They are applying “the cackle” to Kamala Harris already. It was a common description of Hillary Clinton. And it wasn’t Republicans who came up with it.
This just in: Hillary Clinton has been laughing a lot lately. Yes, it’s true — a candidate long accused of being cold and unappealing has taken to emitting a hearty chuckle in public, and on the airwaves. We hope you were sitting down for that one.
Actually, in this highly-monitored campaign, the decisions of its most-disciplined and most-focus-grouped candidate are news, and the Hillary Laugh Tactic has been noticeable. Jon Stewart picked up on it in earlier this week, splicing laugh segments together (in a way that, let’s be honest, would make anyone appear manic), but it certainly set up the punchline: Jon fixing the camera with an intense, humorless gaze and saying “I’M JOYFUL.” Frank Rich noted it too: “Now Mrs. Clinton is erupting in a laugh with all the spontaneity of an alarm clock buzzer.” And then, of course, there was The Cackle.
NYT reporter Patrick Healy is an expert on The Cackle. He’s been observing it carefully since January 2005, he tells us right off the bat. In the middle of heated press questioning, “suddenly it happened: Mrs. Clinton let loose a hearty belly laugh that lasted a few seconds…This was my first close encounter with Senator Clinton, and with The Cackle.” This reads with all the slow-building horror of a B-movie Professor explaining to his save-the-world student how he first came face to face with Evil, and learned to name it.
“Friends of hers told a different story,” says Healy, that she actually had a “fantastic sense of humor.” (Well, they would say that, but Healy can see through them.) Then there’s this:
Mrs. Clinton goes for the lowest-common-denominator display of her funny bone: She shows that she can laugh, and that her laugh has a fullness and depth.
Oh, you — you with your laugh of fullness and depth — we’re on to you. Go back to the gutter you crawled out of, lowlife.
Seriously. What IS this? This article was deemed significant enough by the NYT to publish not once, but twice, under two separate headlines and two separate dates (Sept. 28th on the web, graduating to Sept.30th in the paper). But when I look at it, I see a hit piece masquerading as analysis. Why? “The Cackle.”
If Harris becomes the nominee or is simply seen as the shadow president going forward since the concerns about Biden are so acute this is the type of thing that’s going to happen to her. Trump will do it, of course. But the media will help.
This is believed to be largest no. of petition sigs ever filed. Equals half # of Biden votes in '20. More than double 385K required to get on November ballot. https://t.co/3Ndf8YPft8
This issue is not going away no matter how much the media wants to sound the Democratic party’s death knell:
NEW: Our report tonight on Ed Martin, who is helping craft the Republican Party's platform at the convention and has raised jailing women who get abortions and advocated for a national ban without exceptions for rape or incest. pic.twitter.com/cBzElHhLyr
For years, the GOP platform has endorsed a federal abortion ban, but that could change to reflect former President Donald Trump's views. @marjoriesba tells me on @InsidePolitics her message is: "Don't mess with what's been there for 40 years." pic.twitter.com/fd8i4gby00
It does not sound like the anti-abortion zealots are on board with Trump’s inane “everyone always wanted it to go to the states” construction. We know what they want. And they don’t think they need to shut about it just to help Trump win.
By the way, the RNC has chosen three right wing extremists to write the party platform in secret. Martin is one, and one of the others is Russ Vought, who I wrote about in depth here. The third member of the secret committee is this guy:
Trump campaign chooses Randy Evans—who previously served as general counsel to ex-GOP House Speaker Dennis Hastert, a child sex abuser & convicted felon—to co-lead the RNC’s platform committee. 5/15/24 1/ https://t.co/UnTlTlOg0ipic.twitter.com/29kVAXb76f
— jennycohn@toad.social ✍🏻 📢 (@jennycohn1) May 28, 2024
“Donald Trump has run the most disciplined campaign, maybe, over the last 25 years,” Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade said on July 3. “The fact that he is laying out during this whole news cycle shows a discipline at a whole new level.”
That strategically silent, disciplined Trump does not exist. Since the debate, the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee has repeatedly promoted calls from his supporters to jail his perceived political enemies for “treason” and other purported crimes.
