About the Bullshit Team of Rivals Meme.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have not read Doris Kearn Goodwin's Team of Rivals, nor do I intend to, simply because I find the whole notion that Lincoln built this team of political opponents and molded them into an effective cabinet to be so laughable on its face that I'm not particularly interested in how Goodwin is going to try to convince me Lincoln's cabinet was particularly effective, when I've read numerous works that convince me otherwise.

Here are a few inconvenient truths that the media needs to figure before continuing to peddle its Team of Rivals bullshit:

1. The Republican Party was formed in 1854, in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, just 6 years before Lincoln was first elected. It was built out of anti-slavery elements of the old Whig Party, which basically collapsed after a fatal split over abolition, and mostly northern, liberal Democrats who opposed slavery. So it would have not been all that shocking to find members of the Republican party who had been Democrats as recently as 6 years before.

2. Lincoln's first cabinet (which is what Obama is picking right now), contained no Democrats at all. While Lincoln did replace a couple of his first cabinet members with War Democrats turned members of the rechristened National Union Party (the banner Republicans ran under in 1864) later, the bullshit that Lincoln appointed tons of Democrats to his cabinet in 18641 is pure fiction.

3. Lincoln's cabinet throughout the war was a very dysfunctional bunch. His clashes with Secretary of State William Seward, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (who referred to his boss as the original gorilla, a nickname that General and later Linoln Presidential opponent George McClellan adopted from Stanton) and Salmon P Chase are the stuff of legend. Of his first cabinet, about the only one Lincoln could count on as a true ally was Montgomery Blair, his first postmaster general. It is a measure of Lincoln's gifts as arguably the best pure politician to hold the office prior to FDR that he managed to hold it together at all.

4. What Lincoln's first cabinet did have was a whole lot of Republicans in it who had been rivals for the Republican nomination in 1860. These included Stanton, Seward, and Chase. All three of them went into Lincoln's cabinet convinced they were better suited for Lincoln's role than he was, which led to many of the more famous clashes.

To bring this back to the latter day Obama Cabinet, Obama's cabinet outdoes Goodwin's and particularly the media's Team of Rivals meme. With the announcement of Bill Richardson as Commerce Secretary, assuming Obama's cabinet picks are confirmed, it will contain 4 of the people that ran against Obama for the Democratic Nomination. Unlike Lincoln, Obama's cabinet will contain two Republicans, Marine General Jim Jones as National Security Adviser, and Robert Gates will remain as Secretary of Defense. While true that Jones was an Obama adviser prior to the election, he is still nominally a Republican. Gates' Republican ties are beyond question.

So in effect, Obama out-Team of Rivals Lincoln's Team of Rivalscabinet on points. Will it work as well as Lincoln's? Frankly, for the sake of the country, it had better run better than Lincoln's.

So to sum up, Team of Rivals as a media meme is beyond stupid. It's a lazy construct from our lazy media. I'm sure Goodwin, and particularly her publisher, don't mind all the books the media has sold for her in the last few weeks though.

Give It Up, David.

If I'm ever elected US Dictator for a Day, I will ban the use of the following terms from political life:

game-changer.
race card.
Bradley Effect.

As well as all of the other clichés on this list.

Finally, my inner film geek will immediately pass a law providing for life imprisonment, without parole, and forbidding television privileges for any political idiot, left or right, who uses a basically non-political film to make a tortured, shit-stupid political point, like say, this gibberish from David Sirota, who has pretty much gone around the bend since Obama won the election, because Obama hasn't given him a job, or hasn't passed some arcane ideological purity test of David's with his appointee for White House janitor or some such.

I watched one of the two Best Worst Movies in film history this weekend - Big Trouble in Little China (the other Best Worst Movie is Army of Darkness). Whether brought on by the natural high of a leftover-filled stomach, or the artificial high of Thanksgiving night Maker's Mark, I had an epiphany that this movie is a highly accurate - if artistically absurd - portrayal of a deeply important aspect of how America sees itself in the world.

