I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to all the people to whom I hyped the USA Network show Burn Notice, to all the people I encouraged to tune into Thursday night's season two premiere. Because that? Was crap. I hope you saw some or all of season one, or else you must think that I have no taste, no brains, no sense. If you did see some or all of season one, you must be thinking the same thing I am: how in the hell did that great show turn into this mind-numbingly stupid show?

( Spoilers inside. )

I got my season one Burn Notice DVDs in the mail a few weeks ago, and got to sit down with phierma and cos_x to go through them in one marathon sitting. (If you want to tape or DVR it and do so yourself, USA Network is airing them all back-to-back on July 3rd to prepare for the July 10th season two premier, check local listings for time.) The first time I watched these, I was taken by how well written they were, how witty and wry the voice-over narration was, by how well series creator Matt Nix is paying homage to the great "Florida caper" writers John D. MacDonald and Carl Hiassen, how many great throw-away references to classic non-fiction spy literature he threw in for those of us who share his obsession with the subject, and especially just how much fun Bruce Campbell and Gabrielle Anwar were having with their parts. And lord knows, I'm a sucker for watching actors have fun with their parts.

For those of you who don't know this series and don't remember me hyping it last season, Jeffrey Donovan plays Michael Westen, a one-man private contractor for the CIA in the War on Terror who's been unfairly accused of something awful (for most of season one, he doesn't even know what), convicted in a top secret hearing he wasn't even aware of, blacklisted, shanghai'ed, and dumped back in his home town, his address of record. His identity has been erased, his bank accounts and credit frozen, every government official and contractor with a secret or above clearance told to avoid him under penalty of law, and then he's given word: leave the greater Miami area and we'll send every police force and agency in the US to hunt you down like a dog. Oh, and at the end of the pilot, he finds out that in addition to his FBI tail, he's under really good 24-hour professional surveillance by someone even better than he is. He sets out to clear his name and get his job back. Practically the only assets he has left are his psychotic ex-girlfriend Fiona Glenanne (Anwar), a long-retired alcoholic ex-spy buddy named Sam Axe (Campbell), and what grudging help he can get out of his neurotic mother Madeline Westen (Sharon Gless). This doesn't worry him too much; he's finished field assignments this hard with even less help, before. And in the season one ending cliffhanger, after a dozen episodes of accumulating money and other assets by working as an unlicensed private detective, he has done just what he set out to do: forced the hand of the shadowy conspiracy that framed him for corruption and treason and thereby wrecked his career, with the camera fading to black just as he's about to meet them and find out what this is really all about.

This time through, something different struck me, and it's the way in which the three main characters of Fiona, Michael, and Sam personify one of the ugliest moral and political dilemmas of the War on Terror. Sam is (or at least was) a government agent, CIA covert ops at the end of and right after the Cold War. Fiona is (or mostly was) a terrorist, an Irish Republican Army bank-robber and gun-runner; in fact, at one point in the Cold War before he retired, Sam managed to screw up an arms deal that Fiona was brokering with Libyan intelligence. (One of those in-jokes for those of us obsessed with spy literature: the Reagan and Bush the Elder administrations spent a fortune trying to prove a connection between the IRA and Libyan intelligence. In Burn Notice, that connection turns out to have been the lead character's girlfriend.) Michael, though, is neither a terrorist nor a government agent, he's a private contractor. And it makes him feel awkward that Fiona looks at him and sees "one of us," and that Sam looks at him and sees "one of us." And in fact the main plot of the first season is driven by just how fine the line is between being the kind of mercenary Michael is and the kind of international criminal mastermind and terrorist Fiona is. Fiona at one point accuses him of being "a criminal with a government paycheck." In an earlier episode, Sam says that the kind of things that have happened to Michael in his career, including this, are why he's glad he got out long before the War on Terror: in the Cold War, it was easier to be sure who was on your side. Michael throws the other side of that argument back into Sam's face later: the difference between Sam and Michael is that Sam was a lot more comfortable taking orders. Fiona needles Sam even more often than Michael does over the same point; to her, Sam's unforgivable sin is how readily he keeps handing his conscience over to a government to tell him what's right and what's wrong.

If you want a clearer metaphor for this, one has occurred to me, from the Golden Age of (Caribbean) Piracy. If this is (figuratively) the Caribbean of 1680, Fiona is a pirate. Sam is (ex-)navy. Michael is a privateer.

Michael is a high-minded privateer, at least in his own mind, at least as much motivated by his urge to do what his country needs as he is by his urge to have the government pay what it costs to keep him on the opposite side of the planet from his dysfunctional family with enough left over to fund his mom's hypochondria. But still a privateer. And if you know any of your pirate history, you know this about privateers: an awful lot of them ended up being hanged for piracy. Whether they intentionally crossed the line, accidentally crossed the line, or found themselves mysteriously on the other side of a line someone else blurred for their own greedy reasons, the line between independent private military contractor (privateer) and terrorist enemy of all mankind (pirate) was (and is) way too easy to be on the wrong side of.

P.S. I wish I knew that a bunch of you were caught up on Burn Notice. If I'm reading between the lines of the season one finale correctly, the series creator made a fascinating, and possibly scurrilous, political accusation that I'd love to have readers to discuss with, a discussion I can't possibly go into without wandering way, way deep into spoiler territory.

OK, let me get a long list of caveats out of the way first, reasons why I shouldn't care about an announcement I saw today. First of all, I promised myself a long time ago not to get excited about vaporware any more. Nowhere is this more true than in computer gaming, where oft's the slip twixt the cup and the lip. (Duke Nukem Forever, anyone?) Furthermore, this particular announcement makes a promise that three or four well-funded (and a couple of less well funded) companies have tried to deliver on before, and failed; there exist solid technical and financial reasons why what they're proposing to do may not even be feasible. And finally, the announcement is missing some very very important details ... like the names of anybody involved in the actual creative side of it. So yeah, if what I needed was some cold water to dash all over any potential enthusiasm over this particular announcement, I've got buckets and buckets of cold water standing by.

I can't help myself, though. I had a nerdgasm: "Sci Fi Channel creating hybrid TV series and MMO" (James Egan, Massively.com, 6/2/08, based partially on Geoff Boucher, "Sci Fi Channel is game to join the virtual world," LA Times, 6/2/08). The announcement? A half-dozen wealthy companies have volunteered to put up at least 30 million dollars towards the simultaneous development of an original science fiction TV series for the SciFi channel and an MMO set in the same universe at the same time as the series; player characters will appear in the background of some episodes, and player characters' cumulative actions will have some kind of an effect on the how the storyline of the show plays out.

Holy frelling cats.

There are a ton of reasons why this may not work. We know nothing about the story, other than it's science fiction and set on Earth about 80 to 100 years from now. We know nothing about who's writing it, who's directing it, who's acting in it. We know nothing about the creative team behind the online game, either. $30 million sounds like a lot, but it's about enough to develop one half season of an SF TV show, or one very crappy half-done MMO; the actual budget to do both of those things well might well be ten times that, and nobody has said where any additional money for this is going to come from. Once the pilot episode is done, your average TV episode is done in about two weeks, maybe a month tops for a show that runs short 10 to 12 episode seasons; one "episode" of even the best-funded MMOs takes companies with maximum experience in the industry about three to five months to produce. And, as I hinted at the beginning, the ground is littered with the corpses of promises made by various MMO game developers that player actions would guide the storyline from episode to episode; there are really good reasons, if nothing else related to that minimum three to five month lag between player actions and seeing the results in the game world, why this never works. And even by vaporware standards, this is pretty vaporous vaporware, with a forecast earliest possible release date of two years from now.

