The cross-section of the political and media worlds is full of small time hustlers and con-artists. But Breitbart is an original. Mike Stark got a chance to talk to him for quite a while:
Also read Joan Walsh’s latest on Breitbart. It’s curiouser and curiouser. It would appear that he’s staging a public nervous breakdown, which leads me to wonder if he now thinks he’s doing some kind of Borat thing too. Very weird.
Just one note: Breitbart says repeatedly that it doesn’t matter that the mainstream media believed that O’Keefe wore that stupid costume in the ACORN offices, but it certainly does. They made it appear that the ACORN workers were so stupid that they couldn’t see through such an obviously ridiculous costume, which further played into O’Keefe’s disgusting racist subtext. And unlike Sasha Baron Cohen, whose movie Borat Brietbart repeatedly compares to the ACORN vids, O’Keefe didn’t actually don the costume and the persona to punk the ACORN workers — he faked it afterward. He didn’t have the guts to actually wear that costume in an ACORN office because he knew he didn’t have the talent to fool even one person. So he cheated. You don’t get to take credit for fooling people if you put it together in the editing room.
The truly shocking thing about all of this is that in the age of Obama, the major media and the US congress were so willing to take such nonsense at face value.
Politico has an adorable human interest story this morning featuring a fun odd couple, Rahm Emmanuel and Lindsey Graham, two “honorable” adversaries who are able to reach across the partisan divide and make a deal. We’d heard a little bit about this before, but this article dishes the dirt.
[A}t a time when voters are clamoring for bipartisan cooperation in Washington, this unlikely pairing of White House chief of staff and Southern senator represents one of the highest-level conduits between the polarized political parties. Graham has had more in-person meetings with Emanuel than any other Republican lawmaker, roughly eight or 10 since Obama took office, aides said. The two men also talk regularly by phone.
Fascinating. A little mutual back-scratching, a little good faith, a little give and a little take can often lead to a win-win for both sides. It’s a little bit unusual for them to use such a method to deal with human rights, however:
The main topic these days is Guantanamo Bay — how to close the military prison on the U.S. Navy base there. But their conversations are broader than that, embracing a wide-ranging deal pitched by Graham that would shut down the prison; provide funding to move detainees to Thomson, Ill.; keep the Sept. 11 trials out of civilian courts; and create broad new powers to hold terror suspects indefinitely.
So we have one Senator and the president’s factotum splitting the difference between ripping up the constitution and urinating all over the bill of rights. Don’t you love bipartisanship?
This isn’t unprecedented, of course. The Dred Scott decision was a similar sort of compromise and look how well that turned out. It’s a little unusual to have such things decided via back door deal but that’s probably for the best. The f*cking retards get all upset when you try to do this stuff above board, so best to just take care of the issue with a little chit-chat between pals over lattes.
Read through the ‘This Week’ Transcript. It’s truly terrifying. You try to figure out why anybody thinks it’s a good idea for these people to have the jobs that they do–and you can’t:
.. WILL: Two things. First of all, Sam, you want the president to be Ulysses Grant, who won the war by his wonderful indifference to his own casualties, and I think some members in the Senate and in the House would not approve of that.
DONALDSON: Did I not just say that they may lose some seats? Were you listening?
WILL: By the millions. Now — second, now, Paul says that, in fact, the Republicans have no ideas. They do, cross-selling across state lines, tort reforms, all those. Just a second, Paul. Then you say they’re telling whoppers. That was your view about Lamar Alexander when he said, for millions of Americans, premiums will go up. You said in the next sentence in your column, I guess you could say he wasn’t technically lying, because the Congressional Budget Office says that’s true.
KRUGMAN: No, it’s not what it says…. Can I explain? This is…
WILL: Wait. Let me — let me set the predicate here, because you then go on and say the Senate does say the average premiums would go up, but people would be getting better premiums.
KRUGMAN: Look, let me explain what happens, because you actually have to read the CBO report…. [T]he CBO report tells you… that… what the bill will do is bring a lot of people who are uninsured, who are currently young and therefore relatively low cost, into the risk pool, which will actually bring premiums down a little bit. It will also… lead a lot of people to get better insurance… people who are currently underinsured, who have insurance policies that are paper thin and don’t actually protect you in a crisis, will… get… full coverage. That makes the average payments go up, but it does not mean that people who currently have good coverage under their policies will pay more…. [T]hey’ll end up paying a little bit less.
