p e n g u i n d e v i l

We all know this, yet another installment of the Lovecraft Film Festival! This year I am actually going to go to two evenings, so just wait until tomorrow when there will be a special music report!

Tonight though, I went to see a couple of movies. Due to arriving a bit late and the in-between movie event, I didn’t have anytime to browse the bazaar vendors. But the movies? First up was Hellboy, my first time on the big screen. I think I have warmed on it a bit since the last/first time that I watched it back in 2006, though my previous comments do remain the same. It is basically a fun action-filled comic book hero movie. The story of a young scientist who heads (with the army) to a small island to try and prevent the Nazi’s (and Rasputin) from opening a portal to the other side and letting terrible destructive beings through. While they generally succeed in their mission, one odd thing does get though, a little baby devil-boy with a giant forearm. He grows up, teamed with some other odd ducks, fighting whatever odd beings appear in the world. Of course, the evil folks who led to him being here in the first place come back to finish the job! It has great sets (though a bit much on the CGI), some good villains, and the Hellboy character is not too bad, though Karl Ruprecht Kroenen is easily the most interesting and compelling character in the film. I am lukewarm to the other paranormals and the romance stuff seems rather out of place, but it’s fun and quite entertaining to watch. I also really like the Ogdru Jahad! If anything is going to come and rain down apocalyptic destruction on the world, they would certainly be my first choice! After the film there was a Q&A with Mike Mignola, which was pretty fun…

And then we stepped into the evenings surprise…. The Dunwich Horror! Now, when I saw that they were playing The Dunwich horror with Dean Stockwell, I assumed that it was Roger Corman’s great 1970 film with Dean Stockwell, as I only knew of that. It wasn’t until minutes before it started when it was mentioned that Jeffrey Combs was in it that I started to realize that something else was going on. Boy was it ever. Something else like the difference between walking on the beach and walking into quicksand! Awful? Stink? This dud was terrible! Bad (no… terrible) script, bad cinematography, bad “sets”, bad casting, bad digital video… And they tried too hard to be corny. The worst was the lame half-assed “Lovecraft” angle! Sure, it sort of had some Dunwich Horror going on, but then they just throw in every Lovecraft reference they could think of, making a naive hodge-podge spoken by people who came across as amateur actors, though they were supposed to be brilliant and respected scientists. Griff Furst was the worst, but the whole thing was bad. I mean, Dean Stockwell was fine and Jeffrey Combs did his usual entertaining “look what a weirdo I can be” shtick, but the cast and acting was just bad. And though the worst was the “the house is the book!” scene, to top it all off they seemed to come too close to the un-lovecraftian good vs evil thing, with our “heroes” even using a pentagram for protection!

In an odd moment I broke out Blind Eye Sees All, which I had been planning on watching for months but somehow hadn’t gotten around to. I owned this on vhs back in the day and this was the first time I’d seen it otherwise (and the first time in probably 15 years since I’ve seen it at all)… Quality-wise it may as well been on vhs still, as it remains red-washed, amateur concert footage, though at least it won’t get worse. Anyway, What am I talking about?

This is the classic Butthole Surfers concert video, comprised primarily of footage from two 1985 Detroit concerts (they actually change between shows back and forth during each song, which is a bit odd and would be unnoticeable if it weren’t for the clothes changing). It is around their classic era for touring, though it predates by a few years my ever had seeing them and does not include either of the famed sights of the nude and painted dancer or the backdrop films. But, it does have: Paul Leary as the core of the band, Gibby (obnoxious as always), and Teresa and King Coffey the dynamic drumming duo, who are about the most entertaining aspect of the film to watch; I find their side-by-side, stand-up, unison drumming to be somewhat entrancing, and of course it provides the backbone and gives a great deal of power and draw to the music. But then, this stuff is filled with power and draw.

The dozen or so snippets from their “bedroom interview” are about as obnoxious and “pretentiously drugged up” as you might expect from them, though it can be somewhat entertaining and I liked some of the dialogue with the interviewer. But in the moments when you get the feeling that someone is trying to think of something nutty to say you start to feel like maybe they could have avoided putting any of this interview in here. But at least you get a sense of what it might be like to hang around with them, for what that’s worth.