Oh, and never forget: this is the Internet. There exist at least two or three large cliques of dozens of people each who exist specifically to grief any person or any company that invests any serious money in the Internet for the purposes of commerce or art, in order to make their very important political and artistic point, namely "lol internet." Consider the recent brouhaha between Funcom, makers of the new Age of Conan MMO that's been in the news lately. You didn't hear? Like all MMOs, there's an extraordinarily ill defined rule against "grief play," against playing the game in such a way as to deliberately keep other people from having fun or to intentionally try to make them quit the game. There is no industry standard definition of how to recognize "grief play," though, except via the intent of the griefer, which means that as long as the griefer doesn't outright say that they're griefing, they can usually lawyer their way out of it. As happened just the other day, when someone complained to Funcom that they accidentally offended some member of the Something Awful Goon Squad, who (according to the complainer) brought all 60 members of Goonheim, all of them suspiciously high level for how little time the game has been out, to slaughter this one low-level character, and then "camp" his corpse in shifts to guarantee that he can't actually continue playing at all today, or for however long the Goons decide it will take to prove their point ... whatever that ill-defined "point" may actually be. One of Funcom's game masters showed up to politely ask the Goons to keep it down to "only" 15 to 1, so they wouldn't be accused of grief play. The Goons pushed back, demanding Funcom show there where in the rules it says that 60 people can't camp one corpse for a week, if they want, and Funcom backed down. (See Girdox, "Hordes of Goonheim beats [sic] AoC," Goonheim.com, 5/30/08.) So what happens to this when the swarms on Something Awful, Fark, and 4Chan find out that if they make themselves ubiquitous enough and obnoxious enough they can personally wreck an umpty-million-dollar TV show?

But, good gorram, I can't help hoping and wishing this will work. This isn't something that customers have been clamoring for. This is several somethings that many thousands, maybe in the low millions of customers, all solidly neglected by the current market in both TV and game SF, have been clamoring for. Near-future SF, science fiction of actual predictions about a near-term forseeable future instead of hand-waved over-used cliché worlds and tech. And an MMO where the the players are actually involved in the storyline in ways that other players can see, a world where we're more than supporting roles and spectators as the great changes happen in the game world.

For all that I occasionally ask, annoyedly, that the universe once in a while pretend that it exists for some reason other than to annoy Brad, it looks like the universe, or at least USA TV, is giving me two really sweet birthday presents this year. June 17th is the scheduled release date for Burn Notice season 1 on DVD; I'll be pre-ordering that one pretty soon, you bet. And Burn Notice season 2 starts the actual day before my birthday, July 10th. Sweet.

---

Some time in the next couple of months, probably around the end of June, City of Villains is releasing it's first (and possibly last) really big villain-specific software release. As part of Issue 12: Midnight Hour, they're unlocking two new character classes that can only be played by someone who's already successfully leveled a regular villain to level 50. (And 20 new powersets for the 10 non-epic character classes, but that's not the point right this second.) The new character classes are highly customizable elite Arachnos soldiers: Wolf Spider infantry (who later branch out into Bane Spider special forces or Crab Spider police SWAT guys) and Blood Widow assassins (who later branch out into Night Widow elite spies or Fortunata psychic assassins):

So here's how it affects this blog: I'm thinking of an in-character writing project. My thought is that I'll be creating a Bane Spider and roleplaying him as the Arachnos equivalent of an old Soviet KGB "political officer," someone whose job is correcting the doctrinal errors of his fellow Arachnos troops, standing up for Arachnos political values, and of course spying on members of whatever unit he's assigned on for their superiors. The background I'm imagining is born in the Etoile Islands well after the 1964 Arachnos revolution, after high school one (long ago) tour of duty in the Wolf Spiders, BA and MA in History from Aeon University in New Haven, Cap au Diable, Ph.D. in Political Science from Aeon University, recalled to active duty as a Political Officer during the Battle of the Jade Spider in Siren's Call, Rhode Island, captured and incarcerated as a prisoner of war in Ziggursky Penitentiary, recently broken out by Arachnos as part of Project Destiny and returned to the Wolf Spiders as a Political Officer monitoring the so-called Destined Ones.

And, to the specific point here, I'm thinking of turning the blog over to him periodically, maybe once every week or two. Because the "good guy" politics in this game are so creepy and wrong, it's actually not all that hard for me to imagine defending a Doctor-Doom like supervillain dictatorial regime as the superior alternative, especially from the viewpoint of someone who grew up under that regime and who believes that superhero-dominated America is even worse than it actually is (although how it actually is is bad enough). Imagining playing this character, I'm finding that it's even more disturbingly easy for me to spout, or even write, Arachnos propaganda than it was for me to write the Cthulhu-universe political blog entries I was writing a while back. But I know that few, if any of you, will be interested, so out of courtesy, what I'll probably do is give those posts their own icon, the Arachnos logo, and LJ-cut them.

When you're retired, like I am, you can do something stupid like set out to watch 50 hours of television in a week. Specifically, last week, when the SciFi channel celebrated the season opener for the last season of their Battlestar Galactica remake by rerunning every single episode of BSG seasons 1-3 back to back, 10 hours a day. People have been on me like white on rice to watch this show, telling me it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Even Joss Whedon, in an interview recently, called it the best science fiction TV series ever, and this from a man who's made some pretty impressive science fiction himself. I'd tried catching up a couple of times, including watching the beginning-of-season marathons the last two years. But yeah, now I'm caught up. Or more or less caught up, anyway; I did sleep in a couple of mornings and missed a few episodes, at least two of which I hadn't already seen. But still, pretty much caught up.

I've discovered that I can't help it: I like the following 8 minute capsule summary, "What the Frak is Going on with BSG?", that SciFi also put together to promote the new season, better than I liked the episodes themselves.



Having seen almost all of it, I get what all of you, including Joss Whedon, like about the series. It's serious science fiction, science fiction that takes philosophy and politics and war and ideas in general completely seriously, treats the various subjects it raises thoughtfully in a way that's mostly gone out of style in television and film science fiction. And on the other hand, I know that one of the reasons I avoided this series is a deep and abiding prejudice of mine against remakes, especially remakes of 70s and 80s TV. So knowing that I had that prejudice, and assured by nearly everybody that I wasn't giving it a fair shot, I bent over backwards to try to give it a fair shot. But no. I acknowledge its strengths, but it's got two crippling problems that I just can't get past.

It gives me crippling headaches when I watch it. Literally a crippling problem; I went through a fair amount of naproxen trying to squint at this show to even tell what was going on. It wasn't the shaky-cam, which was well within my tolerances, although I think that was over-used. No, it's that it's not just serious science fiction, it's Serious Film. And like nearly all directors since Oliver Stone, the makers of this series signal that it's a Serious Film by costuming everybody in shades of gray, painting every prop gray, putting them on a gray set, and turning almost all of the lights off. (Apparently just as "real" in games is brown, "serious" in film is bluish-gray.) I found myself longing for the dream and daydream and prophesy and fantasy scenes, because those were the only scenes where they turned the lights on. I found myself attracted to Caprica Six, not because she's some hot babe, but because she's practically the only person in the entire series who isn't wearing gray.

I hate almost all the characters. And that's a deal breaker for me, with any book or movie or series. If some time in the first 20 to 30 minutes, I don't see at least one character that I generally like, one character that's basically a decent person trying to do the right thing, I get massively turned off. For one thing, it's unrealistic. I agree with Heinlein's famous "What I Believe" column from decades ago that if we lived in a world where as high a percentage of the people in it were venal, corrupt, and selfish as the people who are portrayed in "realistic" fiction, there wouldn't be an intact building, an edible meal, or a single working tool or device. I'm sick of, literally sick of, literally sick in my belly and choking on, the cynicism that so much of the press and the media have been smothering us with over the course of my lifetime. I hated it when Harlan Ellison introduced it to written science fiction in the "New Wafe SF" movement in the 70s, and I hate it in this show, too. OK, Lee "Apollo" Adama is a legitimate hero, but he doesn't get nearly enough screen time. Helo's not a bad person, either, and neither is "good Boomer." But again, we're talking minor characters who make brief or sporadic appearances. No, the show's main viewpoint characters are Admiral Bill Adama who's a morally compromised worn-out chronic depressive, Colonel Tigh who's not merely alcoholic but batshit insane, President Roslin who's a corrupt religious fanatic, and Gaius Baltar who's the most famously selfish man in human history, not to mention possessed of the worst impulse control problem in history. Oh, and the Cylons themselves, who are even more religiously fanatic than Roslin and even more batshit insane than Tigh. By and large, I'm not crazy about giving this much of my time and attention to people who are this irredeemably unpleasant to each other.

