Month: August 2008

Smears R Us

by digby

Bob Somerby has a good column out today calling out liberals for emphasizing that the campaign has a racial subtext when Democrats are always portrayed as presumptuous, arrogant elites who are out of touch with average Americans. That’s absolutely true, of course. The effete snobbish liberal has been a staple of right wing attacks for many years.

However, I do think it’s fair to say that Republican character assassination often operates on many levels and there is no escaping the fact that when the politician is black, the Republicans have a whole different context in which to operate — the 200 plus years of racial bigotry in our culture. You can pretend that the effect of calling John Kerry “arrogant and presumptuous” is exactly the same as calling Obama “arrogant and presumptuous” but I don’t think it is. Kerry becomes a snooty elitist, but he doesn’t become an interloper, rising above his place, threatening to take down the natural social order. Both are deadly, but it only works on both levels for Obama.

Most importantly, this isn’t happening in a vacuum. You have to look at the way Republicans have won elections since Richard Nixon’s time. If they hadn’t used race to good effect for the past 35 years to signal (yes dogwhistle) certain subliminal fears and hatred about race, I might be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they are unaware of the multiple levels on which their campaign is working. But they are experts at this game and they know very well that the fact that the candidate happens to be black gives them an extra opening they wouldn’t otherwise have.

The Republicans have a candidate who isn’t trusted by the base, which is already demoralized and subdued after the epic failure of Bush. If they are going to win they have to figure out a way to energize them. One way to do that is to signal that John McCain feels their pain — and their most primal pain is the fact that the “wrong people” are “taking over.” Nobody is more wrong to a whole bunch of them than a young black guy from Chicago named Barack Obama (who may even be Muslim.)

I do not think that most people in this country are stone cold racists, but I do know that the Republican Party has pretty much cornered the market on the worst of them and they need them to come out and vote. If they can get to some others, those who have problems with “foreigners” or who are mistrustful of “big city” people, especially African Americans, or those who think that affirmative action has given unqualified blacks like Obama an unfair advantage, or maybe just the guy who gets unaccountably irked when football players do an end zone dance or when rappers are on TV showing off all that money, they may be able to cobble together a win. There are many ways in which this stuff is expressed and the Republican party, which has spent the last 35 years perfecting the Southern Strategy, knows exactly how to speak to these people.

Yes, it also works on the levels with which we are all familiar — the super liberal elitist snob — and many people are undoubtedly responding to that the same way they did with the snotty ads about Gore and Kerry, against whom this was very successful. I don’t doubt that the McCain campaign is speaking to them too. But to think they aren’t exploiting the fact that this candidate also happens to be black is, to me, absurd. Of course they are. They are the party of Lee Atwater.

Bob says that if Democrats want to win, rather than being “right” in a graduate seminar, they shouldn’t say anything about all this. I don’t disagree. I have never suggested that Obama should make this campaign a referendum about racism or that he should get all up in arms about it. Both campaigns danced around it during the primaries (and it was probably a mistake for both of them considering the make-up of the Democratic electorate.) But in this general election, it certainly can only hurt Obama to bring race front and center. He has to play by the Jackie Robinson Rules — and it’s pretty clear that he, if not some of his supporters and surrogates, gets that. (I agree with Bob that Kerry was just a misery on MTP.) But let’s face it; the fact that everyone has to tread so carefully around the subject makes the point. However you slice it, race is still a potent subject in America.

I’m not a member of the campaign and I don’t have many readers who are not tuned into the themes that I have written about for years here, so I think it’s perfectly appropriate to treat the subject as a seminar on this blog. I’m analyzing the race in real time as I see it, not trying to put together a winning strategy for Obama. (I don’t think they care what I think…) Yesterday someone wrote a comment to a post at Talk Left (which seems to have disappeared now) saying that I was inappropriately seeing the race through my theory of American politics as an an outgrowth of the civil war divide. That’s true — except for the inappropriate part. After all, Obama is the first black candidate who has a real shot at winning. If that isn’t relevant to my theory about the American civil war tribes, I don’t know what possibly could be.

