(Actually, I went to see a “quotalong” re-release of The Princess Bride, but it was sold out.  I am still ruing not buying my tickets online)

I have to say that afterwards I was furious with those who gave the film a thumbs up, because it is terrible.  It is one of the worst film biographies I have ever seen, probably the worst.  If you went into this film to try and get a grasp of the awesomeness of Margaret Thatcher, you would have been largely disappointed.  Certainly I was expecting a recounting of all her finest moments and the major milestones in her life.  Instead, we got a film full of an old lady mumbling to her daughter and talking to her dead husband, with only the slightest glimpses of her past.  And what was shown of her past was not even the great moments of her career, but simply a few scenes where she has conversations with those close to her about those moments.  She is shown either conversing with her husband, or conversing with Geoffrey Howe, but not actually doing the acts for which she is famous.  It is a travesty.  The only good scenes in the whole film are the ones where she is speaking from the dispatch box in parliament eviscerating Michael Foot (is there anything more satisfying than destroying the Left in mouth to ear combat?).  But that’s it.  The rest is garbage.

There are two themes in this film.  The first is that Margaret Thatcher is now old and senile.  I think I know what the point of this theme is, but I’ll get to that in a minute.  The second is that Thatcher was a feminist  fighting for strong womanhood in a world of weak men.  Which is a fine aspect of her career to examine, but the film acts as if this is the driving force of her life, when Thatcher herself was very much against feminism, or at least that simplistic synopsis of it.  A particularly offensive scene follows one of her 1950s election defeats (actual campaigning not shown, of course), where Dennis proposes marriage to her.  She accepts, but responds with a tirade about how she won’t be some sort of little housewife.  It’s stereotypical bullshit, sixth form scriptwriting, but it clearly shows the writer has not even read Thatcher’s own autobiography, in which she goes on at length as to how wonderful it was to be a housewife in the 1950s!

The acting is mostly below par, save for Meryl Streep, who is of course sublime as Mrs Thatcher.  But if you want to see her literally become a public figure before your eyes, you should go see Julie and Julia instead, which is supremely superior to this crap.  The young Dennis Thatcher is also good, and portrays well the suave businessman that he was in the 1950s (albeit forgetting that he was ten years older than his wife to be).  But Jim Broadbent is awful, and portrays Dennis as a buffoon, with only a few scenes where he truly captures his forthright rigour and the powerful hold he had over his wife.  The fact that Dennis was the only man that could stand up to Margaret is something that seems to have been deliberately left out by the filmmakers.  An thony Head is completely miscast as Geoffrey Howe, and basically looks and sounds like his Buffy the Vampire Slayer character.  And the young Margaret is far too bashful for the first President of the Oxford Conservatives.

How can you release a movie about Thatcher without even showing the best bits of her life?  And spending all your time on the worst bit – her current decayed state?!  Well I spot a trend here.  Have you ever noticed that, whenever left wing people make a movie about a right winger, they nearly always portray that right winger as being “haunted by their demons”?  That’s why they’re such bastards!  Voices in their head!  So we see Anthony Hopkins as Nixon haunted by his mother and ranting incoherently, Josh Brolin playing Bush playing baseball in a field of dreams, and now Maggie talking to her dead husband.  That’s what the Left think drives us!  The voices in our heads!  Interesting huh?

(As an aside, Oliver Stone’s W is an excellent film, and a far better picture than this dreck)

I hope that some time in the near future, a decent film will be made about Margaret Thatcher, and that Meryl Streep can reprise her superb performance in it.  But even a Left Wing hatchet-job depicting her as evil incarnate would have been better than this tepid horror of a film.  At least in a film like that we might get to see what she actually did with her life.

Here’s some real Thatcher, which is all you ever need to watch of her right now:

…and this one is my favourite, because it basically sums up every defence of Obama’s Presidency I have ever heard over the last three years:

Santorum was Bush’s biggest cheerleader in the Senate.  He never met a big government conservative faith-based program he didn’t like.  The fact that he has now morphed into THE conservative candidate is a credit to his campaigning skills, which, as it turns out, are considerable.  The trouble is that he is a moral conservative, not the proper kind.  He is saying he wants to cut the size of government now, but then so is Mitt Romney, and I don’t believe either of them have fully bought the concept that government is the enemy, not the tool, and elections aren’t just about the Right’s ability to manage public money better than the Left.