Funny me, I just thought it was a silly, B-Grade film that possesses enough of a quirky charm in its characters to hold up 20 years later. And blaming the Maker's Mark would have been a valid excuse, if just about every other post by David Sirota since November 4 wasn't equally incoherent.

The main character, Jack Burton (Kurt Russell), is obviously cast as America. Indeed, director John Carpenter pretty overtly wants him to be something of a Western cowboy (for instance, though a truck driver, Burton carries his belongings in a saddle bag). As the Toronto Star praised Russell in its review, "He does a great John Wayne imitation." Meanwhile, David Lo Pan and his gang are the Rest of the World, and more specifically, the Non-Aligned Countries, otherwise known as the Axis of Evil.

No, that's the funny part. Actually, he's a millenia old Chinese Warlord who got his ass-kicked by another Chinese Warlord, who's trying to put together another army in Chinatown in San Francisco. What the hell movie was Sirota watching?

The plot casts these Foreigners as having created a terrorist cell in San Francisco's Chinatown

Terrorist cell, Chinese street gang, same difference.

In fact, every Chinese person in the movie - good guy or bad guy - is made to seem like their first and foremost loyalty is not to the United States, but to China ("China is here, Mr Burton!") - a key fear propagated by American pop culture, from the McCarthy witchhunts for communist infiltrators to George W. Bush's domestic "war on terror."

That would include the other main protagonist, Wang Chi, who at one point proclaims his love of America, in pretty stark flag-waving relief, early in the film. Clearly David passed out early in this film, and recalls the rest from a hazy, alcoholic dream state.

Let's read on though. Maybe he'll be more coherent in the next paragraph.

So how does Burton/America deal with Lo Pan/Foreign Terrorists? He has no plan at all, other than to head to their headquarters and bust in guns blazing. The lack of planning is not an accident or something looked down on - it's how he rolls and he's proud of it, as evidenced by his repeated refrain that he doesn't need to plan because "it's all in the reflexes." And everytime he says this line, we're supposed to laugh and cheer with him, because this is how we roll.

Then again, maybe he won't be any more coherent.

This takes things to a whole different level of stupid. As pointed out by one of the commenters in the thread, and the director's commentary, the point of Jack's character, the main driving force, is he thinks he's the big hero, when he's really the sidekick. Reading anything more into this just shows David to be looking for a message that isn't there.

We don't plan when dealing with foreigners who have different customs and cultures and who threaten our interests - we don't need to plan because planning is for pussies. We're fellow truck-driver cowboys with daggers in pocket of the boots we're wearing over our acid wash jeans - and dammit, "it's all in the reflexes."

You know, it almost hurts to think about the pretzel-like contortions Sirota had to get himself in so he could try to extract deep political thinking out of a B-Grade Comedic Action-Adventure Flick.

While Burton stumbles a lot and makes an idiot out of himself, his lack of planning ultimately works. He defeats the evil foreigners, saves the day and gets the girl (who he's too cool to keep around). The moral of the story is that while America might make some blockheaded mistakes, they're honest ones and because we're the "good guys" we'll end up winning the day. There may be "big trouble" but it's manageable because compared to American power, everything is little (in the movie's case what's little is China, but it could be anything - Iraq, Al Qaeda, etc.).

Um, actually, his Chinese-American comrades do most of the heavy lifting, while Jack pours bullets in the ceiling, knocking himself unconscious. Knocking myself unconscious after reading this is sounding increasingly tempting, by the way.

Big Trouble in Little China debuted in 1986 - arguably the peak of American world supremacy. The Soviet Union was on its heels about to collapse and there were no other superpowers, or emerging superpowers. So, in that sense, the movie was a vaguely accurate metaphorical depiction of the United States at the moment. We could kick some ass without really having to think about it.

Wha? This paragraph hurts my brain.

That said, the tongue-in-cheek flavor of the film suggests Carpenter is using the Burton character to deliberately ridicule American hubris (and let's not forget the very end of the movie just before the credits roll: the crazy-eyed demon about to get his final revenge on Burton could be the world taking revenge on that hubris).

