Johnny's Got a New Girl

by Patrick J. Buchanan
http://www.townhall.com/
Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his running mate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin attend a campaign rally in O'Fallon, Missouri on August 31.
(AFP/File/Robyn Beck)

The risk John McCain took last Friday is comparable to the 72-year-old ex-fighter pilot knocking back two shots and flying his F-16 under the Golden Gate Bridge.

McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his co-pilot was the biggest gamble in presidential history. As of now, it is paying off, big-time.

The sensational selection in Dayton, Ohio, stepped all over the big story from Denver -- Barack Obama's powerful address to 85,000 cheering folks in Mile High Stadium, and 35 million nationally, a speech that vaulted him from a 2-point deficit early in the week to an 8-point margin. Barack had never before reached 49 percent against McCain.

As the Democrats were being rudely stepped on, however, Palin ignited an explosion of enthusiasm among conservatives, Evangelicals, traditional Catholics, gun owners and Right to Lifers not seen in decades.

By passing over his friends Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, and picking Palin, McCain has given himself a fighting chance of winning the White House that, before Friday morning, seemed to be slipping away. Indeed, the bristling reaction on the left testifies to Democratic fears that the choice of Palin could indeed be a game-changer in 2008.

Liberals howl that Palin has no experience, no qualifications to be president of the United States. But the lady has more executive experience than McCain, Joe Biden and Obama put together.

None of them has ever started or run a business as Palin did. None of them has run a giant state like Alaska, which is larger than California and Texas put together. And though Alaska is not populous, Gov. Palin has as many constituents as Nancy Pelosi or Biden.

She has no foreign policy experience, we are told. And though Alaska's neighbors are Canada and Russia, the point is valid. But from the day she takes office, Palin will get daily briefings and sit on the National Security Council with the president and secretaries of state, treasury and defense.

She will be up to speed in her first year.

And her experience as governor of Alaska, dealing with the oil industry and pipeline agreements with Canada, certainly compares favorably with that of Barack Obama, a community organizer who dealt in the mommy issues of food stamps and rent subsidies.

Where Obama has poodled along with the Daley Machine, Palin routed the Republican establishment, challenging and ousting a sitting GOP governor before defeating a former Democratic governor to become the first female and youngest governor in state history.

For his boldness in choosing Palin, McCain deserves enormous credit. He has made an extraordinary gesture to conservatives and the party base, offering his old antagonists a partner's share in his presidency. And his decision is likely to be rewarded with a massive and enthusiastic turnout for the McCain-Palin ticket. Rarely has this writer encountered such an outburst of enthusiasm on the right.

In choosing Palin, McCain may also have changed the course of history as much as Ike did with his choice of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan did with his choice of George H.W. Bush. For should this ticket win, Palin will eclipse every other Republican as heir apparent to the presidency and will have her own power base among Lifers, Evangelicals, gun folks and conservatives -- wholly independent of President McCain.

A traditional conservative on social issues, Palin has become, overnight, the most priceless political asset the movement has. Look for the neocons to move with all deliberate speed to take her into their camp by pressing upon her advisers and staff, and steering her into the AEI-Weekly Standard-War Party orbit.

Indeed, if McCain defeats Barack, 2012 could see women on both national tickets, and given McCain's age and the possibility he intends to serve a single term, women at the top of both -- Sarah vs. Hillary.

The arrival of Palin on the national scene, with her youth, charisma and vitality, probably also portends a changing of the guard in Washington.

With Republicans having zero chance of capturing either House, and but a slim chance of avoiding losses in both, a Vice President Palin, with her reputation as a rebel and reformer, would surely inspire similar revolts in the Republican caucuses.

As Thomas Jefferson said, from time to time, a little rebellion in the political world is as necessary as storms in the physical.

The Palin nomination could backfire, but it is hard to see how. She has passed her first test, her introduction to the nation, with wit and grace. And the Obama-Biden ticket, having already alienated millions of women with the disrespecting of Hillary, is unlikely to start attacking another woman whose sole offense is that she had just been given the chance to break the glass ceiling at the national level.

Her nomination, which will bring the Republican right home, also frees up McCain to appeal to moderates and liberals, which has long been his stock in trade.

With his selection of Sarah Palin, John McCain has not only shaken up this election, he may have helped shape the future of the United States -- and much for the better.

We’re Not Sisters with Her

Palin exposes the feminist Left.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez
National Review Online
http://www.nationalreview.com/
September 01, 2008, 0:30 a.m.

ST. PAUL — Last Tuesday, a coalition of feminist groups, including the White House Project, held a forum on women in politics at the Performing Arts Center in Denver. By week’s end, their world was rocked.

On Friday, John MCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate. The White House Project exists to get women elected to office — and ultimately, to the White House.

But in much the same way that the NAACP doesn’t exist to herald Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell, feminists really only champion a certain type of woman — a type Sarah Palin doesn’t fit.

In their weekly newsroundup, Women’s eNews declared Satuday morning:

While Palin’s selection was met with cheers among Republican advocacy groups she will not be warmly welcomed to the national stage by women’s rights advocates within the Democratic or independent folds. Ellen Malcolm, president of the pro-choice Democratic political action committee EMILY’s List, quickly issued a statement: “McCain clearly sees the power of women voters in this election but has just as clearly failed to support any of the issues that they care about. His choice for vice president only reinforces that failure.”

In her sarcastic New York Times column Sunday, Gail Collins concluded:

If she’s only on the ticket to try to get disaffected Clinton supporters to cross over, it’s a bad choice. Joe Biden may already be practicing his drop-dead line for the vice-presidential debate: “I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine, and governor, you’re no Hillary Clinton.”

She wrote that the insinuation that women would vote for women is “offensive.” Monday morning, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun wrote:

Under the circumstances, the decision to choose this woman over the likes of, say, Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson looks less like a stroke of genius than a stroke. It looks crazy. It looks wacky.

You’d be crazy to take that at face value. They wouldn’t have loved the more moderate Kay Bailey Hutchison either, truth be told. Not as conservative as Palin, she’s a Texas Republican who supported George W. Bush and the Iraq war.

As Gloria Steinem put it two decades ago when Geraldine Ferraro was tapped to run as Walter Mondale’s Number Two, “If it was a Phyllis Schafly, no one would be celebrating.”

No liberal feminists, for sure, but Feminists for Life and the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List are fully behind Palin.

In the weeks ahead, Sarah Palin should drop the lines about cracks in the glass ceiling and Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro. If you’re a conservative who needed to be rallied to a candidate on the Republican ticket who seems to share your worldview, you now have her.

If you’re voting because you’re into good girl role models, you’ll like “Sarah” (as everyone seems to be referring to her), who is very far away from the faux-feminism of the one-free-grope Clinton apologists — something most self-proclaimed feminists can say.

But if you’re a professional feminist, you may just be exposing yourself as more about liberal Democratic politics than any kind of sisterly encouragement for women pols.

And you’re also exposing the so-called “gender gap” once and for all as a myth.

As Kate O’Beirne points out in her book, Women Who Make the World Worse, “In the last seven presidential elections, Republicans have won five times and received more women’s votes than Democrats in three of the races.”

If women flock to McCain-Palin, it may not be because Palin has a uterus but because they vote Republican, know we’re at war, and aren’t into the silly girls’ games the Left likes to play.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.

America’s "Best" Theologian

By Mark D. Tooley
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Christian pacifist Stanley Hauerwas was hailed by Time magazine in 2001 as America’s “best” theologian. Whether best or not, he is certainly one of America’s most influential theologians and ethicists.


Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School

Hauerwas helps enable otherwise orthodox Christians feel enjoyably naughty by opposing the American “empire” and all the “Constantinianism” that supposedly enslaves most of Christianity. At about the same time that Time was acclaiming his influence, Hauerwas implied that 9-11 was America's chickens coming home to roost. He likened al Qaeda’s attack on America with another blast of supposed terrorism on 9-11-1973, when Chile was ostensibly victimized by America’s alleged support for Pinochet’s coup against the Allende regime.

Although a profound theologian, Hauerwas is a considerably less profound historian and observer of contemporary politics. Trashing America as the reincarnation of Caesar is his specialty. But Hauerwas trashes with a charming Texas twang that winsomely beguiles religious audiences striving for a form of down home sophistication.

Earlier this Summer, Hauerwas spoke at a trendy “emergent” church in Charlotte, North Carolina called “Renovatus,” whose name Hauerwas smilingly derided as “pretentious.” America’s “best” theologian was asked for whom he is voting in November. “I’ll probably vote for Obama, if you want to know,” he responded. “Not that it [matters] … I mean, it’s quite an extraordinary symbolic vote, and I care about it because I’m a white Southerner. I understand race.”

More characteristically, Hauerwas denounced the concept of democratic elections, American-style. “First of all, if you want to know what coercion looks like, it’s called a democratic election,” the Christian ethicist pronounced. “It’s where 51% get to dominate 49%.” Noting his commitment to “Christian non-violence,” he admitted his own “anarchist view of the world.”

Hauerwas described American elections as essentially the “Roman circus where you’re given entertainment to stop the American people from concentrating on … what really should be at the heart of the political process. Namely, such as, why is it that no one is angry at the inequality of income in this country? I mean, the inequality of income is unbelievable. Unbelievable. Why isn’t that ever an issue of politics? Because you don’t live in a democracy. You live in a plutocracy. Money rules.”

Although clearly not a political theorist, Hauerwas is not reluctant to disclaim on the evils of American democracy, even while he insists that politics don’t matter. Oddly while he deems elections as coercive, and essentially sees all government as innately violent, he is not immune to the charms of the Welfare State. Self-described as pro-life, Hauerwas has “strong views about abortion. … I don’t mean to say I want Roe versus Wade overturned. What I want, for example, is for some American politician to come along and say, ‘We’re going to give every child that’s born in this society a living wage.’ I mean, let’s start on the positive end …” So the “violence” of a coercive state compelling certain wage scales appears to be acceptable to the Christian pacifist/anarchist.

Referring to his traditional self-description as a “sectarian fideistic tribalist,” Hauerwas observed that typically he is “asking Christians to withdraw from the world.” But he added with his usual wry sarcasm: “I wouldn’t mind withdrawing, but hell, we’re surrounded. There’s nowhere to go. The question is how to just keep going through, and you’re going to take some losses. So we have to be wily as serpents on these matters. I’m not asking you to withdraw from politics. I’m just asking you to be there as a Christian.”

For Hauerwas, "being there as a Christian" in politics requires ranting against the evils of AMERIKA and its fear of the nasty truth about itself. “Do we want to know that we’re the richest people in the world, raping the rest of the world [so] that we can remain rich?” he asked. “Do we want to know that Iraqi war really is about cheap oil? Do you really want to know that?” He added: ““Do you really want to be told that, ‘Look, America is a racist country, and the terms keep getting changed to hide that from ourselves?’

Speaking of racism, postmodernist emergent church guru Brian McLaren just wrote for Jim Wallis' Sojourners website about Hauerwasianism, and quoted a critique by "Postmodern Negro" blogger Anthony Smith. "That voting is seen as a means of violence can only come from Christians who don't know what it is like to be without the gift," Smith blogged. "This is why the loudest voices for political disengagement on Gospel grounds tend to be of lighter hue. It is another form of advantage to eschew voting.”

In other words, the Hauerwasian disdain for pedestrian American democracy is just another hobbyhorse for privileged white academic elites. Even Rev McLaren, a fellow Obama supporter, chimed in his affirmation of Smith's critique of Hauerwas. "When I hear folks in the U.S. dissing voting as dirtying ourselves with the business of the empire, I keep wondering, 'How would somebody in Zimbabwe respond to that kind of talk?'"
Naturally, McLaren had to sully his pro-democracy point with left-wing gibberish: "Or considering how few votes in Florida it would have taken for George Bush not to have been elected in 2000, I wonder how bereaved and maimed Iraqis – and Americans – would respond to Floridians who decided to make a religious statement by not voting?" On that, McLaren and Hauerwas are no doubt agreed.

Hauerwas is at least brutally consistent. If America is indeed the Evil Empire, then why should virtuous Christians sully their hands in the dirty work of imperial politics? Most of the Religious Left is not ready to accept that point, not wanting to risk their own political disempowerment. Or, from a more positive perspective, perhaps even they intuit that some aspects of the "empire" are indeed a "gift."

- Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

Obama's Kind of Town, Chicago Is …*

[*If you're not familiar with the song My Kind Of Town(Chicago Is), click here to hear Frank Sinatra sing it.]

By Steve Sailer
http://www.vdare.com
September 1, 2008

Did you know that now-convicted fixer Tony Rezko, who funneled $250,000 in campaign contributions to Sen. Barack Obama from his initial campaign onward, got his start as a big-time Chicago operator back in the early 1980s through … the Nation of Islam?


Tony Rezko and Barack Obama

Also known as the Black Muslims, they are the gentlemen in the bow-ties who preach that, in prehistoric times, the vile Dr. Yacub genetically engineered Europeans to be a race of human wolves.

Fat Tony, of course, is neither Black nor Muslim—he's a white Christian immigrant from Aleppo, a famous Syrian rug-trading souk.

The Black Muslims are also notoriously anti-Semitic—but not when it came to their friend Tony Rezko, whose partner in Rezmar, the notorious government-subsidized slumlord racket, was Daniel Mahru, who is Jewish.

But that's the kind of town Chicago is—diverse, vibrant, tolerant … as long as you've got clout and are willing to put aside petty differences and play ball with others with clout to mutually defraud the public.

If you want to understand Barack Obama, you have to understand Chicago, the city where he twice chose to make a political career.

Chicago sits at the conjunction of America's two great watersheds, the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, which made it the transportation hub of the nation by the Civil War. Even today, the convenience of direct flights from O'Hare make the Chicago area central to American corporate life. The ample amount of money that can be extracted from businesses before they finally resolve to flee Chicago means that the city has always been a politician's paradise.

I'm still amazed that I only found out about Rezko's decades-long relationship with the Black Muslims last week. It showed up in the obituaries of Jabir Herbert Muhammad, the son of Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad of evil memory, whose followers assassinated his rival Malcolm X in 1966.

Jabir's funeral was quite a success. Both current Nation of Islam boss Louis Farrakhan and The Champ, Muhammad Ali, were in attendance.
Malcolm had converted the young Cassius Clay to Elijah's race-baiting Islamic heresy in the early 1960s. In 1964, however, Elijah excommunicated the dangerously charismatic Malcolm and installed his own son, Jabir, as Ali's business manager. The energetic Rezko, who had arrived in Chicago from Syria in 1974, went to work for Jabir in the 1983 and was soon managing the ex-champ's business affairs.

Rezko, sadly, was unable to make the memorial service because he's been busy at Chicago's Metropolitan Correctional Center since his conviction on 16 counts in June.

