Hey Now, You’re a Rock Star.

When seeking out an immediate frame of reference for Nick Stoller’s enjoyably absurd, hard-R romp Get Him to the Greek, about the road trip misadventures of a hedonistic rock god and a well-meaning, long-suffering agent from his record label, you could easily place it within one of two recent traditions: The current surge in Men Behaving Badly burlesques (The Hangover, Hot Tub Time Machine) or among its fellow raunchy-sweet forays from the Team Apatow factory (Knocked Up, Superbad, Walk Hard.)

Of those two, I’d say Greek falls more agreeably into the latter than the former camp. (Probably no surprise — Apatow is a producer here, and he and Stoller go back to the days of Undeclared.) For all the rock-star depravity on display during this sordid bender of a road trip, the film feels smarter and less fratty than the Todd Phillips oeuvre. (As our Odd Couple race down a Vegas hallway to escape an amphetamine-fueled P Diddy: “This is the longest hallway of all time!” “It’s Kubrickian!“) And it keeps its aw-shucks Apatow humanism at heart even amid all the thoroughly reprehensible behavior — the binge-drinking, drug muling, public vomiting, green musing, threesomes, jeff-smoking, and whatnot. (In fact, Greek gets positively Lost Weekend-wistful at times, which is not a setting you saw much of in Old School.)

And amid the raunch, Greek also hearkens back to earlier influences. In its basic plot outline, this is sort of a remake of the Peter O’Toole, Mark Linn-Baker comedy My Favorite Year (a movie I saw multiple times growing up, since my grandfather loved it and it was kicking around the house on VHS back when videotapes were still a novelty.) And with its two industry men on a mission, its easy drug use and hero worship, its deft early wise-cracking about music video and celebrity culture, its absurdist pulse, and its ultimate fanboy fondness for all things rock-n-roll, Greek also reminded me of the under-appreciated Cusack-Robbins vehicle, Tapeheads — Aldous Snow, meet the Swanky Modes. (Spinal Tap is pretty obviously in the mix too.)

I should say on a note of full disclosure that Stoller’s brother is a friend and colleague of mine here in town, so I went into Greek predisposed to warm to it and enjoy myself. But, even if there wasn’t any personal connection, I’m pretty sure I would’ve been sold by the first ten minutes or so. After some mild concern that one has wandered into the wrong movie — we at first seem to be in Blood Diamond territory — it turns out we are in fact on the music video set for an atrocious (yet globally-conscious!) new single “African Child,” by ex-rock-god and frontman of Infant Sorrow Aldous Snow (Russell Brand, reprising his role from Forgetting Sarah Marshall.) Talking about his newest magnum opus to the interviewers about, Snow decidedly does not compare himself to an “African White Jesus from Outer Space.” (“Well, that’s for other people to say, really. That I remind them of Christ.“)

All the while, the crush-worthy, genre-friendly Rose Byrne (28 Weeks Later), Sunshine) is vamping and skee-bopping around behind him as Snow’s girlfriend, international pop star Jackie Q — a vaguely cruel, often devastating send-up of, at various times, Lady Gaga, M.I.A., Lily Allen, and Alicia Keys. As with Hot Fuzz, this first ten minutes is so gleefully over-the-top and frontloaded with celebrity cameos that it gives you the sense that [a] folks had a great time making this movie and [b] pretty much anybody might show up over the course of this flick — a feeling compounded by the likes of Pharrell, Tom Felton (nee Draco Malfoy), and Paul Krugman popping up at various times throughout the ride.

Unfortunately for Aldous, “African Child” is very quickly deemed “the worst thing to happen to Africa since apartheid, and that — coupled with Jackie’s absconding away into the arms of Lars Ulrich (“Why don’t you go sue Napster, you little Danish twit!“) — sends him careening off the wagon and back into rock star excess. Enter Aaron Green (Jonah Hill, looking ever more like the late Chris Penn), an inveterate Infant Sorrow fan, now record label guy, who comes up with the grand idea of a tenth anniversary comeback concert for Aldous Snow at the Greek Theater. His tyrannical boss (P Diddy, funnier than you’d think) signs off on the gambit, and so Aaron is sent forth to London to acquire Snow for the gig. Kick up a rumpus, don’t lose the compass — but get him to the Greek on time…

And there you have it — The rest of the movie consists of Aaron going through all manner of hedonism and indignity to get Aldous Snow across the world, on stage, and in-the-zone. Over the duration, this dissolute duo bond, cavort, discuss their girl trouble, hide and remove things in sundry body cavities, and ingest enough drugs and alcohol to kill a small donkey. To be honest, the film does go shapeless at times, and it works best before [obvious spoiler] they reach their final destination city. (Without the road trip and ticking clock giving form to the tale, it feels like it rambles all over the place in the last twenty-five minutes or so.) And some of the characters — most notably Aaron’s sweet but overworked girlfriend Daphne — seem on the underwritten side (partly because she’s played by Elisabeth Moss of Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce, and so we expect her to be given more to do.)

