Who made James Dobson Republican Pope, and why are so many candidates anxious to kiss his ring? Mitt Romney made the pilgrimage to Colorado Springs, and Newt Gingrich confessed his sins to Dobson. Now the Focus on the Family president has attempted to squash the popularity of actor/politician Fred Thompson. Of the potential presidential candidate, Dobson contends: "I don't think he's a Christian." Thompson retorted that he is indeed a Christian. The response of Dobson's spokesman only made matters worse: "We use that word--Christian--to refer to people who are evangelical Christians." Say what? (Does that invalidate the claim of America as a "Christian nation," since just seventy million Americans, by the Focus on the Family standard, are Christian?)
The "You are not a Christian"/"I am so a Christian" dialogue may have been the stupidest political exchange all year. Believing your brand the One True Faith is all well and good, but to take it a step further and schismatically denounce other Christians as non-believers is idiotic, untrue, and not a program for political victory. So, to alleviate future embarrassment, I petition Dr. Dobson to refer to those Christians who, to take a few examples, read every word of the Bible literally, broadcast their faith to strangers, and believe a born-again faith in Christ a one-way ticket to heaven as Super Christians. The rest of us, if he will indulge us so, might be renamed christians. When spoken, christian is no different from Christian, so controversies like the one Dr. Dobson and company just set off will be more difficult to spark. Embracing this less offensive lingo would be a really super, Super Christian even, thing to do, Dr. Dobson.
Evangelical Christians, such as James Dobson, have been, in my opinion, a force for good in American politics. But when evangelicals, or any group, starts to adopt the model of interest-group politics that other minority groups subscribe to, they not only marginalize themselves, they put the issues that initially motivated them on the backburner. Who cares if Fred Thompson is an evangelical Christian? Jimmy Carter was an evangelical? Was he a good president? Ronald Reagan wasn't an evangelical. He was a great president.
Another danger of obsessing over a candidate's religion is to validate the Left's bigotry against evangelical politicians. Who can forget the derision that rained upon George W. Bush when he dubbed Jesus Christ a thinker he identified with? With Dobson highlighting Romney's Mormonism, and Thompson's status outside the ranks of Super Christians, can he, without any hint of hypocrisy, complain the next time urban sophisticates deride a candidate that takes Christ seriously? A candidate's politics matter, not his religion.
Though identifying as an evangelical Christian usually provides an insight into one's politics, it is by no means a fool-proof indicator. Remember Harriet Miers? Dobson and other evangelical leaders urged the conservative movement to support her. We were supposed to forget that she donated to Al Gore, launched a feminist lecture series at SMU, and joined something called the Progressive Voters League while refusing to associate with the Federalist Society. All we needed to know was that she was a born-again Christian. Had we listened to Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson then, conservatives would have been guaranteed now, I am convinced, another vote affirming Roe on the court. Far from the sheep they are portrayed to be, many evangelicals rebelled against Dobson's advice on Miers.
That makes sense. What matters to most evangelicals I know is getting Roe v. Wade overturned, blocking attempts to erode marriage, and keeping the federal government out of school-board decisions on the Ten Commandments, prayer, and Bible reading in classrooms. Whether an evangelical Christian, a Catholic, a Jew, or a Mormon accomplishes this is irrelevant. One's actions in public life, rather than one's actions on Sunday, will provide instruction on what candidate might best achieve these goals.
"I repeat, so as not to be misunderstood, that this Court does have power, which it should exercise, to hold laws unconstitutional where they are forbidden by the Federal Constitution. My point is that there is no provision of the Constitution which either expressly or impliedly vests power in this Court to sit as a supervisory agency over acts of duly constituted legislative bodies and set aside their laws because of the Court's belief that the legislative policies adopted are unreasonable, unwise, arbitrary, capricious or irrational. The adoption of such a loose flexible uncontrolled standard for holding laws unconstitutional, if ever it is finally achieved, will amount to a great unconstitutional shift of power to the courts which I believe and am constrained to say will be bad for the courts, and worse for the country. Subjecting federal and state laws to such an unrestrained and unrestrainable judicial control as to the wisdom of legislative enactments would, I fear, jeopardize the separation of governmental powers that the Framers set up, and, at the same time, threaten to take away much of the power of States to govern themselves which the Constitution plainly intended them to have."