On Sunday, Trump “ReTruthed” a post calling for former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) to face a “televised military tribunal” for her purported “treason.”
He also “ReTruthed” a post stating that 15 current or former lawmakers, including Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Vice President Mike Pence, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), “SHOULD BE GOING TO JAIL.”
Trump also “ReTruthed” a post urging him to “BRING DOWN THE ENTIRE SOROS FAMILY AND ALL THESE TREASONOUS TRAITORS THAT HE FUNDS” as part of a “COUP AGAINST AMERICA.”
And Trump “ReTruthed” a post describing Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the former president’s New York hush-money trial, as a “corrupt globalist judge” and called for Merchan to be “removed and charged.”
At a Friday rally, Trump also called for the release of rioters who had been prosecuted for storming the U.S. Capitol in response to his 2020 defeat, saying, “Free the J6 hostages now. They should free them now for what they’ve gone through.” The Associated Press also noted that “Trump repeated several of the false claims he made” during Thursday’s debate in his speech.
Pundits and journalists have spent the last eight years predicting Trump would change, or prematurely declaring that he had done so. But he is what he is — an unhinged demagogue with an authoritarian’s view of American institutions. No amount of wishful thinking from his right-wing media allies promoting a new, more disciplined Trump will change that.
Pro-Publica released its full unedited interview with Joe Biden from September:
In the wake of President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, his opponents and most major media organizations have pointed out that he has done few interviews that give the public an opportunity to hear him speak without a script or teleprompters.
Defend the facts. Support independent journalism by donating to ProPublica.Donate Now
ProPublica obtained a rare interview with Biden on Sept. 29, nine days before the Hur interviews began. We released the video, which was assembled from footage shot by five cameras, on Oct. 1. We edited out less than a minute of crosstalk and exchanges with the camera people, as is customary in such interviews.
Today, we are releasing the full, 21-minute interview, unedited as seen from the view of the single camera focused on Biden. We understand that this video captures a moment in time nine months ago and that it will not settle the ongoing arguments about the president’s acuity today. Still, we believe it is worth giving the public another chance to see one of Biden’s infrequent conversations with a reporter.
Here’s the press conference with Zelensky two weeks ago, He starts off on the teleprompter but then answers questions.
I don’t have an explanation for Biden’s performance at the debate. I know that elderly people can rather suddenly deteriorate or show signs of mental and physical fatigue rather abruptly. Maybe something specific has happened. I don’t know. But it’s clear that he isn’t some kind of vegetable that they’ve been hiding through his entire presidency. Maybe it comes and goes but it certainly isn’t constant.
I’m not sure that makes a difference as he and others assess whether he can continue. But I thought it was worth showing in any case.
In 1973 the Senate Watergate Committee uncovered a plan that had been hatched three years earlier by a man named Tom Charles Huston, a White House liaison to the Interagency Committee on Intelligence (ICI), a group chaired FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to monitor “left wing radicals.” The Huston Plan, as it was known, laid out detailed operations to burglarize the homes and conduct electronic surveillance of these co-called radicals and even detain anti-war protesters in camps to be created in western states. President Richard Nixon signed off on the plan only to rescind his approval a few days later under objections from Hoover himself.
It was one of a number of nefarious plots uncovered during the investigations, including the actual burglarizing of Pentagon Papers whistle blower Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, an order to bomb the Brooking s Institute and the Watergate burglary itself. The Huston Plan was one that was never carried out but went directly to the president who signed the order.
I bring this obscure bit of Watergate lore up because it was the Huston plan that precipitated a very important historical question posed to Nixon by David Frost in their interviews in 1977. Frost asked Nixon:
So, what in a sense you’re saying is that there are certain situations and the Huston plan or that part of it was one of them where the president can decide that it’s in the best interest of the nation or something and do something illegal.
Nixon famously replied, “well, when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal.”
That answer caused a national uproar. The mere idea of a president being above the law, especially one who had been driven from office and then pardoned for his crimes by his successor was outrageous.