Someone said the other day that if Colin Powell had run for president that he would have won in a heartbeat, suggesting that race isn’t a factor anymore. To that I can only say that it’s like a Richard Nixon going to China thing — if Colin Powell had run, he would have run as a Republican which means he wouldn’t have been race baited by Republicans. That’s at the heart of this issue. It’s tribal and race is one (and perhaps the most important) of the defining issues that divide them.

The fact that we have a likely black president obviously shows incredible progress. I’m sure most right thinking Americans are proud of that fact, even if they don’t like Obama for other reasons (after all, he’s a liberal, effete, gay snob, like all Democrats.) But considering our history, there’s a lot of special baggage attached to this candidate, some of it still quite burdensome. The Republicans will naturally do everything they can to make sure they can get as much of it as possible tied around his neck without leaving any fingerprints. It’s what they do, and they’re damned good at it.

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Twists and Turns in the Anthrax Case

by dday

There is a very coordinated push to leak details about the late Bruce Ivins to certify that he is the “lone nut” anthrax killer, details which don’t entirely hold up upon scrutiny. There’s definitely a desire on the part of the government to make this an open and shut case seven years after the fact, but it doesn’t completely hold together. In fact, the media reports are almost all contradictory.

The LA Times is claiming that Ivins stood to make money off of an anthrax panic, because he invented some bioterror vaccines, but inside the article it’s made clear that we’re talking about not much more than $10,000. A social worker who worked as a therapist with Ivins was reportedly scared to death of him and claimed that he tried to poison people in the past, but the social worker, Jean Duley, has her own checkered past, with a long rap sheet, and apparently knew about the grand jury investigation, as it’s in her restraining order against Ivins:

client has a history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, actions, plans, threats & actions toward theripist. Dr. David Irwin his psychiatrist called him homicidal, sociopathic with clear intentions will testify with other details FBI involved, currently under investigation & will be charged with 5 capital murders. I have been subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury August 1, 2008 in Washington, D.C.

How would she know that before testifying? Why does she have intimate knowledge of the case? Why is she the recipient of FBI information?

The FBI is leaking to the LA Times that DNA evidence proves Ivins’ guilt, and that after new genetic tests it was clear that only Ivins could have been the killer. But the New York Times Scott Shane calls the evidence circumstantial and that the grand jury was planning to continue to meet for weeks.

While genetic analysis had linked the anthrax letters to a supply of the deadly bacterium in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., at least 10 people had access to the flask containing that anthrax, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation also have no evidence proving that Dr. Ivins visited New Jersey on the dates in September and October 2001 when investigators believe the letters were sent from a Princeton mailbox, the source said.

The source acknowledged that there might be some elements of the evidence of which he was unaware. And while he characterized what he did know about as “damning,” he said that instead of irrefutable proof, investigators had an array of indirect evidence that they argue strongly implicates Dr. Ivins in the attacks, which killed 5 people and sickened 17 others.

And Ivins held security clearance as recently as last month and was only barred from the Ft. Detrick site after counselors warned of his “deteriorating mental condition.”

This could be a guilty man knowing the walls are closing in, or a marked man who was harassed into suicide because many in government wanted to close the case. The point is that there are a lot of questions, and until the evidence is revealed there’s no reason to accept the official story. It is called “unlikely” that Ivins even knew how to produce weaponized, dry anthrax and didn’t have access to it. (The site Anthrax Vaccine is going to be indispensable going forward; Dr. Meryl Nass, the author, and Glenn Greenwald appeared on Democracy Now this morning.)

