Anthony Williams for President

It’s unlike me to settle on a candidate for President so early in the primary season, but I’ve made my choice. It’s this guy.

Anthony Williams, former mayor of Washington, DCThose of you outside the Washington, DC area may not know who Anthony Williams is, and you might be confused by the fact that he doesn’t appear on the ballot in any of the 50 states. Anthony Williams was the mayor of Washington, DC from 1999 to 2007, and he did a heckuva job cleaning up after a heckuva mess.

How? After the disastrous administration of the grandstanding (and coke-snorting) Marion Barry, Tony Williams came into the mayor’s office with his nasally voice and his dorky little bow tie. He didn’t spew forth a lot of bullshit about the audacity of hope and the firmness of character. Williams simply rolled up his sleeves, set the dial for Maximum Wonkiness, and turned out budget surplus after budget surplus. You could see him on TV in press conferences for years, discussing the minutiae of fiscal policy with the authority of someone who stayed up half the night digging through stacks of government reports. Nobody was inspired to write a song about how they had a crush on Tony Williams.

Before Williams, the city was in such dire shape that Congress had to step in and effectively wrest control out of Mayor Barry’s hands, setting up a control board to manage the city’s affairs. Before Williams, a good chunk of DC’s parking meters were permanently busted, because a bunch of punks discovered that you could easily decapitate them with a baseball bat. Seriously. The city was full of smashed-up parking meters that the city didn’t bother to fix, losing out on millions of dollars of revenue.

In my view, Anthony Williams is the model of what a president should be. A sober, staid manager who keeps his head, who knows the facts better than anyone else, who arbitrates disputes by getting people to sit down at a table and discuss things calmly like grown-ups. Presidents do not need to be soaring masters of inspirational rhetoric. They don’t need to promise you the moon. You can have your presidents who promise you get-rich-quick schemes; I want a president who consistently delivers prime plus two.

It’s obvious who I’m taking aim at here. Hint: his name begins with a “B” and ends with “arack Obama.” I’ve been watching the hype surrounding this guy for months now and shaking my head in amazement. It’s amazing how many people fall for this stuff every two years. We’re going to restore civility to Washington, DC! We’re going to cut through the partisan gridlock! We’re going to change the tone! Right, sure. President Howard Dean said that too, as did President Wesley Clarke, President Ross Perot, President Colin Powell, President Gary Hart, and President Jerry Brown. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was going to end the partisan bickering in Congress, right before she started threatening other Democrats with retaliation if they didn’t support the fiercely partisan Jack Murtha for House Majority Leader.

Every time I hear the rhetoric about courage and audacity of hope, I roll my eyes. What the hell does that even mean? Courage and audacity to hope for what? It’s meaningless blather. It doesn’t tell you anything. It’s kind of like those people who tell you that they don’t follow any particular religion, but they’re “spiritual.” To quote the late Chris Farley — well, la-dee-frickin’-da!

Read more

The Bourne Paranoia

Here are a few things that every American knows.

  • The world is a vile and dangerous place.
  • America is blindly and irrationally hated by just about everybody outside of our borders.
  • If we left our security up to the peaceniks, bureaucrats, and Boy Scouts we elect to national office, the United States would be a smoldering ruin in a matter of months.
  • Therefore it’s necessary that we fund a zillion intelligence agencies and black ops teams who routinely conduct secret assassinations in the name of defending our country.
  • Nevertheless, despite our massive economic and military power, the United States is drastically outnumbered and constantly on the verge of apocalypse.

The Bourne Identity posterAt least, these are the assumptions behind just about every spy thriller ever made. Now I find myself wondering: When the hell did these assumptions become so ingrained in our psyche? When did we blithely start accepting this worldview? Who says the United States should behave this way — and, for that matter, when did we all decide that the United States actually does behave this way? What the fuck happened to my country?

These assumptions are also the ones that underline 2002’s The Bourne Identity. It’s a nice little popcorn flick with a plot so familiar you can slip into it like an old bathrobe. Matt Damon plays Matt Damon, playing a CIA-funded black ops assassin who has a change of heart because the agency has Gone Too Far. Now after a bout of amnesia, he finds himself on the run from the very organization that funded him. Car chases and dead bodies ensue. Spoiler alert: the heroic Matt Damon gets the girl, and the villainous Chris Cooper gets shot in the head. (Oh, and FYI, there are more spoilers below.)