*shrug*

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. If it's your thing, enjoy it. Me? I'm looking forward to two entirely different SciFi presentations: Sunday evening's "Jason and the Argonauts" (can't find a link) and next Saturday evening's "Odysseus: Voyage to the Underworld" (which I'll have to tape and watch later, I'm busy Saturday night).

Many of my friends know that I've been mildly obsessed, for quite some time now, with a one-season TV show whose network lost faith in it and yanked the plug before any of the important questions got answered, one with a talented international cast and a very unique look, with beautiful costuming and art direction unlike any other science fiction that's been put on the screen, big screen or little screen. What, you thought I meant Firefly? Nah. I liked that, thought it was great, am glad I saw it all, and I showed it to a lot of you, yes. But now that it's largely all wrapped up, by a sequel that I admit (in hindsight) was almost as poorly made as V: The Final Battle, I'm pretty much done with it. No, I have a much older one-season-wonder SF TV show obsession, one I only just managed to catch up with completely, one that I think is going to last much longer for me: Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's 1969/70 ITV series UFO.

I've had the complete UFO tv series on my Amazon wishlist ever since they came out with it, The Complete UFO Megaset. But the list price used to be much higher, and used copies harder to find; I only finally got a copy of my own during the Christmas season, and only a couple of weeks ago did phierma and cos_x and I finish watching them all in sequence. I literally hadn't seen any of these since the local PBS affiliate briefly ran the series late evenings when I was still a kid back in the mid 1970s, so I was a little nervous about whether or not it would hold up. To my pleasant surprise, seeing it now 30+ years later and as an adult, it holds up even better than I remembered. When you compare it to what our other choices were circa 1969, say the famously awful third season of the original Star Trek, it's nothing less than amazing. But even if you aren't willing to cut it some slack for the fact that TV production values have gotten higher, that TV writers have gotten better at writing convincing dialog, that some TV directors have learned many new tricks since 1969 for affordable ways to make really compelling film, I think this series still has the potential to hook you, for a reason that ought to be near and dear to the heart of any science fiction fan: it asks a really interesting question, and takes the answers to that question very seriously.

The premise is that, just as we remember history, there have been UFO sightings since the mid 1940s, and historical records of everything from unexplained fireballs to "chariots of the gods" that could be UFO sightings back prior to that. But the series starts with some events set in 1969, when a small UFO lands in a heavily wooded northern English park of some kind, and the space-suited pilot gets out and kills two of three picnickers with a strange rifle and kidnaps the third, leaving without a trace ... except for one. For the first time, one of the victims of a UFO attack had been running a home movie camera all through the beginning of the attack, and the alien(s) didn't find it. His film fell into the hands of NATO intelligence, and now NATO has to answer the question "now what do we do?" We have one verified attack by extra-terrestrials on Earth. One tiny attack, yes, but who knows how many attacks go on every year and we don't know, since the UFOs seem to be completely undetectable and the aliens pretty good about sweeping up evidence? So two USAF officers assigned to NATO in England, one of them an ex-astronaut, set out to convince the UN Security Council, in secret sessions, that this could be the reconnaissance phase of a much larger invasion to come. If it is, we're completely outclassed. So our first priority has to be coming up with some way to detect and intercept incoming alien craft, no matter how much it costs. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, despite another alien attack suspiciously targeted at those two officers, they manage to convince ambassadors for all the permanent security council members to commit to just that: a ten-year plan to fund everything it would take to detect and intercept incoming UFOs.

They set up a plausible cover story, one that turned out to be useful in its own regard. To keep the space program from imploding, they faked up evidence of highly valuable mineral resources on the moon, some of which turned out to actually exist. With an investment bubble in space going, the UN's members agreed to accept and fund an International Astrophysical Commission to keep space demilitarized and to intervene whenever various countries' space ventures conflict with each other, including a small military arm called SHADO. Everybody knows it exists, and years after the space bubble burst many people question whether or not the UN should still be in the space "business," whether the IAC and SHADO are worth their multi-billion-dollar budgets. But like any UN agency, it's got bureaucratic momentum on its side.

So everybody in all the worlds' major militaries knows about SHADO, and know they have to cooperate with it, even when they know that for security reasons and diplomatic reasons they'll never be told exactly which country or company any SHADO operation is aimed at or why. Any journalist who covers the UN beat or the space business beat knows that SHADO exists, suspects it's a bureaucratic boondoggle, and might spend some of their time digging to find where all that money goes, having no more luck investigating the fraud and graft they suspect is the explanation for that huge budget than most journalists have investigating fraud and graft at the UN level, and only the most hard-core paranoids think that that's particularly suspicious. The few corporations that are still doing business beyond earth orbit know that they have to take orders from SHADO as the price of doing business, and are openly grateful that SHADO really mostly doesn't care what they're doing as long as it's civilian and stays well away from SHADO's spacecraft and its Moonbase. (And if anybody does get too close, SHADO also has and will use a drug that erases the last 12 to 18 hours' worth of short-term memories. Unless the person has the potential to fill an important job for which SHADO needs to hire right now.)

After that brief intro set contemporarily in 1969, the rest of the series was set 10 years in the future, starting in 1980, when SHADO finally developed a breakthrough technology involving faster-than-light detection gear that lets them see nearly all UFOs as they enter the solar system in time to intercept them more than half of them before they reach Earth, even though their budget only barely stretched as far as three single-missile moon-based interceptor spacecraft. They catch nearly all of the remainder with a small fleet of (extremely cool-looking) covert submarine aircraft carriers spread across the north Atlantic and the north Pacific. So now, after ten years and billions of dollars, they can finally document just how much danger Earth has been in all this time. And how much of a threat are the aliens? They send one to three ships, every one to four months. Each of those ships kills and/or kidnaps two to three people, apparently for medical and/or scientific purposes. Over the course of the first roughly year of the program, the size of the "invasion" never wavers. And now SHADO has an even bigger problem, one that almost no other SF TV series has thought to address: would the world's governments still think it was worth untold billions of dollars a year and the risk of however many lives on a still-risky space program to prevent maybe a dozen deaths a year? Do we actually have to care that we're being invaded? Or would we be better off spending that money to help people who got burned in the space investment bubble, not to mention all the people who didn't even get that much benefit out of it?

The series asks an even more interesting question than that, too, and this is the one that I was referring to at the beginning of this. All of SHADO, counting their direct civilian supervisor at the UN, amounts to fewer than a thousand people, probably no more than a couple of hundred. They're the only ones who know that Earth is under attack. As part of their ongoing cover story, SHADO has manipulated public opinion to convince the public that the very idea of an inter-stellar invasion force is pathologically silly. So none of those couple of hundred people can tell anybody else where they work for a living, what they do for a living, or why what they're doing matters ... not even when some of them end up dead. Not their friends, not their neighbors, not their own families. OK, we've seen this before. But what Gerry and Sylvia Anderson did better than anybody else, I think, it show you what working at a place like that for 10 years does to you, what kind of weird insular and incestuous culture develops under those conditions, what a hothouse it turns into when the only people you can really talk to are a couple of hundred co-workers. A couple of hundred co-workers who are constantly computer monitored by a spooky and unpopular top-notch Soviet bloc psychiatrist with his computerized psych exams, looking for any sign that you're going to lose it and/or that you'll become a security risk. A place where they can not possibly simply fire you, and where nobody has yet had the guts to find out what Commander Straker would do if you tried to quit. Three or four of the best episodes have no actual alien attacks in them; the whole drama of those three episodes relates to the rather more intense human drama of working at a place like SHADO.

