Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Recommended Reading

Fred Kaplan on Bill Clinton's trip to North Korea.

• Posted at 9:17 PM · LINK

Tuesday Evening

I kinda feel sorry for sane, intelligent Republicans these days. There are such people...lots of 'em. And they must be cringing and writhing to see their party represented by tea-baggers, birthers, deathers, Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, and folks whose idea of democracy is that you mass at town hall meetings and just try to shout everyone else down, screaming that Obama was born in Kenya. My Conservative pal Roger visibly winces at the suggestions that Rush Limbaugh is "the" face of the G.O.P. because Roger thinks that Limbaugh cares only about getting people to listen to him, not about winning elections.

But these folks are only part of the problem. Another part is Republican politicians who are deathly afraid of them. I think most Senators and Congressfolks on that side of the aisle know well that the idiots are idiots. Trouble is, they're useful idiots. They vote. They donate money. They work for candidates. And as much as they hate Democrats, they're even more rabid against Republicans they think are weak on their pet issues...or worse, turncoats. So if you're a G.O.P. guy in office and you want to stay in office, you have to kind of wink at them and say non-confrontational things about how they have some valid points and are raising questions that must be addressed.

There was a period in my life (a brief one, thankfully) when I found myself around a lot of folks who were convinced of all sorts of major conspiracies in the Kennedy assassination, including a few that were but one notch closer to reality than a scenario in which JFK was offed by a band of Venusians. I went in, thinking that what these people craved was an answer they could believe in, but soon discovered that that was the last thing they wanted. There were such researchers and skeptics around but they were pretty much trampled into oblivion by a mob that could and would never be satisfied by any solution.

Most of them didn't even have one theory about who killed Kennedy. Some had a dozen mutually-exclusive theories (i.e., if #1 was true, numbers 2 through 12 could not have happened) and they got hysterical if you tried to take any one of those theories away from them. Every conceivable explanation was possible except, of course, that maybe the 35th President of the United States was killed by one lone nut with a rifle. One did not dare consider that possibility in their midst. That didn't get them anywhere.

In the same sense, the birthers really don't want definitive proof that Obama was born in Hawaii. That's of no use to their purpose, which is to pretend the nation didn't really elect a black Democrat who's kinda Liberal. In this article, Joe Conason reminds us how a lot of the same folks tried much the same thing with Bill Clinton, trying to de-legitimize his presidency by ginning up scandals that later evaporated for lack of any evidence. As long as Obama is in office, we're going to be hearing this nonsense. Get used to it.

• Posted at 8:46 PM · LINK

Comics at Comic-Con

The wonderful Heidi MacDonald of Publishers Weekly has posted her long report on this year's Comic-Con. I agree with darn near everything Heidi ever says about anything but I have to address something about one thing she said in this piece...

It’s quite disheartening and demoralizing to look at all the major media coverage of the con and not see a single comics-only project or personality (unless you count Stan Lee) getting coverage.

Yeah, it is. And equally disheartening is to see Heidi MacDonald, whom I adore, write her major overview report on the con without mentioning Jerry Robinson or Russ Heath or Nick Cuti or Doug Moench or most of the comics-only guests or events. In earlier coverage, she mentioned a couple because they were onstage at the Eisner Awards but I think that was about it.

The place was crawling with comic book folks, past and present, and there was plenty of interest in them. They just get ignored in the fan press because, I guess, it's more interesting to cover Robert Downey Jr than it is to cover anyone who ever drew Iron Man. I got Stan Freberg, who is kind of a legend in animation, down to the convention and he was mobbed and we turned away hundreds of folks at the Freberg panel...but that's received nary a sentence in the convention coverage. We had a Golden Age Panel that has gone largely uncovered. I did a panel with comic creators from the seventies that has been noted on one website so far, and a particularly historic panel — the first-ever reunion of the three main "Bob Kane" ghost artists on Batman — that I've yet to see mentioned anywhere online...

...but I sure see a lot of people complaining there's not enough emphasis on comics.

There's plenty of comics content at that event. It's there and if you decided to only attend programming that was wholly about funnybooks, you could do that and easily fill four days...and I don't just mean with my panels. One of the many things I love about Comic-Con International is that they don't just schedule and support the programs and guests who are likely to pack Hall H. They spend money to bring Lew Sayre Schwartz and Jack Katz to the convention.

That's not going to change so I have no complaints in that area. Those folks are getting plenty of attention from the convention. They're just not getting much from reporters, even those who lament that Comic-Con puts too much emphasis on movies and "hot" non-comic concerns.

One actually came up to me on Sunday and started bitching about all the focus on the movies and the Hollywood celebs and such. Now, my attitude about the Comic-Con (oft-stated) is that the con is really a dozen or more cons rolled into one. There's an anime con in that building, an animation art con, a small press con, a Golden Age comics con, a gaming con, etc. Some of them don't interest me in the slightest so I sidestep those aisles and find the con I want to attend. I always seem to be able to find it. Unless you're dying to attend a sparsely-attended gathering, the one you seek is in there somewhere. Don't let all those other conventions annoy you or distract you.

But this guy was upset that so much of the Comic-Con wasn't about comics and he felt, I guess, that I'd concur and would rush off to do something about it...maybe throw Robert Downey Jr out of the hall or something. Instead, I told him about that great panel we did on the Golden Age of Batman with Jerry Robinson, Sheldon Moldoff and Lew Schwartz. If you're interested in the history of comics, it doesn't get any more historical than that. I then said to this fellow who was complaining about the con not being about that kind of thing, "I didn't see you there."

And so help me, he replied, "I couldn't be there. I had to get in line to see the 24 panel with Kiefer Sutherland."

• Posted at 2:04 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

From the episode of the Hollywood Palace for March 27, 1965: Tony Randall introduces Allan Sherman performing his parody of "Downtown." You may be shocked at the lewd, suggestive dances that the kids did back then. Hey, did I ever tell the story here of how when I was 13 years old, I wrote my own parody lyrics to "Downtown" and Allan Sherman said he was going to sue me? Remind me and I'll try to get to that story one of these days. Thirteen is not a good age to be threatened by one of your heroes.

• Posted at 2:08 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Michael Hiltzik discusses efforts to kill the "public option" proposals for health care...and he asks the musical question why some folks are so desperate to protect the mega-profits of the insurance companies. Here's one paragraph of many worth quoting...

The firms take billions of dollars out of the U.S. healthcare wallet as profits, while imposing enormous administrative costs on doctors, hospitals, employers and patients. They've introduced complexity into the system at every level. Your doctor has to fight them to get approval for the treatment he or she thinks is best for you. Your hospital has to fight them for approval for every day you're laid up. Then they have to fight them to get their bills paid, and you do too.

That has all been my experience, the experience of most friends, and a constant gripe of darn near every doctor I've had in the last decade. When someone asks me, "Do you really want the government coming between you and your physician?," I have to remind them that right now, that's the position of insurance company employees whose job description is to pounce on every possible loophole to deny coverage and payment.

Unfortunately, I don't think the mounting public debate about Health Care Reform is going to be about things like that. Looks like it's going to be about arguing if the bills really contain provisions for killing Grandma when her nitroglycerine tablets get too expensive.

• Posted at 12:19 AM · LINK