Doesn’t it seem like just a decade since the protagonists of our current national melodrama began taking the stage? John McCain announced his candidacy on David Letterman – only to discover that what Dave giveth, Dave can definitely take away. Hillary Clinton thought she’d prove herself futuristic by announcing from her sofa, via an Internet video message; little did she know how the Internet would eventually help overwhelm her once-inevitable rise. Only Barack Obama chose to do things the old-fashioned way, with a grand speech from a statehouse lawn; it was the first of many occasions when Obama, alone among his rivals, recognized that momentous times call for Big Gestures.

And so here we are, five days before the election and less than 24 hours after the last flurry of those gestures. Thirty-five thousand Floridians gathered at midnight for the Kiss-Up in Kissimmee, watching Bill Clinton — in a manic attempt to restore the bona fides he sullied during his wife’s misbegotten run – make his best full-throated argument for Obama. (I say “full-throated” because Clinton seems to have calculated that if he spoke unbelievably loudly – and in a mad dash of words – we wouldn’t notice that he could have been talking about any Democratic candidate, not just the one perched on a stool next to him.) Obama even managed the video-era feat of being two places at the same time, sitting down with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show even as he and Bubba were simultaneously bounding (if not bonding) on stage outside Orlando.

And then there was the small matter of the 30-minute infomercial with which the Obama campaign commandeered seven broadcast networks and cable channels last evening. In case you haven’t seen it, and have a half hour to kill, here it is:

Whatever else last night’s Obamapalooza accomplished, it achieved the same thing his announcement speech in January 2007 did: It made his opponent’s efforts appear small and petty by comparison. McCain spent the day, as he spends every day, on the attack, playing to the narrow-mindedness and bloodlust of his rally crowds rather than to the concerns and hopes of those couple million voters who may not have made up their minds, yet don’t view the world through a conservative ideological prism. Having turned his back on “honor” and “integrity” and all that crap that had never really worked for him anyway (see South Carolina, 2000), McCain and his Bush-leftover advisors now aim to replicate W.’s 50-plus-one strategy by getting ugly and staying ugly right through Tuesday. (more…)

Whether you were a child of the ’60s or (like me) of the ’70s, the Beatles’ perpetual presence on the radio seemed something of a birthright. Every “official” Beatles single between “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “The Long and Winding Road” reached the Billboard Top 40, and for five years after the band’s 1970 breakup all four members were reliable fixtures on AM radio. That omnipresence began to fade in 1975 as John Lennon went into retirement, George Harrison’s hitmaking became hit-or-miss, and Ringo … well, Ringo seemed to lose his mojo right around the time he found producer Arif Mardin.

But Paul McCartney found a way to remain radio-relevant straight through the ’70s, making the Top 40 even with drivel like “Letting Go,” “Girls’ School,” “London Town” and the singles from Wings’ last album, the brutal 1979 Back to the Egg. (His chartmaking prowess survived a lot of lousy singles, to be sure; it’s not for nothin’ that McCartney-written “classics” made my lists of the Worst Number One hits of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.)

A couple of funny things happened to Macca on the way to the ’80s, however. Sixteen days into the new decade, he was handcuffed at Tokyo International Airport while trying to smuggle a rather large quantity of weed into the country, and instead of giving him a slap on the hand and looking the other way, Japanese authorities locked him up for nine days and threatened to throw away the key (before eventually relenting). He returned home to find erstwhile bandmate Denny Laine exploiting the event with a single called “Japanese Tears,” and suddenly Paul found himself without a band once again.

He retreated to a home studio, much as he had as the Beatles were splitting, and emerged with a solo album that was even more idiosyncratic than his first one had been a decade earlier. But then, after the first single from that McCartney II album (“Coming Up”) topped the charts in customary fashion, he released another one – and it didn’t even make the Hot 100, much less the Top 40.

That single was “Waterfalls” (download), a lovely ballad whose quality is hard to deny, but whose utter pop-chart failure is easy to understand. Its lethargic pace and bare-bones production values hardly fit on the radio during the summer of 1980 alongside “Funkytown,” “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” and “Upside Down” – Christopher Cross’ “Sailing” was about as slow as programmers were willing to go. (more…)

Last night I had a dream … of long-faded memories, and basic-cable infomercials:

Voiceover: Remember…this?
John McCain: “Who is Barack Obama?”