Which is, of course, part of what doomed the show, since what ITV was clearly looking for, when they gave Gerry Anderson the money for his first ever live-action TV show, was "Thunderbirds versus the Flying Saucers." There turns out to be another historical quirk that worked against them: Kirk Kerkorian, the notorious first of the corporate raiders to specialize in taking over profitable companies and looting them of all assets not nailed down for himself and his friends before leaving those companies bankrupt and walking away from their debts, aquired the film studio where UFO was being shot and shut it down in mid season. By the time they got back up to speed at a new studio, they'd lost a third of their actors, including the number two guy and the number one woman on the series. The episodes that come after that break look just as good, and some of them are even a little better written, and they wrap up some of the questions asked early in the series. But sadly, the loss of some of their best actors did the series no favors.

If you've never seen this one, track it down. No, 1980 didn't turn out exactly the way the Andersons thought it would. They did better than most, showing a world where most of the upper middle class and above have car phones, a world where the Cold War is still going on but has reached a level of detente where nobody worries about it much any more, a world where a lot of professional people think the problems of race and gender discrimination have been solved but are then surprised that even some of the most successful black and female officers and business people don't agree. You can let yourself get distracted by the fact that actual 1980 fashion wasn't nearly as glamorous as Sylvia Anderson's designs, by the fact that the tech looks wrong, and by the chronic problem of so much SF TV of just not even caring about the physics of interstellar war and outer space dogfighting. (Particularly in British SF TV, outer space is a remarkably tiny place.) If you look past that, if you simply accept that a world that didn't give up on space travel in the early 1970s might have actually looked more glamorous than the world we got, and look at the series the way I do at this remove, as an alternate history piece? I'd stack it up against any SF ever filmed. Ever. I wish more people knew it well.

A couple of quick follow-ups to earlier blog posts:

First: Eris forfend that I re-open the Strikethrough '07 shouting match now that it's finally quieted down (after a mind-numbing 393 comments so far). But I was following up on a news story after seeing that the local prosecutor has dropped all of the cases that came out of the Dateline/PervertedJustice snuff-film episode; he won't come out and say it, but it's pretty clear that he has a moral objection to accepting evidence collected by vigilantes. While glancing to see what Perverted Justice had to say about this, I saw a link that they've spun off an entire second website: CorporateSexOffenders.com. And as I warned, who should happen to be at the very top of their hit list but our own LiveJournal.com and its parent company Six Apart. And if you read their entire beef with Six Apart, it's even worse than I thought.

What I predicted was that what they wanted was one change and that would be enough to make them go away, for LiveJournal to hire a full-time member of the abuse team whose job was to do nothing all day but run site searches for pedophiles and boot them off the service; even if that didn't get all of them, even if everybody knows it never could, that would be enough to convince Perverted Justice that they were making a good faith effort. That is, after all, what they settled for from MySpace and Blogger. But no, now they've got their sights set higher. They also want LiveJournal to boot off of the service anybody who in anyway suggests that teens having sex with adults is not the end of the world. In other words, they not only want LiveJournal to boot users who confess to crimes, or who attempt crimes. They also want LiveJournal to ban users who do anything to suggest that the law ought to be changed, or who defend the fact that the law hasn't always been this way.

See, that right there is enough to explain why civilized people and nations don't tolerate vigilantism, isn't it? Mission creep.

Second: A while back I recommended you tape or TiVo a new USA network TV series called Burn Notice. What I said at the time was that we'd need to see how good the writing was going to turn out to be to tell whether or not this was going to suck. Well, after tonight we're 3 episodes in. And in fact, the last two episodes weren't written by the series creator. According to the writers blog, USA threw a demand at them that sounds to me less like how business executives deal with a million-dollar investment than like some kind of reality-TV initiation stunt: with no warning they told him they wanted him to crap out 3 episode scripts in 10 days, including in that time the time needed to hire at least two more writers and bring them up to speed. The second episode, "Identity," suffered a little from being a little too obvious, not least of which because the main plot was lifted intact from several classic caper films and detective films. But taken as a whole, the 3 episodes are a solid body of work, certainly a better 3 opening episodes than in a lot of other successful series I could name. (*cough* ST:TNG *cough*)

Burn Notice is violating one of the cardinal rules of network television, the rule that says "show, don't tell." The industry is almost as violently allergic to voice-over narration as they are to foreign-language subtitles. And in fact the reason why almost every detective or spy show these days has a less-experienced partner, or one with different expertise, is so that they have an in-character excuse for expository dumps. The problem with that is that that bucket has been to the well too many times, the gag has gotten tired. No, the character of Michael Westin does his own voice-over narration ... but only of the "spy" parts of his job and life, not his actual personal life. And here's what I noticed about that. For one, it does a great job of giving the series a very literary feel, making it feel more like a great book than like a cheesy detective show, not least of which because the lead character is a lot more literary-sounding in his own head than he is in real life. In real life, as you'd expect of a professional spy, he's very laconic. Considering how much time he spends with nobody to talk to, if he weren't narrating the show it'd be very nearly silent. But just as interestingly, I started paying attention to what parts of what he's explaining, and how he explains them. Michael is explaining to some invisible bystander what being a spy is really like, and explaining it in the slightly condescending tone of someone debunking movie myths. This lets him say things like, "International spies are drawn to aid conferences for the same reasons that hookers are drawn to conventions. You can do a lot of business, and the drinks are free." Or to say things like, "If you have to deal with an angry drug dealer, give me a hardware store over a gun any time. Guns make you stupid. Duct tape makes you smart." Or to say things like, "Modern electronics makes it very easy and inexpensive to conduct remote surveillance on anyone. This is less glamorous than it sounds," as we're about to see him crawl over some business's filthy tar-paper roof to duct-tape a cheap camcorder to their gutter.

Or this one, from the pilot, that I think gives away the gimmick of the narration: "Hardly any spies come from happy families. People who grow up in dysfunctional families make great spies. They don't trust anyone, they learn to lie like a pro, and they're good at taking a beating." Michael clearly hates his late father for being abusive, and despises his mother for not protecting herself or the kids; he flatly admits to everyone but his mother that the reason he joined the Army at 18 was to run away from home, and the reason he became a spy was to have an excuse to be on the far side of the planet from his family. But as I was musing to myself about who in the heck does Michael imagine that he's narrating his life to? My first thought was that he's composing future mission debriefings for after he gets his job back, but no, he explains the wrong things. I considered the possibility that he's writing a book about his adventures in his head, but he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who'd do that. I considered the possibility that he's just seen too many spy movies himself, and absorbed the narrative device. But then it hit me: the parts of his life that he narrates are the parts that he can never tell his mom about. I strongly suspect that what the writers are doing here is that in his head, he can't help thinking how he would explain these things to his mom, if he could.

Third: Three quick notes about my new Nokia n800. One, it does chime when I get an incoming instant message, I just wasn't hearing it over the music player. Second, it turns out that the hosting provider for my vanity domain, DreamHost, lets you set up your own Jabber server, including gateways to ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. Once my friend who takes care of the domain for me set it up, I was able to log into every instant messenger service account I have from my n800, very nice. And finally, the last piece of it came today: my iGo (was Think Outside) brand Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard. It's a lot bigger and heavier than I was expecting, as in slightly bigger than and about twice as heavy as the n800 itself. On the other hand, it is a full-sized laptop keyboard, and a big chunk of the weight comes from the fact that when folded it's completely encased in solid metal; no fear for this thing while it's rattling around your briefcase or luggage! And boy does it make writing emails or instant messages or text notes a lot quicker as long as I have a flat surface to unfold it on. Definitely worth what I paid for it.

If you do get one of these, one word of advice: throw away the driver CD, the drivers are built into the n800's OS. And throw away the installation instructions, which are incomplete and completely useless. Here is what you need to know. First, when you unfold it, you have to push the sliding bits together in the middle to turn it on. Second, there's a tiny concealed "on" button, that tiny white dot above the hyphen key that you need your stylus to hit the first time. Once you do that and see the LED next to it start blinking, go to the Control Panel on your n800. Set Hardware keyboard to "generic 105 key," then go to Bluetooth, turn it on, and hit Devices, then New. Now the tricky part: when it tries to sync with your keyboard, the non-obvious step is that you type the numeric password from the keyboard and hit enter. That should take care of it; everything else is automatic.

