Spring-Heeled Jack

Today's featured Wikipedia article is on Spring-Heeled Jack, a Victorian urban legend bearing a suspicious resemblance to several 20th-century comic book characters (black cape, metal claws, pointy ears, glowing eyes, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, a big letter on his chest, etc.). Jack sounds for all the world like a circus acrobat gone bad, doesn't he?

The story would have the makings of an excellent Tim Burton picture ... that is, if Burton hadn't already visited so many similar images and notions in films like Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ...

Doing the right thing (if, perhaps, for the wrong reasons?)

The Watergate scandal was my earliest introduction to politics: I watched the hearings every night at my grandparents' feet and absorbed a lot of lasting impressions about how power works and how the powerful can be challenged.  As of yesterday, we all know that it was former FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt whose clandestine meetings with reporter Bob Woodward helped keep the story alive until it boiled over into a 1973 Senate investigation and the eventual unravelling of a presidency. 

( On being loyal versus being a whistle-blower ... )

I don't necessarily buy into the idea of Felt as a selfless hero who set out to save the Republic: there's ample reason to suspect that careerism and institutional motives played a role in his decision.  But whatever his motives, Felt blew the whistle on a lawless Administration. As disillusioning as the Watergate revelations were, I doubt that anything less than the light of day could have cured what John Dean famously called "a cancer on the presidency."

Shooting the Messenger

On Salon.com, today, Sidney Blumenthal tartly reviews the Bush Administration's recent attempts to shoot the messenger on prisoner abuse.  Just you never mind all those torture photos, torture memos, disputes with the FBI and JAG lawyers, reports of "extraordinary rendering" and "phantom prisoners," or the Supreme Court's ruling in Rasul v. Bush.  Cuz, y'see, the NGOs just hate America ...

(If you're not familiar with salon.com, you can read the entire article if you either subscribe or watch a brief ad.)