The meat of this though is the live footage. The energy and controlled chaos and the brilliant songs, but also the terrible mess and obnoxious subculture artiness brings to mind the terrible false dichotomy of “how have I listened to these guys for so long?” and “how could I not listen to these guys constantly!”. But alas that is where we live when presented with music that is this brilliant.

All sorts of classics are here, especially seeming as this was right about when I started listening to them: The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harveys Grave, BBQ Pope, Cherub, Lady Sniff, Mexican Caravan… Winners all around. Though it does end on a lower note with a dull musical bit that goes on well too long. It is highly worth absorbing the antics, sounds and attitude of these guys. They created many unique musical tangents and this stuff never gets old.

The special features are rather light and they include a concert video from 1991 of Mexican Caravan that I had high hopes for, but it not only sounds terrible, it looks even worse than the main feature. If only they would have included the fabulous Homestyle BBQ video instead (featuring a blistering rendition of Fast), with the wondrous stage show that I am familiar with, as it dates from 1988 which was the year that I first saw them (I actually turned 21 at that concert, the best birthday ever… Until my 40th!)

As one might imagine, even though I haven’t been watching too many movies of late, my lack of attention to the penguindevil has led to having a backlog of movies. Which, of course, means multiple instances of brevity, so here’s a start.

I went and saw, at a theater no less, Willie Nelson’s 4th of July Celebration. Now I don’t know what you’re thinking, in fact I don’t know what I was thinking (okay, a friend asked me to go, and I figured, what the hell). So what is it? Well, it is a bare-bones documentary of a concert 30 years ago where Willie Nelson and a cadre of guest stars get drunker all night long on stage and spend the evening talking, playing music and all of that in front of a big mob of long-haired Texan country folk. The fun is mainly in watching the musicians interact, but there are some entertaining musical bits too. Willie doesn’t seem to be the focus, instead Leon Russell spends pretty much the whole night wandering around the stage with his shirt open and a beer in his hand… He is the centerpiece of this treasure of mid-era (as in, between the great classics of olde and the great crap of new) of country music. Musically, I would say that Waylon Jennings is the most prominent person there, which seems sensible as he is Waylon Jennings, but mind you, I’ve really never heard any music by any of these people before so what the hell do I know. The other artists come and go as a repeating, revolving door of musicians. And really, that sums it up. If you want to watch a bunch of long haired country stars of the 70’s get drunk and put on a little musical festival on stage, then this is for you! The high point is unquestionably the performance of Doug Kershaw. Sure, a mild mannered name, but the guy is some crazy fiddlin’ blend of (the crazy world of) Arthur Brown and Pete Townsend. He put on what is, bar none, the craziest and most incredible musical performance I’ve ever seen. I swear the guy was going to explode right on stage!

And in my new series of weekly beer & movie socials, we actually got around to watching a movie on one of them. We watched High Tension (I’ll give up on the Haute this time). Sadly, I don’t feel I have much to say about it. Which would seem justified as this is the third time that I’ve watched it since I started this blog. But looking back to the two previous mentions of it, I didn’t say much about it then either. Well, what to say? If you actually haven’t seen it yet, then it is a great looking, tense, action and gore filled French slasher film. The brief paragraph I gave it in i possess a stellar convertor… still pretty much sums up my feelings about it.

Oh, where to begin? I found this disc cheap and used (score!) a while back and never got around to touching it until recently. What a blast from the past. In the early 90’s, Amphetamine Reptile was the greatest record label of them all, a half dozen or so of their bands were the meat of my musical meals (Cows, Melvins, God Bullies, Cosmic Psychos, Helmet… And more!). So coming across this DVD, Dope Guns and Fucking up your Video Deck, was a glorious holy grail of time travel back to the youthful days of my mid 20’s!

Totaling 45 videos, divided up in to 4 sections; Vol 1 (1990), Vol 2 (1992), Vol 3 (1994) and Bonus Vids (1994-1997), with terribly annoying interludes between each video (featuring someone who I assume is Tom Hazelmeyer pretending to be a CEO whose corporation just bought AMREP and this is all a promotional tape). Anyway, all of that junk is “must-ff-part” material. But the videos are great! Sure there are some minor dissapointments… Terrible production qualities (they get better as the time goes by), not all the AMREP bands were great… But the high points are must haves!