--Hugo Black, Griswold v. Connecticut (dissent), 1965
Ron Paul is running for president. This is exciting. There is no American who would make a better president than Ron Paul. In a nutshell, he stands for the Constitution (Here's his campaign video). Ron Paul is affable, intelligent, and courageous. His delivery of thousands of babies gives him an interesting backstory that juxtaposes nicely against the career politician background of so many of his opponents. Unlike so many politicians, Dr. Paul has the courage of his convictions. If 434 of his colleagues vote one way, Paul won't vote with the crowd if the crowd is wrong. Can anyone make such a claim about, say, frontrunner Rudy Giuliani, whose positions on abortion, gun control, and immigration are determined by whether he's running for mayor in New York or campaigning for president in South Carolina?
Can Ron Paul win? That's not the right question, but it's the question potential supporters will ask. Paul's non-interventionist position on Iraq is certainly more in line with the American public's than his competitors' positions, and his Constitutionalist, pro-life, anti-amnesty, pro-Second Amendment views are certainly more in line with GOP primary voters than the ever-shifting postures of Rudy McRomney. Rudy McRomney will split the moderate to liberal vote in the GOP primaries. If a credible conservative runs and points out Romney and Giuliani's past support for gay rights, abortion, and gun control, and McCain's support for open borders, then that conservative can win.
The problem for conservative voters in 2008 will not be the lack of a conservative standard bearer. Ron Paul is the most articulate exponent of conservative ideas currently holding elective office. The problem will be the timidity of those conservative voters. Increasingly, they cast the votes for the candidate the media tells them is the most electable--whether or not those candidates embrace similar positions on the issues salient to those voters. Unsurprisingly, the media-annointed Republicans are the three most liberal Republicans in the race. This house of cards can't stand for long.
Ron Paul could win the New Hampshire primary. And if he does that, his candidacy gets elevated to the Rudy McRomney level. Think about it. GOP voters in a state that boasts "Live Free or Die" will find the libertarian-minded Paul simpatico. Remember, in 1996, Pat Buchanan, a man who has never held elective office, won this state. He won it despite having other credible conservative candidates eating into his pool of potential voters. Paul will not have that problem. The leading candidates in this race are party liberals (Romney and Giuliani), and a moderate conservative (McCain) whose popularity within the liberal media, and whose shabby treatment of party conservatives, makes him even less popular among conservatives than his more liberal foes. Rudy McRomney will split votes. Ron Paul, or whoever emerges as the conservative candidate, will not only have a larger table of votes to feast on, but will feast on them solo. Do the math. Three moderates don't equal one conservative in a GOP primary. Texan Paul is the candidate--Democrat or Republican--who stands furthest away from Texan George W. Bush. In a year when Republicans will have to forge an identity separate from Bush, this matters. Paul stood against the Iraq invasion when nearly everyone else in his party, and Hillary, Edwards, and Kerry in the other party, gave Bush a blank check. There's also the factor of the debates. The other candidates will be dwarfs next to a giant. Giuliani is very likable. Romney looks good in a suit. McCain is a genuine war hero. But what, of substance, do they offer? We know they want to be president badly. Why do they want to be president so badly? Ron Paul discussing ideas next to candidates who want to say nothing lest they offend will make an impression. He will stand out from the other candidates just as he already stands out from the other congressmen.
Whether Paul can win, of course, shouldn't be the primary consideration of conservative primary voters. A more important question than who can win is who should win. When conservatives, no tiny voting bloc, mark their ballots for who they think should win rather than who they think can win, then the candidate who should win can win.
Conservatives need to stop being defeatist if they ever want to really win. Conceding that people with ideas that mirror your own can't win a national election underestimates the American people. This albatross ensures liberal victories. You see, winning in November with a big-government, pro-choice, open-borders Republican isn't really winning. It's losing. Sure, the Democrats will have lost. But the raison d'etre of the conservative movement isn't to defeat Democrats and elect Republicans. It's to make conservative ideas governing ideas. Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and John McCain won't do that. President Ron Paul will.
