Good ol’ boy Allen facing new Virginia electorate

Story by Chris Graham

Jim Webb has closed the gap on George Allen – and has even, according to one newspaper poll, surged into the lead in the United States Senate race between the two.

The conventional wisdom attributes the momentum that the Democratic Party nominee has been enjoying in recent weeks to an incident at a rally in Southwest Virginia earlier this month in which the Republican incumbent Allen referred to a Webb campaign volunteer of Indian-American descent by a nickname apparently derived from a word for monkey that is used as a slur for people from North Africa.Christopher Newport University political scientist Quentin Kidd wonders if there might be something else at the heart of Webb’s stunning reversal of fortunes.

“I don’t think this is the same Virginia that Allen has run in successfully and won office for several times in the past,” said Kidd of Allen, who was elected to the U.S. Senate representing Virginia in 2000 and was also elected governor of Virginia in 1993.

“There’s a lot of change going on. For instance, we just saw the headlines about a million new immigrants in Virginia. So I don’t think this is the same Virginia – and I think Mark Warner’s election and Tim Kaine’s election, driven for the most part of the moderate voters of suburban Northern Virginia, might suggest that the good ol’ boy doesn’t play as well as it used to play in Virginia,” Kidd told The Augusta Free Press.

Blogger and Albemarle County Democratic Party activist Waldo Jaquith thinks the much-publicized macaca incident involving Allen might have played a part in illustrating that trend.

“What I think is the most disturbing part of Allen’s remark is what he meant to say – not what there’s any debate about, but what he meant to say. Which is, hundreds of miles from Northern Virginia is quote ‘the real Virginia’ – and the area of Virginia where most Virginians live, that’s ‘the fake Virginia.’ And the people who live there don’t count,” Jaquith told the AFP.

“And so even with what Allen intended to say, the message to voters in Northern Virginia is, You don’t count. And no constituent wants to hear that from their elected officials. Combine that with what he ended up saying, intentionally or not, he’s saying, You don’t belong because you live in the wrong part of Virginia, and because you have some crazy skin color, and you have a name that is just nuts, that I can’t even bother to learn to pronounce. Which just makes it so much worse,” Jaquith said.

“Even ignore the name-calling, you’re still left with a message – which is that the area of Virginia with the tiniest population, that is the farthest removed from the rest of the state, is ‘real.’ That’s just a terribly offensive thing to say,” Jaquith said.

How Allen’s comments to that effect will play in Springfield and Vienna remains to be seen. What we know now is that the senator isn’t just going to have to confront the fallout from his macaca slur – he will also have to confront an electorate very different from the ones that elected him to statewide office twice.

“We missed that – maybe we weren’t paying attention to that. And absent this gaffe, we may not have noticed this sort of changing motor in Virginia. Absent that gaffe, we may not have noticed that those moderated voters in Northern Virginia, who come from various backgrounds, may have become upset at something like this,” Kidd said.

“The fact is, this is a different Virginia than it was 10 years ago, eight years ago, six years ago. The census data suggest that, the elections of Warner and Kaine suggest that. So this may be an event that in and of itself doesn’t cause Webb to win and Allen to lose, but it again suggests that Virginia is changing politically – maybe becoming less red and more purple,” Kidd said.

Can Webb capitalize on Macaca-gate?

The adage in the world of sports has it that it is sometimes better to be lucky than it is to be good.

Jim Webb could argue that the same might be said of life in the world of politics.

The Democratic Party Senate nominee entered the month of August trailing incumbent Republican Sen. George Allen by a double-digit margin – before seeing the race tighten to the three- to five-point range in the wake of the fallout from an incident at a rally in Southwest Virginia in which Allen referred to a Webb campaign volunteer of Indian-American descent by a nickname apparently derived from a word for monkey that is used as a slur for people from North Africa.

“Running a successful election is about a lot of things – it’s about having enough money, it’s about having a competent and professional campaign staff, it’s about having a candidate who can speak to voters. But it’s also about luck, in some ways,” said Quentin Kidd, a political-science professor at Christopher Newport University.

The Webb campaign, to its credit, Kidd told The Augusta Free Press, “was able to put itself in a position to be able to respond to the lucky break.”

That having been said, though, it is not going to be the case that Webb is going to be able to ride Macaca-gate to victory in November.