All we know is that US government labs are implicated in a domestic bioterror investigation, which was twisted at the time to further make the case for the invasion of Iraq. Regarding the false ABC report linking the attacks to Iraq (which was not the first, by the way, there was a lot of misinformation or disinformation out there at the time), Glenn Greenwald writes:

Relating to ABC, a reader exchanged emails with Brian Ross this weekend, and Ross wrote this (the email was sent from Ross’ ABC address; yesterday, I emailed both him and ABC’s Jeffrey Schneider to request confirmation of its authenticity, and they didn’t reply):

As we reported more than six years ago our information came from current and former government scientists. The report was discointed [sic] and denied by the White House which we reported. I believe now the scientists got it wrong although they insisted they were correct long after.

Actually, this is the first time, to my knowledge, that Ross has ever acknowledged that his sources for the bentonite story were “current and former government scientists.” Given that he previously described his sources as being “well-placed,” that means, presumably, that they were scientists with extremely close proximity to Fort Detrick (where the anthrax tests were being conducted) if not Fort Detrick scientists themselves. That would mean, if the FBI’s accusation against Ivins is true, that the same Government lab where the attacks originated was the source for falsely telling Ross that tests revealed evidence linking the attacks to Iraq. In light of that, how can Ross possibly continue to conceal which Government scientists disseminated this false story?

It is also worth noting that Ross, who was a key witness in the Steven Hatfill litigation (since he had published numerous incriminating leaks from the DOJ) badgered at least one of his government sources, FBI spokesman Edwin Cogswell, to provide Ross with a release authorizing Ross to disclose the source’s identity (allowing Ross to avoid being held in contempt by the court). Has Ross sought a similar release from his bentonite sources? Clearly, at least in some instances, Ross is able to convince his sources to allow him to disclose their identity when he is properly motivated to do so. For the reasons Professors Rosen and Gillmor point out, no release should be necessary, since these sources fed him deliberate falsehoods, but one wonders if Ross has even tried to persuade them to give permission for Ross to disclose who they are.

There are far more questions than answers at this point. ABC and any other journalist who got tips about this case need to burn their sources if they believe that the sources have lied. Tom Daschle, who received one of the anthrax-laced letters, wants full disclosure on the botched investigation as well.

There’s clearly going to be a sustained effort to close this case, finger Ivins as the killer, and turn away from any of the lingering questions. That would be a huge mistake.

UPDATE: There’s also this.

After the Oct. 5, 2001, death from anthrax exposure of Sun photo editor Robert Stevens, Mueller was “beaten up” during President Bush’s morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide.

“They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East,” the retired senior FBI official told The News […]

In the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda, but investigators ruled that out, the Daily News has learned.

On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, “There may be some possible link” to Bin Laden, adding, “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden’s henchmen were trained “how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together.”

But by then the FBI already knew anthrax spilling out of letters addressed to media outlets and to a U.S. senator was a military strain of the bioweapon. “Very quickly [Fort Detrick, Md., experts] told us this was not something some guy in a cave could come up with,” the ex-FBI official said. “They couldn’t go from box cutters one week to weapons-grade anthrax the next.”

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Fancy Celebrities

by digby

I happened to be nosing around my archives looking for something unrelated and was reminded of the “Fancy Ford” web site that the Republicans put up against Harold Ford in his Senate race. The site is long gone, but thanks to the Wayback machine, you can still access it. It’s very interesting to look at it in light of the recent “celebrity” ad campaign against Obama.

Here’s a piece of McCain campaign manager Rick Davis’s press release from last week:

Barack Obama is the biggest celebrity in the world, comparable to Tom Cruise, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. As he told Congressional Democrats yesterday, he has become the “symbol” for the world’s aspirations for America and that we are now at “the moment … that the world is waiting for.”

Only a celebrity of Barack Obama’s magnitude could attract 200,000 fans in Berlin who gathered for the mere opportunity to be in his presence. These are not supporters or even voters, but fans fawning over The One. Only celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day, demand “MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew — Black Forest Berry Honest Tea” and worry about the price of arugula.

Yet, despite all of the fans, paparazzi and media adoration, the American people still have questions: Is Barack Obama prepared to lead?

