carnage and culture

Monday, February 03, 2014

Philip Seymour Hoffman: The Greatest Actor of His Generation

The actor, discovered dead in his apartment at 46, was Hollywood's patron saint of schlubs, losers, and outcasts.

http://www.theatlantic.com/

February 2, 2014

Famous deaths invite hyperbole. The news that Philip Seymour Hoffman was discovered dead today in an apartment bathroom, with a syringe sticking out of his arm, seems like an occasion to overreact with some exaggerated summary of his career—something like "most talented and kaleidoscopic actor of his time."

Except, in this case, the compliment isn't hyperbolic at all. It's just an accurate description, as true yesterday as it is today. And the competition isn't even that close.

The first thing about Philip Seymour Hoffman—that is, the first thing most audiences saw—is that he looked unremarkable, even boring. He had a hangdog countenance, often sliced with the swoop of his receding blond mane, with small, firm eyes. He wasn't strikingly handsome, nor strikingly unhandsome, neither thin nor obese, not blessed with any distinguishing gosh-wow feature that would make somebody watching an early performance in Twister or The Big Lebowski exclaim, "I think we've found our next Brando." Instead of standing out in these early films, he stood within them—gauging the pace and tone of the action around him and blending in so delicately that it's not uncommon for even Hoffman fanatics to look back on his career and think, I forgot he was in that.

It's easy to forget because there is so much to remember. Even the shortlist is long: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Master, Moneyball, The Ides of March, Doubt, Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Wilson's War, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Mission: Impossible III, Capote, Along Came Polly, Almost Famous, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Magnolia, Boogie Nights. And those are just the movies I remember seeing. The list doesn't include his tremendous career in theater, a stage where his talents were arguably even more kinetic.

The diversity of that list—biopics, romantic comedies, dark dramas, action franchises—offers an appreciation for Hoffman's range. But to truly understand it, you have to see the man in action. Here is our first scene, a talker from Aaron Sorkin's Charlie Wilson's War, where Hoffman plays a maverick CIA agent bitching out his boss, with a voice that flips from wry guttural to grizzly-bear roar.

Now a scene from Capote, for which Hoffman won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Nothing is the same—the voice, the face, the instincts. This isn’t a talking scene. It's a listening scene—and it's masterful. It is, as Hoffman's director Mike Nichols once observed, as if he has rearranged his molecules and reassembled his smallest gestures to form an unidentifiably different human. Acting this good isn't instructive: It's just a lesson in what most other actors will never be able to do.

Finally, out of nowhere, here is the same Oscar-award-winning actor hamming up a pick-up basketball scene in Along Came Polly, as if suddenly possessed by the heavenly spirit of Chris Farley.

An actor this good at talking should not be so good at silence. An actor so good at silence shouldn't be this good at talking. In the delicate art of negotiating rest stops, commanding crescendos, and unleashing fortes, there wasn't a more precise conductor of performances than Hoffman.

We can see, in most actors' greatest roles, a reflection of what we imagine to be their truest self. Jack Nicholson charms as the platonic ideal of a rake, or Al Pacino as the embodiment of bottled and uncorked rage, or Robert DeNiro, as power cut with insecurity (or insecurity cut with power). This sort of mental experiment fails entirely when applied to Hoffman.

In Charlie Wilson's War and Moneyball, where he tosses in supporting-role gems, he is a wall of quiet (and then not-so-quiet) intimidation. He positions himself broodingly behind his stomach, as if it's an office desk. And yet his only Oscar came from playing Truman Capote, an elfin writer, tiny as a human figurine. To watch and believe Hoffman as Capote is to participate in the purest form of theater: This could never be, and yet it is.

Daniel Day-Lewis, the most decorated male actor of his time, has astonished as America's most famous president and most ruthless fictional oil titan. But he excels at playing superlatives—at commanding the aristocratic awe of characters who are bigger than life. Day-Lewis playing a game of pick-up basketball in a romantic comedy isn't a movie scene. It's a discarded SNL skit. It's a bad joke. He would never do it, and nobody would ever want to see it. Hoffman was different. He could puff himself up and play larger than life, but his specialty was to find the quiet dignity in life-sized characters—losers, outcasts, and human marginalia.