Al Gore told a Capitol Hill committee that Earth faces "a true planetary emergency" (TPE) in global warming. This, apparently, is in contrast to a fake planetary emergency (FPE). FPEs include the coming ice age, acid rain, the population bomb, and DDT poisoning. The way to weed out the TPEs from the FPEs is to determine which looming catastrophe environmentalists are currently using to scare people. If, for instance, environmentalists are no longer saying that acid rain will wipe out all the trees in the northeast, then, it becomes a FPE. But when acid rain (instead of global warming) was the cause celebre, then acid rain was a TPE. Global warming is the rage from Telegraph Ave. to Harvard Square, so it's a TPE...until the next armageddon comes along.
As the war in Iraq enters year five, Americans and Iraqis in overwhelming numbers oppose it. Roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose the war. About 80 percent of Iraqis oppose the presence of American soldiers in their country. Less than half of Iraqi respondants believe life is better now than it was under Saddam Hussein and a majority believe violence against U.S. forces is justified.
The war has been a disaster--for Iraqis, for Americans, and for Republicans, who are as delusional about weapons of mass destruction, an Iraqi "connection" to 9/11, and the forged Niger yellowcake documents as Democrats are about global warming. Republicans rightly ridiculed the New York Times when it issued its "fake, but accurate" headline about the discredited Bush/Texas National Guard documents. But Bush camp followers practice the same "fake, but accurate" mental gymnastics when it comes to the Niger hoax. So invested in the pre-war WMD claims are they that neither the lack of WMDs nor the president's admission that coalition forces didn't find any WMDs shakes their faith. The connect-the-dots logic that fools on the Left have employed for so long has now found a home on the Right in the idiotic claims of a "connection"--whatever that amorphous term means--between Saddam and the 9/11 terrorists. Worst of all, the human tragedy in Iraq, the truest of true believers contend, is a media creation. This last delusion, in its regurgitation of conservative complaints about coverage of the Vietnam war, makes one wonder if Vietnam syndrome is an equal-opportunity affliction.
Four years after the vast majority of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, the vast majority of Americans--but only a minority of Republicans--oppose the war. My position has never shifted: the Iraq war is not in American interests. A half-trillion dollars, 3223 American lives, and tens of thousands of dead Iraqis sadly demonstrates the wisdom of staying out of Iraq. Vindication has never felt so terrible.
My ears still ring. I spent my St. Patrick's Day at a surprise, free concert given by the now-defunct Sheila Divine at T.T. the Bear's in Central Square, Cambridge. A brother was awarded two passes, and he gave them to another brother, who gave one to me. Like Buffalo Tom but a decade after, Sheila Divine had a small but intense following in the Boston area. They also enjoyed some success abroad. Alas, rock music in the late '90s and early oughts was at its nadir and stardom didn't normally come with the territory. If you aren't familiar with the Sheilas, and most aren't, here's Hum, Automatic Buffalo, and Where Have My Countrymen Gone. They broke up several years back, but came back for one last blast. I witnessed it, and a blast it was. They rock. Er, they rocked.
The afternoon St. Patrick's Day concert was sponsored by Bushmill's Whiskey, which unfortunately entitled them to control the alcohol that flowed. When I ordered a beer, the bartender told me that taps weren't flowing. Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis? My selections, I was informed, included Bushmill and Coke, Bushmill and tonic, Bushmill and Bushmill, and other such variety. Who am I to complain? Not only was the concert free, but three whiskeys came complimentary too. Better still, my wristband allowed me to flee the corporate monopoly and enjoy a beer down the street. There, in an Irish bar no less, I spotted a man wearing a hat with St. George's Cross atop it. The St. Patrick's Day fashion choice, no doubt, was intentional. Had it been 1977 instead of 2007, and South Boston instead of Cambridge, that man would have lost his hat and a few teeth. We live in civilized times and a deracinated Irishman such as myself will only stare and not impart physical lessons. Who knows what the rest of the evening held for the man and his hat?