VO: That’s right … they’re the hits you’ve come to know and love…
McCain: “He believes in redistributing wealth!”

VO: Here, together, for one last time – the very best of the Republican Party, performed as only McCain-Palin can!
Sarah Palin: “He’s not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.”

VO: Yes, they’re all here, all in one place, assembled just for you. You’ll get favorites like these:
(scrolling onscreen)
“That’s the extreme pro-abortion position – ‘health.’”
“We need to know the full extent of that relationship.”
“I’m very concerned that he may have anti-American views.”
“Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon…”

Palin: “…These wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America…”
VO: You’ll want to act now to preserve these precious memories, because in two weeks this priceless collection of favorite GOP attacks from across the decades will be gone – and some of these hits may never come back!
McCain: “His plan sounds a lot like socialism!”

VO: How much do you expect to pay for a package like this?
McCain: “How about 100?”
VO: Well, for two weeks only, you can have this fantastic collection on three 24-hour news channels – all for just $42.50! That’s equal to the McCain campaign’s poll numbers!
McCain: “That’s not a tax cut – that’s welfare!”

(scrolling onscreen)
“…Palling around with terrorists…”
“Obama and his fellow Democrats got caught putting Hollywood above America…”
“…trying to give liberal judges the power to decide whether criminals are sent to jail or set free.”
“…legislation to teach comprehensive sex education – to kindergarteners.”

VO: So call the number on your screen now, while there’s still time! Operators are standing by…
McCain: “…Maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

As the McCain campaign has pulled out all the nasty rhetorical stops the last couple weeks, its desperate gasps have come to sound distinctly like a death rattle for the vaunted Republican Attack Machine. Careening from one corner to another like a punch-drunk boxer, McCain-Palin has tried (so far unsuccessfully) every counterpunch in the GOP playbook – a book that dates not just to 2000, or 1988, or even 1968, but all the way back to 1948 … or maybe even 1920. (more…)

Jon Cummings: Why am I so bummed that the debate season is over? Please, Barack, take McCain up on his pleas for a dozen more town halls! I know, I know – these three presidential rumbles have been repetitive at times, excruciating at others. But you gotta admit, there’s a certain entertainment value in watching John McCain implode over the course of 90 minutes, again and again and again.

And I want to meet more archetypal Americans like Joe the Plumber … who suddenly finds himself the center of attention because he sits on the cusp of Obama’s under-$250,000 tax cut. Wow – I knew plumbers overcharge, but do they really make 250 large in a year? Cripes! Maybe Sarah Palin needs to replace “Joe Sixpack” with “Joe Chambord.” If there could only be one more debate, maybe McCain could lament the plight of “Cindy the Beer Distributor” who’s overburdened with employer-provided-health-care costs.

McCain obviously was trying to turn Joe the Plumber into an everyman, but he went to the well too many times and poor Joe morphed into a caricature. As did McCain, to a large extent. To his credit, he did get off the good line about how if Obama wanted to run against George Bush, “you should have run four years ago.” But where was that well-scripted line in the first debate, when it might have done McCain a shred of good?

It was the best shot McCain had in his arsenal, and he got it out of the way 15 minutes into the debate; after that he flailed about like Palin trying to shoot down Vladimir Putin from a helicopter (isn’t that the way that story went?). Veering wildly from topic to topic within a paragraph (or even a sentence), he reached his moment of greatest derangement when he concluded a response that was ostensibly about Colombian trade (that major driver of the American economy) by bringing up, within the space of 30 seconds, “talking without preconditions to Hugo Chavez,” raising taxes, and Herbert Hoover. (more…)

I may be a bit slow on the uptake these days when it comes to television commercials — I don’t watch much live TV anymore, what with the TiVo and all. But after about four viewings of this commercial last night during the Phillies-Dodgers game, I finally identified what must be the most perplexing music placement in advertising history. Listen closely and enjoy, if you haven’t caught this one before…

Make no mistake: The new right-wing comedy, An American Carol, is just as bad as you imagine it to be, if not worse. Even as I walked into the theater I couldn’t believe I was plunking down cash money for a film that, despite its not entirely off-putting pedigree, was doomed to failure from the very moment it was conceived.