And there had been some recent unpleasantness between Jabir and Tony. The Chicago Tribune reported recently:

"Muhammad also was once a close associate and business partner of convicted political fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko, but that relationship ended badly and is now the subject of a lawsuit alleging trusts set up by Muhammad were looted…"[Muhammad Ali's longtime manager remembered, By James Kimberly, August 30, 2008]

Jabir's suit claims that Tony embezzled from him his Kenwood mansion, which is located not far from Barack's Kenwood mansion, the 2005 purchase of which Tony apparently subsidized.

Strikingly, the Nation of Islam in particular and Chicago black politics in general were Rezko's launching pad for his decades-long takeover of quite a bit of the government of the State of Illinois.

James L. Merriner wrote in Chicago magazine in November 2007:

"When Harold Washington was running for mayor of Chicago in 1983, Rezko held a fundraiser after Jabir Herbert Muhammad, who was Muhammad Ali's business manager, urged him to get involved in the campaign. Subsequently, Rezko also joined Ali's entourage, traveling the world with him for five years. Rezko apparently took little interest in boxing—he says he and Ali did watch a few matches together—but he relished putting together business and endorsement deals for the champ."[Mr. Inside Out]

I bet he did. A rich punchdrunk pugilist and Tony Rezko—what could possibly go wrong? In the 1990s, Ali's latest wife forced out both Jabir and Tony.

Strange as it seems, the relationship between Rezko and the Black Muslims is not unique. Chicago-based columnist Ray Hanania of the Arab Writers Group explained:

"Like many Arab Americans, Rezko had close ties to the Nation of Islam, which sympathized with the Palestinian and Arab causes. He became close to the inspiring icons like Muhammad Ali and even young Obama, a little-known state legislator who later rose to stardom."

Rezko is representative of a recent trend in Chicago politics: the rise of Arab wheeler-dealers as corruption catalysts.

The elites of the African-American and Arab communities may tend to agree on foreign policy. But down on the street, relations are hostile. The Arab immigrants, who are best known in Chicago as middle-man merchants operating liquor stores and the like in the ghetto, much like the Koreans in South Central Los Angeles at the time of the 1992 riots, are too hated by black voters to win political power for themselves through the ballot box. Hence their leaders tend to play shadowy roles in Chicago politics.

Rezko kept a sharp eye out for upcoming black political talent who could provide a politically correct front for him. Rezmar offered Obama a job in 1990. He didn't take it, but that was the beginning of a long and mutually beneficial friendship between Rezko and the man who is now the Democratic Presidential nominee. Rezko paid for 15 percent of Obama's first campaign, and Obama looked out in the state senate for Rezko's interests in low-income housing and in packing the state's hospital construction board.

Contract set-asides for minorities provide a lucrative opening for crooks like Rezko. The demand for "diversity" provides an excuse for a thumb on the scales, a justification for diverting the contract from the lowest bidder to a political ally who employs a minority frontman. Most of America's pundit class hasn't figured this out yet, but Rezko grasped how "diversity" works soon after getting off the plane. (Indeed, multicultural America is becoming ever more like the Ottoman Empire, giving an advantage to immigrants from old Ottoman mercantile minorities.)

Chicago explained: "Rezko ran Jabir Muhammad's firm, Crucial Concessions. Under Mayor Washington [remember that fundraiser?], Crucial won the concessions to sell food at city beaches."

Now I know why Chicago beach concession food in the 1980s was so untasty. The municipal hot dog stands were managed by the Nation of Islam and Tony Rezko!

Muhammad and Rezko worked the same minority set-aside scam with several high-grossing Panda Expresses at O'Hare airport. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on March 17, 2005:

"Two restaurants at O'Hare Airport have been allowed to rake in millions of dollars, even though the Daley administration learned back in 2002 that the company running them was probably a phony minority "front" for Panda Express and Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a top fund-raiser for Gov. Blagojevich. Crucial Inc. won the O'Hare concessions in part because it was certified as a minority-owned business. Its largest shareholder was listed as Jabir Herbert Muhammad, son of the late Nation of Islam founder, Elijah Muhammad. … The [Chicago minority contractor] program has been tarred by a relentless string of scandals…"[City ignored possible O'Hare 'front' for years, By Chris Fusco, Fran Spielman And Michael Sneed]

Jabir and Tony also got a $10 million affirmative action contract from SBC, the giant phone company whose president was William Daley, Mayor Richie Daley's brother, to run the payphones at the Cook County jail. Their designated owner-operator was a twofer under the quota of 35 percent of contracts reserved for minority and women-owned businesses: a black woman named Deloris Wade, although she happened to be dead.

Building on these black Chicago roots, Rezko eventually became the statewide power behind the throne when the Democrats swept to victory in the 2002 elections. Chicago Magazine reported:

"Rezko became a virtual one-man headhunting firm for staffing the Blagojevich administration, sending along recommended candidates, many of whom ended up getting appointments. … (The U.S. attorney here has charged that Rezko schemed to pack the government with his cronies so that they could peddle their influence.)"

Diversity sensitivity also provides a convenient justification for corruption:

Blagojevich said he sought Rezko's

"advice on recommendations for agency directors for two reasons. Number one, I had every reason to think he was honest and independently successful in business and that he was able to bring us people who were not part of state government before. And he has connections and roots in the African American community, and he could help us with candidates . . . because part of what we wanted to do was to have a diverse administration."

This spider's web of connection is baffling to outsiders trying to understand what Obama really believes in.

You can trace his Chicago network to all sorts of unsavory folks: Rezko, terrorists, Farrakhan, the various Daleys, Jeremiah Wright, Manson Family fans, Jesse Jackson, billionaire Iraqi swindlers, Emil Jones, and so forth.
One of Obama’s donors is the former Iraqi Electricity Minister Aiham Alsammarae, who broke out of prison in the Baghdad Green Zone where he was locked up for stealing hundreds of millions. Alsammarae now lives in the Chicago area, where he put up $2.8 million to help bail Rezko out of jail.

What's the common ideological thread unifying all these gruesome guys?
Perhaps there isn't one—other than cynicism and a contempt for the public. All are part of the "Combine," the bipartisan, multiracial crew of insiders who scratch each other's backs in Illinois.

Consider Michelle Obama. She's been close friends with Jesse Jackson's family since girlhood. Yet, her father was a precinct captain in Mayor Richard J. Daley's Machine and she went to work for Richard M. Daley as a fixer when she washed out of the legal profession in the early 1990s.

The Jacksons and the Daleys were, nominally, enemies during a series of black vs. white mayoral elections in the 1980s and 1990s. In the long view, however, the Jacksons and Daleys are colleagues in their mutual profession of using politics to bilk money and clout from the public.

Think of the Illinois power structure as a pyramid. At the bottom are the voters. Above them are the ethnic activists, like Obama was on the South Side back in the 1980s. Ethnic relations are pretty frosty at the bottom, but much chummier toward the top of the heap, where the big boys engage in a perpetual conspiracy to betray their respective constituencies for their mutual benefit.

Why don't the voters turn the rascals out? Because no one ethnic group can afford to unilaterally disarm in the struggle for government boodle. Your racial leaders may be pocketing much of what they get in your name, but without their connections and time-tested stratagems, your group would be completely despoiled by the other groups' veteran politicians.

So, to echo an old story about FDR, while your leaders may be sonsabitches, at least they're your sonsabitches.

Overall, the Obamas fit right in to this civic tradition. This isn't to say that Barack Obama utterly lacks an ideology. He's a complex, sophisticated man and he may well have private goals more ambitious and/or alarming than those of the average Chicago politician.

Yet Obama is a Chicago politician—make no mistake.