Still, in the end, the film works thanks to the chemistry and comic timing of its two leads, and Brand and Hill have both in spades. (So, for that matter, does the supporting cast — Byrne, Moss, Diddy, and the venerable Colm Meaney as Snow’s gone-Vegas pop.) Your mileage may vary, of course — this would be an easy movie to deem tasteless, and at times, it’s a hard argument to refute — but I still found Greek, like The Men Who Stare at Goats last year, a light, frothy, druggy and funny jaunt sustained by its amiable characters and smart, self-aware writing. Hot funk, cool punk, even if it’s old junk, it’s still rock and roll to me.

Krugman: Enough with the Deficit Panic.

What’s the greatest threat to our still-fragile economic recovery? Dangers abound, of course. But what I currently find most ominous is the spread of a destructive idea: the view that now, less than a year into a weak recovery from the worst slump since World War II, is the time for policy makers to stop helping the jobless and start inflicting pain.” The NYT’s Paul Krugman weighs in on the deficit hysteria afflicting Washington right now. Honestly, this is Keynes 101, people — you don’t dial back government spending at a moment of incipient recovery, or else you end up with things like the 1937 Roosevelt Recession.

FWIW, the deficit witchhunt may be rolling in DC, but the bond markets aren’t listening. “On Friday, they were willing to hand over their cash to the Treasury for 10 years for 3.3 percent interest, a level so low it implies they consider the United States among the safest investments in the world.

Farewell, Froomkin.

“That’s why this Froomkin firing is so revealing. The fact that one of the very few people to practice real adversarial journalism in the Bush era was decreed not to be a real ‘journalist’ — and has now been fired by the Post — is one of the most illustrative episodes of the past several years regarding what the real function of the establishment media is.” Glenn Greenwald, Paul Krugman, Steve Benen, and Andrew Sullivan, among others, respond with justifiable outrage to the WP’s recent firing of Dan Froomkin.

What they said. So, let me get this straight: Froomkin — a guy who’s spoken-truth-to-power during both the Bush and Obama administrations, and who’s been one of the few “killer apps” in the WP’s dwindling journalistic arsenal — is shown the door while paleolithic dinosaurs like Charles Krauthammer are still on the payroll? Riiiight. Particularly in light of the death spiral of academia, it’s just plain depressing to watch the establishment media burn away its last vestiges of integrity these days. It’s just not a good time for people of the writerly persuasion, no matter how you cut it.

Update: “When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many.Froomkin signs off.

The Ghosts of Ford and Bourne.

As most everyone keeping up on current events these days knows, the people around the president, as well as the president himself, spend a good bit of time emphasizing the pragmatic nature of this administration. One senior administration official recently deemed the president a “devout nonideologue”, and Obama himself has argued several times that he aims to tackle the myriad problems before us with a “ruthless pragmatism.” Now, we’ve seen nothing to indicate that Obama’s pragmatic nature is an act. If anything, from installing Sen. Clinton as his Secretary of State to keeping Sec. Gates at Defense, it’s clear that pragmatism, accommodation, and inclusiveness are his temperamental instincts as a politician. Nevertheless, it’s also clear that comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt, and the “bold, persistent experimentation” Roosevelt promised in 1932 — and subsequently followed through on over the course of the decade — aren’t entirely undesired by the White House.

Well, I’ve been traveling over the past few days, and thus haven’t been following the news as closely as usual. Still, even given President Obama’s health care announcement on Monday (highly reminiscent of the NRA in that it purports to let the big players in the health care industry help write the codes, so to speak) and the welcome declaration on Wednesday that the administration would soon seek a new regulatory apparatus for derivatives markets, Franklin Roosevelt was not the first president that came to mind as a point of reference for Obama this week.

No, that would be Gerald Ford, who, most historians agree, was an honorable man thrust into a thorny dilemma by the crimes of his predecessor, and who grievously hamstrung his own brief administration by deciding to pardon Richard Nixon. And now, it seems, history gets dangerously close to repeating itself. For, it’s moved beyond obvious that the Dubya administration not only willfully engaged in torture — clearly, bad enough — but did so to compel false confessions of an Iraq-9/11 connection that they knew never existed. And yet, we’ve already witnessed the ungainly sight of President Obama equivocating on the question of prosecutions in the name of some dubious “time for reflection, not retribution.” (Never mind that, as President Obama reminds us on other matters, wounds, like corruption, fester in the dark.)

