An impressively faithful silent remake, even if it does feature “a micro-encephalic Darth Vader and a 10-year-old Han Solo,” and is missing pretty much the entire our-heroes-on-the-death-star middle portion.
Star Wars as described by a three-year-old. This is surprisingly good.
Alas, they left out a couple of my own personal favorites: The ASCII-animated version, and, of course, Godzilla Vs. Disco Lando (technically more of an Empire Strikes Back remake, so I guess I can’t really complain about the omission).
He seems to be saying that yeah, McCain may be just as evil as Dubya, but at least he wouldn’t be an outright criminal if he were president:
The best aspect of a McCain presidency is that, while it would probably follow the policies of George W. Bush, it would put an end to the politics of Karl Rove. I went back and reread Michael Lewis’s 1997 New York Times Magazine profile of McCain, which gushed (persuasively) over McCain long before McCain- gushing had become a media cliché. You can see in it that, even before his first presidential campaign made him persona non grata in the GOP, McCain really was a highly bipartisan figure. The article cites McCain working unusually closely with Democrats, and quotes Democrats lavishing praise on him. He impugns his own party’s leadership as corrupt. He jokingly refers to his younger political self as a “freshman right-wing Nazi.” Conservative ideologues, as a rule, do not liken conservatism to national socialism.
Liberals tend to view the press’s love affair with McCain as a wildly unfair act of bias. They have a point. On the other hand, they should take some heart in the fact that McCain obviously cherishes the approval of the mainstream (and even liberal) media. His accessibility to the press and public is something small-d democrats should cheer. McCain has conducted interviews with very liberal publications like Grist. He’s promised to undertake an American version of “Prime Minister’s Questions,” whereby members of Congress could spar with him.
Does McCain spin and dissemble? Of course. But the current administration’s practices go far beyond mere spin. In Bush’s Washington, critics are enemies to be dismissed rather than engaged. A McCain presidency would promise to dismantle the whole Rovian method that has torn open such a deep wound in the national psyche.
Beneath his wildly fluctuating ideological positions, McCain is an establishmentarian Republican. Unlike Bush, he cares about elite opinion. He is comfortable sharing power in the traditional postwar style rather than monopolizing it. He might not be another Teddy Roosevelt, but right now another Gerald Ford doesn’t look so bad.
Sure, another Gerald Ford might not be so bad. BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT.
What we really need is another FDR, but that ain’t happening.
