Posted 11/8/2003 06:13:33 PM by Edward Driscoll
I TOOK THE RED PILL LAST NIGHT, and plugged into The Matrix: Revolutions. Much like the previous film, except for the middle sequence (the invasion of Zion), a blow-out, balls-out CGI-gasm of an experience (if totally unnecessary plotwise, as James Lileks pointed out), the film was bad--really bad. Not as bad as The Hulk or Vanilla Sky (to name two recent sci-fi duds), but no great shakes, either. The dialogue is elliptical and nonsensical, and as Jonathan Last notes, the plot totally ignores the questions that the previous film asked. And Lawrence Fishburn's Morpheus character is totally wasted--he does little but ride shotgun while others do the dirty work of flying the hovercrafts or exploring the Matrix. Hard to believe that that much money spent on incredible CGI effects could be coupled with such a lousy script. You'll go see it--if you haven't already--because you've seen the first two. But trust me: The Matrix: Revolutions and its incredibly lame ending, will leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Posted 11/8/2003 04:20:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
WILL HISTORY LOOK BACK at our current period as a single continuum, beginning with World War II, as another Hundred Years War? Truth be told, it wouldn't surprise me.

Posted 11/7/2003 03:26:14 PM by Edward Driscoll
DID HOWARD DEAN BLOW IT with his flip-flops on the Confederate flag? Jonah Goldberg thinks he may have. UPDATE: Tunku Varadarajan writes, "In dictionaries to come, the following entry--'petard, hoist with one's own'--should be accompanied by a picture of a disconsolate Howard Dean." Ouch! ANOTHER UPDATE: Clarence Page also has some thoughts. ONE MORE UPDATE: Robert Novak writes that Dick Gephardt deliberately (and wisely) skipped the debate because he feared it would be "hostile territory".

Posted 11/7/2003 03:20:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
GREAT MYTHS ABOUT THE GREAT DEPRESSION: Thomas Sowell has some thoughts on how Hoover and FDR's virtually identical policies exacerbated and prolonged the Great Depression. UPDATE: Bruce Bartlett picks up the theme.

Posted 11/7/2003 02:56:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
"AFTER ALL, THE KILLING WAS SO--SO BORING": One of the most important books published this past summer was Anne Applebaum's Gulag. In a recent speech, she explained some of the reasons why the horrors of the Soviets aren't as viscerally remembered today by society as a whole as the Nazis were:

Do we, in the West, remember the Soviet past any better [than Russia does today]? One of the reasons I wrote this book was because I really encountered this subject only while living in Eastern Europe, and I started to wonder why. Since there are a lot of writers in the room today, I think I can also confess that I was further inspired by an irritating New York Times review of my first book, in 1994, which was about the Western borderlands of the former Soviet Union. Although largely positive, of course, it contained the following line:

Here occurred the terror famine of the 1930s, in which Stalin killed more Ukrainians than Hitler murdered Jews. Yet how many in the West remember it? After all, the killing was so--so boring, and ostensibly undramatic.

Were Stalin's murders boring? Many people think so. Put differently, the crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction as do the crimes of Hitler. Ken Livingstone, a former British member of Parliament, now Mayor of London, once struggled to explain the difference to me. Yes, the Nazis were "evil," he said. But the Soviet Union was "deformed." That view echoes the feeling that many people have, even people who are not old-fashioned members of the British Labor Party: The Soviet Union simply went wrong somehow, but it was not fundamentally wrong in the way that Hitler's Germany was wrong. Until recently, it was possible to explain this absence of popular feeling about the tragedy of European communism in the West as the logical result of a particular set of circumstances. The passage of time is part of it: Communist regimes really did grow less reprehensible as the years went by. Nobody was very frightened of General Jaruzelski, or even of Brezhnev, although both were responsible for a great deal of destruction. Besides, archives were closed. Access to camp sites was forbidden. No television cameras ever filmed the Soviet camps or their victims, as they had done in Germany at the end of the Second World War. No images, in turn, meant that the subject, in our image-driven culture, didn't really exist either.

I'd like to think that Applebaum's book will help change that, but given how Saddam Hussein's record is being ignored by many today, I'm not very hopeful.

Posted 11/6/2003 08:51:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
OR, MAYBE IT'S 1947 ALL OVER AGAIN: Andrew Sullivan writes:

I particularly liked the following analogy [in President Bush's speech]: 'As in the defense of Greece in 1947, and later in the Berlin Airlift, the strength and will of free peoples are now being tested before a watching world. And we will meet this test.' That's precisely the right way to frame this battle. This isn't a replay of Vietnam. It's a replay of an earlier, nobler war that changed the world for the better. Those are still the stakes today. And we cannot let cynicism or partisanship prevent us from winning the fight.

Sullivan's got a lot more to say about the war--and its critics.