This week, President Obama has compounded his recent error — twice. In the first of two eleventh-hour reversals, Obama — who has promised us “an unprecedented level of openness in government” many times over — instead chose to side with the publicists of the Pentagon and block the court-ordered release of new photographs detailing detainee abuse: “‘The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals,’ Obama said yesterday. ‘In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger.‘” (How bad are they? If Sy Hersh is correct, and there’s no reason to think he isn’t, they could be very, very bad.)

Then, today, the Obama administration announced they will continue using extra-legal military tribunals, not federal courts or military courts martial, for Gitmo suspects. “‘Military commissions have a long tradition in the United States,’ said Obama in a statement. ‘They are appropriate for trying enemies who violate the laws of war, provided that they are properly structured and administered.’” (The key line of the WP story: “In recent weeks, however, the administration appears to have bowed to fears articulated by the Pentagon that bringing some detainees before regular courts presented enormous legal hurdles and could risk acquittals.)”

Obama’s statements aside, the arguments — re: excuses — in favor of blocking the release of these no-doubt-horrifying photos and maintaining extralegal tribunals — now with 33% less illegality! — are the thin gruel you might expect. The WP’s Dan Froomkin already eviscerated the former quite devastatingly, while Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald, laudable as usual, has taken point on the idiocy of the latter: “[W]e’ll give due process as long as we’re sure we can win, and if we can’t, we’ll give you something less.” In both cases, the principle animating the advice given to President Obama seems mainly to be the usual self-serving, CYA behavior of Dubya holdovers at the Pentagon.

But that doesn’t absolve President Obama of his failures here. For whatever reason — perhaps he’s trying to smooth things over in these areas so he can focus on the considerable domestic problems on his plate — Obama is increasingly making the exact same mistake as Gerald Ford. As other commentators have pointed out, by shoving the rampant illegalities of the GWoT under the rug — or worse, perpetuating them — Obama is dangerously close to making his administration retroactively complicit in the crimes of the previous administration.

Now, I’d like to move on to fixing the economy and universal health care — not to mention voting, lobbying, and campaign finance reform — as much as the next guy., But sidestepping the tough choices on torture and the imperial presidency, as Paul Krugman (whom I’ve had issues with but am in complete lockstep with here) noted a few weeks ago, is simply not an option, if we are to maintain anything resembling our national soul after this egregious wallowing in torture and illegality.

Speaking of which, a quick comment on the emerging question of what and when Speaker Pelosi knew about torture (which the Republicans have shamelessly latched onto like a life raft — see in particular Karl Rove frantically pointing at her to save his own skin the other day. You can almost smell the desperate flop sweat exuding from his every pore.) Well, let’s look into it. Commissions, investigations, prosecutions — let’s quit screwing around and start getting to the bottom of this fiasco. I can’t believe I have to keep writing this like it’s even a bone of contention, but look: If we can’t get it together enough to collectively agree that torture is both immoral and illegal, and that those who designed and orchestrated these war crimes during the Dubya administration be subject to investigation, prosecution, and punishment, then we might as well call this whole “rule of law” thing off. As ethicist David Luban noted yesterday in congressional testimony, the relevant case law here is not oblique. Either the laws apply to those at the very top, or they don’t — in which case, it’s hard to see why anyone else should feel bound to respect them either.

Which brings me back to pragmatism. Hey, in general, I’m all for it, particularly when you consider all the many imbecilities thrust upon the world by the blind ideological purity of the neocons of late. But, let’s remember, the limits of pragmatism as a guiding national philosophy were exposed before all the world before Obama, or even FDR, ever took office. When, after several years of trying to stay well out of the whole mess, Woodrow Wilson entered America into World War I in 1917, the very fathers of Pragmatism, most notably philosopher of education John Dewey, convinced themselves war was now the correct call and exhorted their fellow progressives, usually in the pages of The New Republic, to get behind it. (Many did, but others — such as Jane Addams and Nation editor Oswald Villard — did not.) War went from being a moral abomination to a great and necessary opportunity for national renewal. Given it was a done deal, the pragmatic thing to do now was to go with the flow.