“The free publicity and free momentum that he’s had recently is not going to last. Allen has the money and the resources to sustain his ability to overcome this and regain momentum. So I don’t think this is all rosy news for Webb – and I don’t think it’s a death blow for Allen. It could be – it could be that Webb capitalizes on this in a productive way, and it could be that Allen continues to stumble and never quite recovers. But I don’t think those are foregone conclusions,” Kidd said.

The next step for Webb, according to Matt Smyth, an analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, is translating his new place in the polls into a new place in the campaign fund-raising war.

As of June 30, according to data from the Federal Election Commission, Allen had raised $10.1 million for his Senate campaign to Webb’s $1.1 million – and had $6.6 million cash on hand to Webb’s $424,000.

“This might be what national Democratic Party leaders have been waiting for in terms of committing their resources to this race,” Smyth told the AFP.

“There are a lot of Senate races around the country where Democrats are competitive – and because there’s not an unlimited amount of money, they’re going to focus it and try to spend it wisely, so to speak. So if you’ve got a race where a candidate is showing promise and can sustain that, then it’s possible that they’ll infuse that with some cash – and that in itself can keep things competitive,” Smyth said.

“Right now, it seems like Webb has a window of opportunity – he’s got something that puts the incumbent on the defensive, and if they can jump on it, then we might have a competitive race. But Allen is still the favorite, and still has a lot of the advantages,” Smyth said.

As University of Mary Washington political-science professor Stephen Farnsworth notes, one of the key advantages for Allen is his own ability to raise money in large sums.

“Allen is a proven fund-raiser. He’s going to have a lot of money. The challenge for Webb is, how is he going to be competitive with the millions and millions that Allen will be able to bring in? Because when you’re looking at the fund-raising disparities that exist right now, Allen has plenty of money. And if he needs more money, he can get more money,” Farnsworth told the AFP.

“Money in politics goes to the races that are seen as being the most competitive. And the Allen-Webb race, in neither party’s estimation, is not one of the five or six most competitive races in the country. We might rank it at the bottom of the top 10 – but unless it moves up in that ranking, this race is not going to generate the kind of money that Webb needs to be competitive. Because Democrats are going to target their money to those candidates in close races that they think are going to be successful,” Farnsworth said.

Webb campaign spokesperson Kristian Denny Todd said the campaign is seeing some positive movement in terms of its fund-raising efforts – “Our fund raising is going really well. We may not have as much money as George Allen has or will have, but Jim will have enough money to go head to head with him in the fall on TV. We know that – and we’ve always known that,” Denny Todd told the AFP.

More important than the money race, though, is defining Webb and his stance on the issues of the day vis-à-vis Allen, according to Todd.

“We always believed that the more Virginians heard about George Allen, the less they’d like him – and the more they heard about Jim Webb, the more they’d like him,” Denny Todd said.

“I don’t think Allen has been tested. He has run statewide twice – but he’s yet to be really tested. And he goes around saying that Virginia really knows him – but I don’t think people really do know him. So I think this is an opportunity for Virginians to get to know him – and that’s part of the process. The other part is getting voters to know more about Jim Webb. And again, as the polls show, the more they know about him, the more they like him,” Denny Todd said.

Albemarle County blogger and Democratic Party activist Waldo Jaquith thinks Webb is going to have to offer voters more in the way of specifics to be able to continue gaining in the polls.

“It seems pretty clear to me that the next thing that Webb needs to do is something positive – that is, not something that consists of attacking Allen, but something to demonstrate to the public that you’ve seen that Allen isn’t fit to lead, now let me show you by example that I am,” Jaquith told the AFP.

“I don’t know what that would be – there are any number of policy proposals that he could put forward or areas in his own background that he could choose to highlight or a positive commercial. But he will have to fill that void – because what we’ve seen is Allen falling in the polls, which has benefited Webb, but Webb himself hasn’t done anything to earn his rankings at the moment,” Jaquith said.

Kidd concurs with that point – and offered up one issue that Webb could play up to his benefit.

“The most effective way to capitalize on this is to then turn this discussion toward the criticism of Allen for the war and his support of the war,” Kidd said.