I returned to T.T. the Bear's to sample the Bushmill, which I don't recommend. Once the patrons tried it, the promotion's reasoning went, they'd be hooked. Not in my case; I greeted to the reflow of the beer taps in a manner akin to how some people react to the opening of hunting season. The most surreal thing about St. Patrick's Day, or any such festival that makes daytime drinking socially acceptable, is emerging from a dark bar into the daylight under the influence of alcohol--normally a nighttime, darkness-to-darkness experience. One of the worst things about daytime drinking is the nighttime hangover, which kicked in for me at around 10 p.m. It's for good reason that St. Patrick's Day occurs but once a year.
Anyhow, I stuck around after the concert long enough to catch a glimpse of the lead singer hauling his equipment from the club. There's no shame in that. But I couldn't help but think of a half-hour earlier, when hundreds of fans were singing along with him. Now, the stage lights had dimmed. His career as guitarist and singer for The Sheila Divine had ended (at least until the next comeback gig). He was a regular guy again, lifting equipment into the icy streets of Cambridge.
A comedown? I wonder if it's as much a comedown as attaining superstardom, something the Sheila Divine never did, and then playing clubs--in a cover band no less. That's where Brad Delp found himself in recent years. A few years back, I caught Delp in a club in Davis Square, Somerville, miming John Lennon, in the incredible Beatlejuice. In the 1970s, Delp sang lead on what was then the bestselling debut album in history. Boston had a few nice songs, but they seemed too slick--a sin the club-hit Beetlejuice never committed. Cover bands are supposed to be laughable, but Beatlejuice was serious business. Delp had a passion for the Beates. He didn't care that he sang on one of the bestselling albums in rock history. He loved the Beatles and paid tribute. I never saw Boston perform live and it doesn't matter to me. I am too young to have seen the Beatles and it bothers me. But at least I saw Beatlejuice. But like The Sheila Divine, Beatlejuice is over. Brad Delp killed himself last week.
Delp, like Sheila Divine vocalist Aaron Perrino, experienced the fanatics' cheers for perhaps an hour a night. What about the other twenty-three hours? It's tough when people you don't know treat you infinitely better, at least on a superficial level, than the people closest to you. Family members don't buy you drinks, chant your name, or beg for an autograph. But strangers do. That's a weird life.
I have no idea why Brad Delp, or anyone else, committed suicide. I don't know if they know either. If it is, as rock casualty Bon Scott sang, a long way to the top if you wanna rock n roll, it's got to be an even longer way down from the top. This applies, I would guess, to the down that occurs in the hours after the concert ends and life returns to normal (which must seem abnormal), just as it applies to the down years after the peak years. Rest in peace, Brad Delp. Keep on rocking, all living musicians--even if you have to lug your gear.
Barack Obama's Apple Computer, 1984 ad is powerful stuff. Democrats don't like foregone conclusions as much as Republicans (see George W. Bush, 2000; see also, Boring Bob Dole, 1996). Hillary Clinton says nothing. She wants the nomination handed to her without a proper vetting of her ideas. Obama highlights that, and in the process, damages the image of the woman who would be president.
For anyone interested in the real meaning of St. Patrick's Day, St. Patrick himself has reappeared, in the form of Shane McGowan, to tell us.
Time magazine's lead piece, featuring a crying Ronald Reagan on the cover, details "How the Right Went Wrong." This has been a theme of this site since its inception three years ago. It's good to see a conversation among a small group of people--and let's face it, very few conservatives publicly aired their gripes about the movement three years ago--has made the big time.
The piece is at its worst when it offers prescriptions for conservatives to heal themselves. Market-friendly health care? Putting Parents First? Are you joking? These are the themes that will revitalize the conservative movement? It also suggests that conservatives might be a victim of their own successes. No conservative would make such a claim. Perhaps a 35 percent tax rate strikes Time's liberal writers as a conservative success. It strikes conservatives as too high a tax rate--even higher than the one George H.W. Bush signed into law that ignited an internecine tax fight. With a few exceptions, Richard Viguerie being an obvious one, Time relies on for quotes and analysis the same Beltway Conservatives who rah-rah'd Bush and mislead the movement into such a sorry state. This is like asking the arsonist his advice on putting out the fire.
