The American Conservative

Apocalypto keeps looking better and better (a new trailer is available).  I have also heard good things from advance viewers.

One advance viewer, Peter Suderman, writes:

Ross Douthat points out that, despite Mel Gibson’s personal and media troubles, he’s still a formidable force at the box office. To which I would add (and this is coming from someone not entirely thrilled with The Passion) that he’s also an extremely impressive filmmaker as well.

And now, after having seen Apocalypto, all I can say is: you really have no idea. I mean, not to hyperbolate or anything, but … wow.

Update: There are going to be critics who say that the film is not historically accurate.  Where would they get that idea?  I will pretend to be shocked that the man who made Braveheart (a first-rate “fact-based” movie!) is taking liberties with history.  I will probably then go back and buy another ticket.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq and King Abdullah II of Jordan abruptly backed out of a meeting with President Bush on Wednesday, leaving the White House scrambling to explain why a carefully planned summit meeting had suddenly been cut from two days to one. ~The New York Times

The reason is pretty simple.  The Shi’ite government, whom we are supposed to show that we are reliable allies, is entirely unreliable and beholden to its master, Sadr, who very clearly told Maliki not to go to the meeting on pain of losing Sadr’s deputies’ support (and, more importantly, earning the wrath of the Jaish al-Mahdi).  Maliki ignored him, Sadr suspended participation of his deputies in the government and now Maliki is doing at least part of what Sadr wanted. 

The United States has no real ally in the government in Iraq.  Time to come home.

Gov. Bill Richardson’s reelection in New Mexico was never in doubt, and the possible 2008 Democratic presidential candidate spent the final days of his campaign helping fellow Democrats while he cruised to a record-breaking margin of victory. 

So when the Republican Governors Association (RGA) spent $115,000 on ads opposing Richardson in the final weeks, eyebrows were accordingly raised.

That late expenditure in the non-competitive race was the coating on a bitter pill for GOP operatives in several red states with Democratic governors. Their candidates received little financial help from the governors’ association and went on to lose by stunning margins.

As the association convenes its annual conference today in Miami, some operatives say it didn’t have to be that way.

Some of the races in Democrat-governed red states turned out to be nearly as lopsided as Richardson’s 69-31 win; Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano won by 28 points, Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry won by 33 points and Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen won by 39 points. In these races and closer ones in red states such as Kansas and Arkansas, Republicans said the association could have done more with its record-breaking war chest early on, when they were more competitive.

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A national consultant who does a lot of work in Oklahoma and Kansas said those two states represent two of the biggest missed opportunities because they are so cheap to play in. In Kansas, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius easily withstood a challenge from Republican Jim Barnett, 58-41.

“These are both places where the RGA could have come in and spent some early money in very inexpensive media markets,” the consultant said. “And yet they go decide to spend money on Bill Richardson.”

The consultant also said more could have been done in Arkansas, where Democrat Mike Beebe defeated Republican Asa Hutchinson 55-41 to replace Huckabee. ~The Hill

This comes out the same day I made the exact same argument about Mitt Romney’s mistakes as RGA Chairman.  (Honest, I didn’t see the Hill story before I wrote my earlier post.) 

Anybody could have told you that spending money on Dendahl’s campaign in New Mexico was a waste of money.  Dendahl wasn’t even the original nominee.  He had to be recruited to fill in for the man who won the nomination in the primary, some doctor whose name I don’t remember and can’t be bothered to look up (oh, this article has it–J.R. Damron), and was inevitably playing catch-up for the last few months of the election.  Throwing away this kind of money in the NM and Arizona races that were over the day they began ought to be earning Romney the third-degree from party apparatchiks and pundits everywhere.  At the very least, it ought to be making social conservatives think very seriously about whether they want a proven failure of a campaign strategist representing their cause in the primaries.

You have to hand it to Ahmadinejad or his English ghost-writers–the Iranians’ propaganda and PR skills are evidently light years ahead of the Karen Hughes-style goodwill tours and the hokey al-Shura TV channel that constitute our official efforts to “get our message” across in the Islamic world.  Whoever told Ahmadinejad to include the bit about the victims of Hurricane Katrina has apparently been studying our political rhetoric pretty closely.

And for that matter, why on earth does the Orthodox Patriarch believe gaining more legal liberty for the few Orthodox remaining in the former Constantinople is worth Europe’s opening the gates to massive legal Muslim immigration — especially with Western Europe so spiritually and culturally weak, and failing to reproduce itself?

