I don't like theatrics.

Happy Friday!

In contrast to Swinebread's My Top 10 Comic Book Movies post I give you My Bottom 10 Comic Book Movies.

10. Catwoman - Even the beautiful Halle Berry directly off an Oscar win couldn't save this by-the-numbers film.



9. Daredevil - I like Ben Afleck but he didn't have much to do here.



8. The Punisher (1989) - Dolph Lundgren's career couldn't end fast enough for me.



7. Barb Wire - Pamela Anderson can't act. For most guys her natural assets are more than enough to offset this lack of talent. Not for an hour and a half they're not.



6. Superman III - I love Christopher Reeve as Superman and I think Richard Pryor was a comedic genius but whichever executive got the bright idea that mixing these two together would be cinematic gold should've had their family jewels separated from their body and rocketed into the Forbidden Zone.



5. Batman and Robin - I know some fans see the Tim Burton films which preceded this monstrosity as heretical to Batman, but at least those films had Burton's surreal production designs and quirky, off-kilter vision. This film was just a mess.



4. The Hulk - Those like myself that were excited to see what Ang Lee would do with a comic franchise were disapointed that he decided to make every effort to try and put his audience to sleep with long scenes of exposition and little "Hulk smash."



3. Nick Fury: Agent of Shield - Okay, I'm cheating a bit by putting this on the list since it was a made for t.v. movie but it starred David "I'm drunk eating a hamburger" Hasselhoff for God's sakes.

2. The League of Extraordinary Gentleman - I want so much to like this movie, mostly because of Sean Connery. It's just impossible. Great special effects but no heart about sums it up.



1. Howard the Duck - The first sign of George Lucas' descent into dementia. So bad it's STILL not available on DVD and nye impossible on cassette. Lucas has a habit of trying to hide his mistakes.



UPDATE - Randal reminds me that Howard the Duck did have something going for it in the form of Lea Thompson. The scene below is the sole reason why a young Dean Wormer saw this movie more than once.

Well, he doesn't eat much, but he's a regular jackass, and hee-haw, hee-haw, he hawlways likes to be called Arthur.

In his prebuttal to Obama's speech last night Senator John McCain said he was an "agent of change."

"As the Senator from Illinois I am honored to be the first black nominee of a major party for the office of the presidency," McCain said. "Michelle and I are blessed."

McCain's remarks were cut short when aides pushed him into a straight jacket, then quickly ushered him off the stage using cattle prods.

They're asking if we want to beam up.

Warning somewhat nerdy, Star Trek themed post to follow--

As a fan of the old show I would be remiss if I didn't point out we lost a bunch of people dedicated to that great series just in the last week.

Joseph Pevney directed many of the best episodes of the original series including what is considered the best episode by most fans: "The City on the Edge of Forever." He also directed my personal favorite episode: "The Trouble with Tribbles."

In an odd coincidence I used to know his son, and regularly peppered him for any memories he had of his dad's work on the series. He had a funny story about William Shatner coming over to his house in a convertible corvette with his two dobermans. Shatners dobermans would just sit perfectly still in the backseat of that car while he met with Pevney.

Robert Justman was a producer on both Star Trek and Star Trek the Next Generation. His son said of all the Trek related deaths last week "There seems to be a big 'Star Trek' convention and everyone is going," he said. "Everyone is getting beamed up."

Finally I would say the biggest/ saddest loss is the death of composer Alexander Courage. Courage wrote the iconic theme song to the original series. He is also the victim of one of the cheapest acts of Gene Rodenberry's tenure on the show as Rodenberry effectively stole half the royalties for the song by writing lyrics.



Goodbye to all. It sounds like they lived long, and prospered.

There is no true glory in war.

The anniversary of D-Day will be this Friday. In casual reading about Eisenhower's planning for the invasion I came across across the letter below which he'd written in case the mission failed.

What left me with my mouth hanging open is his willingness to accept unequivocal blame. Can yo imagine that in a leader today?

(As a side note: he mis-dated the letter with "July 5" instead of June. No doubt he wasn't getting much sleep at that point.)

Our landings in the Cherbourg have at this hour failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops.

My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available.

The troops, the air and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do.

If any blame or fault attached to the attempt it is mine alone.

This country cannot house its houseless - feed its foodless.

I'm a Democrat.

That was a difficult thing to type.

The Democratic party has at more times than I can count over my almost lifetime membership in it infuriated me in the positions it's leadership has taken. There have been many, many times over the past several years that I've considered leaving the party.

So why would I remain a registered Democrat? Why not join the Socialist, or Green parties?