“If he doesn’t do that, or at least use this opportunity to raise some other substantive issue, he misses out on the opportunity to capitalize on the momentum,” Kidd said. “This is the opportunity to really turn the momentum into his favor over the long term – rather than enjoying the headlines but not gaining anything in the long term out of it.

“Bottom line – this comment isn’t going to help Webb win. If Webb is going to win, he has to take Allen on the policies and the issues,” Kidd said.

(Published 08-28-06)

Guy Gone Wild

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

Whatever happened to … I don’t know, the idea that some things were better left unsaid?

I know, I know – I’m a First Amendment guy. Have to be, me being a journalist and all.

But …

Do I really need to know about whether or not the guy sitting next to me has erectile dysfunction?

I mean, if he does or doesn’t isn’t a matter of concern to me.

Good luck with it – or whatever.

Just leave me out of the loop as far as knowledge of it is concerned.

And yet you turn on the TV, and every other second there’s some guy yammering on and on and on about how he has E.D.

The remainder of the time seems to be devoted to letting people with genital herpes prattle on about their issues.

Ahem.

I’m not trying to belittle the importance of these discussions – not at all.

But seriously, shouldn’t they be behind a closed door, with some doctor type leading the discussion?

Part of me – a big part – pines for the days when we didn’t have to hear this stuff between jokes during reruns of “Seinfeld” or during a broadcast of the Sox and Yankees or whenever else.

Because, let me tell you, the target marketing that is being done these days has to make you wonder.

“Honey, I’m watching the football game – and the last three commercials have been for Viagra, Cialis and that new diarrhea medicine that they put out last month,” I caught myself saying last week, before realizing that I needed to start expanding my horizons from a viewing perspective.

Really – what are they trying to say about the average football fan is that he can’t get it up, really can’t get it up, and also can’t get it out.

These are not good things to find out about yourself from watching the idiot box.

Not that changing your habits will help you out much – I was subject to a promotion for “Girls Gone Wild” the other evening while watching an “Ultimate Fighter” rerun.

So we add to not being able to get it up or out the inability to identify and commingle with members of the opposite sex.

Great.

One last commercial leads me to wonder something else about myself.

I was flipping through the channels when a commercial for something that I hadn’t seen advertised before flashed across the TV screen.

It was young college hunks wearing little more than swimming trunks.

Yep, you guessed it – “Guys Gone Wild.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but …

Webb supporter escorted away from Allen event after n-word question

Story by Chris Graham

A man who identified himself as a supporter of Democratic Party Senate candidate Jim Webb was escorted from a George Allen campaign event in Staunton today after interrupting the start of a local press availability with the senator to ask him a series of questions that included a racial slur.

“Have you ever used the word ‘nigger’?” the man asked the Republican incumbent after Allen had finished up speaking to a local chamber of commerce group.

After repeating the question, the man – who was carrying a tape recorder, a notebook and a pen and introduced himself to the senator only as a “law student” – then asked Allen about a Confederate flag and noose that he keeps in his office.

Allen at first requested that the man wait to speak with him until after he had addressed questions from the members of the media who were awaiting the start of the press availability.

Allen campaign aide David Snepp then asked the man to leave after he became combative – and the man was later escorted away by an employee of the Holiday Inn-Staunton where the event was held.

The man left the premises before the end of the senator’s meeting with members of the press – briefly leaving details about his identity and any possible connection that he might have to the Webb campaign a mystery.

A report in The News Virginian in Waynesboro this afternoon identifies the man as Mike Stark, a first-year law student at UVa.

The Augusta Free Press

has not independently confirmed the man’s identity.

Ben Carter, the president and CEO of the Greater Augusta Regional Chamber of Commerce, which hosted Allen’s visit, told the AFP that the man had purchased a ticket to the luncheon that preceded Allen’s remarks to the chamber group.

A Webb campaign volunteer who witnessed the incident told the AFP that the man had introduced himself to him earlier as being a Webb supporter and University of Virginia law student.

The volunteer, who declined a request from the AFP to identify himself, said the man is not affiliated with the Webb campaign. Webb campaign press secretary Jessica Smith reiterated that in an interview with the AFP this afternoon.

“The person who asked Sen. Allen those questions is not affiliated with us. And we’re not sure that we know who he is,” said Smith, who was briefed on the incident by the volunteer who was at the event.