[Steve Sailer (email him) is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]

Meet The Huckstering Champions

By R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.
The New York Sun
http://www.nysun.com/
August 29, 2008

I believe I made a mistake when I decided not to attend the Democratic National Convention. The consequence of that decision has been that I have had to watch its highlights on national television. There the media gaggle, with few exceptions, has plangently repeated — tediously and cheerlessly — many things that I know to be untrue.

The preeminent untruth resounding across the airways is that the Clintons are political geniuses. They are to electioneering what Ludwig van Beethoven was to the piccolo, or Slobodan Milosevic was to ethnic cleansing, to wit, consummate artists. Since the early 1990s I have sedulously researched the Clintons' life and work. My finding is that they are mediocrities in all things political, save one: huckstering. Moreover, they are accomplished hucksters solely because the media are composed of credulous ignoramuses. Do you think I am being ungentlemanly? I am not alone.

This week, after but two days of watching the media's coverage of the looming Democratic Convention, columnist Tony Blankley — a gentleman to the utmost — coined the term "the mainstream moron media." My guess is that Mr. Blankley was perfectly serene when he typed out that line. Most probably he was wearing an immaculately starched English shirt. Possibly he was wearing a tie and almost certainly he had his pants on. But really, after two days of the media's homogenized mush, enough is enough. "When I turned the TV on," Mr. Blankley writes at the outset of the convention coverage, "the political cable news shows were filled with liberal pundits, liberal anchors, liberal guest historians, liberal weather gals and guys, liberal news you can use chicks, liberal political 'strategists' (i.e. out of work Democratic National Committee gofers)." Practically everything they droned on about was stupid.

Mr. Blankley was particularly critical of the blah, blah, blah that followed the Prophet Obama's choice of Senator Biden as his running mate in their Campaign for Change. Joe is a minor Washington monument, complete with stone head. He has been a senator for 36 years. He may have been a congressional page during the administration of Grover Cleveland. Yet, the mainstream moron media were in the raptures over the Prophet's bold choice.

Of course, I share Mr. Blankley's derision for the Biden edition of the Media Follies, but it is their ongoing enthusiasm for the Clintons that strikes me as most derisible. Hillary just lost a presidential bid considered for months to have been "inevitable" — though I always had my doubts as you will recall — and she lost to a political neophyte, a neighborhood organizer from Chicago. By the end of the first month of the primaries she had blown through $100 million. She was doomed by February 5.

During her extended soap opera she was personally indecisive (as was predictable), presided over a chaotic and embittered staff (again, predictable), and had no control of her reckless husband (stupendously predictable), who, contrary to the mainstream moron media, has almost never been an asset for any candidate he supported. In 2004 he campaigned for 14 candidates, 12 of whom lost — but I repeat myself.

Senator Clinton never really had much of a chance, though you will never hear this from the mainstream moron media. Her negatives were always above 40%. They were at 48% when I last reported on them. No candidate has ever won the nomination with such high negatives. Nor has a candidate won the nomination with such a string of scandals appearing on the public record. Think of her missing Whitewater billing records, her cattle futures skullduggery, Filegate, Travelgate, claims by the last Independent Counsel that she was "less than truthful" under oath, the trashing of the White House as she left in January 2001, the missing White House property she had to return or make restitution on, the last-minute presidential pardons, and her brothers' role in them.

For that matter, think of the early stages of her campaign this year: repeated dirty tricks against Mr. Obama, dubious campaign contributions from shadowy Chinese sources, her husband ham-fistedly raising questions of race. Now there is all this residual animosity against the nominee who won fairly, Mr. Obama. Huckster that she is, Hillary played to her supporters' basest instincts, the women of the fevered brow (feminists), the men of the slightly rubicund neck (hicks).

My Democratic friends, you will all be better off when these shameless opportunists are in retirement.

- Mr. Tyrrell is the founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator, a contributing editor to The New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute.

Who Broke Politics?

The name is Joe. Joe Biden.

By Chet Arthur
National Review Online
http://www.nationalreview.com
September 01, 2008, 4:00 a.m.

Harry Truman said that for the first six months he was in the Senate, he couldn’t believe he’d gotten there. After another six months, he couldn’t believe they’d gotten there.

Barack Obama didn’t hang around the Senate cloakroom long enough to pick up the word on Joe Biden. He didn’t realize that Biden is something of a joke in the Senate.

Isn’t it curious that in 36 years, Biden’s never even been mentioned for Majority Leader, or even for Majority Whip?

Obama’s claim to be a “post partisan” candidate is belied by his choice of the vicious, knee-groining Biden as his running mate. Barack Obama, in his electric acceptance speech, claimed that “politics is broken.” A reasonable question then is: Who broke politics? Much of the credit for the brokenness of politics must go to that political leg-breaker, Joe Biden.

One leading example of how our politics is broken is the judicial-confirmation process. Judicial confirmations used to be civil affairs. They used to be honorable contests in which both sides sought to review the record of the distinguished jurists who sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Joe Biden can claim the lion’s share of credit for turning judicial confirmations into lions’ dens. As Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden presided over the “Borking” of Judge Robert Bork. He was the chief Kleagle for the “high tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas. He tried to go after Roberts and Alito as well. He is not known as the “smiling barracuda” for nothing.

Ironically, not one of the men and women who have come before his committee would have survived one day if they had been proven to have plagiarized major speeches and law review articles — as Biden has been found to have done.

Perhaps because of his own shady past, Biden has seemed determined to impugn the integrity, intelligence, and the competence of all those with whom he disagrees.

Try to recall the confirmations of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer.

Remember the fireworks? Remember the inquisitors bearing down?

Did anyone steal their video rental records — as they did with Judge Bork

Did anyone ask them to share their religious beliefs under oath — as Howell Heflin did to Robert Bork? Did anyone allow lying testimony about a questionable sexual comment to be puffed into a national scandal — as they did with Clarence Thomas? Did anyone drive their spouses from the hearing room in tears?

No one can remember such outrages committed against arguably the most liberal justices ever confirmed. That’s because Republicans still believe in civility. They still believe in the rule of law. They’re trying to repair the process that leg-breaker Biden broke.

Biden presided over a remorseless struggle in which only the strongest can survive. He did not want simply to reject Clarence Thomas, he wanted to destroy the man, send him back to Pinpoint, Ga., stripped of honor and dignity. Justice Thomas prevailed because of his unflinching courage and massive self-control.

With Joe Biden, you don’t reach across the aisle. You retch across the aisle.

For this rancid record, Biden not only should not be vice president, he should not even be in the Senate.

— Chet Arthur is a nom de cyber for a Washington, D.C., political veteran.

She's Palin by Comparison

She’s Palin by Comparison
By John Podhoretz
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/
08.31.2008 - 12:16 PM

The twist-yourself-in-knots-to-oppose-Palin-on-grounds-of-inexperience exercise being indulged in by those otherwise ecstatic about Barack Obama and indifferent to his lack of experience is truly astounding to behold. It is leading them into some fascinating mistakes. For example, Andrew Sullivan – who is quickly displacing David Gergen as the most ideologically elastic person in the annals of recent history — this morning: “It’s the most irresponsible decision by any leading presidential candidate since Bush picked Quayle.”

The thing is, if you were going by “experience” as your guide, Dan Quayle was eminently qualified to be president according to the standards of our time, at least. He had been elected twice to the Senate and once to the House. He had drafted major domestic-policy legislation on job retraining, and was a leading light on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Quayle had served twelve years in Washington, which is what led to him accurately saying in debate that he had the same level of experience as John F. Kennedy when Kennedy was elected president (the line that set Lloyd Bentsen up to say, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy".)

