all about George Bush's base. I'd bet good money that a substantial number of the 2.4 million people who went to see it on its first weekend, were not necessarily going to vote Democrat two or three days later. I'd give the same odds that a substantial number of them were Republican-leaning or Independent voters who were expecting a mildly funny movie about a mad foreigner loose in America. Instead they were left helpless with laughter by an irresistible 'reality' satire of people who even if they were - officially - model Americans, said voters secretly believed to be bigots, prudes, hypocrites, thieves and assholes. An awful lot of what happened in the voting booths on November 7th was about non-Democrats voting their secret misgivings about Republican icons.

It's a theory.

• I actually haven't seen Borat yet, but I'm likely to see "Shut Up And Sing" tonight, and I'll come back with a full report.

• One man's excited about the Democratic takeover of Congress: Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger! The thing about Arnold is that he's desperate to be popular, to be the most loved person in the world. If that means selling out all of your principles and your friends, so be it. Great standard-bearer for his party in California.

• I jumped on this moments after it came out of the President's mouth: he flat-out lied to the press about Donald Rumsfeld staying until the end of his term, and he ADMITTED it in a press conference. I mean, it was unequivocal. But despite all that evidence, Howie Kurtz can't seem to figure the whole thing out. Is it that the media is just so cynical and used to lying that another one leaves them cold? Or can they not find it within their hearts to tell the world that the President is a serial liar?

• I have now praised Ed Morrissey and, Lord help me, Rich Lowry, in the course of a couple of days. But most of his myth-shattering about the election (not all, but most) is pretty right on IMO. It's never as simple as "Party X won because of Y." It's a huge country and there were hundreds of elections with all kinds of countervailing factors.

UPDATE: Like I said, only most of it was right.

National Review editor Rich Lowry slips into the passive voice:

Liberals cannot count on conservatives being associated with corruption, incompetence or an unpopular war forever.

Funny how that “association” just kinda happened to conservatives, of all people. Wrong place, wrong time and all that. It’s like how, when Bush stopped being popular, it suddenly occurred to National Review writers that he was really a great big liberal. It’s funny what you notice when you’re fucked, and, for months before the election, it was pretty easy to see this one coming down the pike, unless your name happened to be “Karl Rove”.