Friday, October 28, 2005

Happy TR's Birthday!

27 October 1858. Have a Bully weekend!

Monday, October 24, 2005

A Man's Triumph.

Men have circumnavigated the globe, explored the seas, air, and space, built magnificent structures reaching to the heavens, and conquered diseases. Yet these triumphs pale to that of an ordinary man surveying his newly cleaned and ordered garage. Time for a victory cigar!

Sunday, October 23, 2005















Good Night, and Good Luck.

George Clooney has created a masterpiece, a visually beautiful film, with a superb screenplay. The smoky jazz score wings one back to the 1950s. David Strathairn is magnificent as Murrow, and Frank Langela is a powerful co-star as Bill Paley. Ah - all those lovely cigarettes! Can we be anywhere but in the glorious '50s?

"Good Night and Good Luck" has relevance to our present condition well beyond cliche' Patriot Act allusions. As I was watching the film, I thought of the Dan Rather, Eason Jordan, and Jason Blair affairs, Bill Bennett and the march of PC across college campuses. The "Report it Now" dovetail blog is, sadly, skewed itself: "responsibile" journalism appears to be ...left-leaning "social justice" journalism, and certainly not found in the conservative strata of the blogosphere.

Was McCarthy wrong? There were some communists and communist sympathizers within government. But McCarthy was a juggernaut who exploited the legitmate concern over communism, and as William F. Buckley has observed (the same Buckley that the film's screenplay recalls defending McCarthy) "..McCarthy did more damage to his cause than benefit."

Great movie - find some good friends of a variety of political stripes, go see the movie, then find a damn good coffee shop and argue 'till dawn. Of course, your communist friends will be remorseful that come the Revolution all of the rest of you will need to rounded up, shot or perhaps "reeducated" for the good of the people.