Sunday, May 25, 2008

Killery

Both Bob Schieffer and Tim Russert hosted Obama love fests this morning (I’m beginning to think the SNL parody was underplayed) and spent a lot of time bashing Hillary for her comment this week mentioning that Bobby Kennedy was murdered in June. If you saw the whole clip (CBS showed it – NBC did not) she was making the point that lots of primaries have dragged on longer than this one, but this was too juicy for the chattering class to leave without assigning to it a subliminal meaning.

However, the subliminal meaning they hope we will glean is so venal they can’t actually say it without contributing to its efficacy, but it’s there. They want people to believe that Senator Clinton was trying to plant the idea in someone’s head that it isn’t too late to kill Senator Obama – such is the depravity and all-consuming nature of her personal ambition. When I started this blog the very last thing I thought I’d spend time doing was defending Hillary Clinton, but I am just amazed at the unified and unrelentingly hostile nature of the media and political establishments aligned against her. She’s won the majority of the popular vote, she has a reasonable (if non-PC) rationale for why she’ll be the stronger candidate in the fall, and she’s played a key role in bringing out more registered Democrats than have ever been seen before. I don’t even like her but I just don’t understand the forces at work here.

Great movie: On a happier note, do yourself a favor and rent Across the Universe. I wish I’d seen it on a big screen with a great sound system (The Zeigfield Theater comes to mind) but it was great on DVD too. It’s a musical set to Beatles music, set mostly in New York with side trips to Liverpool, Princeton, Washington, Viet Nam and Ohio (really). The time is 1967-68 and the story is the story of the times – sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, politics, assassinations, war, protests and love. T-Bone Burnett adapted the music and even if you were on the other side of the Stones v. Beatles argument, as I was, nothing evokes the times like the boys from Liverpool. The movie uses innovative cinematography mixed with animation to create a mixture of the real and surreal. The choreography was fantastic and there are some great performances in small parts by the likes of Bono, Joe Cocker, and my favorite, Eddie Izzard. Don’t miss this one.

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