The reason Santorum is in the lead right now is not necessarily due to circumstances beyond his control.  When he started the race, he was terrible.  He was trying to outflank everybody on the Right of the field, and mark himself out as the social issues candidate in an election where people only cared about the economy.  But then he changed up a gear.  He suddenly (for whatever reason) realised what he was doing wrong, and got very disciplined on his message.  He remained principled on moral issues, but didn’t focus on them, and came up with the right lines to bat away questions.  His line in one of the debates responding to a question about what if his son told him he was gay, “I’d love him just as much as I did before he’d said it”, was disciplined and put him back in the mainstream.  He’s been very adept at contextualizing some of his nuttier comments of years past.  And more importantly, he’s managed to articulate conservatism in a way that Mitt could not, and display his principles and family values in a way that Newt is unable to do.  That, ultimately, is what has propelled him into front-runner status.  He has had some help from the distractions caused by other candidacies, but it’s no accident that he is in pole position.  He has run the best campaign so far, while Mitt’s has faltered (and the less said about Newt’s the better).

Romney has been trying to attack Santorum, but he is doing it all wrong.  He’s going after Santorum’s predilection for earmarks, but it’s impossible to make that stick, since every Senator in the history of the United States has sent pork back to their home state.  The trouble with attacking Santorum on his real faults is that Romney can’t do it without hurting himself.  He can’t call Santorum a moralizing moral majority relic, because he’s a Mormon who is desperately trying to convince evangelicals that Mormons are just as moral as they are.  He can’t criticize Rick for flip-flopping, because that’s Mitt’s picture in the dictionary next to the term.  And being the standard bearer for now derided “compassionate conservatism”?  You can’t run that line with Romneycare on your record.  So he is stuck with the line that he is now the only “outsider” in the race, which is also not going to help him, since everybody knows that GOP “insiders” are supporting him 10 to 1.

All this leads me to believe that Romney is in deep trouble.  He is not going to be able to beat Santorum all on his own.  The great irony is that he is going to need a Newt comeback.  Having not just conquered Newt in Florida, but raped, pillaged and destroyed his campaign, Romney is now going to have to hope Newt beats Santorum in the South so that he can pick up enough delegates in the Northeast and the West Coast to get him over the line.  If Santorum starts winning Southern states as well, then Gingrich is finished and there will be no stopping him.

Personally I do not want Santorum to be President.  I do not think it would be in the Right’s interests for him to beat Obama.  I don’t really think a Romney presidency would be good for us either.  Both would be a repeat of George HW Bush, where a moderate guy spent his term paying lip service to the conservative movement, but prevaricated and dithered on conservative values.  And in Santorum’s case, that would be coupled with moralizing of the worst kind.  It would be like Bush AND Dan Quayle rolled up into the same person.

I reiterate that Gingrich would be the best candidate.  I expect him to win Georgia, and maybe a couple of other states and if he is lucky, he will carry my home state of Texas as well, giving him a large number of delegates, and hopefully some momentum.  But he is yet to change up a gear.  He is still whining and carrying on like a little bitch.  Arrogantly, he thinks he can do this himself without a campaign consultant or proper manager to give him some message discipline.  As long as he thinks that, he will lose, and we will be deprived of a great President.

The reality is of course, that none of these candidates are ideal.  Gingrich would be best, but even he just doesn’t have enough of the right temperament or discipline to avoid making himself, and not Obama, the issue of the 2012 campaign.  The best we can hope for is that he, and Mitt, and Rick, and Ron, all get enough delegates to stop each other from winning, and we have a brokered convention with a compromise candidate being selected.  That would be the most ideal outcome.