Or Carpenter might have just been trying to make a funny, action-adventure film on a shoestring budget. As at least one movie mogul was once quoted as saying, "If you want to send a message, try Western Union."

Look, Sirota's third-rate movie screed doesn't get any better. In fact, it could have only got worse if he'd shouted "Wolverines!" at the end of it.

Here's the deal. It's a point that a lot of highly politicized people on the left and right really miss about entertainment. It's stupid when the Laura Ingrahams, and Bill O'Reillys, and Jonah Goldbergs of the right do it, and it's equally stupid when David Sirota does it.

Excluding documentaries, probably a good 95% of the films released by the film industry are generally devoid of any great political meaning. 3-4% may make a point without trying to make a point. 1-2% may seek to actively make a political point.

Frankly, the films in that 1-2% are usually pretty dreadful films. Remember Syriana? An American Carol? Lions for Lambs? They all tried to say something deep. They were all pretty fucking awful.

And if you're trying to derive deep political meaning from any film in the collected works of John Carpenter, it's time to back away from the keyboard, swear off political blogging for a good month, and maybe go watch some films without viewing everything through political lenses. It will be good for you to see how a good 80% of the country lives everyday. You might actually learn something new that way as well.

Though I have to say that there was no more searing indictment of the Nixon Administration than Sorceror from Outer Space, and The Thing and Christine were a one-two punch of a takedown of the Reagan Administration.

Please shoot me now.

Requiem For A Maverick

Leave it to Matt Taibbi to write the ultimate postmortem on the dumbest Presidential campaign I've ever seen run by Republicans:

McCain's shtick wasn't exactly that, but it was close. He was a war hero who married an heiress to a beer distributorship and had been in the Senate since the Mesozoic Era. His greatest strength as a politician had up until this year been his ability to "reach across the aisle," a quality that in the modern Republican Party was normally about as popular as open bisexuality. His presence atop the ticket this year was evidence of profound anxiety within the party about its chances in the general election. After eight disastrous years of Bush, they thought they had lost the middle — so they picked a middling guy to get it back.

Which made sense, right up until the moment when they stuck him with Pinochet in heels for a running mate. Sarah Palin would have been a brilliant choice as a presidential nominee — and she will be, in 2012, when she leads the inevitable Republican counter-revolution against Obama's presidency. She's a classic divide-and-conquer politician, an unapologetic Witch Hunter and True Believer with a gift for whipping up the mob against the infidel. In a way that even George W. Bush never was, she is Karl Rove's wet dream, the Osama bin Laden of soccer moms, crusading against germs, communism, atheism and other such unclean elements strictly banned by American law.

Palin is exactly the kind of all-or-nothing fundamentalist to whom the career of John McCain had long existed as a kind of sneering counterargument. Up until this year, McCain had firmly rejected the emotional imperatives implicit in Bush-Rove-Gingrich conservatism, in which the relentless demonizing of liberals and liberalism was even more important than policy. While other Republicans were crusading against gay marriage in 2004, McCain bashed a proposed anti-gay-marriage amendment, calling it "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans." While the president and other Republicans wrapped their arms around the Falwells of the world, McCain blasted those preachers as "agents of intolerance." He talked of seeing the hand of God when he hiked in the Grand Canyon, but insisted loudly that he believed in evolution. He even, for Christ's sake, supported a ban on commercial whaling. If there's anything that a decent Republican knows without being told, it's that whales are a liberal constituency.

But McCain didn't care. Back then, his political survival didn't depend on keeping voters artificially geeked up on fear and hatred for Mexicans or biology teachers or other such subversives. He was, after all, a war hero, and Sharon Stone's cousin.

In short, McCain entered this election season being the worst thing that anyone can be, in the eyes of the Rove-school Republicans: Different. Independent. His own man. He exited the campaign on his knees, all his dignity gone, having handed the White House to the hated liberals after spending the last months of the race with numb-nuts Sarah Palin on his arm and Karl Rove's cock in his mouth. Even if you wanted to vote for him, you didn't know who you were voting for. The old McCain? The new McCain? Neither? Both?

Ouch. That'll leave a mark.

(h/t John Cole)