It's not clear that there were roles Philip Seymour Hoffman could not do. He had so many lives within him—and more, undiscovered and unseen. Those are the lives, aside from his own, we've now lost. "For me, acting is torturous," Hoffman told the New York Times in 2008, "and it’s torturous because you know it’s a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That’s beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great—well, that’s absolutely torturous."

He continued: "In the end, I’m grateful to feel something so deeply, and I’m also grateful that it’s over. And that’s my life.”

Related:

'Philip Seymour Hoffman's Greatest Gift: Understatement' -

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/02/philip-seymour-hoffmans-great-gift-understatement/283525/

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Actor of Depth, Dies at 46

By BRUCE WEBER
http://www.nytimes.com/
February 2, 2014

Philip Seymour Hoffman, perhaps the most ambitious and widely admired American actor of his generation, who gave three-dimensional nuance to a wide range of sidekicks, villains and leading men on screen and embraced some of the theater’s most burdensome roles on Broadway, died on Sunday at an apartment in Greenwich Village he was renting as an office. He was 46.

The death, from an apparent drug overdose, was confirmed by the police. Mr. Hoffman was found in the apartment by a friend who had become concerned after being unable to reach him. Investigators found a syringe in his arm and, nearby, an envelope containing what appeared to be heroin.

Mr. Hoffman was long known to struggle with addiction. In 2006, he said in an interview with “60 Minutes” that he had given up drugs and alcohol many years earlier, when he was 22. Last year he checked into a rehabilitation program for about 10 days after a reliance on prescription pills resulted in his briefly turning again to heroin.

“I saw him last week, and he was clean and sober, his old self,” said David Bar Katz, a playwright, and the friend who found Mr. Hoffman and called 911. “I really thought this chapter was over.”

A stocky, often sleepy-looking man with blond, generally uncombed hair who favored the rumpled clothes more associated with an out-of-work actor than a star, Mr. Hoffman did not cut the traditional figure of a leading man, though he was more than capable of leading roles.

In his final appearance on Broadway, in 2012, he put his Everyman mien to work in portraying perhaps the American theater’s most celebrated protagonist — Willy Loman, Arthur Miller’s title character in “Death of a Salesman.” At 44, he was widely seen as young for the part — the casting, by the director Mike Nichols, was meant to emphasize the flashback scenes depicting a younger, pre-disillusionment Willy — and though the production drew mixed reviews, Mr. Hoffman was nominated for a Tony Award.

“Mr. Hoffman does terminal uncertainty better than practically anyone,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, “and he’s terrific in showing the doubt that crumples Willy just when he’s trying to sell his own brand of all-American optimism.”

In supporting roles, he was nominated three times for Academy Awards — as a priest under suspicion of sexual predation in “Doubt” (2008); as a C.I.A. agent especially eloquent in high dudgeon in “Charlie Wilson’s War” (2007);and as a charismatic cult leader in “The Master” (2012).

But he won in the best actor category for “Capote” (2005). As the eccentrically sociable, brilliantly probing and unflappably gay author of “In Cold Blood,“ Mr. Hoffman flawlessly affected the real-life Truman Capote’s distinctly nasal, high-pitched voice and the naturally fey drama of his presence. Writing in The Times, A. O. Scott described the film as being about a writer’s relationship with his work.

“This makes for better drama than you might expect,” Mr. Scott wrote. “Capote’s human connections are, for the most part, secondary and instrumental, which makes Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance all the more remarkable, since he must connect with the audience without piercing the membrane of his character’s narcissism.

“Not only does Mr. Hoffman achieve an impressive physical and vocal transformation — mimicking Capote’s chirpy drawl and appearing to shrink to his elfin stature — but he also conveys, with clarity and subtlety, the complexities of Capote’s temperament.”

Mr. Hoffman appeared in more than 50 films in a career that spanned less than 25 years; in the early 1990s he had small roles in “Leap of Faith,” which starred Steve Martin as a faith healer, and “Scent of a Woman,” in which he played a prep school classmate of Chris O’Donnell, the weekend escort of a blind former military officer on a New York City jaunt, played by Al Pacino, who won an Oscar for the role.