Distilled down to it's base there are two separate reasons I remain in the Democratic party.

The first is that the platform of the Democratic party is generally progressive in nature and I'm a progressive.

The second, perhaps more important reason is it's the largest and most organized alternative to the other major political party - the Republicans. A Republican party which at it's core has spent the last thirty years working to destroy everything that is good and decent about the country I love.

So I'm left to supporting an imperfect party that at it's best is able to win us things like Social Security but at it's worst it can barely stand up to save Social Security when it was under assault by Republicans who believe the governing rule of society should be survival of the fittest.

As long as I call myself a Democrat I recognize that doing so entails responsibilities to my fellow party members. Those responsibilities usually take the form of compromising on my personal preference for who will represent us in contests with Republicans.

At the start of this seemingly endless presidential primary I supported Kucinich. He was the most progressive of the bunch and his politics are closest to my own. He lost his bid for the nomination fairly early into the campaign.

My fallback candidate was Edwards. His commitment to social justice was Kennedyesque. He voted for the war while he was in the senate but had soundly renounced that vote. His candidacy crashed and burned shortly after Kucinich's.

At this point I was pretty pissed off. It seemed to me that the truly progressive voices were dropping out while we were left with what I considered establishment candidates in Clinton and Obama. Yes, these two candidates represented historical firsts but their was nothing about their candidacies that threatened official Washington.

I also had some sour grapes about how about how my candidates were treated by the media...

But after I calmed down and thought about it I realized that part of belonging to a political party is that not everybody in the party thinks exactly like I do. Everybody else has a say. I may disagree but as long as the goals of the party are something I can agree with, how we get there isn't as important.

Besides it didn't matter if I thought my preferred candidates would do better against the Republican nominee in the fall. My candidates lost.

So I compromised again. Ultimately putting a Democrat into the Whitehouse where the Joint Chiefs will have to answer to that person and who will make the next few Supreme Court nominations is the thing that's most important to me.

Tomorrow the primaries end and the supporters of one of the candidates are going to be asked to compromise and put aside thier considerable personal stake in their candidate for the sake of the party. Just like millions of their fellow Democrats have had to do during the course of this last year as their preferred candidates were defeated.

The choice is theirs and theirs alone.

Are they Democrats?

Go do that voodoo that you do so well!

I wish I could say "Happy Friday" but Harvey Korman's death has me a bit blue.

In a bit of irony Korman will mostly be remembered for his efforts NOT to laugh on the "Carol Burnett Show." He regularly put up Herculean efforts towards resisting co-star Tim Conway's frequent bouts of mugging.

Personally I'll remember Korman more for his stints in Mel Brooks movies- especially "Blazing Saddles." His work in that movie was sheer, comedic genius.



BAC has a tribute up along with a video from "The Carol Burnett Show" featuring Korman.

Monkey von Monkerstein also has a nice tribute to Korman up.

But I do know that, as long as we live, we must remain true to ourselves.

Kirk Douglas and his wife just dedicated their 400th playground in the L.A. area.

Here's the 91-year old actor on a slide.

I love this guy.

As we say in program: progress, not perfection.

I almost missed the very cool news that Al Franken pulled within 2 points of Norm Coleman in his Minnesota senate race. This particular race has taken sentimental meaning to me because of the horrible loss of Paul Wellstone in that plane crash a few years ago and the way Rush Limbaugh and Republicans politicized Wellstone's memorial. Something that Franken himself documented in his book "Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."

On an unrelated note I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who takes the time to plow through my mental meanderings here on this blog. Especially when I veer into the occasional rant. My grammar/ punctuation isn't always up to par, no more so when I'm writing about something that pisses me off like Scott McCellan.

Cheers!

Dean

Out, damned spot!

Sorry, Scott. That blood is as much your hands as it is Bush and Cheney's. I know a lot of my fellow anti-war bloggers are praising McCellan's recent revelations but the excerpts I read are disgustingly self-serving. To whit:

Most of our elected leaders in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, are good, decent people. Yet too many of them today have made a practice of shunning truth and the high level of openness and forthrightness required to discover it. Most of it is not willful or conscious. Rather, it is part of the modern Washington game that has become the accepted norm.

You were the Chief Poobah of Washington Bullshit, asshole. You have no moral standing - NONE - to criticize.

Oh, and a good portion of our elected leaders in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, are aren't good, decent people. Those kinds of people - people that oppose the Washington hive mentality you helped sell - are few and far between.