WILL: One question. If the government came to you and said, “Professor Krugman, you have a car. We’re going to compel you to buy a more expensive car,” but it’s not really more expensive, because it’s a better car, wouldn’t you tell them to get off your land?
Will was really on this week-end. This one was particularly interesting in its total unresponsiveness:
VARGAS: I do want to get to one other issue related to this health care bill, which is the language on abortion, because it almost died in the House, the health care bill, because of abortion. There was the Stupak amendment, which attached highly restrictive language to when abortions could be covered, and there — Bart Stupak says this is unacceptable, this current bill, as Obama has proposed it, and he says 20 other members of the House will have problems with it, too. Will abortion kill this thing in the end?
WILL: Well, Alan Frumin’s 15 minutes of fame have arrived. He is the hitherto obscure, but soon to be quite famous parliamentarian of the Senate, and it will be his job to rule on what can and cannot be passed under reconciliation. That is, is it a budgetary-related thing? You can argue about a great many things in the health care bill. Can you say that’s budget-related? No one thinks you can change the abortion language under reconciliation.
Obviously Will was riffing because he didn’t have any clue about this issue and it was gibberish.
The thing went downhill from there with poor Krugman trying to inject sanity, but being thwarted by Roberts’ fatuous non sequitors:
WILL: Twenty years from now, the country is going to be spending a larger portion of its GDP on health care than it is now for three reasons. We’re getting older, and as we age, we get more chronic diseases that interact with one another. Second, we’re getting richer; we can afford to buy more medicine. And, third, medicine is becoming more competent. Therefore, we’re going to spend more on health care.
KRUGMAN: But there’s a…
(DeLong: What Paul wanted to say here was: “There is a big difference between, twenty years from now, spending 20% of GDP on health care with universal coverage and spending 25% of GDP on health care with one-quarter of the non-elderly population uninsured and getting substandard coverage.)
ROBERTS: The other thing is, you know, the health care industry is the biggest employer in most of our cities now. So when — when the speaker talks about a job creation bill…
VARGAS: A jobs bill, exactly.
It wound up with this sad, pathetic, predictable conclusion:
VARGAS: And then, of course, this weekend, we have a brand-new White House social secretary appointed to replace Desiree Rogers, a close friend of the Obamas who is exiting after a bumpy tenure, I would say. Cokie, you spoke with her. She — she was highly criticized after the Obamas’ first state dinner in which she arrived, looking absolutely gorgeous, but in what some people later said was far too fancy a dress, but most importantly, that was the state dinner that was crashed by the Salahis, who walked in without an invitation when the social secretary’s office didn’t have people manning the security sites.
ROBERTS: Well, I talked to — I did talk to her, Desiree, yesterday at length. She is from my home city of New Orleans and fellow Sacred Heart girl.
DONALDSON: What’s the name of the city?
ROBERTS: New Orleans.
DONALDSON: I love to hear her say it.
ROBERTS: But — and she has lots of good explanations about that dinner. And basically, the bottom line is, it’s the Secret Service. But she — but her — her major point is — and I — and I completely take this — is that she — she put on 330 events at the White House last year and did open the building to all kinds of people who had not been there before. And they had wonderful music days of all kinds of music, where you had during the day, the musicians would work with kids in Washington and teach them things before coming on at night.
DONALDSON: Cokie, that’s irrelevant.
ROBERTS: Well, I don’t think it’s irrelevant.
DONALDSON: I mean, it’s irrelevant. People who work for the president understand or should understand their place, which is to be spear-carriers. There are two stars in anyone’s White House, the president and the president’s spouse. After that, this passion for anonymity that once was a hallmark of people who worked for a president, has been lost. She wanted to be a star herself…
ROBERTS: And it’s been lost. Look at all the people who work for presidents and then go out and write books about them.
DONALDSON: I think you’re right.
VARGAS: Do you think she was — did she quit, or was she asked to leave?
DONALDSON: She was asked to.
ROBERTS: She says she quit.
DONALDSON: Oh, well…
ROBERTS: And she certainly has lots…
DONALDSON: And to spend more time with your family.
ROBERTS: No, no, to go into the corporate sector and make some money, where she’ll make a lot of — she’ll do fine.
DONALDSON: Good luck to her. I don’t wish her ill.
DONALDSON: It’s just that she didn’t understand…
ROBERTS: She’ll do very well.
DONALDSON: … she was not a star in the sense that she should make herself prominent.
