United 93; A Must See Movie

I just got back from seeing the movie United 93 on opening night. It was quite an event. I went from initially wondering if I was going to really want to sit through it to almost immediately being riveted to the events as they unfolded. I endured sways in emotion that I simply didn't anticipate and the audience around me reacted similarly.

We've all heard about the event and the various elements that took place but to see it all here, chronologically laid out in fastidious detail results in a journey of raw personal honesty that is hard to accept.

When we first encounter the hijackers the audience seemed curious about them, dealing with them with a fairly open mind that seemed bent on trying to understand the rationale that drove their actions. However, as the events of the day unfolded, most notably outside of Flight 93, that open mind attitude quickly shifted into pure unadulterated hatred for the onscreen terrorists. You could sense everyone leaning forward wanting to find a way to reach out and exact revenge on the perpetrators. The anger welled up and was left with nowhere to go. I simply cannot recommend that anyone who even remotely looks Middle Eastern to head into a theater to see this movie. It would be a risk just not worth taking. In fact, I fear for the actors who played these challenging roles. They did the job almost too well.

The movie continued to draw everyone into it throughout. People around me sat frozen in their seats, many with their hands over their mouths in astonishment. Everything was vivid as if the events were taking place at that very moment. Frustration grew with each passing moment as viewers desperately wanted to intervene in the events but had to endure knowing that nothing could be done.

The final moments of the movie were just draining. You could literally hear a pin drop during the closing shot in a theater full of more than 300 people. Most sat motionless as the credits ran. When people did rise it was accompanied by shaking heads and downward looks. No one wanted to make eye contact for fear of having to admit the depth of their anger and contempt for both the hijackers and those who failed to react accordingly.

While the movie clearly had no political bent, one scene unmistakably causes everyone to think the same thought and that thought was that President Bush failed our country at the moment of its greatest need. He failed us in a way that cannot be pushed aside with political spin. Anyone who sees this movie cannot, in good faith, deny this reality. It took our leader more than an hour after the attacks began and 15 minutes after the last plane (United 93) crashed, to issue a response. It's hard to imagine any of the last three Presidents not responding to this tragedy far sooner. This is the age of nearly-instant communication and the President was informed of this tragedy only 16 minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center. There is no excuse for 75 minutes of doing nothing. It was one thing to give the President the benefit of the doubt in 2001 but seen from the vantage point of more recent failures, this movie sheds new light on the level of incompetence that took place on this day.

Every frame of this movie is a work of clear meticulous dedication to the task. It in no way exploits the events. To suggest it does is to suggest that honesty in movies is not desired. The choice of lesser-known or unknown actors was brilliant. The decision to not complicate matters with typical back-stories and outside issues was also the right one. Just about everything in this movie feels realistic and historically accurate. This is a movie that I suspect will resonate for some time, or perhaps I just hope it will. It made everyone there tonight think very passionately about their own beliefs, about just how much this event really strikes home for all of us and it leaves no room for excuses or posturing.

It's all about Competition

Everyone is talking about gas prices, which is very funny given that just last week all the right-wing pundits were saying that no one would be talking about it until election time because we've all adjusted to the high prices. Anyway, the amazing part to me is that the argument seems to fall on one of two sides; The oil industry needs to be hit with a "windfall profit tax" or the opposite argument that everything is just peachy.

I have no interest in socializing gas prices. I don't have ill-will towards the gas companies for raking in great profits. A tax on oil profits has been tried before and it did nothing for the consumer. A tax now won't save anyone anything significant. In fact, if we dropped the taxes that are currently tied to a gallon of gas, we'd save quite a bit. However, all that being said, I still have a fundamental issue with the situation as it is today.

When Exxon can afford to pay its retiring Chairman $400 million including pension, stock options and other benefits like a $1 million consulting deal, two years of home security, personal security, a car and driver, and use of a corporate jet for professional purposes, something is very wrong.