All that said, the piece is definitely worth spending seven minutes to read. "[E]verything that Reagan said in 1985 about 'the other side' could easily apply to the conservatives of 2007," Karen Tumulty aptly writes. "They are handcuffed to a political party that looks unsettlingly like the Democrats did in the 1980s, one that is more a collection of interest groups than ideas, recognizable more by its campaign tactics than its philosophy. The principles that propelled the movement have either run their course, or run aground, or been abandoned by Reagan's legatees. Government is not only bigger and more expensive than it was when George W. Bush took office, but its reach is also longer, thanks to the broad new powers it has claimed as necessary to protect the homeland. It's true that Reagan didn't live up to everything he promised: he campaigned on smaller government, fiscal discipline and religious values, while his presidency brought us a larger government and a soaring deficit. But Bush's apostasies are more extravagant by just about any measure you pick." Yet, conservatives stood by "their" man. They stood by him in the way a battered, cheated-on, abused spouse stands by her man (his woman?). Who were conservatives going to believe? Bush or their lying eyes?
George W. Bush is Woodrow Wilson on foreign policy and Lyndon Johnson on domestic policy. What's there to like? He is called a big-government conservative, but for brevity's sake I'll just call him a liberal. Okay, okay, he nominated judges who respect the Constitution and cut taxes. But what, other than that, makes him a conservative? McCain-Feingold? Amnesty for illegal aliens? Federal funding for stem-cell research? A hare-brained, chest-thumping mission to Mars? Nation building?
Bush isn't the main culprit in the conservative movement's demise. In 2000, he promised that education would be his top priority and that he would expand Medicare benefits. On most issues, conservatives got what they voted for--which wasn't very conservative. For conservatives who didn't recognize Bush's big-government promises for what they were, there was always the clue of his last name. I would say the leaf doesn't fall too far from the tree, but that would be unfair to George H.W. Bush.
If not Bush, who's to blame for the horrid state of the conservative movement? That would be conservatives themselves, a group that set out to make the Republican Party more conservative but suceeded in making conservatives more like the Republican Party.
"It offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and lonliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one's own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority."
--Vaclav Havel, "The Power and the Powerless," 1978
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Pretty clear, right? It is to the DC Court of Appeals, which struck down Washington, DC's gun ban as unconstitutional. (I might add that the ban, in addition to being unconstitutional, was stupid, in that DC regularly has had one of the highest murder rates since law-abiding citizens were denied their right to bear arms in 1976.) The New York Times snipes, "The court relied on a constitutional interpretation that has been rejected by nine federal appeals courts around the nation." Maybe so, but that just proves how convoluted and politicized those nine courts were. The DC Court of Appeals, finally, got it right.
NBC broadcast more than 200 episodes of Friends, not one of which I've seen in its entirety. BBC broadcast 12 episodes of The Young Ones, all of which I've seen 200 times. I exagerate, but I have seen The Young Ones enough, both in repeats on MTV in the '80s and on DVD (buy it here) today, to know that Rick stands as one of the greatest characters in the mostly unfunny history of situation comedies. See this clip of Rick, as his alter ego the People's Poet, to begin to comprehend his greatness.
A Bay State woman has filed suit against Planned Parenthood and one of its ghoulish "doctors" for not completing the hit she had contracted them to perform on her unborn child. Mommy seeks from the defendants the cost of raising her choice that unexpectedly became her child. No doubt she will need the proceeds to pay off the lawsuit her daughter files against her when she discovers that her mother had tried to kill her.
I drove by the bank thermometer display at around midnight last night, and it read "4." It apparently dipped down to "0." Tomorrow night, the low is predicted to hit "1." I'm in New England, but this is cold for March, no? Later this Spring when the mercury bursts into the 90s, some troglodyte posing as a man of science, who in an earlier age would have divined the apocalyptic meaning of lunar eclipses, will shout: "See! This proves global warming! This proves man has wrecked the planet!" That won't prove global warming anymore than today disproves it.