Here’s an NRSC press release from May, 2006:

Will Fancy Ford Return To The Hamptons To Reclaim His Title This Summer?

WASHINGTON—Memorial Day marks the traditional start of summer and for Harold Ford that means partying with the stars in the Hamptons, an exclusive New York beach hideaway. Today, the NRSC is updating www.FancyFord.com to recognize Ford’s title as the Hamptons “Coolest Politician” the summer of ’04.

“Winning awards from New York gossip columns is fancy but it’s probably not going to help Harold Ford’s efforts to connect with mainstream Tennesseans,” said NRSC spokesman Dan Ronayne. “Hanging out with the stars at a posh retreat grooving to Nirvana is not how most Tennesseans spend their summers but Harold Ford is a fancy guy.”

[…]

If he wants to win another Hamptie, he’ll have to keep up his fancy ways.

Indeed, Ford Had To Compete With The Likes Of Martha, Gwyneth, And Paris. “This season saw Martha Stewart trying to act like she wasn’t about to face a stint in jail, Gwyneth Paltrow trying to act like she wasn’t famous and Paris Hilton trying to get the attention of anyone who crossed her path.” (Dan Kadison and Bridget Harrison, “What You Did This Summer,” The New York Post, September 5, 2004)

(It was observed by many at the time, that “fancy man” was an old southern term for pimp.)

Now the Republicans made fun of John Kerry for windsurfing and “looking French” so this doesn’t necessarily indicate racist intent. But the wording is so similar, particularly with the repetition over and over again of the words “celebrity” and “fancy” that you can’t help but wonder if they didn’t use the Ford campaign as a template.

I’m pretty sure they were drawing comparisons for the press between Ford and JayZ and Diddy who have often been mentioned in the gossip columns hanging out in “the Hampties.” But the celebrity thing worked in a number of ways. It certainly been applied to Democrats in general — you still hear them ranting on about Streisand. But this is a little bit different. It’s got all kinds of layers of cultural meaning and I doubt that it’s an accident that two such similar campaigns are being employed against African Americans. As Pam Spaulding observed:

This site is cleverly intimating that Ford is living above his station and doesn’t deserve to “move up” to the Senate, where, heaven knows, he may start rapping, flashing a grille and put a ho’ dancing pole in his office, with the Cristal flowing non-stop.

And Obama the celebrity is going to turn the White House into Being Bobby Brown.

Update: It turns out the “fancy” language has been employed in this campaign as well.

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Building The Narrative

by digby

Perhaps everyone has already seen this McCain ad, but until a reader sent it to me, I’d missed it. It’s from June 22nd.

FYI: Haloscan seems to be eating some posts. It isn’t me randomly deleting them.

David Broder Sets The Table

by digby

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: for the past fifteen years we’ve seen the Republicans act like a bunch of crazed Visigoths sacking Rome and David Broder uttered nary a peep of protest. Now that they’ve worn themselves out and are fat and tired from slurping at the public trough, the Democrats are called in to clean up their mess. And still, although they suddenly decry “ideological extremism” it’s quite clear that for people like David Broder, the marauding VisiGOP is far less terrifying than the prospect of a progressive majority:

As significant as the numerical potential is the changing character of the new senators who may arrive in this election. They could be welcome news for either a President Obama or a President McCain, because the likeliest winners mainly are centrists who have been tested in real-world politics and have little tolerance for ideological extremes.

Two of the top five Democratic prospects are people who have been governors of conservative states. Sununu is in a rematch with former New Hampshire governor Jeanne Shaheen, who dealt with a Republican legislature throughout her tenure in Concord and — to the disappointment of some Democrats — managed to avoid a new broad-based tax to finance the schools.

The other former governor is Mark Warner of Virginia, favored to succeed retiring Sen. John Warner (no relation). Mark Warner, a millionaire businessman, also shared his capital with a Republican legislature and learned in his four years a wealth of practical wisdom about negotiating compromises.