VARGAS: George?
WILL: It is axiomatic that when there’s no penalty for failure, failure proliferates. She failed conspicuously in her one great challenge, which was the first state dinner, and she’s gone. If she’s gone because she failed, that’s a healthy sign.
VARGAS: The big question, of course, because she was one of that close contingent of Chicago friends is whether or not she’s just the first to leave or if we’ll see other…
ROBERTS: But you’ll see people leave.
ROBERTS: I mean, that’s what happens. It’s a perfectly normal thing that happens in administration, is that people come, and they come in at the beginning, and then it’s time to — to go back to life.
KRUGMAN: Can I say that 20 million Americans unemployed, the fact that we’re worrying about the status of the White House social secretary…
VARGAS: It’s our light way to end, Paul.
DONALDSON: Paul, welcome to Washington.
What can you say to this? The system is broken and corrupt and this is one of the major reasons why.
It’s mind-boggling that George Will can say this without being struck by lightning right there at the table, but he said it without even the slightest shred of irony or self awareness:
It is axiomatic that when there’s no penalty for failure, failure proliferates. She failed conspicuously in her one great challenge, which was the first state dinner, and she’s gone. If she’s gone because she failed, that’s a healthy sign.
It seems that I’m just documenting the atrocities today, but there are just so many.Courtesy Sadly No, we have Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn yukking it up over poor losers who don’t have enough money for dentures:
Louise Slaughter: I even had one constituent, you will not believe this, and I know you won’t, but it’s true. Her sister died, this poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister’s teeth.
[Hugh Hewitt]: Mark Steyn…(laughing)
[Mark Steyn]: (laughing) That’s good. That’s good for the environment, isn’t it?
HH: (laughing)
MS: I’m in favor of that. If we can’t at least, if we can’t reduce our carbon footprint, at least we should be able to reduce our mastication mouth print by recycling dentures. I mean, this gets to the heart of why this is…is second-hand dentures, which I believe was the fourth chorus of that Barbra Streisand song, for those with long memories, but is second-hand dentures a huge problem in the United States? What are the number of people going around? There’s 300 million people here. Are 20 million going around with second-hand dentures? Are 5 million going around with second-hand dentures? The idea that you need comprehensive national health care for, to solve this particular lady’s second-hand denture crisis, I think is…
HH: But Mark, we’ve only got 15 seconds. It happened again and again. When the Democrats talked, you just looked the screen and said, “oh my God, they’re running the country.”
MS: (laughing)
HH: Oh my God, they’re running…Mark Steyn, always a pleasure … Second-hand dentures, the chopper stopper, America.
The right wing has gotten quite a laugh out of this story. And maybe it really is just ridiculous leftwing political correctness to feel sorry for people who have problems with the medical system. But I’m not sure this works, even for their nasty, juvenile audiences. It just feels off, even for them.
But hey, Limbaugh made fun of Michael J. Fox and they all had a good laugh over over Graeme Frost, so being roaring assholes about sick people hasn’t hurt them in the past. But these are tough times and it might be a little more dissonant now.
Matthews: Welcome back. On Friday George W. Bush said his memoir comes out this November. That will be two years since Barack Obama’s victory which some say was a repudiation of the Bush years and that brings us to this question. Will there be George W. Bush nostalgia this November when his book comes out? Kelly?
O’Donnell: Well every president gets a bit of that and I think the more George Bush is not visible, is not talking now; the more there will be interest in what he had to say.
Matthews: Will there be nostalgia?
O’Donnell: For some there will be.
Matthews: Okay, David Ignatius…
Ignatius: It depends on large part on where things are in Iraq. If after the election next month Iraq looks stable a lot of people are going to say, you know we weren’t comfortable with it at the time but George Bush was right.
Matthews: Kathleen, Bush nostalgia for the young (inaudible).
Parker: I think David makes an excellent point that will be the key to whether there’s any nostalgia, but you know George Bush has conducted himself awfully nobly since he left office in terms of hanging back…
Duffy: Compared to Cheney…
Parker: Yeah, well compared to Cheney as Chris would say… (crosstalk) I think he’d really appreciate that and you know there’s admiration for certain things about him.
Matthews: Yeah.
Parker: …that you know transcend his accomplishments.
Matthews: So there will be nostalgia?
Parker: Well, yeah.
Matthews: Okay.
Duffy: Sure as long as everyone’s competing memoirs don’t open up all the debates we’ve been talking about and they are all coming out. But I think these things get better with time.