The problem with Quayle wasn’t that his resume was lousy. It wasn’t. He was, perhaps, the most politically accomplished 41 year-old in the United States at the time. It was that his behavior — first in his introductory appearance as Veep and then with the malapropisms that dogged him throughout his tenure in the White House — made him seem like a lightweight, and thereby called his judgment into question.

Judgment, comportment, the largeness that seems necessary to hold high office without questionable baggage — these are the qualities that matter. There are, recall, no Constitutional qualifications to occupy the presidency other than being 35 years of age and a native-born American. It is voters who determine the qualifications of their president, which is why having an arguments over experience is the sort of thing that delights those of us who spend our time traveling to conferences in other countries and reading foreign-policy journals, but means absolutely nothing to voters. Nor should it. If it did, Richard Holbrooke might be installed as president, or Bob Kagan.

Palin will be a failed pick if her conduct between now and November 4 reveals that she does not have the judgment to be a heartbeat away; that her comportment is not what we would wish of our leaders; and that she does not seem large enough for the office. A great many things will go into determining all of those things, as they are right now with Barack Obama — and, incidentally, John McCain, who has every qualification for the presidency one could imagine except that he hasn’t won an election for it yet.

The effort to pre-determine her unfitness is not only a losing proposition; there is something fundamentally foolish, about it. Even un-American, in the sense that it suggests rule by wonk rather than popular fiat. Ask Bill Clinton, who tried his best to make the case against Barack Obama and then stood on stage on Wednesday night explaining to America that people were saying about Barack Obama just what they had said about him, Bill Clinton, 16 years ago. That is what interesting elections do. They up-end expectations.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/category/contentions

Springsteen, Harley Melding One For The Ages

By DAVE TIANEN
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
http://www.jsonline.com/
Posted: Aug. 31, 2008

Two American icons - Bruce Springsteen and Harley Davidson - met at an intersection called Magic Saturday at Veteran's Park.

This was probably the most anticipated Milwaukee concert of the year. Extravagant expectations often unfold in moderate payoffs. On Saturday night, Bruce Springsteen lived up to every measure of his considerable legend. The display of physical stamina alone from a man who will turn 59 in slightly less than a month was astounding. Springsteen has a reputation for fitness but this was amazing. Twenty minutes in, his dark blue working shirt was soaked with sweat. By the time it was over he had been on stage for three and a half hours without a break. And this was not a leisurely three and a half hours. This was 31 songs, many of them pounding, pedal-to-the-metal rock and roll. After a show that would have exhausted most men half his age, he wound up his regular set with a frantic "Seven Nights to Rock" and then came back for 10 encores. I put my notebook away four times because I thought the show was over only to have Bruce and E Street roar back to life.

This was Springsteen running and sliding on his knees to the edge of the huge stage. This was Bruce throwing his body on top of the front rows. This was Bruce laying flat on his back and pulling himself to this feet by gripping the mic stand. This was Springsteen pulling a young woman out the crowd in an echo of the long-ago video to "Dancing in the Dark," dancing with her and then picking her up and carrying her in his arms across the stage.

This was Springsteen the populist hero reminding his nation of forgotten workers in "Youngstown," or soldiers' lives needlessly squandered in "Last to Die." This was Springsteen the renegade of the highway on "Thunder Road," "Born to Run," and "Racing in the Streets." This was Springsteen the prophet of the redemptive power of music on "The Rising" and "Spirit in the Night." This was Springsteen and E Street as the ultimate garage band on "Wooly Bully" and "Born to Be Wild."

It was an evening richly laden with exhilarating, funny, touching, and sublime moments. These are a few of them:

Reverend Springsteen's rock 'n' roll revival introduction to "Meet Me at Mary's Place," exhorting his fans to meet him at the River of Love, the River of Hope, the River of Joy, the River of Life, the River of Faith.

Springsteen spent several minutes patrolling the front of the stage collecting a couple dozen fan song requests written on cardboard - and then playing a bunch of them.

During "Spirit in the Night" he once again threw himself into the crowd. When he got to the line "She kissed me just right like only a lonely angel can," he bent over for a kiss from a young lady in the crowd. She was so obviously thrilled she looked almost dazed.

Bruce and Little Stevie trading comic ad libs on "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)."

Springsteen dedicating "Racing in the Streets" to Harley father figure Willie G. Davidson.

This was the first tour the E. Street Band finished without keyboardist Danny Federici who died earlier this year of cancer. For the first encore, Springsteen played "Sandy," dedicated it to Danny and brought his son Jason out to play accordion on it.

As everyone seems to understand there is a natural affinity between Springsteen and the Harley brotherhood. They share a restless love of freedom, and a devotion to the core values in American life. Saturday all those elements came together in one of the most special nights in Milwaukee concert history.


Saturday night's Harley Setlist:

Gypsy Biker
Out In The Street
Radio Nowhere
The Promised Land
Spirit In The Night
Wooly Bully (Tour Premiere - Sam The Sham cover)
Darlington County
You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)
Darkness On The Edge Of Town
Youngstown
Murder Incorporated
She's The One
Livin' In The Future
Mary's Place
Working On The Highway
Racing In The Street
The Rising
Last To Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands
Seven Nights To Rock

*****

4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
Glory Days
Born To Run
Rosalita
Bobby Jean
American Land
Thunder Road
Dancing In The Dark
Born To Be Wild (Tour Premiere - Steppenwolf cover)

'The Shield': Seven Seasons of Defying Expectations

By Maureen Ryan
Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Originally posted: August 28, 2008

At every turn, “The Shield,” which begins its long-awaited final season 9 p.m. Tuesday on FX, has defied expectations.

The first person to be surprised was the show’s creator, Rockford native Shawn Ryan. He assumed each season might be “The Shield’s” last, despite the critical acclaim and ratings success it enjoyed when it debuted on FX six years ago.

Well before that dazzling debut, however, Ryan got an even bigger shock, when FX decided to make his uncompromising pilot script in the first place.

“I didn’t think anyone would make it the way I was writing it. I thought maybe somebody might like it and make me change it to be network-friendly,” he said in a recent phone interview.

He wasn’t alone in that belief. (Now would be a good time to exit this story if you've never seen "The Shield" and plan to catch up with it on DVD. This piece does not contain spoilers about Season 7. The video clips in this story are from Episode 1 of "The Shield's" final season. More video clips from Episodes 1-6 [and soon, complete episodes] are available here.)

Damon Lindelof, the executive producer of “Lost,” recalled reading Ryan’s well-regarded “Shield” script when it was making the Hollywood rounds almost a decade ago. As he turned the pages, he waited for elite cop Vic Mackey to be revealed as someone who resembled “NYPD Blue’s” Andy Sipowicz – “a good guy despite his gruff exterior,” Lindelof said.

That never happened. In the final moments of the first episode of “The Shield,” Mackey (Michael Chiklis) committed an act that he would spend years trying to redeem.

“Mackey murders an Internal Affairs rat in cold blood. He kills a cop. Shoots him in the head,” Lindelof said. “And when I read that, I thought to myself, ‘Shawn Ryan will never get this ending on the air.’ ”
“Well, I stand corrected,” Lindelof added.

Not only did FX shoot that shocking ending, Peter Liguori and Kevin Reilly, who were then the top executives at FX and who are now the heads of the Fox network, put Ryan in charge of “The Shield.”

It’s not uncommon for the person who creates a TV show to be elbowed aside once it goes into production, and “The Shield” was a critical project for FX ,which was then trying to put itself on the map with original programming. Despite his lack of production experience, FX trusted Ryan to bring the show to life. He was 34.