When a company can afford to do that at a critical time like we're now facing with respect to gas prices, that tells me that there simply is not enough effective competition in the market. Think about it. Surely there should be a slew of companies that would be willing to get by with virtually none of that sort of extravagance and that company should be able to pass those savings on to the consumer. Since that isn't happening, it's clear that the oil industry isn't exactly following a true free market approach. The same can be said for many other industries, most notably the music publishing business and when its allowed to continue things only get worse for the consumer.

I really don't have the background to know exactly what might be wrong with respect to the oil industry but clearly something just isn't right and until that gets addressed, we're going to continue to pay more than we need to while companies like Exxon continue to pay out ridiculous benefits to their top people.

This Guy Just Doesn't Get It.

George W. Bush is going to go down in history as the worst President the nation has ever had. I have absolutely no doubt about that. It may take a few decades before he rises to that rank fully but it's going to happen.

This guy cannot get out of his own way. His latest debacle is in believing that a good way to turn around his abysmal poll numbers is to replace the disgraced Scott McClellan with right-wing pundit and Fox commentator Tony Snow as Press Secretary.

This move makes zero sense as usual. You want to win back support and you're answer is to hire a divisive, hard-core right-wing pundit from a network despised by at least half the populace?

Par for the course for the worst President in history. What's next, a tax on gas in order to lower its cost?

The Plame Blame Game

It comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone paying attention that Scooter Libby has now admitted that the President authorized the release of information that lead to the outing of Valerie Plame. Now that this information has been reported on, Republican pundits are in overdrive mode looking for any excuse to downplay this realization.

The current attempt at defusing the issue is to suggest that nothing illegal happened because President Bush acted within his rights (rights which he seems to create as he goes along) by declassifying, on the fly, the information that was provided to New York Times' reporter Judith Miller.

For a party that continually attempts to claim the moral high ground, the Republicans seem to continually find themselves mired in situations that beg us to question if they know about the concept of glass houses and rocks not being a good mix.

First, why is it that we never heard anything about this convenient declassification of critical information until now? The answer is that we only heard about it at this point because the process forced it to the surface which, in turn, forced the administration to admit that the President was directly involved in this entire affair. Prior to this we were told, time and time again, that no one in the administration was involved in this. That circle kept getting smaller as time went on and has now fully closed at the very top of the chain.

Second, has anyone yet offered up proof of some sort of official declassifaction process? Is the process so flexible that if the President simply decides to share our nuclear secrets with his neighbor that his opening his mouth constitutes an official declassification? Where's the paper trail?

Third, it doesn't matter, at the heart of it, if the process was legal or not. The point is that we expect more from a President, especially one being sold to us as being so morally bound and centered. To suggest that this President Bush and Vice President Cheney didn't know exactly what the outcome of their actions would be is ludicrous.

The bottom line is that their actions were motivated by vindictiveness, retribution and politics. Bush and Cheney knew full well that releasing the information in question would, in turn, result in the exposure of Joe Wilson's wife. If they didn't know then that raises an even bigger concern about their competency to hold the offices they hold.

At this point the entire defense of the administration on this issue is hinged entirely on semantics that sound every bit as ridiculous as asking us to define what the definition of "is" is.

More Hypocrisy From the Right....

It's getting harder to listen to any conservative lately without hearing what clearly is a calculated effort on their part to smear Democrats wholesale.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, talking on a recent edition of "The O'Reilly Factor" said that "you can expect two years of all-out investigations, attacks, anything they can bring to bear" if the Democrats win back control of either the House or Senate in the 2006 election.

The same has been said by several other notable Republicans and I've now had to listen to MSNBC's Chris Matthews go on about this a few times of late.

What strikes me as hypocritical is that I have to wonder exactly how this differs from what former President Bill Clinton had to endure from Republicans during his entire tenure? Travelgate, Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky..... Give me a break. I'm getting tired of the constant suggestion that Republicans are beyond such questionable acts and that only Democrats would be so low as to go after the President in such a way. Their big excuse now is that we're involved in a war and that it's wrong to go after a President while we're at war. Yeah, okay. How about waking up to the fact that a majority of the country now questions the entire war issue? Enough already.