Matthews: I think he needs a little more time to be away before he gets any, gets the David McCullough treatment.
It’s an article of faith among the Villagers that Bush will eventually be vindicated as Truman was. They have to rationalize their fanboy hero worship to themselves somehow.
George Packer watched the Glenn Beck speech at CPAC and helpfully synthesized it for people who erroneously assumed he was speaking in a foreign tongue. (Foreign planet, that is.) In case you were wondering, he has met the enemy and he is … you.
Watching Beck’s speech to CPAC, I could imagine his appeal for Mrs. Stout. He’s friendly, he has an open face and a chubby body, he’s far from perfect-looking, he does a kind of stand-up comedy, and he talks openly, lugubriously, about his alcoholism and other past failings. “I was living in a little one-room apartment. I’d lost my family, everything was spiraling out of control. I was on the fetal position of my apartment. Am I going to die or I’m going to figure it out and live.” He’s self-educated and proud of it—he spent a semester in college before dropping out for financial reasons, but he still reads voraciously until two or three in the morning. “When did it become a something of shame or ridicule to be a self-made man in America?” And now he’s become a huge success. He gets choked up and pulls out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his face. He’s an inspiration for Mrs. Stout and the country. If I could get up off the floor, he tells his audience, so can America.
Beck puts on reading glasses, walks over to a blackboard that’s been wheeled onstage, and pretends to know things about American history that the educated people would keep from you. For example, the postwar recession of 1919-20 was worse than the Great Depression, which was only great “because of all the Progressive ideas to cure it.” He writes the word “Progressivism” on the blackboard. Progressivism is the main theme of his speech, the “cancer” that’s killing America, that has to be eradicated because it cannot coexist with the Constitution. Progressivism is Marxism and utopian Socialism. Did you know that Communists called themselves Progressives in the nineteen-thirties? To prove it, Beck reads from a 1938 Communist pamphlet that’s he’s just received from a fan, “Progress and Democracy in Rhode Island.” But the worst kind of Progressive was Woodrow Wilson. “I have to tell you, I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me” are Beck’s first words when he comes to the microphone. He holds Wilson responsible for the “progressive” income tax and for Hitler, who was created by the Versailles Treaty, which Wilson negotiated. And Wilson gave us Prohibition, which was the beginning of the campaign for health-care reform. Beck spreads his contempt around both parties—he hates T.R., too, whose Bull Moose Party was also called the Progressive Party (take that, McCain). Coolidge, though, was a great President—so great that Harding’s death must have been an act of God. Then came Hoover, another Progressive, who raised taxes and increased spending, which led to the Great Depression—which was not as great as Wilson’s.
So the bipartisan enemy is the Progressive President—the educated and condescending leader who believes that he can improve life in America. There’s one in the White House now, of course. Progressivism is unconstitutional. The only purpose of the U.S. government, according to the Constitution, “is to save us from bad guys.” (Forget about promoting the general welfare and creating a more perfect union.) “And right now the government looks at the American people as the bad guys.” Beck articulates and answers Mrs. Stout’s own resentments, her sense of siege, of being buffeted by change and powerful, far-off forces, of being despised and left behind. “I’m tired of feeling like a freak in America, and I know so many other people are as well,” he says. This year of resentment is his and hers.
Now that the liberal intelligentsia are finally paying attention to the ravings of the right, it’s interesting that while everyone gets the paranoid strain stuff, they don’t see how Beck has also appropriated both the old time religion delivery and the New Age language of the recovery movement. His schtick isn’t taken literally, it’s experienced emotionally, more as a religious experience or a self-help retreat than a political speech.
Unfortunately, the main point of his sermons and testimony does seep into the consciousness of those who hear him, especially that unpleasantness about progressives being cancer and creating Hitler. They absorb that deep into the psyches as the cause of their primal despair.
This is an interesting article about how the Republicans have become the party of George Wallace (as opposed to Rockefeller, Goldwater and Reagan.) I agree with almost all of it. But the writer, Jonathan Rausch, perversely insists that race has nothing to do with it, which strikes me a ludicrous considering the fact that Wallace’s right wing was based on race resentment and his politics are all the rage just as we have elected our first black president. I suppose that could be unrelated, but I think it’s a long shot.
