Monthly Archives: January 2012

Why should I vote for the Republicans?

 

I know a number of people who do not approve of the Obama presidency, and I can tell you that stating it that way is as mild as it gets. IT has been interesting watching them shift from potential Republican nominee to the newest acceptable nominee candidate as the field shrinks and their prefer choice is eliminated.

There is no doubt that when the election rolls around many of these friends will walk into the voting booth and pull, punch, mark, or otherwise indicate that their selection is for the Republican candidate.

What I wonder is if any of these people, or anyone else out there who has been really animated against the current administration, can argue for me why we should vote for the Republicans, without mentioning Obama or democrats? Can they make a positive case for their side, instead of a case based upon, “The other guys are worse?”

p.s.

For what it is worth I consider Obama to be a merely mediocre president. He could have done better, he could have done more, but I don’t consider him to be the abject failure that some paint him to be, or the sainted hero people wanted him to be.

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Sunday Night Movie: The Eiger Sanction

Last night movie-wise I was certainly in an odd mood. My potential selections, based on time constraints, ranged from the light hearted, (The Hudsucker Proxy) to the serious genre film, (Village of The Damned) thru the blockbuster (Jaws) to what I finally settled upon, 1975’s espionage thriller, The Eiger Sanction.

This was the fourth time that actor Clint Easton had stepped into the director’s chair on a film. In the decades that have followed Eastwood has been nominated several times and has won the Oscar for Best Director. While The Eiger Sanction is a good film, it’s not up to his recent standards.

Eastwood plays Dr Jonathan Hemlock – we never learn is that is an assumed name or not – a government assassin, now retired to teaching art as a college professor. When the Agency has need for an assassination or ‘sanction’ requiring Hemlocks unique skill set, they ruthlessly press him back into service. Continue reading →

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Mitt Romney, Bain Capital, and the politics of hatred

Mitt Romney’s career as a venture capitalist has become a point of attack by his political enemies, both Republican and Democratic. His supporters have fallen back on the defense that these attacks are about class warfare, envy and a hatred of success. It is an understandable, if misguided defense.
I have sympathy for the people trying to defect this line of attack. This is an emotionally very charged and very effective line to use against Mitt Romney, but why is that? Are these charges generated by class envy, by people who are jealous of Romney’s success and vast fortune? Continue reading →

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On writing Men and Women characters

One of the perennial questions is can men write believable and credible women characters? (It is rarely asked if woman can do the same for male characters, the answer is generally assumed to be yes, but that’s a little afield from where I want to go in today’s essay.) I have an author friend, NYT bestseller and all, who feels that she has never encountered a well written female character emerging from a male writer’s prose. I know other women readers who are quite the opposite, adoring some male writers for their depiction of females.
(If you want to start an unending argument at an SF convention, in a mixed audience, praise Heinlein’s female characters. You will ignite women passionate on both side of that questions.) Continue reading →

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And Now another Elimination from Republican Idol

Thursday Gov. Rick Perry of Texas announced his withdrawal from the train wreck that is the Republican Nomination process for President of The United States of America. I remember before Perry got into the race, when Bachmann was the surging anti-Romney, and many people we thinking that there was a Perry shaped hole in the field. Evidently Perry thought so as well. He leapt into the race, shot to the top like a rocket, and turned out to be a firework and not a single-stage to orbit craft. A quick flame out, and a few attempts to reignite his engine failed, Perry has now crashed, leaving a crater where his ambitions once stood. Continue reading →

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Sunday Night Movie: Alien vs Predator: Requiem

Due to the holiday the Sunday Night Movie took place on Monday Night.

I picked up were upgrades to DVD already in my library, but on a whim I picked up Alive vs. Predator; Requiem .

Some months ago a friend of mine and I had stated watching the movie on blu-ray via Netflix, but the disc didn’t work properly and so we only ever saw half of the movie. Last night I watched the entire, unrated, version of the film.

Meh.

It wasn’t horribly stupid or offensive but as a co-worker and friend described it, “that movie’s a teen slasher movie, but with an alien instead of a slasher,’ and I’d say her analysis is fairly on target, Continue reading →

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Marines, The Taliban, and dehumanization in war

So a few days ago a video surfaced where it appeared that four U.S. marines, while be recorded possibly by a fifth Marine, urinated on the corpses of recently killed presumably Taliban fighters. The reaction to the incident has been varies and in many ways thoroughly predictable based upon the political philosophy of the reactive audience.

People have done everything from vocal support for the act to calling for it to be considered a war crime. All of that is of course absurd and nothing more in my opinion than general political tribalism.

I land somewhere in the middle, on the thin isthmus of rational ground between the extremists and partisan on either side. Continue reading →

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