Here's the thing about Keith Olbermann, the host of MSNBC's news analysis show "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," and that's that he wasn't always this guy that you see now. He used to be a trumped-up ex-sportscaster with delusions that he could be a news anchor. So MSNBC originally gave him an anchorman job, in an undemanding time slot, to see what he could do. And he didn't do anything particularly remarkable, not particularly good or bad. Nobody really knew, or cared, who he was, just another generic anonymous guy in a suit reading short intros into actual television journalists' pre-edited film clips. But then, one day, he had an extraordinarily bad day. He actually snapped. Something inside of him broke in half, never to be taped back together again. And as he has recounted in multiple forums, it went something like this.

Keith Olbermann is a guy who doesn't have much patience for celebrity gossip. He'll tolerate small amounts of mocking the more completely outside the mainstream enthusiastic attention-seekers, mocking the freakshow aspects of the freakiest freaks in the celebrity freakshow. But gossip about the lives of mostly ordinary seeming people who are only interesting to the rest of us because we've all heard of them? Reporting on the perfectly ordinary aspects of their lives, like who they're dating or when they or their family members have a kid or when they get a ticket for speeding or when they come down with a cold or something? He hates that stuff. Probably a lot of you do, too, although those of you should probably read Mitchell Stephens' book A History of News, where (among other useful insights) he points out that celebrity journalism is as old as journalism, was always considered front page stuff, and serves the same purpose for society that fairy tales do for children: it's a morality play with familiar stereotyped characters. Olbermann's got no use for that stuff, though, and I don't blame him.

As someone who feels that way, partway through the long drawn out spectacle that was the Monica Lewinsky scandal, some of the experts he was interviewing about the story convinced him that the theoretical news hook for this story just wasn't legitimate. Clinton was being deposed in a sexual harassment suit in which he was being accused of attempting to coerce a subordinate into a sexual act; questions about a subordinate who initiated sexual contact with him, originally against his own will, just aren't relevant to that case. Such questions shouldn't have been allowed, and had the Paula Jones case actually gone to trial any evidence related to Monica Lewinsky would have certainly been thrown out, ruled prejudicial and irrelevant, if not in the first trial then certainly on appeal. So whether or not what he said in regard to those questions fully met the requirement, in a deposition, that testimony be not merely technically true but complete and not misleading was a triviality, something that was only interesting to the public because it was about a celebrity, the President.

And once he came to that conclusion, Olbermann drew a line in the sand with his producers: he would no longer cover the Monica Lewinsky story, let alone lead with it, on days when nothing new had happened. His producers, knowing that the public was tuning into the news wanting to hear whether or not there was any Monica Lewinsky news at the top and bottom of the hour every hour, kept handing him stories that were nothing more than recaps of the news so far. He gave them one last warning: do this to me again and I will quit. They did. He did, and went straight to the public in a series of well received speeches in which he complained bitterly about this. And the somewhat bitter, somewhat angry man that many thousands of viewers count on every night was born when the network hired that guy back to do something that nobody else in journalism is allowed to do except in the ignorant know-nothing world of right-wing radio and its spinoffs: to express contempt for the contemptible, to express impatience with things that deserve no patience. There was such pent-up demand for this from someone who actually knew what he was talking about that even though MSNBC gave him a doomed timeslot against two of the most-watched cable news analysis shows in America, the No-Spin Zone with Bill O'Reilly and the Daily Show with John Stewart, he's been steadily rising in the ratings ever since. He became a minor TV journalism star.

But this has created a small problem: he's not just Keith Olbermann any more, he's Keith Olbermann, TV star. So the network keeps yanking him off the air to attend conferences where he's supposed to woo advertisers and cable TV system operators. They also have to give him sick time to continue to receive treatment for the oral cancer he's in remission with. When you add that to any actual vacation time, plus travel time to and from various events they want him to cover from the scene, he misses perhaps one day in four. So the network has been struggling to find someone palatable to viewers who tune in wanting Olbermann's attitude, not a generic TV news anchor. Olbermann's made his preferences clear: he prefers the job go to Allison Stewart, originally of MTV News, then general roving anchor and host of a short-lived show of her own on MSNBC called The Most with Allison Stewart, currently co-hosting a morning news show on National Public Radio. And while I will not dispute that she is an excellent news anchor, she (like the other people who've auditioned in Keith's spot) lacks something that Keith has, and that's a willingness to express disgust. She's very good at what she does, but no matter what Olbermann thinks, she's not even vaguely what his audience wants. She hasn't, well, snapped yet the way he has.

I think that maybe somebody else has, though: MSNBC morning show co-host Mika Brzezinski. (Thanks for the head's-up on this to a LiveJournal entry from rpkrajewski, who got it from an ITV news story entitled "Paris Gets Chucked Off the News" via JuanCole.com.) You can see for yourself here what happened to her:

On a day when there was relatively important news out of Washington related to the Iraq War, Mika Brzezinski was asked by her producers to lead the morning newscast with what the producers knew that people were tuning in because they wanted to see, namely the news footage from the night before (for those who'd missed it) of Paris Hilton walking from the LA county jail to the car that was waiting to pick her up. Not only was she not willing to do so, she wasn't even willing to let her co-hosts do the story for her. I'm assuming that she feels, as I do, that the story would have been more appropriately handled by one or two sentences during the celebrity and entertainment news, at the back end of the show, saying something on the order of "As expected, last night socialite Paris Hilton was released from the LA county jail, where she served 23 days for violating the terms of her probation from a drunk driving conviction. Ms. Hilton served only half of her sentence, given routine time off for good behavior" while playing the clip itself - no commentary, just the facts, on to other news. When both of her co-anchors joined the producer in insisting that the story had real news value, insisted on opening the broadcast with it with or without her, were condescending towards her over it, and insisted on adding their own inane commentary to the end of the piece, she snapped. She took the script for the piece out of their hands and attempted to burn it. When they turned up another copy of the script, she took it out of their hands by force, got up from the news desk while still on the air live, walked it over to the nearest shredder and shredded it.

Among the people she did this to, among her co-hosts, was MSNBC's Joe Scarborough. Scarborough, a former Republican congressman who MSNBC considers to be the best possible spokesman to comment on Republican matters because of his insider credentials tempered by the public falling out he had with Newt Gingrich that ended his political career, considers him to be another of their biggest stars. Personally, I don't think he's said anything meaningful or coherent since the 2006 elections, which seem to have been as mind-destroying a shock to him as the 1996 elections were to Rush Limbaugh. But MSNBC still thinks he's a big enough star to show up all over their other shows while still hosting his own hour long show every weeknight. Having that huge unprofessional fit, and physically struggling with a much bigger star than herself in the process of taking his script right out of his hands, while live on air, may well turn out to be a career-ending moment for her.

If so, then I know where Keith Olbermann should be looking for a stand-in, if not an actual full-time co-host. It looks like she'd be a perfect fit.

Speaking of spies, I've been seeing ads on extended cable for a new TV series that starts tonight, Thursday night (10:00 pm Eastern, 9:00 pm here in St. Louis), on USA Network: Burn Notice. I'm potentially fascinated, because while it could very easily suck, it's got a lot of things going for it. The first and just barely the biggest is the premise. In the interviews on USA's website, the creator never mentions either series, but I swear to the god it exactly resembles what would happen if you tried to blend the best of Patrick McGoohan's "The Prisoner" 1960s British TV series with the best of John D. MacDonald's "Travis McGee" novels of the 1960s through the early 1980s, only set during the modern "war on terror."