“It certainly sounds like there is somebody who is upset and trying to create a situation there. It’s clear that after the last couple of weeks that there are a number of people who are upset with Sen. Allen because of his remarks. But I have no idea who he is. He’s certainly not on staff with us – that’s for sure,” Smith said.

The reference to “remarks” has to do with the lingering controversy over comments made by Allen to a Webb campaign volunteer earlier this month at a campaign event in Southwest Virginia in which the senator identified the volunteer, who is of Indian-American descent, by a nickname apparently derived from a word for monkey that is used as a slur against North Africans.

Allen shrugged the incident off when asked about it during the press availability that followed it.

“I’m just going to keep advocating what I think is important – which is, protect our freedom, make sure this is a land of opportunity for all, and also to preserve our foundational values,” Allen said in response to a reporter’s question on the incident and its place in the context of what is becoming a negative campaign.

“But my opponent’s campaign, generally speaking, all we ever do get is something negative. But I’m going to try to keep motivating and inspiring people with positive, constructive ideas and visions for our country,” Allen said.

Allen also addressed the controversy over his use of the word macaca that has made national headlines and is attributed for tightening what had been a double-digit gap in the polls between the senator and the challenger to a three-point margin in one poll released earlier this week.

“I’ve said all I care to say about it – and I’m moving forward,” Allen told the AFP. “I’ve apologized for the insensitive remark – and that’s all I’m going to say about it. There’s nothing more that needs to be said. I’ve said all I need to say – and I’m moving forward. And I think the people of Virginia expect us to discuss – or all I know is I’m going to do this – is discuss issues as I did here today.”

(Published 08-25-06)

Who’s the boss?

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

He always gets upset at me for hiding my snacks.

What he doesn’t realize is … I’m a dog, one, and two, has he ever offered to give me a few feet of space that I can call my own, maybe throw in a chest of drawers or something else that I can use to keep things in order, so to speak?

No.

He just walks around the house singing those stupid songs.

“Benzi wants more Benzi snacks.” “Benzi likes to hi-i-i-ide things.”

He could rhyme these songs, let me tell you – it wouldn’t hurt him a bit, and wouldn’t take much effort, given their simplicity.

But anyway, he never once asked me if I wanted to have, say, a hutch that I could put something on – maybe a nice pink lily or something, with a doilie in the shape of a heart.

I like things in the shape of hearts – but then again, I’m a miniature poodle.

It’s kind of automatic that we have to like hearts. And doilies. And pink lilies.

I digress.

Because I’m just dreaming here.

Not that he has anything to worry about – he has a chest of drawers, and a desk for his computer and books and notebooks.

And a cupboard to keep food in.

Not to mention all that cabinet space that he has filled up with God-knows-what.

He has stuff everywhere – literally.

And he gets riled up at me when I hide my snacks or my treats under a cushion on the couch.

Some nerve this guy has – giving me a hard time.

Oh, well. Guess I’ll have to pee in the floor again.

You know – to show him who’s boss.

Is wrestling recommended viewing for children, teens?

Story by Chris Graham

A large video screen in the John Paul Jones Arena replayed scenes from a ballyhooed “live sex celebration” that WWE heavyweight champion Edge and women’s champion Lita had taken part in several months earlier.

And that was early in the “Monday Night Raw” show that was broadcast live on national television from Charlottesville last week.

Another segment had six women gathering in the ring for a rollicking wet T-shirt contest. A third featured two wrestlers inciting those in attendance to chant suggestions that WWE owner Vince McMahon regularly engages in a certain homosexual sex act.

Throw in a dash of intergender violence in the main event that took place after the TV show went off the air for good measure, and you have professional wrestling in all its splendor.

It’s definitely not for kids – but that’s not to say that there weren’t hundreds of children as young as elementary-school age in the crowd for the sports-entertainment spectacle.

Wake Forest University researcher Robert DuRant worries about the long-term impact of pro-wrestling events like the one held at JPJ on younger fans.

“I speak to a lot of parent groups – and what I’ve learned is that a lot of parents, particularly fathers, watch a lot of wrestling with their children. And their perception is that it has no effect on them – they’re adults who have finished their cognitive and psychological and emotional development – and so they assume that it’s having no effect on their children,” said DuRant, the vice chair of the department of pediatrics in Wake’s medical school and one of the authors of a study on the effects of viewing professional wrestling on teens that was published earlier this month in the journal Pediatrics.