What am I missing here? ~Rod Dreher

With respect to his support for Turkish EU entry, Patriarch Bartholomew is in a fairly difficult situation and presumably feels compelled by the intense political pressure on the Phanar to support what the Turkish government wants.  That does not make his position any better, but it makes it more understandable.  I don’t know whether he believes that this will really contribute to greater religious freedom for Christians.  If he does, I’m afraid this is a mistaken judgement, as the winds are blowing in a very different direction under the AK government. 

Pope Benedict’s apparent endorsement of Turkish entry is somewhat more troubling, though both are very unfortunate, because he has a certain real political independence that should allow him to continue to speak forthrightly against Turkish entry if he believes, as he once held, that Turkey is alien to the culture and faith of Europe and consequently does not belong in the EU. 

If allowed, Turkish entry will, of course, hasten the Islamicisation of Europe as Turkish migrant workers move across the Continent and begin to take up permanent residence and Turkey becomes the second largest member state with significant clout in all future decision-making.  If the Turks were admitted, you could stop worrying about Eurabia and say hello to Euturkiye.  The good news, such as it is, is that as the Vatican has become more friendly to Turkish membership a lot of the secular politicians in western Europe have become more hostile.  The only old EU-12 governments daft or short-sighted enough to support it openly seem to be the British and the Greek (the latter in stunning defiance of all public opinion).  New member states who have entered in the last dozen years or so seem to me to have always been more skeptical of the proposed entry of Turkey, but I may be misinformed on that point.

Jason Zengerle notes that Disney is selling Apocalypto as “Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto,” and even has Gibson himself narrating a TV spot. “Does Disney really think Mel Gibson is still a selling point?” he wonders.

Well, if they didn’t, they’d be out of their minds. It’s easy to forget, because he hasn’t appeared in any movies in a few years, but Gibson is one of the most bankable – and consistently bankable – movie stars in recent memory. Meanwhile, he’s directed three movies: the first, The Man Without a Face, wasn’t a big deal, but the other two are among the most successful movies of all time. Braveheart wasn’t a box office smash initially, but it won Best Picture and went on to be huge overseas and on VHS and DVD; there’s a reason it’s playing in what seems to be a constant loop on cable. The Passion of the Christ . . . well, you know how that one turned out. ~Ross Douthat

Ross is right about all of this, but I will add a little bit more.  Consider what Disney had on its hands: a movie so unusual and foreign for its intended audience that, if made by almost anybody else, it would be considered the most eccentric, possibly laughable project on the planet.  It is a movie about the Maya, which might be broadly interesting to those who know something about the Maya, and it is about the collapse of a civilisation, which would interest people who like disaster and action flicks, but it is filmed in Mayan dialect and, unlike The Passion, has no handy, easily-recognised and well-known plotline that allows the audience to skip the subtitles if they want.  If anyone else made it, it would be an automatic art-house release, a Mesoamerican answer to Russian Ark (an outstanding film in its own right, but as slow as Apocalypto promises to be fast-paced).  It is only because Mel Gibson succeeded in making a worldwide blockbuster out of a movie filmed entirely in foreign and largely dead languages that anyone would have been willing to back up a project like Apocalypto.  Plus, the entire cast is made up of actors whom no American audience would recognise, because many of them are appearing in a major film for the first time, so Gibson’s name is the only thing that will make the movie familiar to the audience.  To do anything other than feature Gibson’s involvement prominently in all advertisements would be marketing death.  Without his name tied to the movie title, one might very well think that this was some kind of Mexican horror flick.

Would you suppose that the man who headed the Republican Governors Association in one of the worst election years for Republican governors in memory would be considered a prime candidate for the GOP presidential nomination?  No, neither would I, but for some reason RGA Chairman Mitt Romney, who presided over one of the worst GOP performances in governors’ races, has a rising political reputation and is taken all together too seriously by everyone as a potential nominee for President. 

