A recent source of conservative butthurt appears to be liberals making fun of conservatives.

Bear in mind that modern conservatism, in the form of the increasingly Whiggish GOP consists of people like Louie Gohmert who warns us about terror babies, Michael Savage who wishes for a fascist, nationalist political party, and Rush Limbaugh who says acceptance of same sex marriage is related to mainstreaming pedophilia are doing a fine enough job making conservatism unpalatable without liberal help.

That said, here is Dennis Prager complaining that Richard Cohen says mean things about the right. While Stephen Hayes — yes, the guy who wrote the Cheney hagiography and the book falsely claiming there was a “Connection” between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein — touts Jonah Goldberg’s latest book that nobody with a brain takes seriously, whose central premise is that stupid liberals are reality based and make fun of conservatives when in fact (of course) poopy-head liberals believe myths like global warming while conservatives know that Fox News said Al Gore is fat.

Prager and Goldberg write for National Review. Here are some covers for that publication.

Hayes writes for The Weekly Standard. Here are some of their covers.

In other words, as always, the right would rather the left sit there like it did in the late ’70s and ’80s and take it like a bunch of dummies and don’t you dare ever fight back. Never you mind that the reason the right hates people like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton stems largely from those two (and many others) being able to throw a punch and bloody the right’s noses.

A lot of us remember the first part of this century, with Democrats in complete retreat and the press parroting the GOP message du jour which boiled down to “Democrats who don’t sound like Republicans are out of touch with America.” (Fall 2002 edition: “Yeah, you voted for the Iraq War, but you’re still a terrorist sympathizer!”) It wasn’t until the left hit rock bottom in 2004′s election that it began to reassert itself.

Unlike the right, who has now adopted Rush Limbaugh’s mantra that “low information voters” were bewitched by Barack Obama’s magic, the left actually changed itself in order to be more in sync with America. This is because we are able to admit that liberalism is not perfect, that it must change in response to outside information and that we simply cannot bend reality to fit into what we believe.

Modern conservatism is incapable of this, and to point that out to the right makes them real mad and the write books and columns about liberal meanies not taking them seriously. And oh, by the way, they’re going to vote to repeal Obamacare for the 3,432nd time because Limbaugh will give them a cookie.

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Chuck Hagel was (eventually) right about the Iraq War and his apparent skepticism towards Israeli policy is refreshing (in Washington this means he actually considers what Israel says instead of approving it no matter what) but I still think he’s an unfortunate choice for Secretary of Defense.

It’s simple math. Since the position has existed, there have been 23 Secretaries of Defense. Of those 23, fifteen have been Republicans who have served under both parties. Of the remaining 8 Democrats, they have only served under other Democrats. Our two most recent Democratic presidents, Obama and Clinton, both had Republicans serve as Secretary of Defense.

You can’t tell me that Barack Obama can’t find a Democrat to serve.

There is an utterly false idea that Republicans are stronger on national security issues, but this just isn’t true. Our most recent foreign policy disaster, Iraq, was almost completely the creation of a Republican administration. By comparison, our triumphs – World War II, actions in Yugoslavia, Libya, and the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden, have come under Democratic leadership. (And I fully acknowledge that Democrats can screw up, as Kennedy and Johnson did in Vietnam.)

Democrats can, and should be trusted to lead on defense. The American people just ratified that at the ballot box, choosing Obama to keep them safe over Romney’s feckless, Bush-style foreign policy.

President Obama should look to his own party, to the party of national security, for the most important point-person on national defense. If he feels the urge to show bipartisanship in his new cabinet, he can follow in the footsteps of the Bush administration and put a Republican in charge of transportation.

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Yesterday, as the Republican party was voting for a tax increase for the super-rich, Grover Norquist was widely mocked for a tweet claiming that despite decades of his idiotic pledge, it would be just okay to vote for this tax increase.

It laid bare what people in Washington know about the conservative pressure establishment and its difference from groups on the left. They exist to prop up the Republican party and if that means betraying what is supposed to be their core beliefs, so be it no matter what.

We saw a lot of this during the Bush years and in the Obama years right after, when all these groups were mute on the issues of spending and increasing the size of government, but suddenly got religion when the presidency switched parties.

The NRA does the same thing, when you see them stamp their feet about a President who has actually expanded gun rights (to his detriment, in my opinion) – simply because he’s from the wrong (Democratic) party. Club for Growth, who never saw a tax cut they didn’t wax rhapsodic over, suddenly is okay with the GOP raising taxes in the fiscal cliff fight.