He appeared in big-budget Hollywood films — including “Mission: Impossible III” (2006), “Moneyball” (2011) and “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” (2013) — and critically praised independent films, including “The Savages” (2007), in which he and Laura Linney, as his sister, struggle to care for their declining father; “Synecdoche, New York” (2008), Charlie Kaufman’s offbeat drama in which he played a moody theater director wrangling with his work and women; and “A Late Quartet,” about a violinist in the midst of dual crises, familial and musical.

But citing the highlights of Mr. Hoffman’s prolific work life — which included directing and acting in Off Broadway shows for the Labyrinth Theater Company, a New York City troupe, which he served for a time as artistic director — undervalues his versatility and his willingness, rare in a celebrity actor, to explore the depths of not just creepy or villainous characters, but pathetically unattractive ones. He was a chameleon of especially vivid colors in roles that called for him to be unappealing.

He played an obsequious sycophant in the Coen brothers’s cult comedy “The Big Lebowski” (1998); a former child star pathetically desperate to reclaim his celebrity in “Along Came Polly” (2004), a romantic comedy that starred Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston; a chronic masturbator in Todd Solondz’s portrait of suburban New Jersey, “Happiness” (1998); a snooty Princetonian in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999); a weaselly tabloid reporter who gets his comeuppance (he’s glued to a wheelchair and set on fire) in “Red Dragon” (2002), an adaptation of one of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels; and in the role that brought him his first renown, he was Scotty J., a shy, overweight, gay boom operator on a pornographic film in “Boogie Nights” (1997).

In addition to “Death of a Salesman,” Mr. Hoffman appeared as the anguished and violent playwright, Konstantin, in Mr. Nichols’s production of “The Seagull” at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in 2001, and on Broadway in two other long and difficult roles.

In 2000, he and John C. Reilly were in “True West,” Sam Shepard’s harrowing comic drama about the reunion of two estranged brothers; each of the two roles is substantial, but in this production, directed by Matthew Warchus, the actors each played them both, switching roles in different performances.

And in 2003, he played James Tyrone, the doomed-to-alcoholism elder son of James and Mary Tyrone (Brian Dennehy and Vanessa Redgrave) in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Eugene O’Neill’s portrait of an epic family demise.

“The theater was very difficult for him,” Robert Falls, the director of “Long Day’s Journey,” said in an interview Sunday. “It cost him; there was an emotional cost to the work, having to do it for eight performances a week, and having to rehearse. In ‘Long Day’s Journey,’ a role about an addict who would be dead in a number of years, who was filled with self-loathing, certainly Phil had access to those emotions. But I’m not talking about a method actor. He just brought every fiber of his being to the stage. He was there — with his depth of feeling, depth of humanity — and no other actor I’ve ever worked with ever brought it like that, not at that level.”

Mr. Hoffman was born on July 23, 1967, in Fairport, N.Y., a suburb of Rochester. His mother, the former Marilyn Loucks, is a former family court judge. His father, Gordon, worked for the Xerox Corporation. His parents, who divorced when Philip was young, survive him. In his acceptance speechat the Academy Awards in 2006, Mr. Hoffman thanked many people, but in particular his mother, now known as Marilyn O’Connor, who attended. He thanked her for raising him and his three siblings on her own and for taking him to see his first play.

“Be proud, Mom, ’cause I’m proud of you, and we’re here tonight, and it’s so good,” he said with a smile.

Mr. Hoffman’s other survivors include a brother, Gordon, a screenwriter who wrote “Love Liza,” a 2002 film starring Mr. Hoffman as a man living through the aftermath of his wife’s suicide; and two sisters, Jill Hoffman DelVecchio and Emily Hoffman Barr; his longtime partner, Mimi O’Donnell, a costume designer who is the current artistic director of the Labyrinth Theater Company; and their three children, Cooper, Tallulah and Willa.

