Archive - Apr 25, 2008 - topic

Date
Type
The Associated Press

"Harold and Kumar" stars Kal Penn (right) and John Cho yuk it up at a panel discussion at the SXSW Film Festival in March.

Featured Topic | Posted 29 weeks 4 days ago

Harold and Kumar opens: Is America ready for Guantanamo jokes?

Anti-war films tank at the box office. Hollywood has produced bomb after bomb (so to speak) and the bombs keep coming. Will one ever hit? Well, maybe this time at pair of stoners will be just the remedy Tinsel Town needs to attract an audience and make money. Ready or not, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay hits theaters as mainstream Hollywood's first comedy to lampoon the United States' war on terror.

Read More

Ben likes: Remix of an Olbermann rant

Libertas

The best part of the review comes at the end when Variety describes the film as, “one of the ballsiest comedies to come out of Hollywood in a long time” — proving only that Variety needs to get out more. Maybe a field trip to Wal-Mart, or something. Ballsy? If there’s a finer resume enhancer in Hollywood than trashing America and the people who defend us, I’m unaware of it.

Try to imagine in the thick of World War II, Bob Hope making a film ridiculing our side. Good heavens, even a leftie like Charlie Chaplin had the moral compass to ridicule Hitler instead of Roosevelt and Churchill.

But don’t get the wrong idea. No one’s questioning anyone’s patriotism here.  

Read More

Joel likes: Absurdistan

Anthony Kaufman/Village Voice

Earnest, sad, and righteous, they are not. More inspired by M*A*S*H or Dr. Strangelove than The Deer Hunter or Coming Home, a new pack of political films that defy the clichés of the post-9/11 Iraq War cinema has arrived. Rife with satire and absurdity, with more ambiguity and less agit-prop, they don't toe the MoveOn party line and go beyond the familiar war-is-hell mantra. As documentary filmmaker Michael Tucker says: "Yes, it's tragic and horrible. Duh. What else is there?"

For one, there's the bizarre madness of it at all, as shown in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. While ostensibly a raunchy teen comedy, the film's archvillain is a racist, ignorant deputy chief of Homeland Security who sends Harold and Kumar to face the horrors of Gitmo. "While it's obviously absurd," co-writer-director Hayden Schlossberg acknowledges of the film's premise, "there's an element of truth. There have been people thrown in Guantánamo who have done nothing. We like the idea of doing something about these subjects in a way that's not serious."

"Sincerity handicaps you," explains Tucker, who co-directed a number of Iraq docs, including Gunner Palace. "Trying to be earnest about something—it does nothing to explain it," he says. "That's why the fiction films have largely failed—because people are already in that emotional place." 

Read More

How readers are voting

average
vote
John McCain
The Associated Press

Was he wrong then and right now? Or is it the other way around?

Featured Topic | Posted 29 weeks 4 days ago

Why is John McCain pushing tax policies he once opposed?

Back in 2001, Sen. John McCain famously refused to support President Bush's package of tax cuts. Now that he is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, however, McCain is marching straight down the party line.

Read More

Ben likes: McCain and taxes

Wall Street Journal

John McCain, the Republican nominee for President, has proposed extending the Bush tax cuts. So as morning follows night this week, Democratic news analysis has been pouring forth to proclaim that his tax ideas are a threat to the republic because they'll explode the budget deficit. The Senator needs to understand that he can't win this election by playing on this economic turf.

The subtext of the criticism of the McCain tax plan is that it would somehow "starve" the government of revenue. The figures being tossed around for the "cost" of the McCain tax plan have been estimated at $2 trillion by the liberal Center for American Progress, while the Brookings Institution estimates $5.7 trillion.

Senator McCain doesn't need a doctorate in economics to understand this debate. As a Member of Congress and Presidential candidate, he has listened endlessly to Democrats mau-mau their opponents with rhetoric about "fairness" and the "deficit" and, best of all, the "investment needs" of the government, aka, spending.

The past week's criticisms are intended to bait Mr. McCain into debating his tax cuts on these liberal terms. He can only win this debate, and the election, by breaking free of that mindset and making his own personal case for lower taxes and the prosperity they help to create.

 

Read More

Joel likes: McCainomics

Marie Cocco/Truthdig

Fittingly, and with dreadful predictability, John McCain used April 15—tax day—as the day to release his economic plan. Fittingly, and with dreadful predictability, it offers more of the same. 