By comparison, progressive groups tend to rant about Democrats who aren’t progressive enough, lamenting (sometimes to their detriment) legislation that doesn’t go far enough to the left despite pracitcality. At the same time, groups like the Sierra Club are willing to back pro-environment Republicans (an endangered species), unions are okay with (the few) pro-union Republicans, and groups like NARAL have been fine with staying out of races if the Republican happens to be pro-choice (this is now down to about one person.)

They are not nearly as much in the business of being Democrats as they are in being progressive. Sure, they tend to have alliances with one party over another thanks to a shared agenda – but they aren’t just puppet arms of the associated party in the way it operates on the right.

Vote for a tax increase? Somehow that’s now okay… if you’re a Republican.

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“I saw a peanut stand,
Heard a rubber band,
I saw a needle that winked it’s eye.
But I think I will have seen everything
When I see an elephant fly.”
- When I See An Elephant Fly, Dumbo, 1941

There’s a lot of silliness associated with the whole “fiscal cliff” fiasco. Basically Washington backed itself into a corner and made a last minute agreement because the far right held a temper tantrum that led to the U.S. credit rating being lowered. It’s silliness from start to finish.

That said, I never thought I’d see the Republican party – overwhelmingly in the Senate – actually vote for a tax increase on anyone, let alone the rich. Sure, I would rather the thresholds be set at $250,000 instead of $400,000 and $450,000 but you pass what can pass now. We simply do not have a parliamentary majority to pass the legislation liberals would get in an ideal world.

We’ve certainly seen a template set here by the right, that no matter the outcome of a national election, never mind that their chosen candidate has yet again lost the popular vote by a margin of several million votes (over 5 million and counting), they remain wedded to their ideology and party over any sense of patriotism or civic duty. While I believe in strong progressivism, that is a bridge too far for any movement to cross.

But Obama and Biden got the GOP to vote for tax increases. Not perfect by any stretch, but a step forward.

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I was in a drug store the other day, and while waiting for a prescription I decided to thumb through a gun magazine. I confess, I’m certainly not the demographic for this publication. While I spend hundreds (thousands?) of hours virtually shooting bad guys in games like Call of Duty, I’ve only ever touched a real gun once – my late grandfather’s (unloaded) handgun.

I grew up with almost no toy guns, and while I’ve been exposed to tons of violent media and have a history buff fascination with war (particularly World War 2), it isn’t like guns mean anything to me.

So I open up this magazine and basically its selling its readers a nightmare world in which armed gangs are invading their homes and attacking/killing/raping their families. And of course, the supposed salvation is a handgun.

This is basically telling all gun owners that on some given day in the future they’re going to be Dirty Harry/John Wayne/etc. The problem, of course, is that most of the time when people get shot in the home it isn’t because they gunned down the mysterious dark figure assaulting their families.

This is like me thinking I wouldn’t poop in my pants because Call of Duty prepared me for actual war. So dumb.

Gun owners, particularly the diehard ones, are being sold a bill of goods. We have people in our society that are generally pretty good at taking down the bad guys – the police. What’s better is that they’re actually trained with their guns rather than simply having enough money to give to the teller at Wal-Mart.

The gun magazines show off their product in the same oddly fetishistic way car and gadget magazines do, except it’s a weapon designed to kill people. In addition to all the lax laws, etc. around the world of guns, there is a cultural problem that I doubt can be fixed.

Maybe just having less guns for people attempting to compensate for something else missing in their lives would be a start.

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Three of the top ten movies of 2012 were based on comic books and earned over $1.3 billion at the box office. Yet, somehow, the comic book industry continues to decline – and in an embarrassing way.

This past week came news that – stop me if you heard this before – Peter Parker was going to die. Parker, aka Spider-Man, joins the other iconic heroes to “die” over the last three decades – Superman and Captain America. It’s a lousy stunt designed to end the long-running Amazing Spider-Man and replace it with a brand new #1, Superior Spider-Man. Or some crap.

It’s a short term sales stunt (Peter Parker will be alive by the time Andrew Garfield has to play him in the next Spider-Man movie, trust me), designed to bring mainstream media coverage to comics and will have almost no effect in the long run on comics continual decline. The same thing happened when DC stopped all their comics and rebooted with “The New 52.” In the Superman line, it had the effect of making the character crappier.