That description also fits Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage, who is likely to be the Democratic nominee for Stevens’s seat. Like most mayors of both parties, whatever the size of their cities, he has been held accountable by his constituents for the most basic needs.

I’m not putting down any of those candidates. I’m sure they are all fine people. But Broder’s point speaks to one thing alone — even if the conservatives run our country into the ground they must always be allowed at least equal say in our governance because to do otherwise would let progressives and liberals call the shots — and we can’t have that.

The sad upshot is that at this moment of the conservative movement’s greatest vulnerability, when we have a chance to destroy their brand in the public mind, the message people are getting is that progressives and liberals are at least halfway to blame for everything that’s gone wrong these last few years and the answer is to split the difference. Before it’s all done, I bet we’ll be blamed for the whole damned thing. (Bush, by the way, will be very likely resuscitated by the Village scribes as some kind of genial Harry Truman.)

I don’t know what it is that scares these people so much about liberalism, but if I had to guess they are mostly afraid the lower orders will get above themselves. In other words, they are all garden variety aristocrats.

Update: Meanwhile we have Maureen Dowd obviously trying to paste two unrelated and equally lousy columns into one and making the most daft literary allusion I’ve seen yet: Obama is the apparently anorexic Mr Darcy, hobbled by pride and (wait for it) America is Elizabeth Bennett, blinded by prejudice. McCain is Mr Wickham “the engaging military scamp” and although she doesn’t say it, I’m sure she has cast Clinton as the imperiously rude Lady Catherine DeBurgh. (Perhaps even she felt it would be too much after taking a gratuitous slap at Hillary’s weight.)

11th grade English teachers throughout the land must be rending their garments in despair that one of their students might read this silly thing and try to get away with writing something so puerile and stupid.

Update: Molly Ivors, a jen-yoo-ine litercher expert tells Dowd:

MoDo needs to read the book. Shocking, I know, but passing out over a cosmopolitan ten minutes into during Bridget Jones’ Diary does not, in fact, reveal much about Austen at all.

.FYI: Haloscan seems to be eating some posts. It isn’t me, randomly deleting them.

Anthrax Mysteries

by tristero

Greenwald summarizes a very, very strange and chilling story.:

We now know — we knew even before news of Ivins’ suicide last night, and know especially in light of it — that the anthrax attacks didn’t come from Iraq or any foreign government at all. It came from our own Government’s scientist, from the top Army bioweapons research laboratory. More significantly, the false reports linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government — from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves.

I don’t think it is paranoid in the least to ask, and ask loudly:

What on earth is going on here?

The Jackie Robinson Rules

by digby

It turns out that a majority of Americans think that Obama was racist for saying what he said but McCain’s ads weren’t. It would seem that the most recognizable form of racism for most people is from those who “play the race card from the bottom of the deck.” I suppose that’s progress of a weird sort.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation’s voters say they’ve seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not.

However, Obama’s comment that his Republican opponent will try to scare people because Obama does not look like all the other presidents on dollar bills was seen as racist by 53%. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree.

[…]

Not surprisingly, the McCain ad generates significantly different perceptions along racial and ethnic lines. Most African-American voters—58%–saw the McCain ad as racist. Just 18% of white voters and 14% of all other voters shared that view.

As for Obama’s comment, 53% of white voters saw it as racist, as did 44% of African-Americans and 61% of all other voters.

There were also significant partisan divides. Democrats were evenly divided as to whether the McCain commercial was racist, and they were also evenly divided on the Obama comment. Republicans, by an 87% to 4% margin, rejected the notion that the McCain campaign ad was racist. But, by a 67% to 26% margin, GOP voters believe that Obama’s comment was racist.

Unaffiliated voters, by a five-to-one margin, said the McCain ad was not racist. By a much narrower 50% to 38% margin, unaffiliateds viewed Obama’s comment as racist.