Still, I would grant that many of the tea partiers don’t see themselves as racially motivated and don’t realize that their anti-government, anti-tax movement is predicated on the belief that it’s wrong to take money from good, hard-working Real Americans and give it to the undeserving welfare queens. It’s pretty abstract at this point, although there are more than a few who see it exactly for what it is.
But Rausch’s observation about Wallace’s right wing populism is exactly correct:
[L]ike Wallace and his supporters 40 years ago, today’s conservative populists are long on anger and short on coherence. For Wallace, small-government rhetoric was a trope, not a workable agenda. The same is true of his Republican heirs today, who insist that spending cuts alone, without tax increases, will restore fiscal balance but who have not proposed anywhere near enough spending cuts, primarily because they can’t.
[…]
It does seem serious about pandering to cultural resentment. Speaking to a conservative conference in February, Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota and a possible 2012 Republican presidential contender, denounced “elites” who “hang out at… Chablis-drinking, Brie-eating parties in San Francisco” and who look down on conservatives as “bumpkins.” The only substantial difference from Wallace’s resentful rhetoric is that Wallace did it much better (“They’ve called us rednecks…. Well, we’re going to show, there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country!”). When Pawlenty called on the crowd to “take a nine iron and smash the window out of Big Government in this country,” you knew you were deep into Wallace territory.
I am not saying that today’s Republicans are a bunch of Wallace clones. Or that everything Wallace did or said was wrong, or that Republicans should shun all of his themes just because he used them. I am saying three things.
First, with the important exception of race, not one of Wallace’s central themes, from his bristling nationalism and his court-bashing to his anti-intellectualism and his aggressive provincialism, would seem out of place at any major Republican gathering today.
Second, and again leaving race aside, any Republican politician who publicly renounced the Wallace playbook would be finished as a national leader.
Third, by becoming George Wallace’s party, the GOP is abandoning rather than embracing conservatism, and it is thereby mortgaging both its integrity and its political future. Wallaceism was not sufficiently mainstream or coherent to sustain a national party in 1968, and the same is true today.
Conservatism is wary of extremism and rage and anti-intellectualism, of demagoguery and incoherent revolutionary rhetoric. Wallace was a right-wing populist, not a conservative. The rise of his brand of pseudo-conservatism in Republican circles should alarm anyone who cares about the genuine article.
I’m tempted to point out that this is what happens to pseudo-Straussians who empower the rubes and then come to find out that they can’t control them, but that would assume they aren’t still controlling them. And, of course, they are.
This is from the article in today’s NY Times profiling a tea party leader from Washington:
Ms. Carender’s first rally drew only 120 people. A week later, she had 300, and six weeks later, 1,200 people gathered for a Tax Day Tea Party. Last month, she was among about 60 Tea Party leaders flown to Washington to be trained in election activism by FreedomWorks, the conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey, the former House Republican leader.
And, as usual, the story fails to mention the additional “help” provided by corporate owned right wing Fox News and corporate owned right-wing radio.
The tea parties may be a George Wallace phenomenon, but it is a huge mistake to conclude that conservatives are upset by it. They consider them useful idiots, and very useful they are. By concentrating their fire on the anti-government side of the populist critique, they are helping the owners of America get their groove back. The big question is where the anti-business side of the populist critique is?
By the way, the person profiled in that NY Times article perfectly illustrates Rausch’s point:
In a video viewed 68,000 times on YouTube, she confronted Representative Norm Dicks, Democrat of Washington, at a town-hall-style meeting on health care. “If you believe that it is absolutely moral to take my money and give it to someone else based on their supposed needs,” she said, waving a $20 bill to boos and cheers, “then you come and take this $20 and use it as a down payment on this health care plan.”
Ms. Carender is less certain when it comes to explaining, for instance, how to cut the deficit without cutting Medicaid and Medicare.
“Well,” she said, thinking for a long time and then sighing. “Let’s see. Some days I’m very Randian. I feel like there shouldn’t be any of those programs, that it should all be charitable organizations. Sometimes I think, well, maybe it really should be just state, and there should be no federal part in it at all. I bounce around in my solutions to the problem.”
We’ve heard that Chris Dodd plan agrees to tank the proposal an independent Consumer protection Agency, but Mother Jones is the first to print it. Nick Bauman reports:
This is the document’s top-line summary:
Create a [Bureau of Financial Protection] inside of Treasury with a Presidentially-appointed director; a dedicated budget (through assessments on large banks, non-banks, and with the Fed making up the shortfall); autonomous rule-writing authority with the regulations to apply across-the-board to all entities offering financial services or products; and examination and enforcement authority for large banks and mortgage companies, small banks in a back-up capacity, and other non-banks on a risk basis, as described below. The independent agency proposal would be dropped.