And then someone had the inspired idea of hiring Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93) to take over the franchise. To call The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum better films than their predecessor is kind of like calling a fine aged pinot grigio better than a Zima. They’re among the most intelligent, well-crafted, thoughtful thrillers about American paranoia that I’ve ever seen. (And holy crap, did you realize Matt Damon could act?)

Suddenly our protagonist is no longer just a youthful maverick spy fleeing across Europe with a spunky German chick in tow. Jason Bourne is not so much a character in Supremacy and Ultimatum as he is a manifestation of the American subconscious. He’s an unstoppable force who never tires, who never gives up, who can never be killed. Imagine a cross between Batman and Patrick Henry who knows how to kill people with a plastic pen.

Richard Corliss clearly noticed the transformation in his Time magazine review of The Bourne Ultimatum:

That’s the secret of this character, and Bond and John McClane and all the other action-movie studs. They are a projection of American power — or a memory of it, and the poignant wish it could somehow return. In real life, as a nation these days, we can achieve next to nothing. But in the Bourne movies just one of us, grim, muscular and photogenic, can take on all villains, all at once, and leave them outwitted, dead, disgraced. That’s a macho fantasy of the highest, purest, most lunatic order.

Corliss is on to something here, but I think he’s got it exactly backwards. Jason Bourne isn’t just an action stud in the James Bond mold; Bourne is, in fact, a calculated response to James Bond, or more than that, he’s the anti-James Bond. James Bond on the Bizarro planet. Is it an accident that Jason Bourne and James Bond have the same initials? (Well, actually it probably is. But you’d have to ask Robert Ludlum, who created the character, and he’s dead. But apparently Greengrass didn’t read the Ludlum novels anyway.)

Read more

Be Vewwy Vewwy Quiet, It’s Gay Hunting Season

Am I really going to have to be the one to say I just don’t care that much that Senator Larry Craig (supposedly) solicited gay bathroom sex in a Minneapolis airport? Am I going to have to be the one who says this is getting blown way out of proportion (pun unintended but inevitable)? I don’t think a lot of you are going to agree with me on this one, but I have to say it anyway.

Senator Larry CraigFirst off, the dude was railroaded into confessing his impropriety by the police to avoid embarrassment, and that bothers me. As unseemly as it may be that Senator Craig (supposedly) felt compelled to alert the plainclothesman in the next stall that he wanted to get his knob polished, it’s not a crime. Really, it isn’t. Just the same way that talking to a prostitute about her/his services isn’t a crime until you hand over the cash. Theoretically it might be construed as harassment if he just walked up to a stranger in the restroom to solicit sex in plain English — but it seems to me that the case is pretty thin when you have to be familiar with the whole procedure to even know you’re being solicited in the first place.

Now, actually having sex in a public restroom is a crime, and if the senator was paying a stranger to have sex it’s also a crime. But what if the man in the next stall had responded to Craig’s solicitation by slipping him a note saying “I’ve got a condo two blocks away, why don’t we pop over there instead”? That’s not a crime. That’s called a pickup. Sleazy, yes. But not illegal, and I’m not even sure it’s immoral.

And let’s say he did actually get a BJ in a public restroom. Have we really lost all sense of perspective here? Have we become that prude of a society? Breaking news, North America: men love blowjobs. If there’s any man who claims he doesn’t, please stick your name in the comments below so the rest of us can snicker at you. And while quietly having sex in a semi-public place while nobody can see you is crude and crass and unbecoming of a public official, on the scale of moral turpitude it ranks pretty damn low. I’d say it’s somewhere around shoplifting in the grand scheme of things, but I can’t decide if it’s north or south of that line. Lots of people do dumb things like this when they’re young. Hell, I did stuff like that when I was in college almost twenty years ago.

Of course, nobody wants to walk in on two people having sex in a public restroom. Eww. And you don’t want unattended minors stumbling across something like this either. Which is why you haul these offenders down to the police station, slap them with a fine and community service, and put something in the file that your future employers can dig up if they want to.

But Dave, you sick pervert, I hear you thinking, Larry Craig’s a U.S. Senator! We have to hold him to a higher standard!

Well, sure we do. That higher standard is called “elections.” If this joker decides to run for re-election next year after all, his arrest record, guilty plea, and lame-ass excuses are fair game for his opponent(s). Of course, it’s never going to get to that point. The Idaho Republican Party will wisely decide that supporting Craig is too costly for them, and the national GOP will conclude the same thing. Right now, there are undoubtedly GOP bigwigs calling Senator Craig telling him that stepping down now and allowing a Republican replacement to gain momentum in office for the next 18 months will be a big boon to the party’s chances in 2008.