Overall, just 22% of voters believe that most Americans are racist. That view is shared by 32% of Democrats, 20% of unaffiliated voters and 12% of Republicans. African-American voters are evenly divided on the question.

I should note that I think the Britney ad worked on a number of levels, the racial aspect being the most subtle and easily dismissed. I can understand why most people didn’t see it as racist. That is, after all, the whole point of dogwhistles. But I confess that it does surprise me that 53% of whites and 44% of blacks think “They’re going to try to scare you. You know, ‘He’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name.’ You know, ‘He doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills,'” is a racist comment.

I have no doubt that the campaign has learned the proper lesson from all this. McCain and his nasty surrogates can dogwhistle themselves hoarse all the way to November and nobody can call them on it. If the “liberal” media does, they will be portrayed as in the tank for Obama and part of the problem. It’s a brilliant inoculation. Indeed, it may be such a thorough inoculation that it means that Obama is now in a bit of a straitjacket, having to second guess all criticism of McCain to ensure that it can’t be taken as “racist.” He’s on notice from the great civil rights crusader himself:

“We’re not gonna allow racism to come into this campaign in any form,” McCain said. “And so I’m gonna respond if it comes up again.”

What a neat twist that is. They’ve already managed to hamstring Obama with the silly “confusion” flap and McCain’s national security credentials are sacrosanct since he was a POW, so the field for criticism is narrowing significantly. McCain’s people whine about the campaign being racist and ageist and unpatriotic and then they accuse liberals of political correctness. It’s quite effective.

I know the last thing Obama wants to do is talk about race all the way to November. It’s a minefield. To me that, in itself, says that the issue is still live in our culture. But I guess most people have shifted their view to suggest that even mentioning race is a sign of racism itself.

So, Obama is going to have to be a modern day Jackie Robinson and stoically endure the more subtle forms of racial ugliness that the right throws at him without ever fighting back or even mentioning that it is happening. If he’s as good a politician as Robinson was a baseball player, he’ll do it by sheer talent and force of will (and by boldly stealing home in the world series …)

This ain’t fun. But you watch me, I’ll get it done.
Jackie Robinson

Update:

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Going Independent

by digby

Yesterday I wrote about the different ways the two candidates are trying to appeal to independent voters:

Barack with his appeal to post-partisan compromise and McCain with his straight-talking, macho maverick “I just do what I think is right” approach.

Today we see this:

The different paths John McCain and Barack Obama have taken to support expanded offshore drilling for oil demonstrate how each would govern as president, their supporters said Sunday.

McCain surrogates contended on the Sunday news programs that the Arizona Republican’s turn toward drilling, which he had once opposed, showed how McCain would respond decisively to a crisis. Obama’s supporters argued that his willingness to consider a bipartisan proposal including more drilling showed how the Illinois Democrat would pursue compromise to achieve results.

There you have it.

My experience says that bipartisan compromise means giving conservatives most of what they want and taking a pittance in return, after which they will stab you in the back anyway and spin the compromise to deny you any political rewards for your pragmatism. I don’t think we’ve quite come to the point in the political pendulum where they are willing to change that, but we’ll see. It obviously has some political value in the campaign for Obama, who has a unique set of frames to work within and against.

But I do agree that both candidates are making their runs on the basis of being non-ideological leaders. McCain makes the case that he will crack heads in both parties to get things done and Barack says he will negotiate and compromise to get things done. I think both of them are believable in those leadership roles. Which one the average Independent swing voter thinks is the most effective style and whether they believe it will get their desired results is unknown. I think there are plenty of independents who hate partisanship and just want it to go away — that’s one of the reasons they won’t affiliate with party politics. But they could, theoretically, pick either candidate to do that.