Mr. Hoffman became an actor in high school after a wrestling injury halted his athletic aspirations. He played Radar in a school production of “MASH,” a performance that was skilled enough that the school’s drama director decided to put on “Death of a Salesman”; in 1984, as a senior, he played Willy Loman. After graduating, he spent a summer at the Circle in the Square Theater School in Manhattan and later graduated from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

Mr. Hoffman’s other notable film roles included one of two brothers (Ethan Hawke was the other) who contrive to rob their parents’ jewelry store, a crime that goes grotesquely wrong, in Sidney Lumet’s 2007 thriller “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”; the renegade rock critic Lester Bangs in Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous” (2000); a rogue disc jockey in “Pirate Radio” (2009); and the campaign manager of a politician in “The Ides of March” (2011).

His principal works in progress were “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1” and “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2,” in which he plays the head game-maker Plutarch Heavensbee. He had largely finished on the first film, but was scheduled for seven more shooting days on the second, according to a person who was briefed on the situation and spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality strictures.

The films, directed by Francis Lawrence, are set for release by Lionsgate, the first on Nov. 21 of this year, the second on Nov. 20, 2015.

As a director, Mr. Hoffman worked with Stephen Adly Guirgis, a Labyrinth colleague, on several well-received Off Broadway plays, including “In Arabia We’d All Be Kings,” “Jesus Hopped the A Train,” “Our Lady of 121st Street” and “The Little Flower of East Orange” — all tempestuous works about urban life — and a fantasy biblical discourse, “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.”

Also for Labyrinth, he played the title role in Robert Glaudini’s “Jack Goes Boating,” about the tentative love life of a pot-smoking limousine driver; Mr. Hoffman reprised the role in a 2010 adaptation, a film he also directed.

Labyrinth members were in a state of shock yesterday. “I had no indication at all,” the actor Felix Solis said in an interview. “He was our hero; he was our leader.”

On Sunday afternoon outside the building where Mr. Hoffman died, more than 100 people had gathered to mourn. The body was removed at about 6:40 p.m.; police officers formed a barricade to prevent people from taking pictures.

“He’s a local — he’s a fixture in this neighborhood,” said Christian McCulloch, who said he lived nearby. “You see him with his kids in the coffee shops. He is so sweet. It’s desperately sad.”

At long last, the Lombardi Trophy is coming to Seattle

The Seahawks’ victory over the Broncos in the Super Bowl shows they aren’t just the best team in the NFL this season but a young monster that the league must reckon with.

By Jerry Brewer

Seattle Times staff columnist

February 2, 2014

Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson (3) carries the ball during the first quarter of the Super Bowl XLVIII between the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ on 2/2/14. (William Perlman/The Star-Ledger)

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Blue and green confetti everywhere, falling gently down like Seattle rain. Seahawks coach Pete Carroll is soaked, the victim of two Gatorade showers. Russell Okung kisses the Lombardi Trophy as NFL Hall of Famer Marcus Allen totes it to the stage. The 12th Man roars, even in MetLife Stadium. Kam Chancellor barks, and Marshawn Lynch flees to seek solitude, grinning.

These are snapshots of a long-overdue celebration, images that will stay with Seattle sports fans for a lifetime, memories made permanent by the baddest team to roam the NFL in quite some time.

The Seahawks didn’t just happen to be the best team in an any-given-Sunday league, not after the way they pounded the Denver Broncos, a great team with a future Hall of Famer at quarterback and the most prolific offense in league history. After an emphatic 43-8 victory in Super Bowl XLVIII, they’re now the monster of the NFL, a young team built to chase many more championships, an unsatisfied team that can’t yet comprehend why the world is shocked that they make greatness look easy.

“To be honest with you,” wide receiver Doug Baldwin said flatly, “a lot of players on this team expected a dominant win.”

The drought is over, Seattle.

You don’t have to endure ridicule about your city’s rampant losing anymore. You don’t have to expect the worst even when your teams are at their best. You don’t have to sneer about being overlooked or underappreciated.

The Seahawks have delivered the city’s first championship since 1979 in one of the Big Four sports leagues (NBA, NFL, NHL, MLB). Thirty-five years of suffering, of outlasting mediocrity and mismanagement and misfortune, knelt at the feet of this team. The Seahawks didn’t just win a championship. They yanked the Lombardi Trophy away from the Broncos. They lived up to their preseason promise to leave no doubt this season.

