The Nominee Strikes Back

The press jumped on Trump's claim that he raised $6 million for veterans in his rally back in January.  Trump replied by jumping on the press.  He held a press conference in which he hammered the media, calling them sleazy and dishonest.  It is a moment like this when I really like Trump.  For decades, I have seen the media hound Republicans about things that they ignore in Democrats.  Why aren't these same reporters quizzing Hillary about the Clinton Foundation?  The mainstream media is composed almost exclusively of Democrats.  Republican voters know this and have been frustrated by how Republican candidates just accepted it without comment.  When speaking to George Stephanopolous, Trump reminded the viewer that Stephanopolous was a Clinton operative.  Trump must also have taken note of the huge boost that Newt Gingrich received in the 2012 campaign when he blasted the media for 'gotcha' questions.  The Republican base knows that the media is just as much the enemy as the Democrats are.  The base is so starved for a Republican who fights that it has nominated a marginal Republican to get that long-missing trait.  Romney made a passable impression of a doormat, especially when he let Candy Crowley derail him in the third debate.  Though there are many other Republicans I would prefer to have as president, I really appreciate Donald Trump as a nominee who won't just sit back and let the media walk on him.  Unlike Romney, he strikes back.  As Lincoln said when asked to remove Grant from command: "I can't spare this man; he fights."

The Last Chase

In 1981, I saw this movie and liked it.  Yesterday, I watched it on YouTube.

Frank Hart (Lee Majors) had been a race car driver before the pandemic struck.  Much of the population was wiped out and what was left congregated mostly in the cities.  Soon, cars were confiscated, planes were no longer in use, purportedly to preserve what little fuel was left.  That was twenty years ago, putting the 'present' somewhere between 2000 and 2010.  Now Frank is a spokesman for the mass transit system, an unhappy cog in what has become a police state.  The only sign of hope is the occasional transmission from Radio Free California.

 

Speaking of a police state, Ms. Santana is getting a report on how Hart was 3 minutes later than usual to work and there was footage of him prowling around a confiscation yard (where the confiscated cars are) for the third time in the last month.  He is called in and told he will have a hearing that may result in jail.  His response is to curse out Ms. Santana.  That night, he goes to his garage and starts excavating.  Hidden away is his prototype race car.

 

Meanwhile, Ring (Chris Makepeace) is a brilliant, anti-social prep school student who has been hacking into government servers and vandalizing campus statues with homemade explosives.  It just so happens that Frank gives a fiery anti-government speech at that very prep school.  With the police on his trail, Ring opts to flee to Frank's house.  The pair make an escape from Boston in Frank's car.  The golf cart police vehicles don't stand a chance.  It is California or bust.

 

Once out of the city, the fugitives appear to be mostly home free.  There are people who roam the mostly unpopulated land but there are otherwise few obstacles.  Thus Captain J. G. Williams (Burgess Meredith) is recalled from retirement.  An ace pilot from both Korea and Vietnam, he is enlisted in restoring an old jet and then hunting down the race car.  The jet is an F-86 Sabre, a fighter that was mostly retired by the Vietnam War.  Why this jet?  And weren't there any younger pilots?  Had pilots suffered a higher casualty rate in the pandemic?  The movie does not answer these questions.

 

Frank and Ring have reached Kansas before Captain Williams shows up.  After one strafing run, the car goes into hiding with an Indian tribe who have reclaimed the land since the pandemic.  Frank meets and falls in love with Eudora; this may be a place to end his run.  Ring wants to keep going.  The government is determined that the car must be destroyed and Frank must be made an example.  Troops descend on the Indian town and start shooting civilians.  And the chase is on again.

 

There is a lot of promise in this movie but little of it is realized.  Lee Majors was the wrong man for the part and doesn't have the acting talent to pull off the character.  The script does him no favors either.  The growing father-son relationship with Ring is poorly executed as is his flash love affair with Eudora.