Nixon further explained that position in some detail. He said,:
[I]f, for example, the president approves something … approves an action, ah … because of the national security or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of, ah … ah … significant magnitude … then … the president’s decision in that instance is one, ah … that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they’re in an impossible position.
Frost followed up asking if the “black-bag” jobs that were authorized in the Huston plan would have been made legal by his action. Nixon said:
Well … I think that we would … I think that we’re splitting hairs here. Burglaries per se are illegal. Let’s begin with that proposition. Second, when a burglary, as you have described a black-bag job, ah … when a burglary, ah … is one that is undertaken because of an expressed policy decided by the president, ah … in the interests of the national security … or in the interests of domestic tranquility … ah … when those interests are very, very high … and when the device will be used in a very limited and cautious manner and responsible manner … when it is undertaken, then, then that means that what would otherwise be technically illegal does not subject those who engage in such activity to criminal prosecution. . .
He went on to say that he wasn’t suggesting that a president is above the law just that during war time and “virtual revolution in certain concentrated areas at home” the president does have under the Constitution extraordinary powers.
It sounded completely daft at the time and reinforced most of the country’s belief that Nixon was a tyrannical monster who never should have been anywhere near the presidency. He sounded absolutely nuts. However, there was a small group of conservative legal thinkers who agreed with Nixon’s views of presidential power and thought it was a shame that the congress and the courts had taken upon themselves to usurp the imperial power of the presidency.
The fact is that the presidency had been accumulating power ever since WWII. One of the stalest political tropes around is that once attaining power institutions and leaders rarely give it up and it’s true. By the time Nixon came along to crudely abuse the presidency to punish his political enemies, the presidency was already hurtling out of control. And sadly the reforms put in place after Watergate didn’t hold for very long.
The Reagan administration set about evading and disarming them immediately and a whole generation of young legal Reagan revolutionaries adopted the view that Nixon was right and the presidency had been inappropriately emasculated. They pushed novel new legal concepts like the “unitary executive” theory which puts strong constraints on any congressional authority to grant independent authority to executive branch agencies.
Five members of the Supreme Court came up in that legal atmosphere. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were lawyers in the Reagan administration and Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were in the George W. Bush administration. Justice Amy Coney Barrett didn’t work directly for a president and notably dissented in part of the majority opinion but she did work on Bush v. Gore with Kavanaugh and Roberts. This was a fundamental belief among the elite legal minds of the conservative movement.
But according to NPR Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg, this isn’t just about ideology. They were also shaped by a long-standing gripe that their presidents had been unfairly constrained and harassed. It’s personal for them:
This is a really interesting insight from NPR's Nina Totenberg about the personal history of the Supreme Court conservatives and their perspectives on presidential power. pic.twitter.com/1nbaekvMe9
It is apparent that the Supreme Court majority, like the average MAGA voter and Donald Trump himself, is filled with bitter resentment. In fact, I would suggest that this entire unitary executive, imperial president philosophy stems from grievance over Richard Nixon being forced out of office all those years ago.
The ruling in Trump v. United States was the culmination of many years of careful, strategic planning by the right wing legal community. The six partisan justices in the majority played the long game and when they got the chance to implement their dream of an imperial presidency they did not hesitate. Not even the prospect of allowing a corrupt president unlike any other, including Richard Nixon, gave them pause.
Perhaps like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, they are counting on the Democrats to “take care of him” so they feel free to overlook his obvious criminality to advance their pet cause. Or maybe they are just grateful that his crimes gave them the opportunity to address the issue that’s animated them for so long. Either way, they have not only given the Donald Trump a get-out-of-jail free card they have weaponized the presidency knowing what criminals like Nixon and Trump are capable of. It’s not at all unfair to assume that’s exactly why they did it.
Maybe the problem with getting people to understand the threat posed by Donald Trump, by MAGA, and by Project 2025 is that it has no face.
In the wake of the Supreme Court making the president a de facto king, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts just gave it one. Yes, the “radical left” is the enemy MAGA will defeat “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” And if we resist?
The Biden-Harris campaign put a short clip on social media.