I suspect they will fall into their usual patterns and vote with the party for which they usually vote. I really doubt by the end of this thing that Barack is going to swing Bush voters or that McCain will swing Kerry voters. The campaign’s ugliness is going to take a toll and I think all but people under 25 will likely retreat to familiar ground, blaming the one they didn’t vote for for the dreaded “divisiveness.” I’m pinning my hopes on Democratic turnout, which we have every reason to continue to believe will be enormous. That should be enough.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

The case of the cracked case-cracker: Mad Detective

By Dennis Hartley

“When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting beside me.”

-Woody Allen

In the opening scene of Mad Detective (a new psychological drama/murder mystery that cheats on its metaphysics exam), detective inspector Chan Kwai Bun (Lau Ching Wan) appears to be intently staring into the soul of a dead pig, suspended from the ceiling of a homicide division squad room. A group of his fellow officers silently stands by, transfixed by the sight of Bun, wielding a formidable looking knife as he circles the dangling porker. When rookie inspector Ho Ka On (Andy On) blunders into the room to report for duty, he is pulled aside and shushed by another officer, who whispers, “Bun is immersed in the investigation.” Suddenly, Bun lunges at the pig and begins to stab it repeatedly. Then he dives under a desk and grabs a travel bag, bidding the wide-eyed Ho to accompany him to the top of a staircase. “I’ll lie inside the suitcase,” Bun says. “You push me down the stairs.” And so begins the partnership between inspectors Ho and Bun.

Bun, as we quickly come to learn, apparently possesses the ability to literally “look into the soul” of both perpetrators and deceased victims alike (a neat trick that handily one-ups the cognitive abilities of your typical criminal profiler), and has consequently racked up a 100% success rate solving his murder cases. This odd ability doesn’t come without its psychic/social price; Bun is viewed by most of his peers as a bit of a freak show and is pushed into an “early retirement”. The doubts about his overall mental state appear to be confirmed when, at the end of his tenure, he inexplicably slices off one of his ears (a la Van Gogh) and dutifully presents it along with his gun and badge. (Cuckoo! Cuckoo!)

However, according to the Rules of Old Mentor/Young Protege Cop Buddy Movies, at this particular point in the narrative, an occasion must arise that precipitates Bun being dragged out of retirement to help solve “one last case” (otherwise, we would only have a 20 minute film.) After a fellow cop mysteriously disappears, Ho talks the reluctant Bun into assisting in the investigation, to lend a bit of that special voodoo, that only he do.

Now, this is where co directors Johnny To and Ka-Fai Wai decide to borrow a few tricks from M. Night Shyamalan, and start to have some wicked fun with the viewer’s perception of reality; especially when you realize that you are “seeing” the inner personalities of certain characters just as Bun “sees” them. Toss in a prime suspect with multiple personalities, and buckle up for a real mindfuck. As you may have gleaned by now, you can’t afford to nod off at any point during this film, or you could easily get lost.

While this is not your typical Hong Kong crime thriller, it contains enough requisite elements of the genre to satisfy devotees, like the inevitable denouement wherein all the principal characters converge (usually in a deserted building) and end up drawing a bead on each other in a point-blank standoff. There are some nice visual touches, especially in a nifty “hall of mirrors” climax a la The Lady from Shanghai or Enter the Dragon.

Although there isn’t a lot of “ha ha funny” inherent in the screenplay (written by co-director Ka-Fai Wai along with Kin-Yee Au), it does contain some dark comic overtones, helped along by some subtly arch undercurrents in Wan’s deadpan take on inspector Bun. Not a masterpiece, but an intriguing watch for fans of (really) off-beat whodunits.

The film is in limited release in select cities, but if your cable company provides the service, it is also currently available for home viewing on “IFC in Theaters” PPV (it’s being presented in the original Cantonese, with English subtitles).

Flaky flatfoots and daffy dicks: The Element of Crime, Angel Heart, Manhunter, Lethal Weapon, The Zero Effect, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, They Might Be Giants, I Heart Huckabees, The Big Lebowski, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, The Singing Detective (British TV), Cracker (British TV), Monk (TV), Columbo (TV).