They posted the mantra on their locker-room walls and wore shirts with the same message: “Leave No Doubt, 24/7.” In the biggest game of their careers, they did exactly that, playing with the edge that makes them great.

They crushed the notion of a Manning Legacy Bowl, taking control of the game from the start. They took advantage of the strangest start in Super Bowl history, collecting a safety and a 2-0 lead 12 seconds into the game after Denver center Manny Ramirez snapped the ball over Peyton Manning’s shoulder.

In a matchup of the league’s best offense vs. its best defense, the Seahawks’ D proved to be the most unstoppable force. They held the Broncos to 306 yards, nearly 160 below their season average. Denver scored 37.9 points per game in the regular season, but the Broncos didn’t score until after the Seahawks had built a 36-0 lead.

Manning set a Super Bowl record by completing 34 passes, but he managed only 280 yards and threw two interceptions, one of which MVP Malcolm Smith returned for a 69-yard touchdown in the second quarter.

The Seahawks scored on offense, defense and special teams. Percy Harvin, who had played in only two games all season because of injury, eliminated any dreams of a Denver comeback with an 87-yard kickoff return for a touchdown to start the third quarter.

The score was 29-0 after Harvin’s dash, but the Seahawks wouldn’t relent. Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, who completed 18 of 25 passes for 206 yards and two touchdowns, kept telling his team to apply more pressure. Even when the score ballooned to 36-0, the Seahawks’ special-teams players were still racing to see who could get to the end zone first on a touchback. That’s what they are — relentless.

“This is emotion that we’ve been building up since we were 6, 7 years old and began playing football,” Baldwin said. “We belong here. I kept saying that this is our opportunity and our time. They owe us this opportunity, but they’re not going to give it to us. We have to take it ourselves.”

Oh, they took it. And then they laughed at those who thought they wouldn’t.

“We’re capable of anything,” wide receiver Golden Tate said. “I feel like, at any given moment, we’re capable of breaking a game open.”

Said Carroll: “We played our style of ball. It really wasn’t about the other guys. We just played the way we play. I’m glad that it came out like that, so clearly, so obviously.”

Now they hoist the trophy, not just for themselves, but for a title-starved community that will feast on this triumph. How long had the drought been? The Seahawks are almost too young to remember the Sonics winning the 1979 NBA title. The franchise was only 3 years old then.

“We take this trophy back — everyone knows we are taking this trophy back to the 12th Man,” Carroll said, standing atop the stage at midfield during the postgame trophy presentation. “It’s an unbelievable spirit. It’s their trophy.”

Today, the 38-year-old Seahawks are the best team in the NFL. And they’re set up to stay that way if they can keep their edge and retain the heart of this roster.

The future can wait, however. Finally, you don’t have to seek out tomorrow and dream of the possibility of finding joy in Seattle sports. You can spread out in the moment.

The Seahawks are bringing the Lombardi Trophy home. And it’s yours, all yours, at last.

Pnts	Game	Score
Most points scored in a Super Bowl
The Seahawks became the seventh team to score at least 42 points in a Super Bowl.
55	SB XXIV	San Francisco 55, Denver 10
52	SB XXVII	Dallas 52, Buffalo 17
49	SB XXIX	San Francisco 49, San Diego 26
48	SB XXXVII	Tampa Bay 48, Oakland 21
46	SB XX	Chicago 46, New England 10
43	SB XLVIII	Seattle 43, Denver 8
42	SB XXII	Washington 42, Denver 10

Jerry Brewer: 206-464-2277 or jbrewer@seattletimes.com. On Twitter @JerryBrewer

COLUMNISTS

STORIES

Broncos embarrass themselves in Super Bowl rout

By Mark Kiszla
The Denver Post

2/3/14

Denver's Peyton Manning is hit as he gets rid of a pass during the first of Super Bowl XLVIII between the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ on 2/2/14. (Andrew Mills/The Star-Ledger)

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — It took Peyton Manning 37 years to build a reputation as the best quarterback in NFL history, and only 12 seconds in the Super Bowl to fumble it away.

Duck, Peyton.

