Okay, here’s our mega-run-down on whether Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) was guilty of leaking sensitive information from FBI wiretaps. On this charge the evidence is pretty shaky and Hastings’ accuser and the accuser’s pals were … well, read the post and you decide.
Almost worse than you can possibly imagine (from CNN) …
More than 140 bodies have been found dumped across Baghdad over the past three days, police said Wednesday.
Police said 52 bullet-riddled bodies were found Wednesday, with 20 of them blindfolded, tied up and possibly tortured.
Police also discovered 29 bodies on Tuesday and 60 on Monday.
Ever since I started watching The Sopranos I guess five or six years ago, I’ve watched and marveled at the way the creative arc of what we might call the high-form premium cable drama has been to plumb further and further into deviance, pathology and taboo and yet still pull out characters and worlds a mass viewership can identify with and love. Sopranos was the first move into this space: the brutal mobster in psychotherapy. But of course the mob drama as a refraction of and escape from the American scene has a long history.
Then, I remember, after the smash success of The Sopranos seeing HBO start hyping its new show Six Feet Under, a show about a family of undertakers. I remember seeing the previews for it and it seemed like a cliche of what we expect from brain-dead studio execs who’ve stumbled on a good thing: try to reproduce the magic with a hamfisted and soul-killing version of what worked the first time. So, if a show about a neurotic mobster murderer hit big, how about a drama about a dysfunctional family running a funeral home? If death sells, how about double-death?
But then Six Feet Under, for my money at least, turned out to be one of the best, arguably even the best (though I’m not sure I’d quite give it that superlative) television series ever created.
Even so, I had a similar feeling when I saw that Showtime had picked up Six Feet’s Michael C. Hall for Dexter, an oddly comic drama in which the protoganist is a serial 
killer — clearly the dramtic Everest on the terrain of humanizing the vile or socially shamed.
(Hall was David, the gay brother in Six Feet.)
Now, this would seem hard to pull off. After all, while serial killers get a bad press, most of us tend to believe it is deserved. But it is an amazingly good show. And I have to confess that I fell under its spell after one episode. And I’ve pined through each week waiting for the next episode.
(I missed the live airing of this week’s. But then Sunday was our first day home with our new son. And, did anyone else know about this whole crying thing?)
The preview bills Dexter Morgan as a ‘vigilante serial killer’, which struck me as an odd billing when I first read it. But he’s a real serial killer, a true sociopath, though some elements or emerging elements of his personality might not fit the clinical definition, a man with a driving compulsion to dissect humans. He works as a blood spatter expert for the Miami PD. But by night, or rather on his own time, he finds people like himself, sociopaths and habitual murderers, to kill.
The concept behind the show is that Dexter’s adoptive father, a MPD homicide detective, spotted his son’s predilections at a young age — remorselessness, inability to grasp basic human emotions and emotional idioms, killing small animals — and helped him channel his nascent serial killer-dom into the at least quasi-acceptable form of killing people society would do better off without.
Getting creeped out yet?
I understand. I probably would too before I’d seen the show. But it’s very, very good. One of the treats of the show is the way the writers play with allowing us to see the world through the eyes of a damaged sociopathic personality, the alienation from basic human interactions, the inability to understand them, like going through life hearing the libretto of human existence without any of the score or the cues.
If you’ve seen the show you know about Rita, the Ice Truck killer, Dexter’s, I guess you’d call him his rival and nemesis, and all the rest.
But tell me: have you seen Dexter? Do you like it? I’m eager to hear from other Dexter-philes. Drop me a line.
Happy Thanksgiving.
I was in Tennessee yesterday, scene of this year’s most racially-charged Senate race. I got the holiday gluttony off to a roaring start with a stop at Interstate Barbecue in Memphis. It was my first time, and I now mourn all those lost years. If you ever get the chance, it’s a must-stop. You can’t go wrong with the pork ribs.
The family that runs the joint has a little girl, the same age as my daughter, who was helping out for the holiday. They hit it off, and I sat back and watched as two five-year-olds–one white, one black–sat side-by-side in their own booth coloring in their coloring books, casting sidelong glances at the each other’s work and clearly basking in each other’s presence. Above them on the wall was a photo of Rep. Harold Ford, Jr.
I was struck as I looked around at the restaurant’s patrons–half black, half white–that this is Memphis. This is the South. So when someone like Bob Corker comes along and runs a race-baiting campaign against a black man like Harold Ford, dredging up old prejudices and old fears, and wins, I am angry and disappointed, but I don’t despair the way I used to.
People like Senator-elect Corker can still harken to an earlier era, but that kind of appeal more and more requires a willful ignorance of the reality that is all around you now in the South, the reality of two little girls, one with black kinky hair, the other with board-straight brown hair, hunched together over coloring books in a restaurant frequented by blacks and whites. It is what the South has been for a long time now. It has happened gradually (never fast enough) and sometimes almost imperceptibly. But the changes have come.
There are 99,000 families in Louisiana and Mississippi living in FEMA trailers this Thanksgiving.
A Thanksgiving pardon scandal that you’ll find only at TPMMuckraker.
Since June, Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) has taken free trips to Turkey, Italy, Poland, England, Canada, Spain and Belgium, even though he is retiring from Congress and the subcommittee he chairs had finished its major piece of legislation in May.
Incoming Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) promises oversight on warrantless wiretapping and the CIA’s secret prison system.