Most of you know the premise of "The Prisoner:" Patrick McGoohan plays a British spy who has been captured, either by his own side because they think he's an attempted defector or by the other side because they want to know what he knows, and put in a pleasant replica of a sea-side vacation town ... where he is placed under 24x7 professional personal and automated surveillance, subjected to extensive mind control experiments, and of course told that as an ex-spy, he certainly knows too much, so he can never leave for the rest of his life. Fewer of you, more's the pity, know the premise behind MacDonald's long-running hard-boiled adventure series featuring the character of Travis McGee. McGee is an ex-Special Forces guy, a Korean war veteran, returned to Miami and determined to never really work again. So he "works," whenever he gets hungry enough, as what he calls "a salvage consultant." In a town that has been famous for institutional and political and financial corruption from the 1920s all the way up to the present day, the Casablanca of the Caribbean, the only city in the new world more famously corrupt (and deranged) than New Orleans and Mexico City combined, there are plenty of people who get robbed of something by someone who is untouchable, entirely beyond the reach of the corrupted police or courts, or any private investigator with a real license he could lose (or worse) if some politician or wealthy real estate mogul or some Latin American narco-terrorist stepped on him. If he feels like it, McGee will try to get some of it back for you, using his Special Forces skills, for a fee.

In Burn Notice, Michael Westin (played by Jeffrey Dononvan, whoever that is) is an ex-Special Forces guy turned CIA covert operative. In the middle of a mission, for no reason known to him, someone back in Washington put out word to the whole world that he was a rogue agent, not to be trusted. They told this not only to our side's guys, but to the terrorists, as well, so he narrowly escapes with his life. They pick up his unconscious body and, for reasons not explained in the first season, rather than imprison or kill him they dump him back in his home town with nothing. With less than nothing, actually: they also erase all government record that he ever existed, including his birth certificate and driver's license and passport, plus all his bank and credit card accounts, leaving him with no identity of any kind at all. Oh, and they assign two full-time FBI agents to do nothing other than to report back on his every move and every contact, and to make sure at all costs that he never leaves Miami. So in order to finance the construction of a fake identity and the purchase of all the spy tools he'll need to go up against his own agency to find out who burned him, and hopefully get his old job back, he takes up a temporary job as a completely unlicensed private investigator who'll take cases against people too wealthy or powerful for the courts and the cops to touch (going on the run from the FBI agents, of course). His only allies are a hyper-violent ex-girlfriend, a former IRA terrorist turned professional mercenary named Fiona (played by an extremely easy on the eyes Gabrielle Anwar) who's willing to be his partner, a long-retired older playboy ex-SEAL and former Cold War spy who he thinks is his best friend (but who's also informing on him to the CIA, but then he's also informing on the CIA to Michael), and his hypochondriac mother who finds him clients through her bridge club. With those assets and his training, how hard can it be to go up against the entire city of Miami and the entire federal government?

The second big thing it's got going for it is that the best friend is played by Bruce Campbell:



I think that, for the kind of people who read my journal, that's enough said?

The third big thing that it's got going for it is something that the series creator, Matt Nix, said in the one of the video interview answers on the website, under "Inspiration:" "I've always been a fan of the spy genre, so I've always read a lot, well, less sort of spy fiction and more the wonky, practical spy stuff. I was a political science major in college, so I had a little bit of interest in that from studying international politics." See, I'm something of a fan of spy fiction and non-fiction, too ... but my favorite book on the subject, after the very early Ian Fleming James Bond novels, is Wolfgang Lotz's semi-autobiographical A Handbook for Spies, and other books like it about what the spy business was really like. (Come to think of it, who the heck has my copy of A Handbook for Spies? Is that another book I'm going to have to replace?)

That's still no guarantee that the series won't suck; hard-boiled adventure stories are hard to write well. The show will rise or fall in no small part on the quality of the dialog, and Nix is pretty much an unknown. Bruce Campbell, who isn't even the lead on this one (more the comic relief) has had several series shot out from under him before, and one of them wasn't all that good. I'm absolutely going to watch it, for at least one or two episodes. What some of the rest of you may want to do is record it but not watch it until you hear if it's any good. If it does turn out to be any good, though, I suspect you'll want to see those early episodes to catch up.

The main reason that the last truly great Republican, Barry Goldwater, lost his Presidential run was that he refused to flatly rule out preemptive use of a US nuclear weapon in the Cold War. The fear that this meant that he might provoke a nuclear shooting war with Russia over Vietnam or some other Cold War hotspot was summed up in a widely displayed bumper sticker that parodied the Goldwater campaign's official slogan, "In your heart, you know he's right," as "In your guts, you know he's nuts" -- a fear that the Johnson campaign brilliantly if brutally stoked with a one-shot TV ad that explicitly threatened the voters' children with being blown up by nukes if they voted the wrong way.

I had several occasions to think of that ad, last night, while watching the Republican candidates' debate. It was that kind of a night.

But first, the nominees for stupidest question of the night. The 2nd runner up goes to one of the emailed in questions, to Tom Tancredo, asking him who other than him should be the Republican nominee. Unsurprisingly, he declined to pick one, and said that he'd support whoever won the nomination. The 1st runner up goes to another emailed in question, to Mitt Romney, asking him what he hated most about America. Unsurprisingly, he answered that there isn't anything that he hates about America. But the winner, and it's a doozy, goes to Chris Matthews himself, who asked all 10 candidates how they would feel about having Bill Clinton living in the White House again. Unsurprisingly, all ten candidates were against it; basically they all used their response time to bash Hillary Clinton. It was, in fact, almost the only thing the whole night that all ten of them agreed upon, that Hillary Clinton is a bad person.

Oh, and a special prize for worst phrased question of the night: Matthews asked all 10 candidates how they felt about the requirement for national tamper-proof ID cards, but the way he phrased it, it was impossible to tell if he was talking about tamper-proof biometric IDs for visitors to this country or about requiring all Americans to carry federally mandated national ID cards. Their answers were a confused jumble because they were under tight time pressure in their answers and none of them ever figured out exactly which of those two questions they were supposed to be answering.

They came close to agreement on Iraq: all of them except Ron Paul supported the President and want to stay the course. Tommy Thompson stood out among the other nine as being the only one who actually had a strategy for winning that even passes the laugh test, his (probably should be famous) three point plan: 1) Condition our staying the course on the al Maliki government winning a vote in parliament to keep us there. He doesn't say what he'd do if that vote didn't pass or if al Maliki failed to submit it; this would only be meaningful if the answer is "or else we pull out and let the al Maliki government fail, and begin negotiations afresh with whoever wins the civil war." I don't know if he has the guts to say that, though. 2) Make the Iraqis revise their constitution yet again to turn the 18 administrative regions into actual states, each with its own state government, and let the Shiite majority regions elect Shiites and so forth. 3) Divide up Iraqi oil revenues into thirds: one third to the Baghdad government, one third divided among the states, one third divided up evenly among the whole population. This fascinates me because it's just about the least conservative thing that was said all night, since it contradicts the whole idea of privatizing the oil sector and seems to include an actual threat to pull out if Iraq's governing Shiites keep freezing out the Sunnis the way they have been.

Oh, and I forgot one other point of unanimous agreement: all ten of them, including Rudy Giuliani, were in favor of overturning Roe v Wade. The other 9 were all in agreement that the day that Roe gets struck down will be "a great day in American history;" Rudy's more "liberal" stance was that he wants Roe overturned but isn't that excited about it, and is okay with the political reality that if abortion's legality was turned over to the individual states that his own home state would probably leave it legal.

The buried lede: But no, the really scary thing about the night was just how eager everybody on that platform was, even Ron Paul, about nuking Iran. The question Matthews offered, originally to McCain, was whether or not he agreed with Fred Thompson's claim that Iran has already committed acts of war against us, and that we're fully justified in any use of force against them in return. Not only did he agree, at great length, but went on to say that if the CIA thinks that Iran has a nuclear weapon and might use it against Israel, we should drop The Bomb. This rattled Matthews enough that he asked everybody on the platform if the US would assist Israel in a unilateral attack on Iran's nuclear sites. McCain and Giuliani both said that the President should ask the CIA's permission first; everybody else agreed 100% yes.