Aghast at this 180-degree shift in the thinking of people he greatly admired, a young writer named Randolph Bourne called shenanigans on this “pragmatic” turnaround, and excoriated his former mentors for their lapse into war fervor. “It must never be forgotten that in every community it was the least liberal and least democratic elements among whom the preparedness and later the war sentiment was found,” Bourne wrote. “The intellectuals, in other words, have identified themselves with the least democratic forces in American life. They have assumed the leadership for war of those very classes whom the American democracy had been immemorially fighting. Only in a world where irony was dead could an intellectual class enter war at the head of such illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world-liberalism and world-democracy.

Now, you’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger cheerleader for the progressives than I. But the fact remains that Bourne, who perished soon thereafter in the 1918 influenza epidemic, was prescient in a way that many of the leading progressive thinkers were not. The emotions unleashed by the Great War and its aftermath (as well as the sight of the accompanying Russian Revolution) soon fractured completely the progressive movement in America, and proved exceedingly fertile soil for the reascendancy of the most reactionary elements around. (Back then “Bolshevik” and “anarchist” were preferred as the favorite epithets of the “One Hundred Percent American” right-wing, although “socialist,” then as now, was also in vogue. At least then they had real socialists around, tho’.) And the pragmatic writers and thinkers of TNR, who thought they could ride the mad tiger through a “war to end all wars,” instead found their hopes and dreams chewed up and mangled beyond recognition. They wanted a “world made safe for democracy” and they ended up with the Red Scare, Warren Harding, and an interstitial peace at Versailles that lasted less than a generation.

The point being: however laudable a virtue in most circumstances, pragmatism for pragmatism’s sake can lead one into serious trouble. And, as a guiding light of national moral principle, it occasionally reeks. As Dewey and his TNR compatriots discovered to their everlasting chagrin, you can talk yourself into pretty much anything and deem it “pragmatic,” when it’s in fact just the path of least resistance. And, when your guiding philosophy of leadership is to always view intense opposing sides as Scylla and Charybdis, and then to steer through them by finding the calm, healthy middle, you can bet dollars-to-donuts that the conservative freaks of the industry will always be pushing that “center” as far right as possible, regardless of the issues involved. And, eventually, without a guiding moral imperative at work — like, I dunno, torture is illegal, immoral, and criminal, or the rule of law applies to everyone — you may discover that that middle channel is no longer in the middle at all, but has diverted strongly to the right. In which case, welcome to Gerald Ford territory.

Nobody wants that, of course. We — on the left, at least — all want to remember the Obama administration not as a well-meaning dupe notable mainly for its unfortunate rubberstamping of Dubya-era atrocities, but as a transformational presidency akin to those of Lincoln and the two Roosevelts. To accomplish this goal, it would behoove the White House to remember that Lincoln, pragmatic that he was, came to abolition gradually, but come to abolition he did. Or consider that Franklin Roosevelt, pragmatic that he was, eventually chose his side as well. “I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match,” FDR said in his renomination speech of 1936. “I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

I should like to have it said of President Obama’s administration as well. The alternative — Obama’s sad, “pragmatic” capitulation to Dubya-era criminals — is too depressing to contemplate. But the picture below (found here) gives you a pretty good sense of what it’ll mean for America if we don’t get to the bottom of this, and soon.

Reality Bites.

“I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.” As TPM noted, we seem to have finally reached the point where there are “no more sharks left to jump. For alas, Sen. Clinton’s final, fraying tether to the reality-based community (and my general election vote, not that she’ll be getting that far anyway) gave up its last this weekend, as she — in defiance of her usual m.o. and very much in the manner of Dubya and the GOP — deemed universal opposition to her gas tax pander to be merely a figment of “elite opinion. (She’s also doubled down on her anti-Obama gas tax ads.) As Robert Reich noted: “In case you’ve missed it, we now have a president who doesn’t care what most economists think. George W. Bush doesn’t even care what scientists think. He rejects all experts who disagree with his politics. This has led to some extraordinarily stupid policies.” (Clinton partisan Paul Krugman, also a member of the elite-economist cabal, has yet to weigh in on his being cast down as an enemy of the people.)

As it turns out, one of the salt-of-the earth proles at the event (self-identified as an Obama voter making less than $25,000 a year) called Clinton out to her face for this blatant idiocy: “‘I do feel pandered to when you talk about suspending the gas tax,’ the woman said, adding: ‘Call me crazy but I actually listen to economists because I think they know what they’ve studied.’” Clearly, this woman will be requiring significant reeducation. “‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’ ‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’” (Give Clinton credit: Her campaign has been a travesty, but it’s been great fodder for Orwell references around here.)