Why was it doomed? Quite simply, conservatives aren’t funny. It’s a massive overstatement, I know, and utterly unfair to some of the not-inconsiderable talents involved in the making of this film, such as Airplane director David Zucker, his regular muse Leslie Nielsen, and Frasier star Kelsey Grammer. But there it is: Conservatives aren’t funny. And after all the evidence that’s piled up recently, who’s gonna argue the point?

Twice in the past three years, Fox News has attempted to develop satire-based comedy programs to provide right-wingers with an alternative to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report; both Red Eye and The 1/2-Hour News Hour tanked miserably and were pulled off the air within days. (The latter show was created by 24 mastermind Joel Surnow, but the only torture on THHNH was in watching flop sweat engulf the “comedic” anchors.)

A few weeks ago, Bill Maher sent his cameras to Minneapolis to see whether attendees at the Republican National Convention could pull off a segment of “New Rules”; the results were disturbingly unamusing. (more…)

Bill Maher’s aversion to religion is well documented, thanks to his regular, tangential diatribes on Real Time and the occasional scripted bit in his “New Rules” segments. This weekend, however, he debuted the first Real Time movie spinoff, and wouldn’t you know he felt the need to celebrate not his penchant for pot smoking or his confirmed bachelorhood, but his vehement rejection of organized religions and the various gods they worship.

The result, Religulous, is a curious blend of rants, eye rolls and “interviews” with a variety of religious folk chosen mostly for their guaranteed silliness. We get an atheist’s guide to the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando and the Creation Museum in Kentucky, as well as field trips to the Vatican, the Temple Mount and the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. We meet a Puerto Rican preacher who bills himself as Jesus’ second coming, and we get a series of set pieces of a type familiar from Borat (which makes sense, given that the two films share director Larry Charles). The funniest of these features Maher visiting Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, where he appears in bum’s garb and rants incoherently (yet accurately) about the tenets of Scientology.

Mixing in snippets of old Hollywood swords-and-sandals Bible epics, Catholic instructional films and archival religious-war explosion footage, all timed for maximum comic effect, Maher wields his humor as a ridiculing and dismissive bludgeon. He goes after easy targets, for the most part – funny hats, “magic underwear,” speaking in tongues and such – and through much of the film his mission seems just as pedestrian: to get laughs from fellow atheists and agnostics, and to let believers of every stripe know he thinks they’re, well, “religulous.”

Much of this works as pure humor, if you’re down with this sort of thing. But for the first hour and a half of this film whose running time is 1:35, Maher’s ridicule seems untethered to any real outrage, or even any real purpose other than to flaunt atheism’s (apparent) intellectual superiority over belief. It’s only in those last five minutes that Maher brings home his real message: that the pomp and circumstance of organized religion is the glitzy front for a dangerous ideology of separatism and mutual hatreds that threatens to destroy mankind one way (weapons of mass destruction) or another (failure to address climate change because it is, as Tina Fey-as-Sarah Palin described it the other night, “just a natural part of the end of days”). (more…)

Jon Cummings: My junior year at college I took a creative writing class in which all the students received copies of each other’s short stories and offered critiques in a roundtable format. Almost all the students were earnest, ambitious types practicing to write the Great American Novel, and most of the mistakes we made were problems of overreach – of attempting to go from zero to William Faulkner in 8 seconds. One young man, however, submitted a sweet little story that seemed to be written for – and by – an eighth grader. Its plot was simplistic, its characters were cute but vapid, its message was utterly immature – yet the whole thing was rendered successfully, as far as it went. My classmates and I sat around the table and had no idea what to say to this guy; we didn’t know for sure whether he’d really tried to write a children’s story, or whether this effort represented the full firing of his intellectual circuitry. So we gingerly danced around our critiques, piling on the patronizing praise for what he was “able to accomplish” with the “type of story he wrote.” And then, after we’d made the author feel like a winner, we dug into the next story with the kind of analytical intensity each of us would want applied to our own work.

That story pretty much sums up my feelings about tonight’s festivities. It’s a 200-word substitute for “Joe Biden was playing chess, and Sarah Palin was playing Candyland.” She announced at the outset that she wouldn’t really be participating in a debate – “I may not answer the questions the way you want me to, or the way the moderator does …” – and she proceeded to instead offer up a manic, 90-minute imitation of Dolly Parton hosting Hee-Haw, replete with winks and nose-scrunches and “darns” and “you betchas” and rambling soliloquies so full of shit the highlights in her hair faded to brown.