As much as it hurt to be humiliated by a 43-8 loss to Seattle in the Super Bowl, the pain will be nothing compared to the heat Manning will take for flopping on football's biggest stage. The Broncos were so bad Sunday, the sun might be embarrassed to show its face in Colorado.

"The word embarrassing is an insulting word, to tell you the truth," an obviously irked Manning said Sunday.

Football is not fair, and then you die a thousand deaths as a quarterback when your team looks scared and unprepared on the game's biggest stage. With an 11-12 record in the postseason, Manning gets dissed for choking in the postseason.

This loss won't help. Rout is not a strong enough four-letter word to describe how poorly the Broncos played. After throwing two first-half interceptions that ignited Seattle's rout, Manning will take the brunt of the blame.

"A lot of people will put the blame on Peyton Manning. ... But this is a team loss. It's not Peyton Manning's loss. It shouldn't be a knock on his legacy," Broncos defensive tackle Terrance Knighton said.

Has the NFL championship game ever been lost in a single play?

Embarrassing might be an insult to everything the Broncos achieved as they became the first team in league history to score more than 600 points in the regular season, then beat San Diego and New England in the playoffs. But embarrassing is the only way to describe what happened to Manning and the Broncos on the first snap from scrimmage. It is destined to go down as the most embarrassing play in Super Bowl history.

Manning is known for having all the answers. He walked into MetLife Stadium for the big test. The first thing Manning did? Misspell his name on the paper.

Standing in the shotgun, Manning barked signals Denver center Manny Ramirez could not hear above the din of 82,529 screaming fans. "Nobody could hear me," Manning said. As the quarterback walked toward Ramirez to fix the communication breakdown, Ramirez launched the snap far over Manning's head. The football bounced into the end zone. Broncos running back Knowshon Moreno pounced on it, conceding a safety to Seattle.

When did Ramirez figure out Manning was in no position to take the first snap of the Super Bowl, a play the Broncos had two weeks to rehearse?

"They told me on the sideline," said Ramirez, who admitted he snapped the ball three seconds after Manning expected it to be delivered. "There's no explanation."

The most prolific quick-strike offense in NFL history scored two points for Seattle without the Seahawks even trying.

And the Super Bowl dreams of Denver? Gone in 12 seconds.

"When you're trying to battle back, it's really hard," Broncos receiver Eric Decker said. "And I think you could definitely feel the momentum of the game snowball on us."

From the opening kickoff, which saw returner Trindon Holliday slammed down at the 14-yard line, the Broncos were dominated by the first rule of the playground: Athletes stay. Losers walk. No amount of intelligence or creativity can overcome a clear and decisive difference in speed and strength.

Super Bowl XLVIII was not NFC vs. AFC. It was varsity vs. JV. Whenever Seattle speedster Percy Harvin touched the football, whether as a running back or a kick returner, time and the Broncos stood still. Their championship aspirations faded to black.

Panic set in for Denver shortly before halftime. Trailing 22-0, Broncos coach John Fox eschewed a short field goal in an attempt to gain 2 yards on fourth down. Manning's pass to Demaryius Thomas never had a chance.

After Harvin opened the second half by taking the kickoff 87 yards for a touchdown that put Seattle ahead 29-0, Fox decided not to go for it on fourth down, facing fourth-and-11 at the Seahawks' 39-yard-line with 10 minutes, 54 seconds remaining in the third quarter. The punt was a concession speech.

"We were on a national stage, in the biggest game in America," Decker said. "And to come out and play like that?"

It was super depressing.

Manning set a Super Bowl record with 34 completions. "Star Wars" numbers, but an unhappy ending. Fair or not, it's the dominant story of his NFL career.

Pardon John Elway for having a 1980s flashback for the lopsided Super Bowl losses he endured early in his playing career. "We just didn't play like we're capable of. I was disappointed," Elway said.

A year ago, a stunning loss to Baltimore in the playoffs gave the Broncos a sense of purpose and a motto: Unfinished business.

This loss to Seattle was worse. It shouted: As now constructed, the Broncos are not good enough to win it all.

As quarterback of the Broncos, Manning won the league's MVP award for the fifth time. Here's betting he would trade all those trophies for just one more championship ring. At age 37, Manning is running out of time to go jewelry shopping.

