I Think the North Koreans Are Watching Marco Rubio

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CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Obama should give Canada an answer, already. Keystone Cop-Out.

JONAH GOLDBERG: On statues, statutes, and civil society. Satan at the State House.

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: Polio eradication evinces the benefits of the triumph of the West. A Better World Through America.

ANDREW STILES: New York's governor has a long history of nasty behavior toward opponents. Cuomo, Still the Prince of Darkness.

JOHN FUND: A presidential report suggests good reforms, but its support for no-excuse absentee ballots is wrong. Improving our Voting Systems.

SLIDESHOW: The Priest of Kiev.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

January 24, 2014

I Think the North Koreans Are Watching Marco Rubio

Pretty cool picture, sent by Marco Rubio's office, from his overseas trip that included a visit to South Korea and the DMZ:

A North Korean soldier takes a picture of Senator Marco Rubio through the window as Rubio stands in a conference room in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.

Yeah, that photo's going in some intelligence file somewhere.

Forget the Policy Position; I'm More Baffled by the Venue

USA Today seems to think this statement from this politician is shocking . . .

The Republican governor of Texas supporting less jail time for pot users?

Gov. Rick Perry, a staunch conservative, riled the Lone Star state Thursday when he told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that he supports the decriminalization – though not the legalization – of marijuana use.

"As the governor of the second-largest state in the country, what I can do is start us on policies that can start us on the road towards decriminalization" by introducing alternative "drug courts" that offer treatment and softer penalties for minor offenses, Perry said during an international panel on drug legalization at the summit. Perry was speaking alongside former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.

Perry emphasized that he is not for the legalization of marijuana but defended states' rights to make those choices. He said it's perfectly constitutional for states like Colorado to experiment with decriminalization and that Washington should stay out of those decisions.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. I'm more shocked that Rick Perry is speaking at Davos.
Alongside Kofi Annan and the Columbian president!

You're familiar with the Davos World Economic Forum, right? It's like the annual summit of the Acela-class for the entire world. The closest thing stateside is the Aspen Ideas Festival, a big gathering of really big names, combining the genuinely accomplished with the insufferably full-of-themselves. You get lots of Democratic officeholders, a smattering of Republicans, media bigfoots, billionaires, entrepreneurs, and a couple of celebrities of the Bono-level "globally conscious" variety -- basically everybody who's been on the cover of a magazine at your local newsstand, gathering in a Swiss village to live like kings and bask in their status as one of the important people.

I'm not begrudging Perry going to Davos. I'd go, too. Our Jay Nordlinger covered it for a few years. But this just doesn't seem like the Texas governor's kind of crowd. What next, brunching with Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria? I can only imagine the shock of the Davos crowd, certain they would be hearing Madeleine Albright's latest groundbreaking and innovative thoughts on foreign policy, or that they would be furrowing their brow in deep concern about debt ratios and global-warming negotiations in South Sudan, only to see stepping onto the stage . . . Rick Perry. That guy!

Maybe someone mistook him for Josh Brolin.

First, We Cancel the Contract of this 'Flushy McFlusherson' Guy

Your tax dollars at work:

Federal authorities have accused the company that vetted former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis of conducting 665,000 incomplete reviews in exchange for millions of dollars in bonus payments, according to court documents.

About 40% of the background investigations performed from 2008 to 2012 by U.S. Investigations Services, a Virginia-based company that performs hundreds of thousands of background checks for the government, were incomplete, authorities alleged as part of a fraud claim against the company. The government's legal action is unrelated to its work involving Snowden, who is charged with the unauthorized disclosure of formerly secret government surveillance operations, and Alexis, a government contractor whose shooting rampage left 12 dead in September.

"Specifically, USIS devised a practice referred to internally as 'dumping' or 'flushing,' which involved releasing cases to the (U.S. Office of Personnel Management) and representing them as complete when, in fact, not all (reports of investigations) … had received a quality review,'' the government charged.

Citing internal company e-mails, the government charged that "dumping was a frequent and accepted occurrence at USIS.''

In one e-mail dated Oct. 29, 2010, a company supervisor told a manager, " 'tis Flushy McFlusherson at his merry hijinks again!!''

Yeah, that last line seems pretty damning. Considering the habit of putting incriminating words in e-mails, I wonder if that supervisor then went on to work as Chris Christie's deputy chief of staff.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and the Modern-Action-Hero Template

Last weekend I caught Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Mild spoilers follow.

By no means is JR: SR a bad movie. It's a well-made movie, with four well-known actors playing the kind of archetypes they're very, very comfortable in. Chris Pine is the plucky, quick-thinking protagonist that doesn't seem all that different from his James Kirk in the Star Trek reboot; Keira Knightly is cute and charming as Jack's not-quite-wife; Kevin Costner is the shadowy, no-nonsense CIA veteran; and director Kenneth Branaugh plays the Russian oligarch up to no good. Branaugh does his best to add a new bit of deep-rooted nationalist patriotism to the very familiar "Russian oligarch up to no good" stock villain. The Saint, Air Force One, Vin Diesel's xXx, Goldeneye, the last Mission: Impossible movie, Salt . . .

But there's something nagging about the new direction of the Jack Ryan franchise.

Jack Ryan has been described as "a thinking man's action hero," but the real secret of his appeal was that he was the heroic figure that a lot of guys -- and probably some gals -- could envision being someday. Most of us know we're never going to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or have the lethal skills of a Navy SEAL. But if we think of ourselves as reasonably smart, we like to think we could, in the right circumstances, be Jack Ryan. He wasn't quite a deductive genius on par with Sherlock Holmes, or whipping up miraculous gadgets like MacGyver, but he was smart, and usually managed to figure out what the bad guys were up to by doing more research and analysis on a seemingly obscure topic than anyone else in the U.S. government.

Jack Ryan's "super power" is that he did his homework. In every movie, his big heroic action is that he figures something out faster than everyone else. (You'll pardon my referring to Ryan in film, but it's been a lot of years since I read the Tom Clancy novels.)

In The Hunt for Red October, Ryan has researched Marco Ramius enough to figure out that he's not a lunatic, but is actually trying to defect.

In Patriot Games, he helps track the IRA terrorists to Libya and helps save his family in a subsequent revenge attack.

In Clear and Present Danger, he figures out that his CIA superiors have launched a secret military operation against Colombian drug cartels, tracks down John Clark, persuades him to launch a rescue operation, and even reaches a temporary alliance with a drug lord, exposing the double-dealing of his second-in-command.

In The Sum of All Fears, Ryan has researched the new Russian president enough to instinctively know he didn't launch a nuclear attack on the United States.

In Shadow Recruit, the first Jack Ryan film not based on one of Tom Clancy's novels, the creators decided they wanted to show an aspect of Ryan's past not yet depicted on film -- his short stint in the Marines cut short by injuries from a helicopter crash -- and take the character in a decidedly more physical direction. Early on, Pine's Ryan survives an assassination attempt with some close-quarters bare-knuckle brawling that seems straight out of the Jason Bourne films. Then he does a bit of sneaking, and hacking straight out of a Mission: Impossible film, then a car chase through the streets of Moscow at night. It all ends with Ryan needing to find a ticking bomb in the middle of a chaotic lower Manhattan being evacuated . . . very Jack-Bauer-in-24-style stuff.

Shadow Recruit takes Tom Clancy's very distinctive protagonist and makes a very good action movie, but a less distinctive one.

ADDENDUM: I see from Mrs. CampaignSpot that Amazon has new coupons through its "Amazon Mom" program. Great news, Matt Yglesias and Josh Barro! Enjoy the children's books, baby wipes, and lactation vitamins, fellas!

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