“I think one thing that helped me was, frankly, my ignorance,” said Ryan. “I had not done a lot of TV producing at that point. I had written for a couple of shows [‘Angel,’ ‘Nash Bridges’] , but I wasn’t involved in a lot of production decisions … I didn’t have any kind of preconceived notions about how these things were supposed to be done.”

Ryan credits fellow “Shield” executive producer and director Scott Brazil, who died in 2006, as well as the show’s first director, Clark Johnson, with coming up with the production strategies that gave the show its distinctive style. Money was tight: In its first two years, the show’s budget was $1.3 million per episode, which was “minuscule” compared to many network budgets, Ryan recalled.

“We didn’t want the show to be 85 percent of a network show, even though we had 85 percent of the budget,” he said.

When it arrived, “The Shield” certainly looked like nothing else on TV—except, perhaps, the more adventurous documentaries on HBO and PBS.
“The Shield” was shot in an immediate, fluid style, often with handheld cameras. Many scenes were filmed in hardscrabble locations in and around the show’s scruffy Los Angeles studio. As they tried to keep the peace on violent, gang-controlled streets, Mackey and his fellow Strike Team members found themselves in corner stores, in messy apartments, in claustrophobic interrogation rooms and in innumerable alleys.

You couldn’t count on tidy endings on this densely plotted show – thank goodness – but you could always count on the fact that Mackey and his team would run down a litter-encrusted alley at some point. Thanks to the show’s “you are there,” kinetic shooting style and energetic editing, you could almost smell the stench coming off the garbage.


Walton Goggins, Michael Chiklis, David Rees Snell and Alex Laughlin

“A lot of other shows have a tendency to try to glamorize the characters,” said Laurie Holden, who has a recurring role in Season 7 as federal agent Olivia Murray. “Working on this show, they like it if you have circles under your eyes.”

Mackey and his crew work out of a battered precinct house nicknamed the Barn, and on a July 2007 visit to that set, during filming of the final set of episodes, the show’s commitment to battered realism was much in evidence. Holes festooned the carpets, paint was peeling off battered walls and everything looked dirty. When a cup of coffee was accidentally knocked over, crew members grinned at the attempts to clean it up.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” one said.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its unconventional depiction of life in the big city, “The Shield ” got noticed, and not just by awards-giving organizations and critics. In the 2003 and 2004, Ryan said, Brazil got calls from other TV producers and executives, who wanted to know how they made a show that won Michael Chiklis an Emmy and garnered truckloads of praise, all on a cable-TV budget.

Ryan has a deep-seated aversion to singing his own praises (compliments are usually met by attempts to give most of the credit to his “Shield” colleagues). Yet he does allow that “The Shield” did play a role in helping to create a bolder and more risk-taking aesthetic, especially in the cable realm.

“It wasn’t solely because of the creative success of ‘The Shield’ and [FX’s] ‘Nip/Tuck,’ but a lot of it was the economic success of ‘The Shield.’ It inspired people to get into this [original series] business, because we were making the show for a price that made sense,” Ryan said.

But the show’s budget dictated several deviations from the usual TV formulas. Complicated lighting setups took too long to set up, so artificial lighting was kept to a minimum. Shooting in small rooms necessitated the use of small, handheld cameras. Filming on location was routine.

“24” and “The Wire,” which premiered a few months before and after “The Shield,” respectively, as well as later series such as “Friday Night Lights” and “Battlestar Galactica” helped make that kind of “on the fly” aesthetic popular. But “The Shield’s” lasting influence can be seen in the popularity of its various directors, who are now working on everything from “Dexter” and “Saving Grace” to “Law & Order.”

“But that’s the nature of TV and film. It’s not the same as copying a test in school,” Ryan said of the influence of “The Shield,” which, he noted, owes a debt to everything from “The Sopranos” to “L.A. Confidential.” “I can’t say I was lying in the weeds, waiting to change television. I just took the circumstances I was in and did the best I could with them. And I think other people in my same position would have found similar ways to do things. I do like the fact that we were sort of the first to do it.”

For the first episode, Ryan trusted the vision of Johnson, an actor who’s both appeared in and directed episodes of “Homicide” and “The Wire,” but Ryan said he did have one request when the pilot was being shot.

“He and I had both been on police ride-alongs, him as research for being an actor on ‘Homicide,’ me when I was a writer on ‘Nash Bridges,’” Ryan recalled. “I just said to Clark, ‘I just want the viewer to feel like they’re on a police ride-along.’ And that’s what he brought to it.”

Perhaps the only similarity between Ryan and Mackey is that both work best when underestimated. When “The Shield” pilot was being shot, FX was also filming a pilot called “Dope,” starring Jason Priestly as a drug addict. Ryan had heard rumblings that that the network’s executives might be leaning toward picking up that show instead of “The Shield.”

“Not being the favorite helped us,” Ryan said. “We were able to make the pilot in such a go-for-it style that we eventually won the day, I think, on execution. I think our director out-directed their director. I think we out-cast their show. They had Jason Priestly playing a drug addict. And that seemed like a casting coup at the time, because nobody wanted to put themselves in an FX show.”

Few in Hollywood thought Michael Chiklis was right for the role of a volatile cop. At that time, Chiklis was best known for his much milder role in “The Commish.” Nobody could see back then that his star turn as the compelling Mackey would eventually inspire the creation of dozens of copycat bad boys, TV antiheroes with lots of flaws but little of Mackey’s depth.

But Chiklis, who lost weight and shaved his head before starting work on “The Shield,” brought a ferocious vigor to the role, which won him an Emmy in 2002. But the show’s intensity takes a toll, Chiklis said in a 2007 interview on the show’s set. (A longer version of that interview is here.)

“Some roles are exhausting physically, some are exhausting mentally. Some are really devastating psychologically. [Vic] is all of that,” Chiklis said. “You ever take a face cloth and soak it and wring it out? That’s me, at the end of the day. I’m a wrung-out washcloth. An overcooked noodle.”

CA - MARCH 27: Actor Michael Chiklis and Creator/producer Shawn Ryan (r) attend "The Shield" seasons 5 and 6 DVD launch party March 27, 2007 at the Cabana Club in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images)

As cast member Walton Goggins, who plays Strike Team member Shane Vendrell, noted in a separate interview, it can be especially difficult to work when the show’s shooting on location. Consecutive days of shooting in the grimier areas of Los Angeles, especially in the summer heat, are not unusual.

“An inordinate amount of focus is required to do our work on this job. And it’s not just the words, it’s not just the density and the complexities of the story. It’s the traffic. It’s the noises on the street,” Goggins said. (My interview with Goggins is here.)

Part of the reason for that exhaustion at the end of the day springs from nature of the show’s storytelling, which mixes complicated plots with the expert excavations of moral grey areas. Vic Mackey spends most episodes trying to escape the consequences of his canny but shortsighted actions, and that constant juggling act takes a toll on him and everyone around him. But the genius of “The Shield” is that it’s impossible to think of Mackey as purely evil. He’s convinced that he’s doing the right thing.

“Really, it harkens back to that Jack Nicholson speech in ‘A Few Good Men,’ ” Chiklis said. “He is the embodiment of that argument: ‘I am the man on the wall, you people who sit in your suburban households can look at what I do from a distance, and go, “Oh, isn’t that terrible, isn’t he awful?” But you can’t handle the truth of what we need to do to protect ourselves.’”

Though the show’s distinctive style and characters have been imitated – sometimes skillfully – on dozens of network and cable shows over the years, few have come close to making entertainment that creates such suspense within such a tangible, complicated world. After seven seasons, the cops in the Barn – Dutch (Jay Karnes), Claudette (C.C.H. Pounder), Shane, Ronnie (David Rees Snell) and Billings (David Marciano) – seem utterly real. It’s hard to picture the TV landscape without them.