Republicans Admit Record of Failure Since 1988

The entire Republican party has taken a new approach that they think is the recipe for success. The key talking point is to continually evoke the name of Ronald Reagan. If you haven't heard it yet, you soon will. Nearly every Republican candidate has taken to suggesting that they're conservatives in the "Reagan Mold".

The great part about this is that it once again shows just how little people think when they decide to set a path that takes them over thin ice.

Does it not occur to Republican strategists that by using this phrasing that they're admitting that all of their input from 1989-1992 and 2001 straight through to 2008 has been, is and will continue to be a complete failure?

We're supposed to believe that things have been so rosy under the leadership of the Bush family that candidates running for office feel the need to reach back nearly 20 years to attempt to point to a positive experience? This, of course, is a bit of a questionable concept all its own. For those of us who lived through the Reagan years, it wasn't the Garden of Eden that today's Republicans would have you believe. I voted for Reagan in 1984 only to have him reverse course and enact that largest tax increases in history at the time. Prior to that he'd managed to rack up the largest deficit the country had seen to that date. Revisionists will attempt to tell you that this was all done in the name of bringing down the Soviet Union. Complete BS.

If the best your side can come up with is to evoke foggy memories from two decades ago, clearly something else much larger is broken. If you can't see through this charade, you're just going to have to admit that you've given up your objectivity. The right should realize that evoking "Reagan Mold" draws a picture for many of us of and old guy knee-deep in old smelly cheese, not a face that belongs on Mt. Rushmore.

7 Minutes to Election Success

I look forward to Bill Maher's, "Real Time with Bill Maher" show each Friday night at 11pm on HBO. For those who would deride the show as being one that Bill O'Reilly likes to refer to as one from the "extreme left", I would have to disagree. Anyone from the right is welcome to come and join the panel. Few do, and that speaks volumes about the nature of the show. It can't be controlled as the right would like it. Simply spewing out talking points and rhetoric will bring the bearer quick, articulate lashback. Most Lefties couldn't get on Fox News shows if they showed up with a Ronald Reagan lunch pail, by contrast. One show is about intellectual discourse while the other is about prepared, calculated theater. I prefer the former thank you.

Anyway, this past show included a very uncomfortable segment that started off with Bill Maher discussing Andy Card and showing the famous picture of Card whisping in George Bush's ear, "America is under attack." This, as we now know, was followed by seven long minutes of the President sitting in his chair looking dumbstruck. Maher went on to point out that if he were the Democrats he would have used that footage to win elections in 2004. The interesting part to me is that Bill spoke as if the time for this opportunity had passed.

Frankly, I believe it'd extremely effective to get every Republican you can find on the record defending the President sitting there doing nothing for seven minutes and then use their ridiculous response to drive them out of office. There simply is no intellectual debate to be had on the subject. Your President is told the country is UNDER ATTACK and his response is to si there like a log for seven long minutes (let's not forget that once he did actually get up, it was to spend another 20 minutes in the school taking pictures with the kids and teachers).

More than any other responsibility, we look to our President to have the skills to react quickly, intelligently and decisively in such situations. The words, "America is under attack" have only been uttered a very few times in our history. These situations demand reaction, not confusion. Yes, it was great theater for Bush to show up at Ground Zero and make a speech but that was all prepared in advance and that seems to be the only environment this President can work in. It isn't that difficult to look heroic after hours and days of preparation and rehersal garnering material from top aids for the effort. It's how a person reacts in a time of crisis, AT THE TIME OF CRISIS, that defines the person. George Bush has failed miserably at every opportunity in this area and it's time to put that failure to good use.

If I were the Democrats, I would run the supporting responses to these actions all election cycle and remind the people that this is the party that's been running our government. Is it any wonder that George Bush's poll numbers have tanked and that people don't believe in him? I wouldn't believe in a supposed leader who cannot get off his chair for seven minutes in a dire emergency either.

As Bill Maher said, if this were Bill Clinton, Karl Rove would have run this exact type of campaign. Get all those on the right on the record defending the indefensible and then ride that wave of rhetoric right into office.