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Negative Appeal

by digby

This is anything but dispositive, but it probably does indicate who the McCain campaign was aiming at with their snotty, negative ads:

Small study suggests McCain ads lampooning Obama hurt

John McCain struck again on Friday, releasing a Web video suggesting that his Democatic rival, Barack Obama is “The One,” a semi-religious figure sent to save the world. The spot includes footage of Charlton Heston as Moses, parting the Red Sea.

The ad was the second released this week by McCain intended to make fun of Obama. Earlier, the campaign issued an ad that likened Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in an effort to take the shine off the huge crowds Obama drew in Berlin during his European tour.

Friday’s ad takes that theme one step further, lampooning Obama’s soaring rhetoric and suggesting that the Illinois senator suffers from a Messianic complex. As the ad comes to a close, it shows Heston in his iconic role as Moses parting the Red Sea, then asks the question “Obama may be The One. But is he ready to lead?”

How successful the ads will be at turning what are widely perceived as Obama’s strengths into weaknesses won’t be known for some time. Experts have warned they could backfire on McCain, making him seem bitter and petty and emphasizing differences between him and Obama.

A small study of people’s reactions to the Britney-Paris ad suggested, however, that while people don’t like the ad, it caused them to doubt Obama, and small percentages who’d said before viewing the ad that they’d vote for him said afterword that they wouldn’t.

Those declines didn’t result in more support for McCain; doubting Democrats and Republicans instead moved into the undecided column. Independents who moved away from Obama did say they’d vote for McCain.

Granted, this is a really small sample and I have no idea whether this methodology is considered reliable. But I would guess that the McCain campaign did some focus grouping on Obama’s soft spots before they embarked on this and that they were aiming at those independent voters, which both campaigns think might be attainable — Barack with his appeal to post-partisan compromise and McCain with his straight-talking, macho maverick “I just do what I think is right” approach.

It will be interesting to see which one of those appeals to independent voters will work. McCain’s obviously decided that he needs to turn Obama into an effeminate, foreign peter pan of some sort in order to get them, and if that small study is correct, it may have some impact. I don’t pretend to understand why, but then I’m not an independent and I think both “straight talking maverick-osity” and “post-partisan compromise” are fairly empty concepts. (But then, I believe American politics are almost entirely about the effective use of partisan political power, so waddo I know?)

We’ll have to wait for something more substantial to really tell us if these ads worked and I don’t know even then if anyone can reliably do it. They were designed to work on many levels and I don’t know if it’s possible to unravel people’s feelings about such things with any precision. Still, it’s sort of interesting. Everybody hates negative ads, but they do work, at least on some people.

Update: I am really starting to hate this unctuous, double-talking creep:

Speaking of a much more serious tiff this week about whether or not Obama played the race card in the campaign, McCain seemed to defend his team’s strong response.

“We’re not gonna allow racism to come into this campaign in any form,” McCain said. “And so I’m gonna respond if it comes up again.”

On another hot campaign issue, McCain said “the American people will make a judgment” on whether his campaign’s pressure prompted Obama’s apparent shift this week toward allowing drilling for oil in U.S. coastal waters as part of a comprehensive energy plan.

But McCain claimed his opponent’s position remains much different from his.

“Well, the fact is he still opposes offshore drilling,” McCain said. “He opposes nuclear power. He opposes most every measure, incentives to build a battery-driven car. So, I’m not surprised that he’s hedging on this issue. But the fact is he still opposes offshore drilling. We need to drill now and drill immediately, and it’s disgraceful that the Democrat-controlled Congress goes on a month-long recess without acting on energy.

“I would hope that he would urge the speaker of the House to at least have a vote on it,” McCain added.

“Sen. Obama is still opposed to a comprehensive energy plan,” McCain claimed. “It seems to me the only thing he wants us to do is inflate tires” to improve gas mileage.

Just like Bush: “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes, rubes.”

At this point I don’t care if Obama flips on every single issue, I will do everything I can to see this jackass defeated. Ugh.

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