Brian Beutler, responds, “Incredible to me that this stuff only surfaces because the Biden campaign and media watchdog types tweet it out. To the extent it figures into campaign coverage at all (even pre-debate) it’s just ho-hum, in passing, nbd, etc.”
Actress Taraji P. Henson made a plea for paying attention during the BET Awards on Sunday. “The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!”
Project 2025 is a REAL threat to all of us. Every part of it is a wrecking ball for our lives, our families, and our rights. #BETAwardspic.twitter.com/D0ovXno6xo
No, it’s not a game, confirms Nicole Wallace. The mission statement for 2025 is “a full-scale reimagining of our entire system of government and who runs it … in Donald Trump’s image.”
Wallace: This is not a game and this is not a drill. Project 2025 is the plan that Donald Trump would implement on day one. It is a full-scale reimagining of our entire system of government in Donald Trump's vision. Axios reporting describes the plan as 'Trump's imperial… pic.twitter.com/66zPcsthFL
The big picture: Trump promises an unabashedly imperial presidency — one that would turn the Justice Department against critics, deport millions of people in the U.S. illegally, slap 10% tariffs on thousands of products, and fire perhaps tens of thousands of government staff deemed insufficiently loyal.
He’d stretch the powers of the presidency in ways not seen in our lifetime. He says this consistently and clearly — so it’s not conjecture.
As Democrats second-guess themselves and tear out their hair over Joe Biden’s debate performance, foreign adversaries and MAGA Republicans must be gleeful. Ruth Ben-Ghiat (“Stongmen”) reminds Twitter how autocrats think, “To ensure victory, it is optimal for democratic and progressive forces to be divided close to the election. They’ll have plenty of time to be together in jail.”
Piece of cake, thinks Kevin Roberts.
Only 1 in 4 Americans know about the Republican Party's plan for a Christofascist takeover of America called Project 2025. Here's a quick primer. Y'all know what to do. pic.twitter.com/a6xeHNobk3
The Maga movement hates you. They really hate you.
The tweet below may or may not be trolling from a “Heritage American,” home-schooling, Mises Institute reactionary, but these days it’s best to believe white men like this one mean what they write:
“Middle Americans are the ones that prioritize the maintenance of their way of life, desire to be left alone by the coastal elites, and identify much more with memories of folk and kin than with postwar America as an ideological engine of world transformation. They understand instinctually that America was a place and a people, an inherited social order, not a propositional nation.”
Despite the flowery language in the Declaration, no, our is not an egalitarian nation dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” These guys reject the country’s founding principles.
“We’re coming for the Civil Rights Act next, then the New Deal. We’re gonna repeal the 20th century.”
Believe them the first time. Neo-feudalism, women barefoot and pregnant, minorities in their place, and LGBTQ+ types back in the closet, that’s the ticket. They want to rule.
Over the course of a remarkable weekend, I saw the best minds of my boomer generation destroyed by madness — newspaper columnists and other big shots convinced they were cosplayers in a real-world episode of The West Wing, saving America by giving chief of staff Leo McGarry the best words to convince an ailing President Bartlet that it’s time to step down.
Democrats, many of them, are panicked over President Joe Biden’s debate performance on Thursday. This is one time Democrats really do seem in disarray. The press is having a field day, of course. But reporters are wary enough of being blamed for holding the drum while the “Biden must go” team beats it that Brian Stelter tells CNN it is no longer us (the press) but Democratic officials turning against Biden.
In the grocery store, online, on listservs, and in calls, “Biden can’t win” blares self-fulfilling prophecy in spite of the fact that, at least in the polls, there is no Biden free fall.
Three-quarters of US voters say the Democratic Party would have a better shot at holding the presidency in 2024 with someone other than President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. His approval rating also has hit a new low following a shaky performance in the first debate of this year’s presidential campaign.
In a matchup between the presumptive major-party nominees, voters nationwide favor former President Donald Trump over Biden by 6 points, 49% to 43%, identical to the results of CNN’s national poll on the presidential race in April, and consistent with the lead Trump has held in CNN polling back to last fall.
Philip Bump cautions not to put too much weight on that one poll, but that “there aren’t significant shifts in the favorability of either candidate. Biden and Trump are each viewed more favorably by members of their parties than they were in April.”