Neither Gwen Ifill nor Biden chose at any point to remind Palin that there were actual questions she was supposed to be answering, actual policies she was meant to be discussing. Palin’s answers were brain dumps interspersed with folksy witticisms aimed directly at the type of folks who are predisposed to want a know-nothing hockey mom rather than a dedicated public servant living in the Naval Observatory. Ifill and Biden didn’t seem to know what to make of this adorable bumpkin, so they carried on as though they were still taking part in something serious and Palin was merely the comic relief. (more…)

What a confluence of events this week! A few hours after this column posts, Sarah Palin takes the stage for what might turn out to be her one unscripted, real-time appearance before the American electorate. Tomorrow – speaking of “real time” – Bill Maher’s documentary Religulous will open in theaters to poke fun at (and to poke holes in) religious-fundamentalist worldviews like Palin’s. Also at the movies tomorrow: An American Carol, the first-ever right-wing political farce.

The first-ever fictional right-wing farce, that is.

And just in case you hadn’t noticed, Sept. 29-Oct. 4 is Banned Books Week – the week when the nation’s librarians hope you’ll give at least a moment’s thought to the continuing threat censorship poses to our free society. It is entirely fitting that Palin’s debate with Joe Biden should fall during Banned Books Week, since her resume includes a contemptible brush with book-banning during her term as Wasilla mayor in the mid-1990s.

Since Palin became John McCain’s running mate a month ago, I have been frustrated with the mainstream media’s refusal to pay much attention to her censorial tendencies. There have been a few back-of-the-section newspaper articles and brief mentions in Palin biographies, but few words of real outrage concerning an issue that directly reflects upon the Republican ticket’s attitude toward free expression. Even last weekend, when actor and Creative Coalition member Tim Daly mentioned it on Real Time, the panel failed to discuss it at length – perhaps because the subject didn’t offer fellow guest Ralph Nader yet another opportunity to rail incoherently against the major-party candidates’ “corporate masters.”

Nevertheless, Daly was on target when he identified the censorship incident as a disqualifying offense. Indeed, I consider it not only a firing offense for Palin, but for McCain as well, for tolerating (much less choosin as a running mate) someone who would so blatantly undermine the Constitution that the president swears on a Bible to uphold. (more…)

This past Sunday, in a coordinated effort to flout a federal law banning political endorsements from the pulpit, 33 evangelical and fundamentalist pastors in 22 states used their sermons either to endorse John McCain or to attack Barack Obama. Organized by the Alliance Defense Fund, the campaign of law-breaking was designed to test the IRS’ willingness to enforce – and, they hope, to overturn in the courts – a 1954 amendment to the tax code that prohibits churches from “participat[ing] in, or interven[ing] in … any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.”

Sunday’s efforts were only the most blatant in a long series of conservative-Christian efforts to undermine the Constitution’s separation of church and state. For 30 years now, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, and similar groups have been encouraging pastors to push the envelope of partisan politics, and have been blanketing churches with “voter guides” designed to go right to the edge of illegality without crossing the line.

Such activities were dealt a major setback in 1998, when the Christian Coalition lost its tax-exempt status and subsequently lost much of its influence. However, apart from that the one moment of Clintonian ballsiness, the federal government – dominated over the last three decades by Reaganites, Bushies and the occasional Democrat too fearful of offending churchgoers – has generally looked the other way as thousands of churches have abused their tax-exempt status and violated bedrock principles established by the Founding Fathers.

The traditional bargain between the government and the nation’s churches is simple enough for Sarah Palin to understand: In exchange for the beneficent granting of tax-exempt status that saves each congregation many thousands of dollars a year (or even millions, depending on how mega the church is), the religious community must avoid directly advocating the election or defeat of individual candidates on Sunday morning. That’s not to say that pastors can’t advocate the tenets of their morality in pointed ways during election season – they have an enormous amount of freedom to rail against abortion or gay marriage or (ahem) witchcraft all they like. (By the way, pastors also have the freedom – usually in completely different churches – to rail against hatred or bigotry or war or narrow-mindedness, or imposing one’s supposedly “moral” beliefs on the rest of the citizenry.) (more…)