Sam Brownback wanted to go farther than that. Earlier in the evening, he was asked what to do about the fact that even in the "moderate Islamic" regimes that he thinks should be supporting us more, our popularity is down to around 10% to 12%. Brownback's answer was that we should engage those "moderate Islamic" regimes, and he specifically named Pakistan, with "the full range of tools: economic, diplomatic, and military." (Emphasis added.) That's right, not only does Sam Brownback join the vocal majority on the platform who were openly asking why in the heck Bush hasn't nuked Iran yet, he wants us to threaten to invade Pakistan if the Pakistani people don't start liking us more.

If that doesn't scare you, you're not paying attention.

Last week, I encouraged you all to watch the Democrats' first 2008 primary debate, and I was right to do so. As I said the next day, anybody who missed it missed one heck of a good show. I'm a little more dubious about tonight's first Republican primary debate. Not because I'm anti-Republican, but because I just don't think this one's going to be as good a show. It's got three big things going against it:

The candidates are a lot more boring. Practically the only thing that the blogosphere and the punditocracy have found to agree upon this year is my Ghod, is this the weakest Republican line-up in decades. Two elections ago, the Democratic challengers were derided (not unfairly) as the Seven Dwarves, seven guys who were all more likely to spontaneously combust than they were to get elected president, seven guys who were all perennial also-rans who were only being taken seriously at all because no real candidate was running. Well, after seven years of George W. Bush stomping on any Republican who has even once said something that he wasn't first told to say by the White House, the Republicans are even worse off than that. I mean seriously, the only candidate they could run that has any actual charisma, any actual speaking skill, any rapport with voters, any chance of beating any Democrat in the running (except Clinton) is Chuck Hagel. Unfortunately for the Republicans, Chuck Hagel's sudden attack of political cowardice that has his campaign announcement on long-term hold means that he won't be up there. That leaves them with basically nothing but the freakshow candidates ... and not even entertaining freakshow candidates, at that.

Ron Paul probably won't be the night's Mike Gravel. Even if he weren't a more sober speaker than Mike Gravel, even if he weren't more cautious about being seen as a bomb-throwing radical (although he's substantially more radical than Gravel is), I'm assuming that by now he's seen Mike Gravel's performance last week, and knows not to make himself look like a fool the way Gravel did. Which means that a show that desperately needs a court jester to liven it up, someone with nothing to lose to hold the front runners' feet to the fire, probably won't have one. Maybe Matthews will goad Tancredo into a tantrum about dirty immigrants, but that's about all we can hope for. I'd love to be wrong, though.

Chris Matthews is no Brian Williams. The main reason why last week's show was so much fun to watch was that Williams did an insanely good job of keeping it moving, against every candidate's best efforts to slow things down whenever they had the microphone. He also asked some nicely non-obvious questions. Unfortunately, he's not moderating the Republican debate; that job fell to Chris Matthews, the host of MSNBC's show "Hardball." So what I'm afraid will happen, as someone who keeps catching parts of Matthews' show before or after other things, is that the show will slow down horribly every time Matthews gets the microphone, because nobody in news today (except maybe Bill O'Reilly, and he's not really in the news business) is more fond of the sound of their own voice than Chris Matthews is. And for all that he calls his show "Hardball," I've never seen Matthews actually ask a hardball question. He asks the same questions every other journalist has already asked his interview subject 20 times before, questions they're expecting and are ready for, and considers his interviews to be "hardball" because of his willingness to interrupt their canned responses in order to give himself more airtime.

It's on the same channel, MSNBC, and on the same web page, politics.msnbc.com, at 8pm Eastern time. *sigh* Even if you don't watch it, I probably will. Wish me luck staying awake through it.

I'd say that, no matter what the newspaper and TV reporters tell you, there are three stories to walk away from last night's Democratic primary debate with: Brian Williams did an absolutely amazing job of running the thing, Mike Gravel is the new Al Sharpton, and stick a fork in Bill Richardson, he's done.

Kudos for Brian Williams: The question everybody had been wondering was how in the heck do you divide up 90 minutes between 8 candidates and get any meaningful answers out of any of them? The answer seems to be, you let Brian Williams run things, because he's gotten really, really good at this. First of all, he started out by flat-out banning an awful lot of time wasters: no thanking anybody (as he put it, more or less, he and the organizers and the hosts have all agreed in advance to consider themselves thanked), no opening or closing statements, 60 second limit on all answers and each candidate got only a very limited number of 30 second "rebuttal" chips to cash in at will. And two of the questions were resolved via simple show of hands. I was just absolutely floored by his skill at keeping the pace up, keeping things lively, and getting good short answers (instead of speeches) out of the candidates. Those of you who skipped this one missed some really good television.

I will also say that if anybody still thinks that the Democrats were boycotting Faux News's debates because they were afraid of tough questions, wow, they should have heard Brian Williams last night. The whole middle third of the program was dedicated to a section he called "perception issues," which was a code word for, "you get 60 seconds each to answer the nastiest question I have." And wow did he do a good job of making every single one of them squirm. Obama ducked his, if somewhat gracefully. Edwards recited boilerplate while looking uncomfortable. He and Clinton then got a shared question that neither of them wanted to hear; I'm sure their answers would have gone over much better at a Republican fund raiser, and they knew it, but those were the answers they were stuck with. (I actually think that Williams went easy on Clinton; I could have easily thrown a much harder question at her. But then, mine may be one she has a prepared answer on.) Richardson flubbed his so badly that his career is basically over, not just his run but his whole career, more on that in a second. Dodd basically shrugged and gave the best answer he could, admitting it wasn't good enough. Kucinich actually had a good answer for his. Biden, admittedly, got the softball question, the straight line to set up the laugh line of the night, but the whole joke left the audience with an uncomfortable reminder of what Biden has to be embarrassed by. And Gravel had his second, and biggest, of his three total emotional meltdowns of the night.

Mike Gravel is the new Al Sharpton: The embarrassing question for Mike Gravel was that Williams managed to dig up a quote from right after Gravel declared his candidacy in which Gravel admitted he didn't care if he won or not. So Williams' question was, "Then doesn't that mean that you're wasting our time?" And boy, do I wish that a lot of never-gonna-happen candidates had been asked that in previous debates; heck, if somebody had asked Al Sharpton that question before he got in his Republican-paid-for hatchet job on Howard Dean, George Bush would probably have never been President. But that aside, what Gravel said was that when he got in, it was just as a way of doing what, well, he didn't put it this way, but what an awful lot of fringe candidates and the whole Libertarian and Green Parties in this country have always done with their Presidential runs. That is to say, he was taking advantage of the system to abuse it for a subsidized soapbox for his current cause of the moment, namely, attacking everybody else including even Dennis Kucinich for being cowardly about the Iraq War. (Gravel, whose prior claim to fame was as the man whose single-handed filibuster personally ended the Vietnam War draft, won't settle for defunding the war, and even explicitly revoking Bush's war powers authorization isn't enough. He wants the Democrats to revoke the War Powers authorization and add language to the War Powers Act making it a felony for Bush to keep troops in Iraq after authorization has been revoked.)

But, says Gravel, he's not just making speeches now, now he's serious, because he believes that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Joe Biden, the four front-runners, are so dangerously wrong on the subject of Iran that they're going to get us all killed. And, having said that (at the top of his shrilly screaming lungs, practically), he turned his attention particularly to Barack Obama. His complaint, that all four of those candidates agree with George Bush that the US ought to continue to threaten to nuke Iran if that's what it takes to keep them from getting The Bomb, applies equally to all of them. But in particular he singled out Obama and went after him like a rabid animal. His personal mission now seems to be to do everything in his power to torpedo the Obama campaign, and to take down Clinton and Edwards and Biden if he has any momentum left after that. Which, given the much commented-upon preference the Republicans have for running against Clinton and their nervousness about running against Obama, makes me very curious as to who's funding his campaign and who's providing his volunteers? Because this particular kind of attack looks eerily familiar to me.