“One thing I learned from Joss Whedon that I blatantly stole was the idea of approaching the stories first from character,” said Ryan, who is also executive producer of “The Unit” and has several new projects in development, including a private-eye dramedy for FX, a drama he’s working on with novelist James Ellroy for A&E, a sitcom for Fox and an adaptation of the book “Confessions of a Contractor” for CBS.

“The cop stories were always the last thing we’d figure out on a ‘Shield’ episode,” Ryan continued. “You just start from the premise of, ‘What do you want to happen to Vic and Shane this week? What do you want to happen to [fellow cops] Dutch and Claudette or Danny and Julien, or [Vic’s ex-wife] Corrine? What hoops do you want them to jump through?’ And then you figure out, what are the best stories that allow you to do that.”

I'll post a full transcript of my interview with Ryan soon. For other "Shield" interviews and features, go here.

(Click on link below to access video clips)
http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2008/08/the-shield-seve.html


Shawn Ryan, Michael Chiklis Ride ‘Shield’s’ Final Season

FX Taking Steps to Pull in Fans
By Jon Lafayette
http://www.tvweek.com/
August 29, 2008 5:25pm

Michael Chiklis is pleased with the way FX’s “The Shield” is coming to an end—with a bang, not a whimper.

“I feel like we really finished it in an incredibly strong way,” said the series’ Emmy Award-winning lead actor. “Especially the last seven episodes, it becomes like a moving freight train and it becomes quite explosive in the final episodes.”

The series, which begins its final season Tuesday, made a bang in the TV world, opening the door to a new type of edgy drama on ad-supported cable TV and creating an identity for FX.

Series creator Shawn Ryan said the freight train described by Mr. Chiklis has been stuck in the yard for a long time.

“It’s been the longest goodbye in TV history,” Mr. Ryan said.

Shooting finished in November, but post-production work couldn’t be done until the Writers Guild of America strike ended in February. The final four episodes were edited in March.

“It feels like a movie. We’re waiting for that release,” Mr. Ryan said.

While fans of the show are no doubt eagerly awaiting the final season of the groundbreaking basic-cable series, the show has lost viewers over the years. FX President John Landgraf is conservative in his estimates of how the last season will perform in the ratings.

FX is taking steps to retain viewers. For example, the News Corp.-owned network is creating a two-minute recap of each episode that viewers can watch to keep up with the series if they miss the show for a week.


Actors Jay Karnes (L), Michael Chiklis (C) and Walton Goggins arrive for "The Shield" season 5 DVD release party in Hollywood, CA 27 March 2007

The recaps are designed to be automatically recorded by digital video recorders when viewers tape full episodes, giving them the option of watching the full hour or the two-minute update to keep them from falling behind on the serialized storyline.

Even with those efforts, “I am skeptical that we’re going to see a lot of new viewers,” Mr. Landgraf said.

“Over time, you have a lot of viewers who for whatever reason fall by the wayside,” he said. “Now that they know it’s the end, they may come back to check it out. But I’m not expecting that ratings this season will be significantly higher than the one that just aired.”

Ratings for the show peaked in season two with an average of 3.2 million total viewers. Last season the show averaged 2.2 million viewers.
Mr. Landgraf wants FX to stay in business with both Mr. Ryan and Mr. Chiklis.

Mr. Ryan is working on a buddy show about detectives with a relationship that’s comedic in a “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” way, Mr. Landgraf said. Mr. Ryan is working on the project with Ted Griffin, who wrote “Matchstick Men” and “Ocean’s Eleven.”

Mr. Landgraf said Mr. Chiklis, in the role of an executive producer, brought a family drama to the network that involves financial chicanery and fraud. The network is in the process of hiring a writer to create a script.
Of course, the network would love to have Mr. Chiklis in front of the camera as well.

“In a heartbeat, if we had the right part for him,” Mr. Landgraf said. “The guy is to us what Johnny Carson was to NBC. He helped us build this network.”

Everyone involved in “The Shield” still seems slightly shocked that the show ever got on television.

Part of the credit goes to Kevin Reilly, who was head of programming at FX then and is president of entertainment at Fox now. He had been previously been at HBO, and when the story of Vic Mackey hit his desk, he wasn’t worried about a show featuring an antihero.

“Our biggest concern was not, is it too far out there?” he said. Rather, FX executives worried about whether their cop show would stand out from the crowded field.

Mr. Ryan had written “The Shield” as a sample script. He was surprised to get a call from FX.

“I had no reason to believe that anyone outside of HBO would make a script like that,” Mr. Ryan said. “The basic idea of your central character killing another cop at the end of the pilot, you didn’t see TV shows like that on the major networks.”

Mr. Ryan said he didn’t know much about FX then.

“I had no idea who Peter Liguori or Kevin Reilley were,” he said, referring to FX’s president and programming chief at the time. “I had no idea why they’d be interested in my script. I spent a lot of time talking to Kevin and it became clear that I had stumbled into the zone that they were trying to hit.”

Mr. Ryan said he wasn’t trying to break new ground in what could be shown on basic cable.

“I think if we start from a place of, ‘Hey, let’s break down barriers,’ the audience can sniff that out and things can seem a little gratuitous,” Mr. Ryan said. “We just tried to tell the best story we could week to week, and we did it without having the usual network filter on how we told those stories or how admirable we had to make our characters. The result was something that a lot of people found groundbreaking.”

Another difficulty in getting “The Shield” on the air was finding the right person to play Vic.

“Like any great alignment of the stars, it’s hard to imagine now that anybody else could have played it,” Mr. Reilly recalled. “But in fact we were struggling casting the role. Michael’s name came up early on. His agents wanted us to offer it to him. I wasn’t going to do it because I knew Michael Chiklis as a fantastic actor, but a very different kind of guy than we had in mind.”

Mr. Chiklis had starred as ABC’s cuddly “Commish.”

Mr. Reilly said he’ll never forget Mr. Chiklis’ reading.

“It was one of the great moments in my show-business career,” Mr. Reilly said. “When Liguori and I walked upstairs to the casting room, Chiklis was sitting there chewing Nicorette gum in a leather jacket with the shaved head. We both looked at each other like, ‘I think that’s him.’”

“There was no chit-chat. There was no small talk. He launched right into the scene like Vic Mackey. He was Vic Mackey. He literally knocked us on our asses and then blew out of the door with that same sort of magnetic energy that he brought to the role.”

Mr. Reilly and Mr. Liguori just looked at each other when the reading was done, almost speechless.

“I just said, ‘That works,’” Mr. Reilly recalled.

Mr. Reilly said fighting for the role turned out to be a move that realigned Mr. Chiklis’ career.

“There were other more lucrative options out there, and the important thing is that in these fragile careers you have a guy who said, ‘This is the right role for the right moment in time for me and I’m not going to just chase the money,’” Mr. Reilly said.

Mr. Chiklis said the success of “The Shield” vindicated that decision for him.
“People were telling me that I was insane and I’d never work again if I did it,” he said. “Had the show not worked for whatever reason, I would have definitely taken a big hit in terms of taking that kind of risk. But thank God I did. I had to go with the material and the people involved.”

Before taking the role, Mr. Chiklis said, he wanted to be absolutely sure the network was going to shoot the script he fought so hard to be a part of.

“That was my biggest thing. Am I going to show up on day one on the set and the pink pages are going to come down and this is going to be boiled into its least common denominator, because I’ll quit,” he said.