In any case, regarding the big picture: Unfortunately for earlier hopes that we’d be done May 6, it’s looking like tomorrow will almost assuredly bring a split, with NC for Obama and IN for Clinton. (That is, unless Zogby has finally broke out of its slump this cycle.) Meaning, of course, that Clinton will be even more mathematically eliminated. And yet, in all likelihood, we’ll slog on to June 3. Yay. (With that in mind, each side picked up another super today: Kalyn Free of OK for Obama and Theresa Morelli of Dems Abroad for Clinton. But as Morelli only counts for 1/2 a vote, that’s another 1/2-vote pick up for Obama.)

Update: make that two and a half: Obama picks up two more MD supers, Michael Cryor and Lauren Dugas-Glover. And it sounds like some of Clinton’s CA supers are reconsidering their options.

Update 2: Apparently, economists still mattered in 1992.

The Petrol Pander.

“I don’t think it’s brilliant economics; unfortunately, it may be good politics. The smart people say ‘It’s stupid,’ and the people who aren’t as schooled say ‘At least it will do something for me,’…I don’t know that anyone connects the dots: that there have been a series of politically expedient decisions…that have added up to an economic picture that is not at all rosy and in fact fairly disastrous.” In an A-1 story this morning, the WP joins the recent general calumny against the Clinton-McCain gas tax cut (which Clinton is now campaigning heavily on in IN and NC — Obama is now pushing back on TV.) “‘You are just going to push up the price of gas by almost the size of the tax cut,’ said Eric Toder, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington.” Indeed, it’s apparently such a dumb idea that even diehard Clinton cheerleader Paul Krugman is forced to concede thus. Of course, the reality of the situation hasn’t stopped Bill Clinton from entering full-Pander Bear mode on the issue.

Update: Clinton doubles down, and introduces legislation promoting McCain’s lousy idea in the Senate. Responded Obama: “It’s a Shell game, literally.”

Kuttner: He’s the real deal.

Barack Obama’s speech on the financial crisis was a remarkable breakthrough…I wish I had written the speech. It is this kind of leadership and truth-telling that is the predicate for the shift in public opinion required to produce legislative change. A radical, appropriately nuanced, and deeply public-minded description of what has occurred, the speech was Roosevelt quality: the president as teacher-in-chief.

The American Prospect‘s Robert Kuttner praises Obama’s economics speech of yesterday, and calls out Paul Krugman for his blatant partisanship: “Unlike some of my friends, I have not fallen in love with Obama…But Krugman, ordinarily an ornament of fair-minded progressive economics commentary, writes almost as if he has become part of the Clinton campaign. His latest characterization of Obama’s proposals in commenting on the New York speech — ‘cautious and relatively orthodox‘ — was preposterous.

Krugman Jumps the Shark.

“Why, then, is there so much venom out there? I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody.” He’s been teetering on the brink for awhile now. (Not for nothing did TNR deem his last anti-Obama column the “least surprising NYT column ever.”) But NYT columnist Paul Krugman finally, irrevocably jumps the shark with his column this morning, which blames the “cult of personality” around Obama for all the venom in the Democratic race at the moment, and claims Obama is turning the Democratic party into “Nixonland.” Um, yeah.

First off, it doesn’t seem like Krugman gets out around the blogosphere much, since every political board you can find out there is strewn with Clinton supporters saying wildly intemperate things. (I’m sure he’s suffering from a selection bias — given that he’s invariably writing anti-Obama pieces, he probably gets a lot more prObama hate mail.) Second, there’ no mention at all of any of the shadier tactics employed by the Clinton campaign over the course of the past few months, of course (and he cherry-picks rather drastically when it comes to discussion of the race card.) No, the problem for Krugman resides only in Obama cultists and a vast media conspiracy. Right.

When it comes to economics, Krugman is usually a sound thinker, even if I do think he has a tendency to belittle the progressive position on matters of political economy. (The title of his recent book, The Conscience of a Liberal, makes it plain.) But, when he strays off the economics reservation to dabble in history or politics, hoo boy. This column, frankly, is partisan hackery of the first order.

Untruth and Consequences.

Try as they might to contain it, Dubya’s role in the Iraq-Niger component of Weaponsgate continues to leak under scrutiny. Worse still for the White House, many irate columnists are examining the larger pattern of deceit that has characterized this administration. Whatsmore, the I-word is now getting thrown around. How, I wonder, will the Bushies manage to lie their way out of this one?

High-Power FM.

Paul Krugman explores Republican radio conglomerate Clear Channel’s role in inciting pro-Bush rallies around the country. (Via Medley.) You have to wonder if the people smashing Dixie Chick paraphernalia felt even a little bit sheepish. After all, it’s not like they’re French or anything.