Casino Jack

We finally rented Casino Jack last night. Kevin Spacey does a kickass performance as Jack Abramoff. Kelly Preston played his wife, and Jon Lovitz was also in it. Other than that I hadn’t seen or heard of most of the actors. The actors that I hadn’t heard of were pretty good likenesses of Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist and the rest of the sleazebags involved in this whole scandal.

The movie actually portrayed Jack Abramoff as a somewhat sympathetic character, at least as far as slippery power-crazed lobbyists go. Kevin Spacey got a Golden Globe nomination for his performance.

The movie is well worth renting. It’s good that an important chapter in our recent history can be kept alive with an entertaining movie.

Sort of the opposite of Fair Game, with Naomi Watts playing Valerie Plame and Sean Penn playing her husband, Joseph Wilson. I waited months for this to come out on DVD, figuring that a movie starring two of the best actors out there, dramatizing one of the most disgraceful scandals of the Dumbya years, would have to be riveting. Wrong!

I don’t know how they managed, but Fair Game was drier than the wonkiest PBS documentary.

But check out Casino Jack if you haven’t seen it already.

Chief Justice John Roberts’ Hurt Feelings — Part XVIII

“The pwesident said mean things about me, wight in fwont of evewybody. MOMMY!?!?!?!”

When the Supreme Court reverses a legal trend that started in the early 1900s, we’re all supposed to just keep quiet and not say a word. Bribery is now a constitutional right, but sssshhhhhhh…

The Supreme Court’s “Bribery is just hunky dory” decision is possibly the Court’s most unpopular decision ever. To the vast, vast majority of Americans — and this cuts across all political lines — this decision sucks. Liberal, conservative, religious, atheist — practically everybody agrees that this absurd boneheaded — OOPS!

ssssshhhhhhhhh…

Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge now. Bribery is now a constitutional right, and this summer the Supreme Court will probably create another new constitutional right:

Fraud.

Hey, fraud schmaud. Let the buyer beware. A Real American doesn’t need a big smothering nanny state to protect him/her from crooked businesses and politicians. It’s a rough and tumble Free Market out there. Man up and fend for yourself or die.

The fraud/corruption convictions of Jack Abramoff, William Jefferson, Jeff Skilling — among others — could be overturned when the Supreme Court hears their appeals later this year. The law they violated might be “too vague.”

And anyway, perhaps our Founding Fathers envisioned fraud — as well as bribery — as cherished American freedoms, to be enshrined forever in the Bill of Rights.