Posted 11/6/2003 04:23:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
IS IT 1946 or 1943? Fascinating post by Instapundit. UPDATE: The president's speech today certainly makes it sound like the latter. Jonah Goldberg writes, "Whether you think his ideas are monstrous or monumental, one thing's assured: your children will be reading about this speech in school. Mark my words. The rudder of the American ship of state has moved sharply, changing the direction of world history. I believe for the better."

Posted 11/6/2003 04:20:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE MATRIX: REGURGITATED: David Edelstein looks at the final chapter of the Matrix trilogy, and is none too thrilled at what he sees. He does have spoilers, including the ending, something to keep in mind if you haven't seen the film yet. I still think my ending is best, though. UPDATE: Lileks liked the third Matrix movie. Which means Lileks has reviewed the third Matrix movie. Which means one thing...RTWT.

Posted 11/6/2003 12:03:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
"LIBERAL COCOONING" is a term Mickey Kaus invented. So let's let him describe what it means:

"The point is that reporters and editors at papers like the Times (either one!) are exquisitely sensitive to any sign that Democrats might win, but don't cultivate equivalent sensitivity when it comes to discerning signs Republicans might win. (Who wants to read that?) The result, in recent years, is the Liberal Cocoon, in which Democratic partisans are kept happy and hopeful until they are slaughtered every other November." Kaus' subject was an article in the L.A. Times, but his theory applies equally well to the paper's New York namesake.

David Cohen writes that this week's gubernatorial elections could cause Terry McAuliffe to be cocooned as well--at home and out of a job. UPDATE: Sean Rushton looks at how the Democrats filibustering of judicial nominees played a factor in the last two years' elections.

Posted 11/6/2003 11:12:10 AM by Edward Driscoll
"NOT ANY MORE": John Podhoretz writes, "With a few exceptions over the years, the Senate Select Committee has been an oasis of reason in an increasing polarized and partisan Washington. Not any more. In their desperate hunger to destroy George W. Bush, they have destroyed the oasis." Steven Den Beste also has some thoughts, in a detailed essay comparing the leaked memo and the Democrats' decisions with one made by Thomas Dewey in 1944.

Posted 11/4/2003 12:37:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
CBS PULLS THE REAGANS, decides to run it on Showtime. As Terry Teachout writes:

I’m sure that everybody and his sister will be blogging about this one, and they’ll mostly be right. Of course it’s a new-media story, and of course it wouldn’t have happened five years ago. I’ve been following Big Media’s coverage of the flap over The Reagans, and just two days ago I noted with interest and amusement a wire story claiming that CBS would be pleased by the controversy, since it would inevitably increase the series’ ratings. That is soooooo last year. Those of us who blog, whatever our political persuasions, know better. Boycotts of Big Media have always been feasible in theory. (Newspapers, in case you didn't know, take cancel-my-subscription-you-bastards letters very seriously—if they get enough of them.) In practice, though, they rarely worked, because it was too difficult to mobilize large-scale support quickly enough. No more. Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative-libertarian sector of the blogosphere have combined to create a giant megaphone through which disaffected right-wing consumers who have a bone to pick with Big Media can now make themselves heard.

Not surprisingly, Matt ("don't call me a Blogger") Drudge has some thoughts on the topic as well. UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has an interesting slant on all this:

In some ways, I think Drudge has inadvertently rescued CBS. If the miniseries had run, the backlash would have been so great, the exposure of the poisonous bias in parts of CBS so final, it might have helped destroy the already-flailing old media network. So the new media saved the old media. That in itself, of course, is a major story. And Drudge deserves credit for reporting it. Yes, reporting it. Why do the old media never give him credit when he does journalism as well as any of them?

You know the answer as well as I (and Andrew) do: because Drudge has two strikes against him--he's on the Internet, and he's a conservative, neither of which many journalists trust.

Posted 11/4/2003 11:26:38 AM by Edward Driscoll
LORNE MICHAELS IS ON KARL ROVE'S PAYROLL: How else to explain this?

Posted 11/4/2003 11:22:28 AM by Edward Driscoll
MINOR OMISSION: Gee, look what the Times accidentally left out of a story. Ooops! (Hat tip, Andrew Sullivan.)

Posted 11/3/2003 11:01:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
HEY, I GET AROUND! Big thanks to Eric Olsen, who reprinted my review of Miles Davis' A Tribute to Jack Johnson in his Blogcritics-spun-off Weblog in Cleveland.com, the Website of the Cleveland Plains Dealer!

Posted 11/2/2003 08:38:12 AM by Edward Driscoll
15 GIs KILLED, chopper shot down in Iraq: if all wars are Vietnam for the American left, then all wars are Black Hawk Down for Islamofascists. But hopefully we've learned from our mistakes in Mogadishu. Hopefully.

Posted 11/2/2003 08:33:13 AM by Edward Driscoll
THERE'S MORE THAN A KERNEL OF TRUTH in this Scott Ott parody.