Look, Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's . . . Zimmer-Man!
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Morning Jolt July 23, 2013 Ouch. SunnyRight: "Al Qaeda is alive and Detroit is dead." Oh, Hey, No Big Deal, Just 500 Al-Qaeda Members Escaped from Abu Ghraib Yesterday So, one of the good things about the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq is that we don't have to worry about that country anymore, right? The whole Sunni-Shia-Kurd rivalry, not our problem anymore. Rising sectarian violence, on par with the worst times of 2006 and 2007? Call somebody else. Except . . . maybe what happens over there can come back to bite us, anyway:
Those 500 bad guys probably will cause trouble locally, and not necessarily set out to target Americans here or abroad . . . probably. If you're wondering, no, no one has ever escaped Guantanamo Bay (these guys don't count) and no one has escaped the Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., either. Four bad guys escaped from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan in 2005, and all four were eventually recaptured or killed. One other thought, since we're briefly refocused on Iraq: The calculations of the death toll from the Iraq War range from 110,600 (the Associated Press) to the Lancet's 601,027 to the "Opinion Research Business Survey," who counted 1 million. (It will not surprise you that the latter numbers are greatly disputed.) But the number is reasonably estimated to be somewhere north of 100,000 and probably short of 200,000. In other words, estimates of the death toll from the Syrian Civil War — 83,000 to 110,000 — are now reaching the low end of the Iraq War casualties; by the time the bloodbath over there ends, it may surpass the death toll from the Iraq War. No, Seriously, A Giant Pile of Money Would Not, In Fact, Help Detroit. Not Really, Anyway Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that there's talk of a federal bailout for Detroit. It's a terrible idea, but we shouldn't be surprised by it. What is surprising is that the advocates are so blithe about how little a bailout would fix. Really. Let's assume the federal government didn't have $16 trillion in debt and had an extra $18 billion lying around. Assume that the whole country had a bipartisan spirit of generosity, eager to help out a city that had, for years, gone to a domed stadium on Thanksgiving Day to watch their football team lose to some visiting team. Once Washington writes a check to Detroit to cover the city's $18 billion in debt . . . then what? You still have the same moribund economy, the same 78,000 abandoned structures, the same two-thirds of ambulances not in service, the same failing schools, the same shrinking population, the same shameful police response time, the same terrifying violent-crime rate, the same 40 percent of street lights not working . . . and likely, the same failed leaders, with the same failed philosophies and viewpoints that got the city in this mess in the first place. Conservatives outside the city like to point to it as decades of liberal policies run amok, but let's be fair: They can't even get liberalism right. Nearly half of the owners of Detroit's 305,000 properties failed to pay their tax bills in 2011. It's the trifecta of liberal policies and incompetence and corruption that set up the city as a vortex of urban failure so intolerable that almost anyone who could afford to leave did. The city has to change — the question is what kind of change the remaining residents collectively embrace. They need to give people who live elsewhere a reason to live there: If you bring back residents, you'll bring back customers, who will bring back businesses, who will bring back jobs. That virtuous cycle will bring back the tax base, putting money back into the city's coffers so it can finally afford all those things it got used to buying back when one bondholder after another kept buying their municipal bonds. It turns out European banks bought a lot of Detroit's bonds. The pressure to punish them, instead of retired city works, will be enormous. The guys at the Washington Examiner notice that 19 major American cities have even bigger ratios of public employees to residents than Detroit does. What Chance Do Democrats Have in Georgia? Nunn! Remember, no mocking hereditary congressional campaigns unless you mocked Lynne Cheney, Rand Paul, George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, George P. Bush, Ben Quayle, Jesse Jackson Jr., Christopher Dodd . . .
Ha, ha! Those wacky Brits and their hereditary political titles and aristocracy! We're so much better than them! Look, Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's . . . Zimmer-Man! Okay, let's level with each other: When you first heard about this story, didn't you think it had to be a hoax?