Ironically, much of Bush's campaign rhetoric (in 1999-2000) had been aimed at distancing himself from the excesses of Clinton's permanent campaign style of governing. The implicit meaning of Bush's words was that he would bring an end to the perpetual politicking and deep partisan divisions it created. Although Washington could not get enough of the permanent campaign, voters were seemingly eager to move beyond it.

Bush wasn't "elected" so "voters" weren't buying his crap. The way he took office, as the recent HBO film "Recount" reminds us, shows he didn't give a rat's ass about getting beyond "partisan divisions." The man lived for them.

Bush did not emulate Clinton on the policy front. Just the opposite – the mantra of the new administration was "anything but Clinton" when it came to policies. The Bush administration prided itself in focusing on big ideas, not playing small ball with worthy but essentially trivial policy ideas for a White House, like introducing school uniforms or going after deadbeat dads.

Pure, unadulterated crap Mr. McCellan. "Anything but Clinton" wasn't just a formulation against focusing the power of the federal government on trivial issues. It was a formulation against EVERYTHING the Clinton administration did, regardless of merit.

This meant a foreign policy that focused on bluster instead of diplomacy. An environmental policy that assumed science was partisan. A domestic policy that believed the rich were the ones that actually drive the economy and a security policy that believed the chief international threat to the United States wasn't loose pockets of islamic radicals but instead nation-states. A belief that led directly to the attacks on 9/11 I might add.

And it wasn't just Clinton administration policies that got the heave-ho. Treaties that had been negotiated by Republican and Democratic administrations alike were tossed out. Comity and decorum in the senate under control of both parties were thrown on the trash heap. The federal government became the plaything of people who were so full of hubris they believed they and they alone understood how the world worked.

"Anything but Clinton" was really "anything but reason." That's their fucking legacy, asshole.

When Bush was making up his mind to pursue regime change in Iraq, it is clear that his national security team did little to slow him down, to help him fully understand the tinderbox he was opening and the potential risks in doing so. I know the president pretty well. I believe that, if he had been given a crystal ball in which he could have foreseen the costs of war – more than 4,000 American troops killed, 30,000 injured, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens dead – he would have never made the decision to invade, despite what he might say or feel he has to say publicly.

Really? Because I don't think he cares. He's done nothing since then to correct his mistake. In fact he's compounded it with the surge and other efforts to make our presence there permanent.

But the point is HE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN. He's the President of the United States not the garbage man who missed your can. It's his job to know. If he didn't then he simply isn't qualified to be the president.

Which is what most of us have known for years.

Secretary of State Colin Powell was apparently the only adviser who even tried to raise doubts about the wisdom of war. The rest of the foreign policy team seemed to be preoccupied with regime change or, in the case of Condi Rice, seemingly more interested in accommodating the president's instincts and ideas than in questioning them or educating him.

This assumes Rice, Cheney, etc. were smart enought to know better or cared. I'm not willing to extend the President's advisors slack in either case. Or the president for that matter. And Powell can go jump of a bridge. He should've resigned the moment it was clear to him they were going to war. The man has no honor. None.

Most objective observers today would say that in 2003 there was no urgent need to address the threat posed by Saddam with a large-scale invasion, and therefore the war was not necessary. But this is a question President Bush seems not to want to grapple with.

Of course not because at it's core it's a moral question and he's a sociopath.

But as history moves to render its judgment in the coming years and decades, we can't gloss over the hard truths this book has sought to address and the lessons we can learn from understanding them better. Allowing the permanent campaign culture to remain in control may not take us into another unnecessary war, but it will continue to limit the opportunity for careful deliberation, bipartisan compromise, and meaningful solutions to the major problems all Americans want to see solved.

Bite me, Scott. You need to be dragged off to the Hague and tried for war crimes along with the rest of this administration. I'm sure your entire book is full of this self-serving tripe. YOU are just as responsible as Bush and the rest of his administration for the idiotic war in Iraq. YOU have blood on your hands.

I look forward to Baghdad Bob's book. I'm sure it will be just as factual.

You're despicable.

Yesterday the despicable John McCain attacked Barack Obama for supporting Jim Webb's G.I. Bill.

There could be many reasons outside of the obvious political reasons for McCain's actions around this bill and his refusal to support it.

Matt Yglesias points out that even if you take McCain at his word that his stance against increased benefits for veterans it doesn't look good for the aging Senator. He's he either against expansion of benefits because they cost too much (a position that doesn't fit with his regular support of pouring money into the bottomless pit that is the Iraq war) or he's against expansion of benefits because he truly believes it will hurt retention in the armed forces. In other words his dream of 100 years in Iraq will be threatened.

In either case how does McCain not come off as anything other than a batshiat crazy jerk here?