In the few conversations I’ve had and read on my lists, panicked Democrats insist Biden must go. But suppose Biden did step aside, then what? What’s the plan? Who’s the candidate? How would this work?
Essentially, they demand that Democrats replace something with nothing. They are freaked out over Biden but offer vaporware to replace him.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll found:
Vice President Kamala Harris, for example, trailed Trump by one percentage point, 42% to 43%, a difference that was well within the poll’s 3.5 percentage point margin of error, making Harris’ showing statistically just as strong as Biden’s.
CNN’s polling queried telephone respondents about several prominent Democrats.
Reuters reports that some 70% of Democrats in its poll had never heard of Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, an upcoming Democrat. Furthermore, “Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer sat behind Trump 36% to 41%, while Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker had 34% support compared to Trump’s 40%.”
The problem with such speculative polling is that replacing Biden with any of these Democrats, capable as they may be, might allow Trump to win in November on name recognition alone.
Meantime, Donald Trump’s verbal gaffs and “glitches” are legend. He blusters through them, changes course, or launches into weird anecdotes about sharks and windmills. Democrats need to get the conversation back onto Trump’s disqualifications for another term. Like 34 felony convictions, multiple indictments, and a childlike desire for godlike powers.
A lot has happened in the last week, and Bunch reviews much of it in a few paragraphs while attacking the “savvy” and the cult that is now the Republican Party:
Except maybe the dangerous cult is the more important crisis, especially when it carries a printed guide to dictatorship and holds six justices in its back pocket. To focus on the actual threat we are facing, I wish America’s top pundits would spend less time watching reruns of The West Wing and maybe pick up a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
The reality of what’s happening in July 2024 — that an authoritarian-minded president, with help from a politicized and unethical Supreme Court, is on track to lead a nation where all power is being vested in him, his MAGA movement, and the corporate polluters — is THE story, and Biden’s health is a subplot in that drama. The current president is walking slowly, but it’s the American Experiment that’s on a ventilator. Journalists aren’t doing their job: performing basic triage and focusing on the sickest patient in the room. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.
For my part, I haven’t heard this much magical thinking from the left since the last (New Age) Whole Life Expo I covered. People are seriously arguing that Biden has to go because he’s not up to doing the job after January 20, as if good governance in the next presidential term is what’s on the ballot and not the fate of our nation. If Trump wins on November 5, we’re a dictatorship on Jan. 20. And right now, Biden is still the best positioned to prevent that.
As I said yesterday, get me an alternate candidate and a plan and we’ll talk.
You know what they say: “They always come in threes.”
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for film buffs who grew up in the “New Hollywood” era. First, Donald Sutherland. Then Martin Mull. And now, as I’m just learning this evening:
It's an overused phrase, but the death of Robert Towne is truly the end of an era. "Chinatown," "The Last Detail," the great closing "Godfather" scene, he was one of the very best. Just so sad to see him go. https://t.co/710zGRZaPW
His life, like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic, & entirely originally. He gave me the gift of “Shampoo”. He gave all of us the gift of his words & his films. There isn’t another like him. There won’t be again.
The gift of his words, indeed. Although, it’s possible that his true gift was gleaning exactly what was better left unsaid. As he once observed: “Good dialogue illuminates what people are not saying.” Quality, not quantity.
A quick refresh on his credits reveals an impressive number of films of note on which he was “uncredited” for his contributions (Drive, He Said, Cisco Pike, The Godfather, The Parallax View, The Missouri Breaks, Marathon Man, et. al.) much less the classics that he is most well-known for.
It’s difficult for me to come up with adequate words to honor such a wordsmith, so I think I’ll follow his sage advice by not getting too flowery. Here are my top recommendations:
The Last Detail – Hal Ashby’s 1973 comedy-drama set the bar pretty high for all “buddy films” to follow (and to this day, few can touch it). Jack Nicholson heads a superb cast, as “Bad-Ass” Buddusky, a career Navy man who is assigned (along with a fellow Shore Patrol officer, played by Otis Young) to escort a first-time offender (Randy Quaid) to the brig in Portsmouth. Chagrined to learn that the hapless young swabbie has been handed an overly-harsh sentence for a relatively petty crime, Buddusky decides that they should at least show “the kid” a good time on his way to the clink (much to his fellow SP’s consternation). Episodic “road movie” misadventures ensue.