As Andy explained Saturday afternoon, Dodd’s decision to move financial protection inside an existing agency is an effort to gain Republican votes for financial reform. But it’s unclear whether either of the Republicans Dodd has negotiated with to date—Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Al.) and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.)—will support the new plan. There hasn’t been any hint of GOP backing for the proposal in newspaper articles on Dodd’s leaked plan.
I doubt that this had anything to do with Republicans. They know they won’t get their support. This is who Dodd is serving:
Mr. Dimon said Thursday at the Investor Day conference that he supported certain new regulations to secure the financial system, but not all of them. He said JPMorgan had always supported the creation of a systemic risk regulator, which would be controlled by the Federal Reserve, to monitor the largest and most interconnected banks in the nation.
He disagreed with one proposal to create a separate agency devoted to consumer protection, which would regulate a whole host of activities from mortgages to credit cards.
“We want better consumer protection; we just don’t want a new agency. We think it should be done by the O.C.C. and the Fed,” Mr. Dimon said, referring to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
“Yes, you can say they didn’t do a great job, but they are professional people,” he said. The elegant solution is for Congress to tell them do a better job.”
Mr. Dimon may get his wish, thanks to some persuasive lobbyists in Washington. Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said last month that he might drop demands for a new agency after pushing for its creation.
The Treasury has the same kind of “professional” people — Geithner came from the Fed and Hank Paulson came from Goldman Sachs. I think Dimon will agree that they are trustworthy for his purposes.
The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. -Douglas Adams
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars. -Charles Darwin
I cannot persuade myself that it has been 50 years since anyone has bothered to make a film in which naturalist Charles Darwin’s seminal treatise on the theory of evolution, On the Origin of Species, plays any kind of significant role; but five long decades have indeed elapsed between Stanley Kramer’s intelligent and absorbing 1960 courtroom drama, Inherit the Wind (based on the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial”) and the new Darwin biopic, Creation. Perhaps this indicates that Hollywood itself has not evolved much, nu?
Perhaps I judge too harshly. After all, “Hollywood” has little to do with this particular film, as it was developed by BBC Films and the UK Film Council. The problem, it would seem, stems from U.S. distributors, none of whom initially appeared willing to touch the movie with a 10-foot pole following its debut at the Toronto International Festival last year. Maybe it had something to do with that peculiarly ‘murcan mindset that trucks with “reviews” like this one, posted on Movieguide.org., which states (among other things):
Manure, nicely wrapped with a bow, is still manure. A lie that there is no God and that somehow we have randomly shown up here on Earth as an accident is still a lie, even if it’s well written and acted.
Minds like steel traps. Okay, I do realize they are a staunchly Christian-oriented website, and are certainly entitled to their own opinions. At any rate…thank Ardi that someone eventually picked it up, because the film has now found limited release here in the states.
Although Jon Amiel’s film (written by John Colee and Randal Keynes) leans more toward drawing-room costume melodrama, focusing on Darwin’s family life-as opposed to, say, an adventure of discovery recounting the five-year mission of the HMS Beagle to boldly go where no God-fearing Christian had gone before in the interest of advancing earth and animal science, those who appreciate (to paraphrase my movie critic brethren over at Movieguide.org) thoughtful writing and fine acting…should not be disappointed.
Real-life married couple Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly play husband Charles and wife Emma Darwin, respectively. The story covers Darwin’s mid-life; beginning several years after his voyage on the Beagle and culminating on the eve of the publication of his most famous book. Darwin is not in a very healthy state when we are introduced to him; he suffers from a variety of stress-related maladies. Aside from the pressure he is under from peers like botanist/explorer Joseph Hooker (Benedict Cumberbatch) to organize 20 years worth of scientific notes and journals into his soon to be legendary tome (especially after Alfred Russell Wallace beats him to the punch with his brief 1858 essay on natural selection), he is literally sick with grief over the death of his beloved daughter Anna, who died at age 10 from illness. He is tortured with guilt over her death; he suspects Anna’s weak immune system to be the result of inbreeding (his wife was also his first cousin). Indeed, this was a tragic and ironic epiphany for the man whose name would become the most synonymous with the groundbreaking theories on evolution and natural selection.