I’m convinced that 60% of this whole scandal has to do with public disgust at male homosexuality. It’s a quick opportunity to score some political points because most Americans are really queasy about gay male sex. Gut check time: if you walked in on Carmen Electra and Angelina Jolie engaging in hanky-panky in a public bathroom stall, would you storm out of there looking for a cop and demand that they be publicly humiliated and dragged through the mud?

In case you’ve forgotten, this is Carmen Electra:

Carmen Electra

And this is Angelina Jolie:

Angelina Jolie

No, if you saw these two (or two women who look just like them) going at it in a public place and you’re like most people in this country, you’d probably back out of there very slowly, make lots of conspicuous coughing noises, and state in a loud voice that you hope nobody in this restroom is doing anything that the approaching police officers might take offense at.

Read more

Politicians and Personal Lives

In case you missed it, the other day the sky boiled with lava and winged monkey creatures came down from the clouds tossing Molotov cocktails at pedestrians. Pestilence broke out, crops spontaneously combusted, and children started randomly developing stigmata.

Senator David VitterThe cause of this all, of course, was Senator David Vitter’s confession that he had once partaken of the services of a D.C. prostitution service, helpfully provided to us by Grand Inquisitor Larry Flynt. You know, Larry Flynt, the canny investigative journalist behind Hustler who forced that rabid mass murderer Bob Livingston to resign from leadership of the House in 1998 because he strayed from his marriage.

I really get hopping mad at revelations like this. Why? Because I firmly believe that it’s none of our fucking business what our politicians do with their personal lives.

Guess what? I don’t care that Senator David Vitter is hanging around with prostitutes on his spare time. I really don’t. Also:

  • I don’t care if he’s cheating on his wife
  • I don’t care if he’s gay or bisexual
  • I don’t care if he litters
  • I don’t care if he’s getting audited on his taxes
  • I don’t care if he cheats at cards or golf
  • I don’t care if he got bad grades in college
  • I don’t care if he’s got a gambling problem
  • I don’t care if he smoked marijuana in college
  • I don’t care if he still smokes marijuana on his own time
  • I don’t care if he uses the “f” word or tells someone to “go f— yourself”
  • I don’t care if he did cocaine or heroin a long time ago
  • I don’t care if he uses the “n” word from time to time in private conversation
  • I don’t care if he calls somebody by an obscure French ethnic slur in the heat of a campaign event
  • I don’t care if he drives an SUV or a Prius
  • I don’t care how big his house is or how much electricity it uses
  • I don’t care how much he spends on haircuts he pays for out of his own pocket
  • I don’t care what his wife does for a living
  • I don’t care what religion he is
  • I don’t care if he’s friends with lobbyists
  • I don’t care if he’s a hypocrite
  • I don’t care if he flirts with the wrong people
  • I don’t care if he watches or downloads pornography
  • I don’t care if he owns a Confederate flag
  • I don’t care if he’s a closet racist
  • I don’t care if he’s a closet sexist
  • I don’t care if he’s a closet homophobe
  • I don’t care if he smokes
  • I don’t care if he has a drinking problem
  • I don’t care if he makes an egregious statement or two, as long as he promptly apologizes

Now here are the things I do care about as regards Senator David Vitter:

  • I care about the policies he advocates
  • I care about the votes he casts in the U.S. Senate
  • I care if he’s charged with a crime that’s not a misdemeanor

Let’s make up a new rule. When our politicians step out of the office at the end of the day, they’re private citizens. Which means that just like you won’t splash it all over the newspaper that your next-door neighbor is having an affair, you won’t do the same about a politician. You shouldn’t follow a politician around or snoop on his personal life or try to dig up dirt on him. Now if he kills someone or actively cheats on his taxes or stashes bribe money in his freezer, then I want to hear about it. Until then, shut the fuck up.

Read more

The Vapid World of CNN

At one time, CNN was considered a network of substance. People used to trust CNN to deliver important, on-topic news. What happened? The network has succumbed to competitive pressures and resorted to crass sensationalism, celebrity gossip and the time-honored stories about women in trouble and petty criminals. Checking on the CNN.com homepage a few moments ago, I see stories “above the fold” about: A fire on a cruise ship (the main story, occupying about a … Read more