At the same time that major media companies are making huge investments in iconic comic properties (Disney bought Marvel, Warner Bros. Owns DC) and seeing huge returns in other media (including games), the source material is suffering.

Marvel and DC are steadfastly interested in pumping out new #1 issues and getting an artificial pop out of them, while the underlying product declines. Its like a company floating new IPOs as the main company flounders. It’s not a sustainable model.

Even worse, it will come back to bite the industry in alternative media. The entire reason The Avengers was such a draw at the movie theater was that it was the realization of 60+ years of engaging comic book mythology. People were invested in Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, etc. because so many grew up with them – not because they killed them off for yet another #1 issue and a temporary infusion of money.

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Enjoy the day and appreciate the time you’ve got with family and loved ones, trust me.

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One of the weirder accusations I’ve seen thrown out by gun lobby apologists in the days since the Newtown massacre has been the idea that liberals bring up the issue of gun control and gun violence reduction because they hate the NRA.

Now, it isn’t that liberals don’t hate the NRA, but this excuse appears to be yet another false article of faith among the right because liberals are so invested in stopping the flow of money from the NRA to mostly right-wing politicians. But unlike, say, the amount of money that flows into races with the backing of private industry or lobbyist groups, the NRA is not a particularly fearsome political actor. Studies indicate that they are really bad at the business of winning elections, and even when you exclude their top goal for 2012 – preventing President Obama’s re-election – they may have had a worse track record than Karl Rove’s Crossroads operation.

As a sidebar, this is also why many of us on the left hate how scared Democrats have become of the NRA. They are electorally impotent.

So, liberals don’t dislike the NRA because of its electoral muscle. Why do we hate them?

They make the America we love a less safe place to live. The NRA exists in order for there to be more guns in America. More guns in America, more deaths by guns in America.

In 1995, former President George H.W. Bush resigned from the NRA when they sent out a letter describing federal agents as “jackbooted government thugs” who wear “Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms” and “harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.” Oh by the way, this letter came out about a month after the Oklahoma City bombing, in which a domestic terrorist did so in the name of anti-governmental beliefs.

That’s today’s NRA. That’s the organization who this year added Barack Obama to its list of supposed tyrants, along with Bill Clinton and anyone to the left of Atilla The Hun in a leadership capacity.

It’s an organization who took four days to condemn the deaths of innocent children with weapons it champions.

So yes, a lot of us hate the NRA. Many of us also wonder how you couldn’t.

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The pattern of response to tragedies like Newtown is set in stone. Grief, sadness, mourning, identifying the victims, understanding the killer’s motive, and the news gets a little quieter and more reverential and then we move past it.

How about we do something more this time? How about we not allow a fringe organization packed to the gills with all manner of bizarre (sometimes bigoted) conspiracy theories to dictate the safety of our society. How about we tell the NRA to keep quiet and let us go about the business of helping our society?

The familiar arguments have already made the rounds. First, we can’t talk about remedying gun violence in the immediate aftermath of yet another mass shooting. Then the argument is made that sensible gun laws wouldn’t have prevented the particular mass shooting we’re talking about. These are both nonsense excuses.

Gun violence is a regular part of American life, unfortunately. There are very few days in between incidents like these, unfortunately. And you don’t assess the viability of a law based on the particular crime it may or may not have prevented. You make choices about these laws based on common sense. It may not have prevented this mass killing, but it may prevent the next one.

The assassin is responsible for his horrific crime, but we have no obligation to make it easier for him and others to murder like this, or worse.

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The release of a brand new Superman movie is a big deal for an uber-Superman fan like myself. This movie is a big deal because for there to be a DC universe equivalent of Marvel’s multi-movie universe, it is essential for Superman to succeed (especially after the Green Lantern movie deservedly flopped thanks to it being a piece of garbage). Superman Returns did okay at the box office, but I feel like I’m one of the few people out there who liked it despite its flaws and it is generally viewed as a failed attempt.

Ok, so here’s the Man of Steel trailer:

First off, this is a very dark trailer, particularly for Superman. This is far and away my biggest concern. You can do “dark” versions of most comic characters, and the execution works quite well for a character like Batman. Similarly the movie versions of Spider-Man, Iron Man, and X-Men were “dark” as well and it worked. By contrast, Captain America and Superman have to be lighter fare to stay true to the sunny optimism of the characters.