Don’t expect a Hollywood-style “wacky” comedy; as he did in all of his films, Ashby keeps it real. The suitably briny dialog was adapted by Robert Towne from Daryl Ponicsan’s novel; and affords Nicholson some of his most iconic line readings (“I AM the motherfucking shore patrol, motherfucker!”). Nicholson and Towne were teamed up again the following year via Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.
Chinatown – There are many Deep Thoughts that I have gleaned over the years via repeated viewings of Roman Polanski’s 1974 “sunshine noir”.
Here are my top 3:
1. Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water.
2. Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.
3. You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but, believe me, you don’t.
Of course, I’ve also learned that if you put together a great director (Polanski), a killer screenplay (by Robert Towne), two lead actors at the top of their game (Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway), an ace cinematographer (John A. Alonzo) and top it off with a perfect music score (by Jerry Goldsmith), you’ll likely produce a film that deserves to be called a “classic”, in every sense of the word.
The Parallax View – Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 “conspiracy a-go-go” thriller stars Warren Beatty, who delivers an excellent performance as a maverick print journalist investigating a suspicious string of untimely demises that befall witnesses to a U.S. senator’s assassination in a restaurant atop the Space Needle. This puts him on a trail that leads to an enigmatic agency called the Parallax Corporation.
The supporting cast includes Hume Cronyn, William Daniels and Paula Prentiss. Nice work by cinematographer Gordon Willis (aka “the prince of darkness”), who sustains the foreboding, claustrophobic mood of the piece with his masterful use of light and shadow.
The screenplay is by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr. (based on the 1970 novel by Loren Singer, with a non-credited rewrite by Robert Towne). The narrative contains obvious allusions to the JFK assassination, and (in retrospect) reflects the political paranoia of the Nixon era (perhaps this was serendipity, as the full implications of the Watergate scandal were not yet in the rear view mirror while the film was in production).
The Yakuza – Robert Mitchum and Ken Takakura are excellent in this complex culture clash/gangster drama. DIrector Sidney Pollack had major writing talent on board-Robert Towne and Paul Schrader (who scripted from a story idea by Schrader’s brother Leonard).
Shampoo – Sex, politics, and the shallow SoCal lifestyle are mercilessly skewered in Hal Ashby’s classic 1975 satire. Warren Beatty (who co-scripted with Robert Towne) plays a restless, over-sexed hairdresser with commitment issues regarding the three major women in his life (excellent performances from Lee Grant, Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie).
Beatty allegedly based his character of “George” on his close friend, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring (one of the victims of the infamous 1969 Tate-LaBianca slayings).
This was one of the first films to satirize the 1960s zeitgeist with some degree of historical detachment. The late great cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs infuses the L.A. backdrop with a gauziness that appropriately mirrors the protagonist’s fuzzy way of dealing with adult responsibilities.
Personal Best – When this film was released, there was so much ado over brief love scenes between Mariel Hemingway and co-star Patrice Donnelly that many failed to notice that it was one of the most realistic, empowering portrayals of female athletes to date. Writer-director Robert Towne did his homework; he spent time observing Olympic track stars at work and play. The women are shown to be just as tough and competitive as their male counterparts; Hemingway and (real-life pentathlete) Donnelly give fearless performances. Scott Glenn is excellent as a hard-driving coach.
Tough Guys Don’t Dance – If “offbeat noir” is your thing, this is your kind of film. Ryan O’Neal plays an inscrutable ex-con with a conniving “black widow” of a wife, who experiences five “really bad days” in a row, involving drugs, blackmail and murder. Due to temporary amnesia, however, he’s not sure of his own complicity (O’Neal begins each day by writing the date on his bathroom mirror with shaving cream-keep in mind, this film precedes Memento by 13 years.)