Mark Kiszla: mkiszla@denverpost.com or twitter.com/markkiszla

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Sunday, February 02, 2014

The Cowardice of Wendy Davis

Passionate advocates of unrestricted abortion aren’t willing to talk about, well, abortion.

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com/

January 31, 2014

Wendy Davis, a Democratic state senator running to replace Rick Perry as governor of Texas, owes her political stardom to two things: a pair of pink sneakers and her unstinting support for a woman’s right to terminate a late-term pregnancy in a substandard clinic. Yay, feminism!

Last year, Davis led an eleven-hour filibuster — that’s where the sneakers came in handy — to block legislation that would ban abortion after 20 weeks and require abortion clinics to meet the same standards that hospital-style surgical centers do.

This was all going on against the backdrop of the sensational Kermit Gosnell case in Pennsylvania. Gosnell ran a bloody, filthy “clinic” where he performed late-term abortions with a barbarity you’d expect to find in a Sawmovie. Sometimes he’d “snip” the spines of fully-delivered babies with a pair of scissors. His instruments were so unsanitary that some women got STDs from them. Cat feces was a common sight on the procedure-room floors.

In short, you didn’t need to be an abortion-rights activist to find the story of interest, but you’d certainly expect an activist to be up to speed on it.

Working on that theory, The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack caught up with Davis last August to ask her a few questions.

McCormack noted that once you got past the squalor and filth of the clinic, Gosnell’s illegal late-term abortions weren’t all that different from legal late-term abortions in other states. “What is the difference . . . ,” McCormack asked, “between legal abortion at 23 weeks and what Gosnell did? Do you see a distinction between those two [acts]?”

“I don’t know what happened in the Gosnell case,” Davis replied. “But I do know that it happened in an ambulatory surgical center. And in Texas changing our clinics to that standard obviously isn’t going to make a difference.”

She should have stopped with “I don’t know what happened in the Gosnell case” — because in the words of the grand-jury report, the “abhorrent conditions and practices inside Gosnell’s clinic [were] directly attributable to the Pennsylvania Health Department’s refusal to treat abortion clinics as ambulatory surgical facilities.”

So the one thing she claimed to know wasn’t true. Also, what curious incuriosity. If you were suddenly a national leader on an issue you felt passionately about, wouldn’t you want to know what happened in a case that cuts to the heart of your cause?

Not Davis. Her time is better spent denouncing the ignorance of women who disagree with her. When McCormack asked what to make of the fact that a majority of American women support a ban on late-term abortions, Davis responded, “I again think that a lot of people don’t really understand the landscape of what’s happening in that arena today.”

Think about that. In the course of a short conversation, she revealed that she didn’t know what she was talking about while casually dismissing the majority of American women who disagreed with her as not knowing what they’re talking about.

Let’s fast-forward to 2014. Davis was recently interviewed by Jorge Ramos of Fusion TV. He asked her, “When does life start? When does a human being become one?”

Davis answered with a non-answer: “You know, the Supreme Court of course has answered this decision, in terms of what our protections are.” Blah blah blah.

Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics slammed Davis for being “too cowardly to give a straight answer, let alone a thoughtful one, to a straightforward question that goes to the heart of a matter she has made the signature issue of her political life.”

I agree. But Davis is merely at the forefront of the cowardice epidemic. On the anniversary of Roe v. Wade earlier this month, President Obama couldn’t bring himself to say the word “abortion,” preferring instead virtually every poll-tested buzzword. Indeed, in all of the “war on women” noise, abortion is almost always wrapped in the velvety euphemisms of “women’s health” and “reproductive choice.”

It should tell you something when passionate advocates of unrestricted abortion are so uncomfortable talking about . . . abortion.

Perhaps all of the rage abortion extremists aim at their opponents is cover for a deep insecurity — maybe psychological, definitely political — about the reality of what they are defending. Senator Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) once said that life begins “when you bring your baby home” from the hospital. That is not very far from Wendy Davis’s position. But she doesn’t want to say that — certainly not in Texas! Better to change the subject to the evils of her opponents and — hey — have you seen my sneakers?

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.