Darwin also wrestles with a two-pronged crisis of faith. On the one hand, his inconsolable grief over the cosmic cruelty of a ten year old dying of complications from what should only have been a simple summer chill has distanced him even further from the idea of a benevolent creator (a confirmation in his heart of what the cool logic of his scientific mind has already been telling him). Then, there is the matter of the philosophical chasm between his science-based understanding of all creatures great and small, and the religious views held by his wife (whom he loves dearly). He continues his work, but hovers on the verge of a nervous breakdown, which distances him further from Emma and his surviving children (the Darwins eventually had ten, although only five are depicted in the film). He rejects counseling from long time family minister and friend Reverend Innes (Jeremy Northam), alienating him as well. Darwin’s subsequent journey to both recovering his well-being and finding the balance between commitment to his scientific life’s work and loving devotion to his wife and children is very movingly told.
Interestingly, Bettany had a bit of a “warm-up” for this role back in 2003, when he played the ship surgeon and naturalist Dr. Stephen Maturin, in Peter Weir’s Master and Commander – The Far Side of the World. He delivers a very strong performance here, and if you are familiar with some of the Daguerreotype portraits of Darwin taken in his younger years, even bears a striking physical resemblance. Connelly is sort of reprising the same role she had in A Beautiful Mind, but it is the type of character she inhabits very well; at once intelligent, strong-willed, compassionate, sensitive, and 100% believable. Toby Jones, who specializes in portraying historical figures as disparate as Truman Capote (Infamous), Swifty Lazar (Frost/Nixon) and Karl Rove (W) does a brief but memorable turn as botanist Thomas Huxley (who famously exalted “You’ve killed God, sir!” to Darwin in reaction to his breakthroughs in evolution theory). The revelation here is young Martha West in her film debut, stealing all her scenes as Anna (her dad is Dominic West, who is best known for his work on the HBO series, The Wire). There are some nice directorial flourishes throughout; especially when we are taken on a scurrying, “bug-cam” eye’s view of the wondrous microcosmic universe in the Darwin’s back yard.
Despite what the knee-jerk reactions from the wingnut blogosphere might infer about what I’m sure they interpret to be the godless blasphemy permeating every frame of the movie, I thought the filmmakers were even-handed on the Science vs. Dogma angle. This is ultimately a portrait of Charles Darwin the human being, not Charles Darwin the bible-burning God-killer (or however the “intelligent” designers prefer to view him). Genius that he was, he is shown to be just as flawed and full of contradictions as any of us. After all, we bipedal mammals with opposable thumbs are still a “work in progress”, aren’t we?
Right up there with them are the neocon “intellectuals.” Check out the latest lunacy from middle east expert Frank Gaffney (now writing for Breitbart, natch. What a hustle…)
Among other reprehensible actions, Team Obama terminated the nation’s only program capable of providing a near-term ability to intercept ballistic missiles early in their flight (i.e., the boost-phase). This Airborne Laser Program nonetheless was successfully tested earlier this month — destroying not one but two missiles similar to those arrayed against us and our friends today and making the case that such systems should be operationalized and deployed as a matter of the utmost urgency.
Then, there are the persistent reports that President Obama is going to accede to Russian demands to reinstitute bilateral restrictions on missile defenses as part of the new START follow-on treaty now being finalized with the Kremlin. Moscow lost its effective veto over such U.S. systems when George W. Bush withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001 and the Russians have been as anxious as its American fellow-travelers to be able to exercise it again.
Now, thanks to an astute observation by Christopher Logan of the Logans Warning blog, we have another possible explanation for behavior that — in the face of rapidly growing threats posed by North Korean, Iranian, Russian, Chinese and others’ ballistic missiles — can only be described as treacherous and malfeasant: Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.
What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo (above). As Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo.
People keep talking about the reasonable Republicans reasserting themselves. Who are they?
(based on the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial”) and the new Darwin biopic, 
, but it is the type of character she inhabits very well; at once intelligent, strong-willed, compassionate, sensitive, and 100% believable. Toby Jones, who specializes in portraying historical figures as disparate as Truman Capote (
) does a brief but memorable turn as botanist Thomas Huxley (who famously exalted “You’ve killed God, sir!” to Darwin in reaction to his breakthroughs in evolution theory). The revelation here is young Martha West in her film debut, stealing all her scenes as Anna (her dad is Dominic West, who is best known for his work on the HBO series, 