Mr. Chiklis said he’s concentrating on movie work after “The Shield” wraps, but wouldn’t rule out doing another series.

“If some great writer wrote something phenomenal tomorrow and it landed on my desk and it happened to be on television, I’d probably damn well do it,” he said. “A lot of the greatest stuff that’s being made right now happens to be made for the small screen, I believe.”

Television Review: "The Grizzly Man Diaries"

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/reviews/tv/la-et-grizzlyman29-2008aug29,0,3064229.story

From the Los Angeles Times
TELEVISION REVIEW
'The Grizzly Man Diaries' on Animal Planet

A revelatory show about Timothy Treadwell, who died in an Alaska bear attack, is an exploration of a man trying to find a solid center for himself.

By Mary McNamara
Los Angeles Times Television Critic
August 29, 2008

It isn't often you can say that a show on Animal Planet follows a great literary tradition, but "The Grizzly Man Diaries," which follows the adventures of Timothy Treadwell, echoes voices as disparate as Thoreau, Yeats and even Sam Gribley of "My Side of the Mountain." The desire to forsake the drudgery and pressures of civilization for the noble simplicity of the natural world has always tempted and tormented certain people.

But unlike Yeats, who never did arise and go to Innisfree, Treadwell did actually break the bounds of society and for 13 summers lived virtually alone among the grizzlies in Alaska's Katmai National Park -- that is, until he and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were killed in 2003 by a grizzly attack.

Treadwell's death got a lot of attention, partly because he had been a vocal, self-pronounced protector of the bears (despite the fact that the land he camped on was a federal reserve) and partly because his final minutes were recorded on the audio portion of a videotape. Although, mercifully, the tape was never released publicly -- it cannot be found on YouTube, thank heavens -- the sheer awfulness of its existence provided such a coda to Treadwell's life that many who never heard of him suddenly began praising or condemning his actions.

Filmmaker Werner Herzog was moved to document Treadwell's life; his award-winning documentary "Grizzly Man" portrayed a self-aggrandizing, troubled man who, unable to find a place for himself in society, created an alternative existence for himself among the bears.

While "Grizzly Man" is a conscious attempt by Herzog to unravel Treadwell's psyche, "The Grizzly Man Diaries" simply presents excerpts of the 100 hours of videotape Treadwell shot of the bears and himself during his 13 summers in Alaska. The footage is oftentimes astonishing, the bears ferociously beautiful, but still the show is less a treatise on grizzly habit than it is an exploration of a man trying to find a solid center for himself.
With his penchant for baby talk and his Prince Valiant haircut, Treadwell seems an unlikely mountain man. Unlike, say, Steve Irwin, another animal activist who died among the creatures he studied, Treadwell was not a trained scientist or naturalist or formal educator; in "Grizzly Man" it was revealed that he was, among other things, a failed actor who, after spiraling down into drugs and alcohol, found his salvation through the bears.

The film's producers do not shy away from the controversy that surrounded Treadwell. The first episodes tackle the main issue head-on -- namely, was his relationship with the bears real or imagined? An early show also contains an act of grizzly bear brutality that clearly shakes Treadwell and forces even him to question what they must think of him and what place he occupies in their world.

For a viewer raised on the more treacly "Born Free" and "Grizzly Adams," "The Grizzly Man Diaries" is a bracing, if unsettling, reminder that when one leaves civilization one should not expect to find . . . civilization. If the bears seem to accept Treadwell's presence as nonthreatening and, so, not worthy of attack, that is all they do. Any fondness or friendship seems strictly one-sided, brought to the wilderness by a man who could neither live within the confines of human society nor truly outside of it. It is both heartbreaking and revelatory to watch.

Animal Planet has made its name on the love and fascination humans have for animals, and it is impossible to walk away from "The Grizzly Man Diaries" without thinking about the place of humans in the natural world, of how we impose our definitions of love and friendship on creatures who may not be able to reciprocate and why we need to do so at all. Pretty heavy stuff, not to mention some really great shots of grizzly bears.

mary.mcnamara @latimes.com

Joe Biden's Mythical Blue-Collar Roots

By Steve Chapman
Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com
August 31, 2008

Joe Biden once got in trouble for plagiarizing a speech and inflating his academic record. So it will not surprise you to find that his famous working-class background turns out to be mythical. But it may surprise you to learn that Biden isn't the one who has trouble with the facts.

In his Wednesday night speech at the Democratic convention, Biden referred to "those of us who grew up in middle-class neighborhoods like Scranton and Wilmington." In the video preceding his address, he said that the people he knew as a boy didn't regard themselves as working class but as middle class.

So what did the news media report? "Sen. Joseph R. Biden accepted the vice presidential nomination of the Democratic Party with a speech that harkened back to his working-class roots in Scranton," said The Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal informed readers that "Sen. Joe Biden showcased his working-class upbringing." The New York Times said he "spoke frequently, and earnestly, of his blue-collar background."

No, he didn't. In fact, he did just the opposite. Anyone paying attention would have noticed as much. But the legend of Joe Biden, born in a welding shop, dies hard with political reporters, who find it easier to romanticize a gritty, hardscrabble childhood than a conventionally comfortable one.

The facts are there for anyone who wants to look at them. When Joe Biden Sr. died in 2002, his obituary in the News-Journal of Wilmington reported that when he married in 1941, "he was working as a sales representative for Amoco Oil Co. in Harrisburg."

It went on, "Biden also was an executive in a Boston-based company that supplied waterproof sealant for U.S. merchant marine ships built during World War II. After the war, he co-owned an airport and crop-dusting service on Long Island." Upon moving his family to Delaware, the News-Journal said, Biden "worked in the state first as a sales manager for auto dealerships and later in real-estate condominium sales."

Executive, co-owner and manager? Those titles identify the jobholder as solidly middle class, if not better. They fall in the category of white-collar occupations, not blue-collar.

And Biden Sr. clearly knew the difference. In his book, "Promises to Keep," Biden writes that his father was "the most elegantly dressed, perfectly manicured, perfectly tailored car sales manager Wilmington, Del., had ever seen."

Biden notes that he himself could have gone to the best public high school in Delaware. Instead, he enrolled at Archmere Academy, a Catholic prep school that made him think he had "died and gone to Yale." He took a summer job to help pay the steep tuition, which today amounts to $18,450 a year.

That doesn't mean the Bidens never had financial trouble. Biden says they had to move in with his mother's parents after one setback, and he remembers "when the electric company would send a collector to the house."

For nearly a year, the father was reduced to cleaning boilers for a heating company. But middle-class people are not immune to unemployment and bad business deals, and the Bidens regained their footing before long.

So where did he get his working-class reputation? Partly it comes from Biden's streetwise demeanor and his preoccupation with the fact that his family wasn't as well-off as some of the people he knew -- which seems to have given him a permanent chip on his shoulder. Partly it comes from his frequent tributes to blue-collar folks, such as the firefighters who took him to the hospital when he suffered an aneurysm.

But mostly it reflects journalists' weakness for simple, vivid narratives. It's easy to write about a statesman who worked his way up from a log cabin. It's easy to write about a leader who came from great wealth. But someone growing up the son of a sales manager is a bit lacking in color and drama.

The errors about Biden bring to mind the recent satirical report from humorist Andy Borowitz: "A member of the U.S. Olympic diving team was disqualified from competition today when it was learned that he did not have a sufficiently compelling human story line to exploit on the NBC telecast of the worldwide sporting event."

Biden just didn't have a sufficiently compelling human story line for a presidential campaign. Luckily, he does now.

schapman@tribune.com