 

Burgess Meredith is likewise not the best choice.  He comes across as being on the edge of senility.  Moreover, this is a man who remembers the days of freedom and clearly misses his flying days.  It would be hard to pick someone more unsuited to assassinating an unarmed race car driver.  However, it is quite clear that Meredith had a great deal of fun playing the role.

 

The setting is interesting but not sufficiently explained.  Is this police state government really so toothless that it must get a septuagenarian crackpot pilot to stop Frank?  The world must have fallen much farther than it appears.  Are we in a Dark Age with a few pockets of humanity?  No, that doesn't quite work.  Somehow, the controller in Boston is able to locate exactly where the car is and how fast it is going.  Ditto for the F-86.  Here is a totalitarian government that knows all but has very little ability to influence anything beyond the cities.

 

At times, the movie does feel like a defense of automobiles.  The car itself is central and the Washington fixer is concerned that people will want to drive cars again.  Even today's government is ever so keen on mass transit (witness the train boondoggle in California) and down on privately owned cars.  But even here, the movie only hints at being a pro-car movie.

 

The car itself, so integral to the story, is ludicrous.  Who makes a race car with two seats?  The car is NASCAR meets Formula 1.  The design needs to have a second seat so Ring can come along.  I don't follow racing and am far from a car guy and yet I see the car as impractical and silly.  If it was something he had built over the last two decades, maybe.  Nope, this is something he buried to prevent it from being confiscated.

 

The Last Chase is available on YouTube.

The Lobster

His wife has fallen in love with someone else, therefore David (Colin Farrell) must leave The City and go to The Hotel.  At The Hotel, he has 45 days to fall in love again or he will be transformed into an animal.  His animal of choice is a lobster.  When he has only a week or so left, he fakes interest in a woman who is best described as a psychopath.  It does not work out well.  He flees The Hotel and joins the Loners.  The Loners live in the woods and it is a high crime for them to have any romantic involvement, a sudden reversal of the other parts of the world.

 

The dystopian world is, like Gaul, separated into three parts.  There are the couples who live in The City.  The police are suspicious of people wandering about alone in the city; at one point, a woman is interrogated regarding the whereabouts of her husband and the cops don't appear satisfied by the answers.  At the Hotel are the singles who want to be couples and avoid being turned into animals.  In this bizarre universe, attraction appears to be predicated on a shared oddity.  There is a woman who suffers regular nosebleeds who couples with a man who fakes nosebleeds.  See, they have something in common.  When David becomes an outcast and joins the Loners, he finds himself attracted to a woman (Rachel Weisz) who is short-sighted like he is.  However, when that common ailment ends, he finds it difficult to be attracted to her.  Very strange.

 

Singles at The Hotel can extend their limit of 45 days by capturing Loners.  There are nightly hunts where Singles charge into the woods and shoot Loners with tranquilizer darts.  Captured Loners are transformed into animals and sent back into the woods.  As such, there are odd animals stalking about through the later part of the movie; the camel was the most humorous.

 

Virtually everyone met in the movie is socially awkward.  Indeed, if you are single and, despite knowing your fate is to become an animal, still have trouble pairing off, you must be awkward.  Some have said that Farrell provides a powerful performance but I didn't get that feeling.  This movie would work just fine with a bunch of people who couldn't act, in fact it might work better.  The emotional ranges go from A all the way to B.

 

Fun dark comedy and worth seeing.

No Sense of Humor

Here is a post that makes you shake your head.  Apparently, the t-shirt wearer should have panicked because the other refugees were Muslim too.