Noir icon Lawrence Tierny (cast here 5 years before Tarantino tapped him for Reservoir Dogs) is priceless as O’Neal’s estranged father, who is helping him sort out events (it’s worth the price of admission when Tierny barks “I just deep-sixed two heads!”).
Equally notable is a deliciously demented performance by B-movie trouper Wings Hauser as the hilariously named Captain Alvin Luther Regency. Norman Mailer’s “lack” of direction has been duly noted over the years, but his minimalist style works. While he was not credited, Robert Towne contributed to the script. The film has a David Lynch vibe at times (which could be due to the fact that Isabella Rossellini co-stars, and the soundtrack was composed by Lynch stalwart Angelo Badalamenti).
Also recommended:
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (under a pseudonym)
The Two Jakes
The Firm
Tequila Sunrise (also directed)
Without Limits (also directed)
One more thing…
Towne may not have written the entire screenplay, but the scene he contributed to The Godfather is unforgettable and infinitely quotable:
I’m seeing a lot of discussion about whether or not the Democrats should use this Court’s extreme decisions as a primary issue in the fall since there’s not a lot we can do about it. I say yes. It’s all part of the far-right power grab that includes Trump and Project 2025. Of course they must run on it.
Obviously, wanting to focus attention on something doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. And for those ready to pounce: No, this is irrespective of who is at the top of the Democratic ticket. The obvious fact is that any day Democrats are talking about Joe Biden’s age is a wasted, lost day. What’s more relevant is that this is not and would not be changing the subject. It is the subject. It’s the actual subject that the campaign and election are about.
Donald Trump threatens the entire existence of the American republic. He is able to do this because the Supreme Court he created is assisting him in doing so. It is a corrupt Court. It overturned a central right for half of our population. It routinely mixes and matches rationales, jurisprudences, logics to arrive at the end point of transforming America into the justices’ extremist vision. We’ve heard that yesterday’s decision was a terrible decision, an extremist decision, that it changes the American experiment fundamentally. No disagreement with any of those points. Most importantly, in my mind, it’s a fake decision. Yes, it will now be controlling within the federal courts. But it doesn’t change the constitution any more than a foreign army occupying New England would make Massachusetts no longer part of the United States. That may seem like a jarring analogy. But it’s the only kind that allows us to properly view and react to this Supreme Court.
The rationale for the decision yesterday has literally no basis whatsoever in the U.S. Constitution. To capture this, comparing it to the earlier, unanimous appellate court decision in the contrary direction is revealing. The argument amounts to: separation of powers, yada. That’s it.
The advantage we can all take from the Dobbs decision is that it takes issues and actions that can seem technical, esoteric, removed from daily life and plants it squarely in the center of daily life. The Supreme Court is hellbent on taking away our freedoms and our liberty? Yes, really. Dobbs, in addition to being a huge deal itself, anchors the larger assault in everyone’s daily lived reality. That’s the way to see this and argue it to the public: the same out-of-control Court, which Donald Trump created and which ended abortion rights, now wants to change the constitution itself to help Donald Trump commit more crimes.
The election is about Donald Trump and the Supreme Court, the two forces working to overthrow the American republic. That’s the subject. It’s not Joe Biden. So both substantively and politically it makes all the sense in the world. The Court has done us all the favor of not always being as aware as it might be of the political and electoral dimensions of the justices’ bad acts. Yesterday’s ruling is a helpful if disastrous reminder of what the election is really about.
I could not agree more. At some point we are going to know if Biden is staying in or not and while the press will dog him relentlessly if he does, the race will reset to focus on Trump again. He will make sure of it. This is the message or at least the primary message. The court ‘s decision is the most far-reaching wrong turn the court has taken probably since Dred Scott. They’ve redefined the presidency as a time-limited (maybe…) dictatorship. The stakes in this campaign were always high. Now they’re truly existential.
The 2024 election is effectively an up-or-down vote on Constitutional democracy. If Trump loses, the question of what abuses the Supreme Court allows him to do in office becomes moot, and cases will eventually finish litigating the rules and start trying the crimes. The American people asserting their support for the Constitution in the face of such a threat will invigorate pro-democracy forces, and provide opportunities for renewal.
