NRO Newsletters . . . Morning Jolt . . . with Jim Geraghty
July 25, 2012
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Here's your Wednesday Morning Jolt. Enjoy! Jim |
| 1. Panic in Team Obama?
So . . . President Obama sought to directly explain to voters what he meant by a comment about small business that has reverberated through Republican attacks on his re-election. The new ad, "Always," which will air in in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Nevada, argues that Republicans were mischaracterizing a comment he'd made that seemed to suggest that small businesses weren't solely responsible for their own successes. "Those ads taking my words about small business out of context -- they're flat out wrong. Of course Americans build their own businesses," Obama says in the ad. "Yeah, if you're making that ad, you are seeing something very scary in your polling and focus groups," Drew M. concludes. Allahpundit: "Am I right in thinking that O never felt obliged to do a spot like this, clarifying his own comments, back in 2008? He gave his speech on race to try to defuse the Rev. Wright uproar, but he never did an ad directly answering an attack that I can recall, not even after his immortal "bitter-clinger" comments at that lefty fundraiser. Typically the playbook when a pol says something damaging is to let it lie and not extend its media shelf life with a new commercial that dredges it up again in the course of rebutting it. He must be awfully nervous about how "you didn't build that" is playing with that middle class he claims to care so much about if he feels obliged to do this. Exit question: O says here that his point in the original "you didn't build that" comments was that America needs to "stand behind" its small business owners. Is that right? Go re-read what he said in Roanoke. Sure sounded at the time like he was telling them that they owe us, not that we owe them." Why this big a response? Dan McLaughlin, also known as the Baseball Crank, notes, "Obama takes more damage from saying socialistic-sounding things than dumb things because voters suspect him of being socialistic, not dumb. . . . As I've noted before, Obama's a corporatist & collectivist, not a socialist. To average voter, not a meaningful distinction; both unpopular." Meanwhile, from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal last night: "In the presidential horserace, Obama leads Romney by six percentage points among registered voters, 49 percent to 43 percent." Sample breakdown: Democrat/lean Democrat: 46 percent; Republican/lean Republican 35 percent; strictly independent, 16 percent. So in a sample that is 11 points more Democrat than Republican, Obama is up 6. Yawn. |
2. Bloomberg to Gun-Control Advocates: Behold, the Instrument of Your Liberation!
So, what do we do if the mayor of a major city goes . . . off his rocker? Mayor Bloomberg ramped up his gun-control rhetoric to a whole new level last night, saying he's surprised cops don't walk off their jobs until the public forces lawmakers to get guns off the streets. "I don't understand why police officers across this country don't stand up collectively and say we're going to go on strike, we're not going to protect you unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what's required to keep us safe,'' he told CNN's Piers Morgan. My initial response was that this reminded me of a particular movie villain who concludes he needs a major city's police force out of the way before he can achieve his policy goals, but then I got grief for a spoiler, so I'll just leave all of those thoughts for the third item . . . Ed Morrissey has the patience to go through all the ways this comment is insane: First, we have laws in most jurisdictions that prevent first responders such as police and fire agencies from going on strike at all, because of the public safety consequences. Bloomberg is literally calling for anarchy in the streets as a way to extort unconstitutional infringements on liberty -- by the police. Perhaps Bloomberg missed a couple of civics lessons in school (which would explain more than a few of his initiatives), but police don't get to write their own laws and impose them by force on the populace. Neither do they get to decide whether and when they will enforce the law or let criminals run rampant in order to terrorize our communities into complying with their idea of what the law should be. In America, the people create the law, and the police uphold and enforce it. If individual police officers don't like the law, they can work through the democratic process to change those laws, or they can find another line of work. Finally, though, Bloomberg's proposal would only reinforce the truth that citizens have to defend themselves from crime. Over at New York magazine, Dan Amira notices: You may be familiar with the Taylor Law for its prohibition on strikes by public employees, such as teachers, transit workers, and, yes, police officers. But the law also declares that "no public employee or employee organization shall cause, instigate, encourage, or condone a strike." Bloomberg is a public employee, no? And he appears to be encouraging a strike? Not that we expect Bloomberg to be brought up on charges or anything, but still, he's the mayor! He's not supposed to be violating the law. We're no experts in the Taylor Law, though, so we talked to a couple guys who are, such as Alex Colvin, the chairperson of the Department of Labor Relations, Law, and History at Cornell's School of Industrial Labor Relations. "He's certainly encouraging the police officers to violate the law, I think that's clear," Colvin tells us. However, Colvin adds, the prohibition on encouraging strikes was written with union members and union leaders in mind, not just any public employee with an opinion. "You could try to make an argument that a literal reading would suggest that, as a public employee, he's engaging in this," Colvin says, "but it's certainly going well beyond the original intent of the Taylor Act." By Tuesday afternoon, Bloomberg seemed to realize he had stepped in it: "I didn't mean literally go on strike," he said at a Tuesday event about the economic impact of same-sex marriage. "In fact, in New York, they can't go on strike. There's a law against it." |
3. The Dark Knight Review Rises