Why I prefer Republicans

Glenn Reynolds has a great article today that explains one of the main reasons I prefer Republicans to Democrats.  The Founders had expected the press to be antagonistic of government power, regardless of who was wielding it.  They had not foreseen the rise of the party system but early in the republic, each party had party-run papers.  Andrew Jackson had newspaper men in his Kitchen Cabinet so that he could get the right propaganda to the masses.  Want to read that Jackson is a murderous villain who is exceeding his authority and ruining the nation?  Read a Whig-supported paper.  The bias was out in the open and everyone knew which papers supported which party.  Today, the press is composed mostly of left-leaning journalists who cheer when a Democrat is in office.  However, when a Republican is in office, it is a sin if he goes golfing.  The press is a lapdog or an attack dog depending on the letter (D or R) after the president's name.  I want attack dogs; I'm with Glenn.

On the Lunatic Fringe with Glenn Beck

I first encountered Glenn Beck in 2005 or 2006.  The first show of his I remember, he was talking to one of his co-hosts - probably Pat - and kept asking if he sounded normal.  This led to a discussion about his attention deficit disorder and was now taking drugs to address it.  Hmm.  Despite that very odd introduction, I tuned in more often and then followed him to TV.  He had a show on CNN for a couple of years that I watched pretty frequently.  Then he moved to Fox News Channel.  I watched that a fair amount.  After that, he went independent and started his own network, Blaze TV.  I have watched virtually none of that.

What drew me to Glenn was that he said stuff that you weren't supposed to say.  I had been watching Bill O'Reilly back in those days, and Bill was considered a grenade thrower.  He had nothing on Glenn.  Where others were asking 'What have we done to deserve the enmity of Muslims?', Glenn was explaining the tenets of the Koran that called for jihad against the non-Muslim.  He would bring up topics that others would not.  Sure, sometimes those were in the vein of conspiracy theories but there was enough valid stuff to keep me watching.

Glenn is a doomsayer.  The world is on the brink of destruction and has been ever since I first tuned in.  He is always telling his listeners/viewers that they must take action or doom will fall.  In fact, doom is still going to fall but you need to be ready so you can help those who aren't ready.  And he was right!  The housing collapse came just a couple of years after I started following him.  I suspect that fueled his rise.  Eventually, his constant chicken little routine offered with more emotion than reason and rivers of tears drove me away.

 

On today's program, Beck and Brad Thor discussed a 'patriot' assassinating Trump if/when he becomes Hitler:

 

If Congress won’t remove him from office, what patriot will step up and do that if, if, he oversteps his mandate as president, his constitution-mandated authority as president, I should say.

 

I am no Trump fan but this is lunacy.  It is quite possible that this has been taken out of context but Beck has been massively anti-Trump.  Both he and Thor fear the Republican Congress will continue to be spineless but that only shows neither of them understand the current political atmosphere.  The Republican Congress is spineless because any opposition to a black president is prima facie evidence of racism.  A white heterosexual Republican male will benefit from none of that.  Moreover, the Democrats are going to tear into President Trump.  Most of the media, which has been cheerleading Obama, will pounce on Trump's every action in much the way they pounced on George W. Bush.  Trump will not be able to get away with even a fraction of the unconstitutional actions that Obama has.

When the Shoe is on the Other Foot

One of many reasons that I want a very constrained and limited government, even when those who share my views are in office (who am I kidding, that doesn't happen), is that I know it won't last.  Eventually, someone with whom I profoundly disagree will get the reins of power.  If I have been a cheerleader while my guy was riding roughshod over the traditional give and take of a Representative Republic, it is going to look really bad when I change my tune when the other party does the same thing when the shoe is on the other foot.  If he is elected, Donald Trump is going to have no more power than Obama currently has and yet the left is panicked as if he is going to impose fascism with his first executive order.

 

While Obama has by his own definition exceeded the authority granted to him by the Constitution, the left has cheered.  These short-sighted boosters may now be seeing the light.  If a President Trump follows the precedents of President Obama but instead uses them to impose a non-leftist agenda, how does the left complain?  Obama set a precedent when he rewrote immigration law without the participation of the Congress.  He decided certain immigrants would not be deported even if they were caught.  Very well, then if President Trump decides that no Muslims can emigrate to the US, the principled argument has already been lost by supporting Obama.

 

Here is another take.