And, of course, the other thing that he has in common with Al Sharpton is that seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array will march out of my backside before either one of them takes the oath of office as President of the US. Gravel's 77 years old. He's been out of politics for almost 30 years, and even when he was in politics, he was nothing but a 2-term Senator. More to the point, the American people are never in my lifetime going to hand the keys to the Oval Office to a guy who can't control his temper. But he has another thing in common with previous fringe candidates, one that the commentariat all picked up on: just by being on that stage, he makes candidates that the professional commentariat and the political elite would like to paint unfairly as "radical fringe" look a lot more moderate.

In fact, Gravel didn't actually say anything last night that was so radical that I would disagree with it. His actual statements, his actual policy analysis, was all stuff that I 100% agree with. (Correction: I forgot his attack on nuclear power. But even that, while I disagree with him, wasn't terribly radical.) I would probably love to have Mike Gravel as President. But other than being the vicious attack dog attached to the seat of Barack Obama's pants, the main thing that he's achieving so far is to make Dennis Kucinich look suddenly amazingly more electable, and to make Joe Biden look remarkably cool, calm, and in control.

Alas, Bill Richardson is done: Williams dug up a quote from Richardson in which he said that the reason he was the last of the Democratic candidates to call for Alberto Gonzalez' resignation is that he wanted to give him every possible chance to defend himself, specifically because he was a fellow Hispanic. Williams put Richardson on the spot about that, in essence accusing him of having two standards, one very generous one for his fellow Hispanics and one draconian one for everybody else, white or black.

I can only assume that one of three things is true: either Richardson and his debate-prep team never saw this one coming, or Richardson refused to listen to them, or they did a terrible job of crafting an answer. Because Richardson came out swinging, more or less, saying that it was perfectly natural for him to want a fellow Hispanic to succeed, and at least he's candid about it, and that the rest of us shouldn't judge him for that because at least he did eventually give in and call for Gonzalez' resignation. I could have written a better answer than that in my sleep. I could have improvised a better answer than that off the cuff. As it is, basically, the answer that Richardson gave is one that he'll have to explain at every campaign stop from now until he throws in the towel: did he really mean that he thinks Hispanics should get an extra free pass on bad behavior? Does he really think that it was acceptable of him to give a fellow Hispanic a break he wouldn't give a non-Hispanic? Does he really think that everybody does things like this? Would he give fellow Hispanics a free pass on bad behavior, or at least an extra chance to explain it away, in a Richardson administration?

Because frankly, that crap doesn't fly in America. He's toast. His answer was so bad, was so bad, that not only is his Presidential campaign effectively over before it even seriously began, his diplomatic career is probably over, too. Because who's going to send someone out to negotiate or even to fact-find for the US who's going to be asked about this by every reporter in the world at every public appearance? Heck, that was such a monumentally stupid answer that I wouldn't bet serious money on him getting to keep his governor's seat. Does New Mexico have a voter-initiative recall mechanism in their state constitution?

It's a shame. With him down, I'm leaning towards Biden, right this minute, myself. Sort of. Maybe. (Edit, a couple of hours later: It took half an hour of poking around the web, including Biden's own website, to remember why I thought this was a bad idea in the first place. Now I don't know who I support. Heck, maybe I will back Mike Gravel.)

What about the other six? Other than Gravel, and to a lesser extent Kucinich, everybody played it somewhat safe, taking the high road. I think they all pretty much understood that none of them had anything to gain by going after any of the others. The front runners had nothing to prove, and the most important thing for the back-benchers to prove was that they were just as good as the front runners, that they had as much to say for themselves as the front-runners do. (Although at one point early on Edwards basically got away with implying that Clinton is a candidate that you shouldn't trust, but it was so subtle I'm not sure even she got it.) Kucinich did go far enough out on a limb to slam two others on the dias, but only in passing: he briefly went out of his way to mock Clinton for her claim that she couldn't possibly have known that Bush wasn't bluffing about invading Iraq, and he joined in with Gravel at the end in piling on Obama over Obama's insistence that the US had a right to nuke Iran.

Nobody is going to change their mind about Clinton because of her performance last night. I thought that her answers were evasive and divorced from reality, but her many fans in the party are already all over the air about what a great job she did. Obama didn't change any minds either way as far as I can tell, either, pretty much sticking to playing it safe. Neither Edwards nor Dodd really said anything particularly memorable; I had to go back over my notes to remember even what questions they were was asked. Biden did remarkably well, I thought, speaking remarkably well. And while Biden is stuck with the same stupid answer that Clinton is about having voted for the Iraq War, saying he trusted Bush when Bush said he was only bluffing Saddam to get the weapon inspectors in, unlike Clinton, Biden is willing now to admit that was pretty bone-headed of him, so he gets points for having learned from that mistake, which is more than she can say. And if Kucinich hadn't had Gravel to cover for him, I would have said that he came across as combative and a little mean-spirited. As it was I think he probably did a better than expected job of looking potentially Presidential, and his willingness to take the others on did a very convincing job of staking out the solid center of the anti-war faction in the party.

I'll predict that, even as clips from the debate begin circulating, the net effect will have been that Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and Dodd did themselves neither much good nor any harm; that Biden and Kucinich and even Gravel did themselves some good (not much good in Gravel's case, but at least some good); and that Richardson did himself substantial and irreparable harm.

So many distractions, so little time -- I had two other things I wanted to write about and get done, but I couldn't let today go by and not remind you that the first all-candidates debate for the Democratic Party is tonight on MSNBC and on their web page. The actual debate is from 6pm to 7:30pm Eastern time, 5pm here in St. Louis. 90 minutes divided among 8 candidates. Kind of sad, really, but at least the network isn't giving into the obvious temptation to make their own decision, this early, as to who is or isn't a "viable" candidate.

The pre-show and the post-show may be more fun than the debate itself. Chris Matthews of Hardball and Keith Olbermann of Countdown are teaming up again. Some of you know that I could pretty easily live without Chris Matthews, although I think he's doing better work these days than back when I went off on him a few years ago for his obnoxious habit of never letting a liberal finish a sentence while slavishly devoting his full respectful attention to even the stupidest things that his conservative guests were saying, and for taking his list of questions to ask his interview subjects right off of the Bush campaign's daily talking points memo. I'm sure most of you know that I think Keith Olbermann, the cranky and moderately erudite former sportscaster who hosts Countdown, is the greatest thing on TV for his "suffer no fools gladly" attitude and for the fact that he usually does a better job of knowing what he's talking about than any other commentator on TV.

But unless you watched MSNBC's November 2006 election night coverage, what you may not know is just what amazing chemistry these two guys have when you put them together. That first night that the two of them had to share a desk, it was obvious for much of the early evening that neither one of them had a whole lot of respect for each other's work. But by the end of the evening, there was such chemistry between them that I gather that there are people out there writing Matthews/Olbermann slashfic. (No, I don't know where to look for it. And I don't want to know.) They really do have wildly contrasting styles for their own shows, yes. But when they're together, they goad each other into doing the best work of their careers. Their pre-show starts an hour before the debate, and the post-show runs for an hour after the debate. By the time the post-show begins, they should both be just tired enough, and just comfortable enough with each other again, for there to be real fun, real fireworks, and the some of the best political and historical analysis you'll ever hear.

Of course, I'm on pins and needles. My preferred candidate, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, has yet to break through the 1% support barrier in any national poll. I've seen a few polls among people who've been at political conventions and political gatherings where all the candidates have spoken that have put him in the top four, and one poll that showed that among those liberal Democratic volunteers who are the most familiar with the candidates he comes in second only to Barack Obama. But to get the attention and the traction and the momentum he'd need to put his ads in front of a national audience, to get more chances to be heard by a national audience, he really needs to knock one out of the park tonight. He's got at most 10 minutes, in front of an audience that mostly doesn't want to hear from him because they're too busy breathlessly sucking down whatever garbage the right wing candidate, Clinton, or the two glossy but basically inexperienced candidates