Who would that candidate be?  Anybody who has not been through an actual presidential campaign before is a non-starter, and you want someone who would sufficiently unify everyone.  You don’t want a noob.  So that leaves out Jeb Bush.  Really, if we are going to have a compromise candidate, it is going to be one of the following:

• Dick Cheney
• Sarah Palin
• Mike Huckabee

Those three are the only ones who have had their feet held to the fire and know what is required to get the job done.  (There is also the aforementioned Dan Quayle and George HW Bush, but we are trying to find someone who can win)  My preference is for Palin, but I think Cheney could do the job equally well, and be an excellent President also.  Both would be acceptable to conservatives and the Tea Party.  Cheney would also be acceptable to the “establishment”, with only the question of his age and health a hindrance (he is 71 and his blood pumps by virtue of an electronic device – he literally has no pulse!).  Probably Huckabee would be the most acceptable to everyone – while his record as Arkansas Governor is more moderate than one would like, he would still have Tea Party support.  I suspect if a compromise was thrashed out, his name would be the one that emerged.

But of course, I still want Palin.  Who should have run in the first place.

How possible is a brokered convention?  Never discount the possibility that, if Gingrich fails on Super Tuesday or later, that he runs a “kamikaze” campaign, ie. he stays in the race, but declares that he wants a brokered convention and people should vote for him if they want someone other than Romney or Santorum.  It’s so crazy that it might work…

As with any dictatorship, how well this goes will depend on how benevolent a dictator Banks plans to be.  Is he now an enthusiastic convert to smaller government, lower taxes, choice in health and education, property and self-defence rights… or is he going to revert back to his moralising, Muldoonist past?  The C&S agreement recently hammered out was a good start, but is Banks going to be any more than a National-But-More-Staunch MP like his predecessor Hide?  Or is he going to provide the electorate with a real alternative?

Frankly I would rather a newly Muldoonist Party than a tepid classical liberal one.  I only wish all my friends on the Right would now stop playing 1% politics and join National, where they could make a real difference and play for 50%.  (That’s how you win, you know…)

Robin Bain was probably, like most of us, not a perfect person, but there is almost no evidence that he killed his family.  The real killer, his son David, should be wished well and left alone with his demons, but he should not get a cent to compensate him for what was a just sentence for what he did.

*My personal opinion only, I make no claim to know Karam’s mind or mental state.

I love you, my darlings! 

His October Surprise for Obama will be fascinating.  I can’t wait.

The league’s New Zealand director, Alison Stanton, and board member Lisa Manning, both of whom had difficulty establishing breastfeeding, said yesterday that the group’s response, when asked by the council about the bottle-feeding clip, was part of its normal activity: advocating for breast-feeding.

“This question about us being offended [by the bottle-feeding clip] and bullying or demanding that it be taken out – it was a measured response,” said Ms Manning…

“Measured response”?!!  Is that supposed to be a defence?  If you were really advocating for breast-feeding, then why are you complaining about a MAN using the only method available to him?  Positive advocacy means you publicise IN FAVOUR of something, not AGAINST something.  This has got to be the worst attempt at spin I’ve seen since Mitt Romney last opened his mouth and said something.

You’re still both a pair of fascists.

Nobody likes to speak ill of the dead, and it is not my intention to do so here.  But I will state the facts:  The crew were confused as to their position, because their computers had been set up with an incorrect flight path.  They did not know that, but they were aware that something was wrong.  We know this from the black box recording.  However, the crew made the mistake of simply scratching their heads and not doing anything about it.  They did not double check their position with McMurdo.  Furthermore, they continued to fly at an unsafe altitude.  Of course, they were trying to give their passengers a good show, but the fact remains that what they did was against both company policy and safe flying.  They should have immediately increased altitude while they verified their position.  They did not do so, and paid for that decision with their own lives, and the lives of their passengers.

I am sorry for the wives who lost husbands and the children who lost fathers.  But they need to accept that the crew made mistakes and played a part in the tragedy.  They can’t bring their loved ones back by agitating politicians to lay blame exclusively on the airline, when the judgment of the crew was a part of why the disaster occured.