How would you like to be one of those victims? "Man, I must have a terrible concussion, it looks like George Zimmerman is coming to rescue me . . . Wait, it really is him. Uh, sir? Mr. Zimmerman? I appreciate you trying to pull me from this wreckage, but honestly, if you rescue me, my whole life is going to turn into this racially charged, controversial media maelstrom, and honestly, I'd rather take my chances with the leaking gasoline around my legs . . . Honestly, there's a 50-50 chance Al Sharpton and a bunch of Hollywood celebrities will denounce me if I say nice things about you, and Spike Lee will either tweet out my home address or the home address of somebody else, and either way this will lead to some folks rioting as if their favorite team had just won a sports championship, so . . . I'm just going to keep this shard of glass in my midsection and hope the jaws of life get here pretty soon." Now, a reaction of initial incredulity — what are the odds that Zimmerman is at the scene of a dangerous accident just a week after his trial ends? — should not extend into instantaneous conspiracy theories. But apparently to some minds, if it doesn't fit the narrative, it can't possibly be true. Bryan Preston:
Bryan Jacoutot, writing at Legal Insurrection: "I'm not sure what, if any, effect this random act of kindness will have on the barrage of threats the Zimmerman camp has been exposed to over the last 16 months. If nothing else, perhaps it can serve at least to show a more human side of a man who has been fairly consistently vilified by many on the national media stage." This tweet, comparing the car-accident-rescue score of George Zimmerman and former senator Ted Kennedy, was retweeted a mere 352 times. Melinda Henneberger, Washington Post political writer and She the People anchor, apparently doesn't find that funny one bit. Robert D.: "If only Zimmerman had rescued a black lesbian illegal immigrant on her way to get an abortion, MSNBC would have imploded." Today's Movie Review: Why Animated Sequels Deserve More Effort than This Despicable Me 2 The upside of parenthood: You get to play with Legos again, and nobody thinks you're weird because you're spending quality time with your child. The downside of parenthood: Periodically you're going to have to go to the movie theater to see a kids' movie that just isn't that good. After watching the sequel, I was strongly urged by a loud, pint-sized demographic to rent the first Despicable Me, and I found it was significantly better than the sequel. That one was about Gru, a Ernst Blofeld/Penguin-like super-villain whose evil plot requires him to adopt three little girls in order to infiltrate a rival's home, and he ultimately finds the joys of fatherhood to be more satisfying than his nefarious plot to steal the moon. Good concept, right? A fresh take on the unprepared parent/"Mr. Mom" trope, and it has a character arc and everything. Despicable Me 2 takes that once potentially interesting character and turns him into a pretty bland gadget-creator, recruited by a painfully generic secret spy organization called the "Anti-Villain League" — a moniker that clearly took milliseconds and milliseconds to imagine. Gru's assigned to go undercover in his local shopping mall to find another villain in disguise. Steve Carell is the voice of Gru, and Kristen Wiig is the voice of Lucy, Gru's assigned partner, and you can hear the actors really trying to make their characters interesting, but in the end, we're left with a single-dad-meets-potential-wife-at-work-and-has-awkward-courtship storyline. I didn't find it all that interesting, and I have a hard time believing the kindergarten set did, either. The mall setting is pretty blah, they only investigate two suspects, the villain is pretty blah, a dad-is-paranoid-about-his-daughter's-first-girlfriend subplot feels left over from an '80s sitcom. Large swaths of this movie have a "eh, I guess that's good enough" feel. Despicable Me 2 would have been pretty tough to take if it wasn't for one element that is as funny and inspired as the rest of the movie falls flat: Gru's minions, which are anthropomorphized little yellow pills, babbling barely comprehensible gibberish, assigned to help Gru but generally bumbling and incompetent. For everything else the filmmakers flub, they sure as heck know how to create a character that a child will imitate afterward. Bee-do, bee-do, bee-do, my house is now filled with foreign ambulances. The closing credits promise a "Minions" movie, and perhaps should have just skipped to that. NRO Digest — July 23, 2013 Today on National Review Online . . .
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