It probably doesn’t help that two of the three states (Florida, Iowa, Michigan) where he wasted, er, invested so much of the RGA’s money didn’t come close to electing Republican governors (Nussle lost by 10, DeVos by 14) and the third was always strongly Republican-favoured thanks to Jeb Bush’s popularity.  Meanwhile, governors’ races in states that should and could have been more competitive (such as Maryland, where Ehrlich only lost by seven, or Oregon, where Kulongoski won only narrowly four years before, or Wisconsin, where the margins were in single digits for a long time) were not receiving those resources.  Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota just barely scraped through (he won by 1 point) thanks to his own personal popularity, but apparently without too much help from Romney.  But for Pawlenty’s surprise comeback at the end, Romney’s performance as chairman would have been even worse. 

It was always going to be a bad year for the Republicans (and well it should have been), but with the brilliant captains of Liddy Dole and Mitt Romney it was probably a lot worse than it had to be.  This doesn’t bother me very much, but if I were someone who was terribly concerned about the fate of the GOP I would not be cheering on Mitt Romney after a mediocre-at-best showing as head of the RGA.  Anyone who plainly gets outmaneuvered by the likes of Bill Richardson is not someone I would want leading my side.

Just as the entry of Tom Vilsack into the presidential race may make it possible for Democrats to skip Iowa, a serious Romney bid may allow both McCain and Giuliani to announce they are bypassing New Hampshire because they can’t compete with the near-favorite son that Massachusetts boy Romney is. This probably won’t happen, since McCain did so well in New Hampshire in 2000, but it does indicate Romney will have yet another hurdle to jump. He may do well in New Hampshire, but that will be easily written off as a geographic fluke. ~John Podhoretz

I have spent some time (probably far too much time) thinking about Romney’s primary prospects, and this one just doesn’t compute.  New Hampshire continues to be the only New England state with greater GOP registration over the Dems, but it is also famously contrarian and independent-minded and it also went for the Democrats in a big and somewhat surprising way in 2006, which may change the complexion of the primary in ’07-’08. 

This is not a state where social conservative pols do terribly well in any election (unless they also happen to run, as Buchanan did in ’96, on economic populist themes), and Romney is so far basing much of his candidacy around his religious and social conservative appeal; his other major issue that he runs on at this point is his universal health-care boondoggle in Mass. that will presumably make many in the home of Live Free or Die feel rather queasy.  I am also extremely skeptical that they think of a carpetbagging Utahan who was elected in dreaded Massachusetts as their “near-favorite son.” 

It is true that Dukakis won the 1988 Democratic primary, so there is no clear evidence that New Hampshire voters will necessarily reject someone from Massachusetts, but it is hard to see why they would be disposed to embrace him because he comes from next door.  I predict that New Hampshire is not going to be a terribly good race for any of the Terrible Trio.  (One entertaining possible outcome: McCain, Giuliani and Romney all give speeches where they announce that they are in a three-way tie for third place behind Duncan Hunter and Tommy Thompson.) 

Their likely poor showings in N.H. may actually be good news for them.  As 2000 reminded us, the eventual Republican nominee is slightly less likely to win N.H. in open years.  On the Republican side since 1948, there have been seven elections that might reasonably be called open (i.e., there was not an incumbent President running) and in four of them the N.H. winner did not become the nominee.  The three who did go on to win the nomination and election are Reagan in ’80, Nixon’s ’68 run and Bush the Elder in ’88.  (On the Democratic side in open years, the N.H. winner has an even harder time winning the whole shebang, with only two of seven primary victors becoming the nominee–Carter and Dukakis.)

“I would call it a civil war,” Powell told a business forum in the United Arab Emirates. “I have been using it (civil war) because I like to face the reality,” added Powell.

He said world leaders should acknowledge Iraq was in civil war. ~Reuters

The clear implication of that last line is that he thinks Mr. Bush does not use that phrase because Bush does not like to face “the reality,” which pretty much confirms what we’ve all been thinking about him for some time now.

I’m so obviously American that I don’t think the question merits any navel-gazing or serious thought. But my parents come from a part of the world where there’s a powerful stigma associated with being a dark-skinned Muslim. This is part of what prompted partition, the sense that the Hindu clerisy in eastern Bengal was so economically and culturally dominant that it was retarding social progress among the Muslim majority, a plausible if obviously explosive claim. So why the heck would I stop identifying with other dark-skinned South Asian Muslims? ~Reihan Salam

So, as I read this, Reihan continues to identify himself as a Muslim out of a sense of loyalty to his parents and his ancestral people in Bangladesh.  This is not “unadmirably tribal.”  This is what I might call quite natural.