In this execution, director Zack Snyder appears to be tapping into the idea of Clark’s powers manifesting at a young age and the responsibility that quickly foists upon him.

That leads to the biggest WHAT in the whole trailer, but first some history.

The Kents – Jonathan and Martha – are the key to Superman’s entire identity. They are the only parents he truly knows. They are the ones who give the character his traditionalist midwestern outlook on the world and they are the ones responsible for his moral compass. There have been several alternate reality stories that take advantage of this to point out just how different and possibly amoral Superman could have become without the influence of the Kents in his life (the closest parallel is Spider-Man and the influence of Uncle Ben and Aunt May).

So my jaw hit the ground in the exchange where Kevin Costner’s Jonathan Kent appears to make the argument that Clark should have let an entire bus of children die, apparently elevating his fear of how the world will react to someone with Superman’s powers over the lives of innocent children. I seriously hope this is just a bad impression left by editing because otherwise it is a very serious perversion of what Jonathan Kent has been for the 74 years of Superman’s existence.

I’m hoping I’m wrong here.

Otherwise, there’s a lot to like here.

The open of the trailer seems to be about Clark’s powers manifesting at the beginning of his puberty, as his mom explains to him how to block out the rest of the world — a skill that comes in handy when you can see and hear for miles.

Here’s Superman in some sort of hangar, apparently with other alien (Kryptonian?) ships.

When he asks about his legacy, we see the “S” insignia, which means that this version of Superman appears to be following in the footsteps of the original Superman movie where the “S” was some sort of crest for the El family back on Krypton (in some versions, Martha Kent comes up with the logo and stitches it on his uniform).

I love that we’re going to get the Fortress of Solitude (there’s no other reason for Superman to be in an arctic setting).

Superman flying around the curvature of the earth? That’s basically every imagination session from my childhood. Ask my Mom, she gave up so many of her perfectly good towels to the exploits of Superman.

Giant explosion in downtown Metropolis? Sounds like a hero-villain fight. If it is half as good as the fight in downtown Metropolis from Superman 2 (minus the giant ad for Marlboro), it will be epic.

Russell Crowe IS Jor-El, which is about as good as you can get short of Marlon Brando as Jor-El.

Why are there alien ships in Smallville? Kryptonian invasion? Or Braniac? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm????

Here’s Michael Shannon looking badass as General Zod, and apparently he and Superman will be punching the crap out of each other, which is epic.

Christopher Meloni is credited as “Colonel Hardy” but I have a feeling he may end up being Metallo (cyborg powered by a Kryptonite heart) down the line. Richard Schiff is Dr. Emil Hamilton, who is Superman’s scientific right-hand man and I believe this will be his character’s first time on the big screen.

Superman and his mom. This is key. Depending on the moment, if one of Superman’s parents lives to his adulthood it’s his mom. I personally prefer when both of them are alive, but I like the idea of grounding him with this relationship. Alien invasion got you down? Fly to Kansas and get some pie from Mom.

And now this. Lois. This, more than almost everything else, is the key to Superman. In Superman Returns, Kate Bosworth was unfortunately miscast as Lois Lane. The key to Lois Lane is a hard-nosed award-winning reporter who is thrown by how she feels about Superman. The best big screen Lois was Margot Kidder, particularly in the first two movies. I know Amy Adams has the acting chops for this, though I think she looks too young.

Lois, besides his parents, is what keeps Superman connected to the real world and away from being a god disconnected from Metropolis. This movie will have to bring them together, hint at romance and simultaneously create mythology’s greatest (in my opinion) love triangle: Clark – Lois – Superman. This was where Christopher Reeve excelled. Look at this scene from the original Superman, when Clark completely changes into Superman and considers revealing his identity to Lois, only to chicken out. ITS SO GOOD.

In the new movie, we’ve got them holding hands and there’s the hint of the essential Superman – Lois romance. I hope they can pull it off, because without it the movie will never work.

Other things I’m hoping to see in this movie are a fully developed set of characters at the Daily Planet, at least including Perry White and Jimmy Olsen. Similary, I want some allusions/hints of the wider DC Universe. They don’t have to be on the nose, but I’d like mentions of Gotham City, maybe a line about “that weirdo in Gotham,” or some other clues that Superman is just the first of this new class of being to inhabit this new world.

And maybe some Lex Luthor.

I’m excited about the possibility for this movie, and hopeful that the caveats I’ve noticed are just fanboy anxiety.

Up, up, and away!

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