I didn't follow the Scooter Libby case close enough to even offer an opinion on the justice of the verdict against him. I would say that once again the cliche "it's not the crime it's the cover up" has been vindicated. But in this case, there has been no charge of a crime independent of the crimes committed in the cover up. Anyhow, I was amused to read the Associated Press's note that Libby was "the highest-ranking White House official convicted in a government scandal since National Security Adviser John Poindexter in the Iran-Contra affair two decades ago." Of course, higher officials in presidential administrations have been convicted of crimes since Poindexter. Henry Cisneros, for instance, comes to mind. Cisneros, technically, didn't work in the White House--at least not on a daily basis. And he's a Democrat, which makes such careful, specific language as "White House official," instead of "administration official," crucial. Also, you don't have to go back to the Reagan Administration to find a National Security Adviser convicted of a crime. Alas, Clinton Administration National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was not convicted in a "government scandal." The devil is in the details, the second cliche of this post, comes to mind when reading the AP account.
"Man, as an ethical integer, is free to choose between good and bad courses within the limits of his circumstances, or he is not. If he is not free, if he can only accept what is handed to him from above (by fate, or by decree of the human agents of fate), then there is not much use in talking about morality or ethics. To make any sense of the idea of morality, it must be presumed that the human being is responsible for his actions--and the responsibility cannot be understood apart from the presumption of freedom of choice."
--John Chamberlain, The Roots of Capitalism, 1959
Perhaps I let my glass-is-half full side get the best of me in interpreting the results of the CPAC straw poll positively. There is another, more depressing way of looking at the CPAC strawpoll results (Perhaps I am making too big a deal of a minor matter?). Though it is true that Mitt Romney won with an anemic 21 percent, suggesting a wide open field, Rudy McRomney--that is Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney--combined to take 50 percent of all ballots cast. In other words, maybe the problem is not so much with what right-wingers used to deride as country-club candidates. The problem is with conservative voters, or should I say "conservative" voters. They've traded in any sense of principle for the reward of winning. Rudy McRomney has his strengths as a candidate. A third of him is a good family man, a third of him is a war hero, and a third of him upstaged the president in leadership after 9/11. But to defer to electibility a year-and-a-half before the election--as half of CPAC's "conservatives" seem to have done--speaks volumes about the backward direction of the not-so-conservative movement.
David Fincher’s Zodiac is for amateur sleuths at once an inspiration and a cautionary tale. Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhal), the movie’s main character and the author of the book on which the film was based, turns his life inside out and doesn’t even succeed in solving the Northern California Zodiac murders of the late 1960s. Alas, neither detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) nor reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) do either. The investigators, the film suggests, were also victimized by the Zodiac killer. Damaged marriages, careers, insomnia, and substance abuse mar their lives. In a figurative sense, they lose their lives to Zodiac too.
Having developed a fascination about the Zodiac murders, though not, I assure you, as consuming as monomaniac Graysmith’s, I was pleased to see the film’s fidelity to the case. Though its conclusion implies a killer, the rest of the movie, including Fincher’s casting of multiple actors as the Zodiac killer, suggests possibilities. Zodiac the film doesn’t allow itself a neat, Hollywood ending because Zodiac the case doesn’t allow for a neat, Hollywood ending. The film deviates little from Graysmith’s book of the same title. It stays true even down to arresting images of a dirty sex toy that, unfortunately, remained etched in my mind after reading the book. If the film differs from the book in any way, the former plays as more of a detective thriller while the latter, though certainly not in the horror genre, is a scare-the-body-thetans out of you page-turner.
At two-and-a-half hours, the film is too long. Fincher’s direction is, as always, superb. Though it repeatedly reminds viewers of place and time, the film's cars, hairstyles, phones, fashions make this, at least with regard to dates, redundant. The cast is a murderers’ row of thesbians: Chloe Sevigny, Robert Downey, Jr., Jake Gyllenhal, Adam Goldberg, Brian Cox, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards. The soundtrack is minimal, but I will never listen to Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man the same way again.
What the film has going for it more than anything is an arresting story that is more interesting than fiction. A murderer taunting the police with encrypted messages, attacking victims with a medieval executioner’s mask, suggesting a bizarre cartographic pattern to his murders, and terrorizing the Bay Area with threats of murdering children in school buses all makes for a tale that is hard to make boring.