But more of the same what?

Is it Bushonomics? This is the more debilitating version of Reaganomics we have had for the past seven years. It has been more damaging, because neither President Bush nor the Republicans who controlled Congress through most of his tenure gave a whit about cutting spending, which Reagan, from time to time, tried to do. So one of Bush’s parting gifts when he leaves the Oval Office is going to be an overhang of debt.

The straight-talk candidate’s economic plan offers a ticket straight back to the same old story: tax cuts that go to individuals and businesses, which Congress (especially a Democratic Congress) will in all likelihood balk at offsetting with deep spending cuts, and which will in all likelihood end up obliterating any glimmer of hope for a bipartisan deal on the future of entitlement programs.

Been there, done that. Don’t really want to go back to that future.

 

Read More

How readers are voting

your vote
average
vote
Jihad
The Associated Press

A suspected Al Qaeda militant is captured in Afghanistan.

Featured Topic | Posted 29 weeks 4 days ago

No more "jihadists": What should we call the terrorists we're fighting?

Don't call them jihadists any more. And don't call Al Qaeda a movement. Federal agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter Terrorism Center, are telling their people not to describe Islamic extremists as "jihadists" or "mujahedeen," according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. Lingo like "Islamo-fascism" is out, too.

Read More

Ben likes: Preventing the West from understanding jihad

Walid Phares/Foundation for the Defense of Democracies

First, the argument of "good jihad" raises the question of how there can be a legitimate concept of religious war in the twenty-first century to start with. Jihad historically was as "good" as any other religious war over the last 2,000 years. If a "good jihad" is the one authorized by a caliph and directed under his auspices, then other world leaders also can wage a "good crusade" at will, as long as it is licensed by the proper authority. But in fact, all religious wars are proscribed by international law, period.

Second, the authors of this lobbyist-concocted theory claim that a wrong jihad is called a Hiraba. But in Arab Muslim history, a Hiraba (unauthorized warring) was when a group of warriors launched itself against the enemy without orders from the real commander. Obviously, this implies that a "genuine" war against a real enemy does exist and that these hotheaded soldiers have simply acted without orders. Hence this cunning explanation puts "spin" on jihad but leaves the core idea of jihadism completely intact. The "spoilers" depart from the plan, attack prematurely, and cause damage to the caliphate's long-terms plans. These Mufsidoon "fail" their commanders by unleashing a war of their own, instead of waiting for orders.

This scenario fits the relations of the global jihadists, who are the regimes and international groups slowly planning to gain power against the infidels and the "hotheaded" Osama bin Laden. Thus the promoters of this theory of Hiraba and Mufsidoon are representing the views of classical Wahabis and the Muslim Brotherhood in their criticism of the "great leap forward" made by bin Laden. But by convincing Westerners that al Qaeda and its allies are not the real jihadists but some renegades, the advocates of this school would be causing the vision of Western defense to become blurred again so that more time could be gained by a larger, more powerful wave of Jihadism that is biding its time to strike when it chooses, under a coherent international leadership.

Read More

Joel likes: Wrong war, wrong word

Katha Pollitt/The Nation

"Islamo-fascism" conflates a wide variety of disparate states, movements and organizations as if, like the fascists, they all want similar things and are working together to achieve them. Neocons have called Saddam Hussein and the Baathists of Syria Islamo-fascists, but these relatively secular nationalist tyrants have nothing in common with shadowy, stateless, fundamentalist Al Qaeda--as even Bush now acknowledges--or with the Taliban, who want to return Afghanistan to the seventh century; and the Taliban aren't much like Iran, which is different from Saudi Arabia--whoops, our big ally in the Middle East!

Islamo-fascism" looks like an analytic term, but really it's an emotional one, intended to get us to think less and fear more. It presents the bewildering politics of the Muslim world as a simple matter of Us versus Them, with war to the end the only answer, as with Hitler. "Islamo-fascism" enrages to no purpose the dwindling number of Muslims who don't already hate us. At the same time, it clouds with ideology a range of situations--Lebanon, Palestine, airplane and subway bombings, Afghanistan, Iraq--we need to see clearly and distinctly and deal with in a focused way. No wonder the people who brought us the disaster in Iraq are so fond

Read More

How readers are voting

your vote
average
vote