“The public-health implications of this are that our children are undergoing significant and substantial growth – emotionally, cognitively and psychologically – in order to prepare for adulthood. And exposing them to this form of media and entertainment has a significant effect on the brain as it’s developing in all these different aspects. So while the adult may perceive that it’s not affecting them, it is having a profound effect on children,” DuRant told The Augusta Free Press.

The study found is that the more frequently adolescents watched wrestling, the more likely they were to engage in a number of indicators of violence – including fighting and carrying weapons. Of particular interest, DuRant said, was the correlation detailed between watching wrestling and engaging in date-fighting – and the finding that the relationships for both fighting and weapon-carrying in general and date-fighting were stronger among girls than among boys.

It’s not just the teen set that is impacted by what they see on wrestling programs.

“The younger you are, the less you understand what’s really going on here,” said Steven Danish, a sports-psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“If you think about an adult watching television, and watching what people are wearing, you would see that a lot of times adults use television as a guide to what they should wear, to what’s in fashion. So if TV models kind of behaviors for adults, it models behaviors for children. And if wrestling is being shown on television, and children are watching it, then they’re going to see a lot of violence – and a lot of inappropriate behaviors in addition to violence. And they don’t know that it’s not real,” Danish told the AFP.

To make the leap from children and teens not understanding that the violence that they witness on a wrestling program is not real to them engaging in those behaviors after the show is over is difficult to do in the eyes of Syracuse University communications professor Bob Thompson.

“It’s almost impossible to construct a study that can really put this causal link together – because there are so many variables about how we behave,” said Thompson, the director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse,

“There are a lot of people who watch wrestling, for instance, who don’t do any of this kind of stuff – because there are so many other elements that go into the complete recipe of their behavior,” Thompson told the AFP.

“I’d be the last person to say that what we watch doesn’t have some impact on our behavior. There would be no billion-dollar advertising industry if it didn’t. We watch lots of commercials for various things – and it does influence our behavior. And we’ve all heard the story of the ‘Happy Days’ episode where Fonzie gets a library card, and the next week, libraries across the country are deluged with requests for library cards,” Thompson said.

“When ‘Top Gun’ was released, more people tried to enlist in the armed services that had airplanes. When ‘L.A. Law’ came out, law schools got peak applications. ‘CSI’ has created a booming industry in forensics medicine and classes and majors. So obviously, what we consume culturally certainly could have impact on our behavior,” Thompson said.

“When I was a kid, we’d watch an army movie, and then go out and play army. We’d get our toy guns and go out and play soldier. There’s a big jump from saying that that inspired us to go out and kind of play and act things out from the movie that we saw and saying that we were going out with the intent to really beat each other up and get real weapons and shoot each other. The jump that it would’ve taken from playing to doing that would have had all kinds of other elements in it that I think goes beyond that movie,” Thompson said.

DuRant counters by pointing out that “there is a rich literature on the exposure to violence in the electronic media and the effect that it has on both children and adolescent attitudes on their values and natural behaviors regarding the use of violence or aggression.”

“So this study just fits in with the overall existing research,” DuRant said.

And as other research into exposure to violence and its impact on children and teens suggests, “this is something that we need to take very seriously,” DuRant said.

“We teach pediatricians that during well-child visits, they need to counsel the parents of their children about the influences of the media – how much television, how many movies, how many video games should they watch or play per day? This study points out that pediatricians ought to be talking to parents way beyond the childhood years and as children become adolescents about how the media can continue to have a negative impact on children during the adolescent years,” DuRant said.

Some of the media is still lousy

Column by Max Friedman

Before I start this media-analysis column, I have to put in a disclaimer, of sorts. Some of the media, print and visual, is actually doing a good job, and as much as it hurts me to say this, the Associated Press also has some very good reporters, despite their leftist, often anti-American orientation (i.e. the Vietnam atrocity story that just conveniently came out). Read more

Crozet’s hometown newspaper

Story by Chris Graham

Sure, it matters that Crozet’s population is expected to triple in the next 20 years.

But Mike Marshall wasn’t looking that far into the future.

“Crozet was longing, I thought, for a way for the community identity to get out,” said Marshall, the editor of The Crozet Gazette, a monthly newspaper that the former University of Virginia Law School communications director launched in June.

