Category Archives: Movies
Saving Private Ryan
Mad Magazine did a great satire on the Saving Private Ryan movie poster. It was titled Trading Private Bergdahl “they got five taliban leaders, we got one deserting weasel”.
In the actual movie, a Lincoln channeling General George Marshall gives orders to find Private Ryan. The hapless job falls to platoon leader Captain Miller.
During the search, Miller has to decide whether to keep a German prisoner or press on to find Ryan. He releases the Jihadi, er German, only to have come back later in the flick and kill one of his men.
When they finally find Ryan, Miller tells him all his brothers have been killed in battle and he has orders to bring him home. Ryan refuses saying the men he is with are his brothers now and he won’t leave them behind. Not exactly a Private Bergdahl moment, but hey, it’s a movie.
Even though they’re way outnumbered by the Germans, Captain Miller and his men stay, and they all get killed. Not really, but Captain Miller does. Miller’s dying words to Private Ryan are, “earn this”.
Saving Private Ryan
To further prove life is unfair, Private Ryan lost out to Shakespeare in Love for Best Picture in 1998.
Anyway, I thought this might be a good way to mark the 70th anniversary of D-Day.
Between the Ferns
In an attempt to reach his target audience of young customers for ObamaCare, the president appeared on the Zack Galifianakis show, Between Two Ferns.
The president took some flak for being unpresidential – but so what – he’s unpresidential most of the time. Here he was funny. And Galifiankis was really funny. Plus Zack is a way better pitchman for ObamaCare than Pajama Boy. Actually, he didn’t even make a pitch for the ACA. He mocked it.
Not Between any Ferns
Well, it’s all fun and games until we come to Megan McCardle’s Bloomberg analysis of the McKinsey survey of who’s actually buying ObamaCare. It’s not the previously uninsured “young invincibles”:
If the McKinsey numbers turn out to be correct, I think we should expect that the individual mandate will simply not be enforced. Otherwise, we would be “helping” the uninsured by raising the cost of the insurance available to them, and then fining them hundreds or thousands of dollars for not buying it. I believe the technical term for this is “political suicide.”
Says Jonah Goldberg, “Obamacare, was designed from the outset to screw young people, overcharging them for products they don’t need in order to subsidize older Americans.”
Sochi Spy Swap
There will be no Sochi Spy Swap for Edward Snowden.
Senator Mark Warner wants to deport Justin Bieber to Canada. He could go to jail. Pussy Riot has already been there.
Pussy Rioters served Russian prison time for protesting President Putin’s human rights record. That and desecrating a church. In Bieber’s case it would be for assaulting his limo driver. Or for assaulting his jet pilot with second hand pot smoke.
No Sochi Spy Swap but Snowden Welcome
Putin says Edward Snowden is welcome to attend the Sochi Olympics. Pussy Riot, not so much.
I meant to include a shirtless Putin but ran out of room.
Benghazi: Bad Movie Review or Act of Terror?
David Kirkpatrick wrote a long piece in the NYT December 28 that said the attack on Benghazi was the act of a bunch of locals very pissed off about a movie. The Washington Post later reported that a former GITMO detainee who had trained under Osama bin Laden and fought with the Taliban played a role in the attack.
As they say, “what difference does it make?” Well, President Obama did say that al Qaeda was on the run and headed for defeat. After the attack Susan Rice went on five Sunday news shows to say it was caused by the internet video. And Hillary promised the father of murdered Navy Seal, Tyrone Woods, that they would prosecute the movie maker.
Was Benghazi a Bad Movie Review or Act of Terror?
The fact is the mystery of Benghazi can easily be solved by the man himself. In the second 2012 presidential debate Obama insisted that it is was an act of terror.
Here’s Andrew Wilson’s review in The American Spectator.
An Unbelievably Small Really Futile and Stupid Gesture
The Obama/Kerry insistence on the insignificance of their proposed attack on Syria reached its logical absurd conclusion yesterday when Kerry described it as “unbelievably small”. What do you do with news that’s already a cartoon? You go to Animal House for “a really futile and stupid gesture”.
The side-splitting must have been too much for Putin. He pounced on Kerry’s “rhetorical point” that Assad could avoid attack by giving up his chemical weapons:
“He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week — turn it over, all of it without delay and allow the full and total accounting. But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done.”
By six o’clock Obama was all over the news shows swapping his red line for a life line from Putin.
Unbelievably Small Update
Bret Stephens wants to know “when did the American way of war go from shock-and-awe to forewarn-and-irritate?”.
