Valerie Plame Redux

Remember when Robert Novak mentioned Valerie Plame, wife of Joe Wilson, in an article.  This mention soon became a national scandal that put Scooter Libby in jail and painted the Bush Administration as bullying Wilson's wife to get revenge for his contrary report on Nigerian yellow cake.  As the story goes, Plame was a CIA agent and releasing her name made her a target.  Also, it's illegal to reveal the identity of an undercover agent.  Of course, she wasn't undercover and the law didn't apply.  Also, it was eventually revealed that Richard Armitage - not Scotter Libby - leaked her name to Novak.  But, as mentioned, that wasn't illegal and thus he was never prosecuted.  This faux scandal spawned a movie (Fair Game, 2010).  What we can glean from this is that the press takes it extremely seriously if a CIA agent is revealed, even if that agent is not covert.

 

Last week, the Obama Administration revealed the name of the Afghan CIA station chief, a person who is (was) covert.  Unlike Plame, this is a real leak.  Where is Patrick Fitzgerald?  Clearly, someone in the Obama Whitehouse needs to be jailed and the rest of the administration needs to be harassed.  What, the story is over already?  Didn't the Plame story go on for months and years?  Did someone at least get fired?  No?

 

It is good to see the press showing balance in how they treat a Republican administration vs. a Democrat administration.

 

 

Godzilla

I remember watching Godzilla movies fairly regularly as a kid.  In the early versions, Godzilla was a giant monster bent on the destruction of Tokyo and could not be stopped by any of the high-tech tanks and planes sent against him.  Later, Godzilla morphed into a hero, saving Japan from other wicked giant monsters.  I suspect there was some continuity to that which I have long since forgotten or perhaps never knew.  The new Godzilla is in the later mold.

 

The movie is mostly about the unluckiest family alive: the Brody's.  I suspect these Brody's are somehow related to Sheriff Brody of the Jaws movies.  Joe Brody and his wife work at a nuclear plant in Japan.  Though they don't know it at the time, it suffers a meltdown because of a giant monster nesting beneath it.  15 years later, Joe's son, Lt. Ford Brody, has just come home from a tour of duty - he is with Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) - when he gets a call that his father has been arrested in Japan.  He goes to Japan and ends up at the site of the meltdown just as a giant monster awakens and wreaks havoc.  Heading home, Ford stops in Hawaii, where he finds himself on the battlefield of giant monsters!  But he escapes that and gets back to California just in time to run into a giant monster!  His son is on a bus on the Golden Gate Bridge when a giant monster swims into the bay!  His wife is hiding in a subway station when giant monsters start fighting in the streets of San Francisco!

 

I did like that the monsters feed on radiation.  They like nothing more than some tasty nuclear waste.  Also, they have this natural defense of an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) which dramatically limits the ability of the military to attack them.  There is a scene where aircraft just fall out of the sky and all the lights go out.  I still think a naval gun should be able to take them down but at least there is some reason why the military is confounded by them.  Godzilla is immense.  He is the biggest version to date.  I liked what they did with the jagged plates on his back but his face looks too much like a dog.  It was cool that his emerging from the ocean caused a tsunami.

 

The monster fights really take off in the final act and something about the action reminded me of those Godzilla movies of yore.  Though it was done with topflight computer graphics, the way the monsters crash into buildings just seemed like some guy was in a monster suit.  This was likely an homage to those original films.

 

I went into the movie with low expectations (I saw the last Godzilla movie with Matthew Broderick) and was quite surprise to find it was a good movie.  I expect that Godzilla will return to battle more giant monsters that plague the earth.  I can hardly wait.

Racism according to Kareem

It turns out that since his basketball career, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has become a contributor to Time Magazine.  Who knew?  He comments on how to tell if you are a racist.  If you've ever said that you don't care if someone is white, black, yellow, or purple, he suggests that's a hint you may be racist.  He says that the issue may be how we define racism.  Then, in the rest of the article, he fails to define racism.  Awesome.  However, he does list things that he thinks are racist.  Topping his list is that you deny there is racism.  Well, there's a straw man.  No one denies there is racism.  Racism was codified into the legal system prior to the Civil Rights Movement.  That was structural, wide-spread racism that needed to be stamped out.  Today, we have buffoons like Donald Sterling.  The magnitude of that change is profound but Kareem isn't having it.  See, the Supreme Court overturned part of the Voting Rights Act.  Racism!  The Supreme Court has weakened Affirmative Action.  Racism!  Bill O'Rielly says that discrimination is in the past.  Racism!  He offers a 2006 poll (couldn't come up with something more recent?) that showed 49% of minorities think racism is a big problem versus only 18% of whites.  Racism!

Racism today is a pale shadow to what it once was.  How else to explain that a black man is president, that a black woman was Secretary of State under a Republican president, that Oprah Winfrey spent decades as the most popular television personality?  Why is it that immigrant blacks do amazingly well within a generation while native ones struggle?  I would posit that the immigrants haven't spent a lifetime being marinated in talk of racism from people like Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, Spike Lee, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  Stop telling blacks that they are victims of racism and slavery and The Man.  Instead, tell them that they can be President, Attorney General, Secretary of State, UN Ambassador, Supreme Court Justice, or whatever else.  Will there be hurdles?  Of course!  It certainly doesn't help that anyone who opposes the president's policies is automatically a racist.  If that is how you define racism, then you will find a lot of racists.  Worse still, any black person who opposes the president is an Uncle Tom or a Race Traitor.

 

To a hammer, everything is a nail.  To someone like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, everything is racism.