Marshall debuted the paper with a mass mailing of copies of the publication to 9,200 households in Crozet and Western Albemarle County – “that should give you an indication of the size of the market that we’re looking at here,” Marshall told The Augusta Free Press.

News features run the gamut – from coverage of development issues to stories about local events to a piece in the August profiling a local poet who has just had her first book published.

“People like to get information about what their neighbors are up to. It’s also nice to see something that talks about things from your point of view,” Marshall said.

The Gazette fills another void for Crozet- and Western Albemarle-based advertisers as well, Marshall said.

“Crozet has built up about 100 businesses – and they didn’t have an advertising platform. It makes no sense for them to buy space in the Charlottesville paper, because it’s really expensive, and it goes to a lot of people who aren’t their customers and aren’t likely to be their customers,” Marshall said.

“There’s a sufficient advertising base in Crozet – and a lot of new businesses coming in that are going to need to advertise. So I thought that there was a natural market in terms of there being a little local culture plus an untapped pent-up advertising need – which I think is only going to get a little more acute as the new businesses come in to serve the new people, and they have to get their word out a little bit,” Marshall said.

Marshall has also identified a potential advertising base over the mountain in Waynesboro – where many from the Crozet-Western Albemarle area do the bulk of their retail shopping.

“I’ve been shopping ads over there – and some people are interested. I think that a lot of Waynesboro businesses know that they ought to be paying more attention to what’s going on in Crozet,” Marshall said.

“It’s going to come – because these stores realize that some of their Crozet customers are coming over the mountain, that there is a customer base for this. And they’re just waiting for the numbers to get right – where they look at the rooftops and go, Hmm, that many houses equals this number of customers for a store there,” Marshall said.

Circulation for the July and August issues of the Gazette is holding steady in the 5,000 to 6,000 range per issue, Marshall said.

“I think the response is indicative of the fact that Crozet people have always had this idea that they were their own little town – and for the most part they were ignored and left alone. But now with the growth coming in, we’re more into hanging on to our sort of point of view about things,” Marshall said.

The politics of steroids

Story by Chris Graham

Last year it was baseball. Now it’s Floyd Landis and Justin Gatlin … and baseball.

The issue of the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes continues to get scads of press – and you know what that means. Read more

Knowledge is good

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

I went to see “Talladega Nights” over the weekend, and, well …

It wasn’t “Animal House.”

Here we go again – he’s going to go on about how “Animal House” changed the world.

That is how I judge the quality of a comedy.

“Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the Peace Corps.”

Yes, that “Animal House.”

Most comedies don’t seem to know how to end – and “Talladega Nights” fell into that trap as well.

It was like – OK, let’s poke fun at NASCAR. Just like another Will Farrell star vehicle, “Anchorman,” seemed to be motivated by the theme, “OK, let’s poke fun at TV news.”

That seems to be the driving force behind the genre – let’s poke fun at whatever is in front of us, poke fun at ourselves, have somebody throw up or fart or something, then call it a day.

Chris Graham is now above telling fart jokes? Somebody call the police – whoever wrote this is obviously an impostor.

Ahem.

My point is that you have to bring the movie home – and not many comedies seem to be able to do that.

And honestly, comedy isn’t alone in having this problem.

In this day and age of test-marketing plot twists and endings that lead us to the most saccharine of either that we can get on a consistent basis, there are only a few mysteries and action-adventure flicks that rise up from above the crowd.

Name one.

OK, so I’m being nice there – everything, basically, made from 1988 on pretty much stinks.

Which brings me back to “Animal House” – which pokes fun at college life (Faber College motto: “Knowledge is good”), women’s lib (“I hear Dickinson girls are fast. What should I say?” “Mention modern art, civil rights or folk music, and you’re in like Flynn”), political spin (“You can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg – isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America”).

And then, and yes, it can happen, they bring the movie home.

Like you’re going to bring this column hope. We can only hope.

The extended climax that features the Deltas rampaging through town in a weak and pathetic effort to get their fraternity back is the mother-of-all-comedy-movie endings.

Sure beats two NASCAR drivers in a footrace to the checkered flag.

You saw “Talladega Nights,” too?

Yes. Way, way too much man-love for me.

I’d have to concur.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Well, maybe here …

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