The anointed frontrunners in the race for the Republican nomination make up for in name recognition what they lack in commonalities with Republican voters. Mitt Romney formerly supported a right to an abortion. Now that he's trolling for votes among the Rebubbalicans, he notes that he, like Ronald Reagan, evolved on the abortion question. Rudy Giuliani supports abortion on demand. John McCain, the candidate that strangely elicits the most venom among conservatives, alone among the big three boasts a consistently pro-life voting record. All three candidates have supported citizenship as a reward for illegal immigrants. Romney supported gun control in his sucessful run for Massachusetts governor and Giuliani enforced one of the nation's strictest gun control ordinances as mayor of New York. Their positions on gay marriage seem to fluctuate with what voters they're trying to impress.
The Republican frontrunners are less Republican and more frontrunner. It's not that they disagree with the base on an issue here, an issue there. They disagree with the base about the issues most salient to the base. The base, thankfully, is starting to wake up. At this weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference, the first one I've missed in more than a decade, "Rudy McRomney" buttons, with a slash over the amalgamated candidate's name, sold well. "I feel very angry and betrayed," direct mail guru Richard Viguerie declared at CPAC. "We should withhold support from all major Republican [presidential] candidates today." Amen.
Mitt Romney won the straw poll at CPAC. Assuming the poll's legitimacy, it's telling that the top vote-getter received just 21 percent of the ballots cast. Four out of five participants chose another candidate and two of three conference-goers chose not to participate. It's an open field. Conservatives don't have a candidate yet. Should one emerge the mathematics would add up to the wrong answer for the three Republicrats dominating the field. 1. There are more Rebubbalicans than Republicrats in the Republican Party. 2. Three Republicrats would split a smaller pie than the one Rebubbalican would get to gorge on.
Ten years ago, I read Robert Graysmith's Zodiac. The book was scarier than any horror movie. After putting it down, I checked the lock on my door. I made sure no intruders were lurking in my apartment. I'm not joking. It's that spooky.
The reason, I suspect, the Zodiac killer is the scariest of all serial killers is that he never got caught. While Charles Manson rots in jail, and Ted Bundy feeds worms, the Zodiac killer could still be on the loose. We don't know who he is. We don't know where he is. He could be behind you right now. Another reason the California-based serial killer frightens is that since he outwitted hordes of police, he could certainly outwit you.
Zodiac sent encoded messages to the police which neither they nor Naval intelligence could crack. A married couple, two teachers who dabbled in cryptology, decoded some of them. A few remain uncracked. In the late 1960s to the early 1970s, the Zodiac killed anywhere from five to thirty-seven people. Just as he remains a mystery, the scope of his killings do too. Zodiac had a flair for the theatric. In addition to giving himself the name "Zodiac," the killer occasionally dressed the part. He donned a black, squarish executioner's mask upon hunting humans. He had a fetish for striking near water, or in places with aquatic names, e.g. Riverside, Lake Herman Road. He also killed in geographic patterns. He told police that if police placed a radian angle upon Mt. Diablo on the map, they could discover a pattern for his attacks. Just glancing at this note frightens me.
Zodiac taunted the police. For years, beginning in the late '60s, he mailed letters to the police and media, which usually began "This is the Zodiac speaking," ridiculing his "blue meanie" opponents. Killing was a game to him. The original Dirty Harry movie was based in part on the case. The Zodiac threatened to kill a bus full of school children. He never attempted to make good on the threat as Dirty Harry's nemesis did. On the other hand, the Zodiac never needed to ask himself if he "felt lucky." The police never caught up to him as Clint Eastwood caught up to the demented killer in Dirty Harry. The Zodiac escaped the police's dragnet, and, like Jack the Ripper, will likely escape history's efforts to track him down. On the big screen, the good guy won. But in real life, the villian did.
Four decades after he started killing, the Zodiac stars in a movie in which the villian wins. David Fincher, the excellent director of Fight Club, has made Zodiac, a film based on the chilling Graysmith book. I am frightened, but I will see it tonight--not knowing if the real Zodiac is sitting behind me or not.