SPOILER ALERT, for everyone who doesn't want to know plot details, but who somehow didn't see the movie last weekend. A confession: Upon seeing the first trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, I had a fear it would be terrible. I think most action/adventure stories that feature big, explosive events that aren't hidden away from the eyes of the public ought to have some scene(s) revealing how ordinary citizens are reacting to events. If a villain is doing dastardly deeds, we ought to see the public living in fear of that villain. It fleshes out the world, makes it more three-dimensional and complete. Some reviewer of Batman Returns had lamented that anyone outside of the main protagonists became de facto scenery, barely relevant to the story. Since taking over the Batman series, Christopher Nolan has been extremely interested in telling the story of how Batman affects other people -- his emergence as a symbol of justice to the public in Batman Begins, to the copycats and public backlash in The Dark Knight, and this most recent movie might as well have been called Gotham City. In one of the most audacious decisions, Nolan sidelines Batman just as his villain unleashes a truly nightmarish campaign of terror upon the city, and it's left to the ordinary citizens of Gotham to endure and figure out ways to overcome the worsening danger. I approached The Dark Knight Rises with trepidation, because the preceding movie demonstrated Nolan had no problem spending a lot of time dwelling on the twisted minds of his villains; no matter how well done performances like the late Heath Ledger's Joker can be, too much of that can make for some unpleasant movie-going. The Dark Knight at least ended with a very optimistic message about the people of Gotham City: a ferry full of hundreds of ordinary citizens refuses to kill innocent people in order to save their own lives, and a hulking convicted felon, at first glance one of the city's most irredeemable souls, takes decisive action to save hundreds of innocent lives, accepting his own death as a preferable alternative. I feared this final movie would feature much of the preceding darkness, and little or none of the theme of redemption. The Dark Knight Rises is a very solid, very intense film of epic scale. For what it does, it does brilliantly. There's a part of me that prefers a bit more lightheartedness, the tone you find in The Avengers, but . . . comic-book fans got their yin and yang this summer with these two movies. Like Jonah, I found this film's location shots rather distracting. Nolan decided his Gotham City wouldn't look like the Gothic urban nightmare of Tim Burton's films (actual description in the script: "as if hell had erupted through the sidewalks and kept on growing") or the candy-colored, seizure-inducing visual overload of Joel Schumacher's unbearable two sequels. The city of Batman Begins looked pretty generic; the city of The Dark Knight was clearly Chicago. Unfortunately, you can tell where every scene was shot in this movie: Los Angeles's iconic U.S. Bank Tower is very clear throughout the police chase; Pittsburgh's Heinz Field doesn't look like anything except Pittsburgh's Heinz Field, and you can see the Empire State Building in a lot of the "Gotham Skyline" shots. The entire "city under siege" segments are pretty clearly meant to remind us of Manhattan, and I can't decide whether Nolan is ingenious or exploitative for a scene where we see southern Manhattan/Gotham's bridges exploding, one by one . . . with the half-completed Freedom Tower smack in the middle of the screen. One of the best things Nolan has done with this series is develop the supporting characters; it doesn't hurt that he casts excellent actors like Morgan Freeman and Gary Oldman. (It's easy to suspect that Nolan finds Commissioner Gordon an even more heroic character than Batman, taking on his city's menaces with just his wits and police training.) For many of Batman's storytellers, Alfred the Butler has been comic relief or an afterthought; in this movie, Michael Caine gets some brilliant scenes, grippingly articulating everything a father wants for his son. Anne Hathaway is a surprisingly good Catwoman. And then there's Bane. I find a lot of viewers or reviewers find the motivation for the League of Shadows confusing, but it's not that hard to understand: They're a mysterious, secretive group based primarily in Asia, training in remote mountains, whose ideology has compelled them to strike at Western cities like London, Rome, and Constantinople for their "decadence" and "corruption." They believe that only after a great cataclysm destroying the leading cities of Western civilization can things truly improve, that their efforts will result in a better world in the future, and that no one in their target cities is innocent -- not even children. They use chemical weapons and aspire to use nuclear-level weapons of mass destruction. They're al-Qaeda without any references to Islam. The "Occupy Wall Street" theme that many detected in the trailers was both clearer and more muted than I expected. Clearly, a key element of Bane's plan is to get ordinary Gothamites, bolstered by his goons and released convicts, to violently lash out at the wealthy and forces of law and order. But it's pretty clear none of the villains actually believe the populist damn-the-rich hogwash they're spouting; it's just a convenient fig leaf for their seizing of power. If anything, this movie is about the dangers of envy and frustration being exploited by a demagogue -- but hey, we don't have to worry about something like that in the here and now, right? As for the protagonist . . . in one of the early signs that Batman and Robin would go off the rails, director Schumaker suggested it was time for Bruce Wayne to "get past" the death of his parents. Batman fans exploded with justified rage; that's the core of the character. If he "gets past" it, he has little reason to take the extraordinary choice of heading out every night, patrolling the rooftops, fighting gangsters and murderous psychopaths. But it's as if Nolan took the gauntlet thrown down by Schumaker's comment; how could Bruce Wayne "move on" with his life in a way that made sense and would be satisfying to the audience? The rumor that Batman/Bruce Wayne would die cropped up the moment this was touted as "the final chapter in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy." And now, we know, that the answer to whether Batman or Bruce Wayne dies is . . . yes and no, to both. Gotham residents believe Bruce Wayne and Batman are dead, and Bruce is finally living happily with Selina under a new name. But . . . the cave is still there, and a worthy successor appears ready to embrace the mantle . . . |
4. Addendum
A bizarre report of some very effective spies/hackers: "In 2010, Iran's nuclear facilities were infiltrated by Stuxnet, the centrifuge-wrecking malware allegedly cooked up by the US government. Now they seem to have been hit again by a bizarre attack forcing nuclear plant workstations to pump the song Thunderstruck by heavy metal band AC/DC through the speakers at full volume."
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