Where else are you going to find Lubricated Goat’s “In the Raw” (literally…) video, A King Snake Roost video and, yes, you heard me, a glorious four(!) Cows videos…

Cows “Hitting the Wall”

three Cosmic Psychos videos (though none of them are particularly good), two Melvins videos (including the awesome Honey Bucket, filmed in a barn filled with sheep)…

Melvins “Honey Bucket”

and, two actual God Bullies videos(!), which just serve to remind me how badly I need to convert those LP’s to MP3’s!

God Bullies “Cemetery”

Anyway, if you’re in the know, then you know you’ve got to pick this up. If you’re not in the know, then you’ll probably not want to.

Lately we have hit on a block of stuff on Netflix that is obviously stuff that I put in the queue, but have no recollection of queuing it, or even having heard of it. Too much late night film blog reading I imagine. But so far, the stuff isn’t bad, though it does lean a bit too heavily on the drama side. And speaking of drama…

This time around we watched No Way Out, which seems to be Sidney Poitier’s first movie. And a very dramatic tale it is. A story of the racial tension that erupts when a pair of bankrobbers/brothers who are wounded in a shootout get taken to the hospital prison ward. One of them dies there, while under the watchful eyes of his brother and under the care of a black physician. Of course, his brother being rather anger filled and ignorant of quite a few things, accuses the doctor of murder and swears revenge. Sydney Poitier is Dr. Brooks, a young intern who just happens to be assigned to the hospital’s prison ward at the wrong time and Richard Widmark is Ray, a frustrated man who is so blinded by his hatred and desire for vengeance against the world that he is basically incoherent. But not too incoherent to flame this vengeance, from his hospital bed no less! He uses the local femme fatale to make sure that the word of his brothers “murder” spreads to the unsavory part of town where they are from and from there, things take on a new life.

No Way Out features lots of double-crossing, a race riot and plenty of language that I find bewildering to hear in a film, being someone who was raised in the (I wouldn’t’ say racist-free but at least rasicsm “unacceptable”) era following the 1960’s. This film is filled with a stream of slurs and the feeling is akin to watching reruns of All In The Family if you haven’t seen them in many years. I do appreciate all of these old movies about race issues and the light that they tended to show racists in. Though this one is pretty old for that, being from 1950, it still has a lot of “they said what?” moments.

The movie is a waiting game where you watch Poitier having endless slurs, threats and insults heaped upon him (and not just from Ray), and wondering if (or when) is he going to snap. A great film with great drama and tension and some violence. Poitier and Widmark are both great and quite convincing here. Though the contrast between Poitier’s endless caring and Widmark’s endless shallow hostility is almost a bit too much, you do get the feeling that Poitier might cave on his values before Widmark does. Poitier is so compassionate that it seems to overwhelm him at times and he shows a great resolve to ignore what is forced upon him and just continue to do the best job that he can… But as the threats of violence expand their scope, it does start to seem like there is no way out, and how much can we expect the poor doctor to take?

Wondering what all the hubbub had been about, we watched Michael Clayton. As my second George Clooney movie (following O Brother, Where Art Thou? and I liked this one better), I must admit that I can’t hold anything against the guy.

Michael Clayton is a somewhat confusing thriller, as it takes a bit of time to figure out what the hell is going on and who the hell this Michael Clayton guy is, but it becomes apparent that he is some sort of special lawyer who takes care of “problems” for this big law firm. It takes forever for us to see him do anything that shows any of his great ability, as he mainly seems to drive around and fail to convince people of things while his life seems to be heading a bit downhill. But, of course, something does come up. For years his firm has been fighting a class action law suit for a chemical firm against a bunch of farm families, who have lost hundreds of their family members to pesticide poisoning. There is potentially billions of dollars on the line, and the survival of the law firm if anything goes wrong. Well, of course, something does goes wrong, something rather unexpected. The firms high-powered and vicious attorney who is running the case, suddenly realizes that all this stuff that he has spent his life doing is bad stuff and he needs to right this wrong against these farmers… And it becomes time for some major damage control. Clayton is basically told to straighten it out, and of course, the rebellious lawyer is one of Clayton’s closest friends.

Though Michael Clayton made me think often of A Civil Action, another film about lawyers battling limitless corporate greed, they really have little in common (aside from their hostile views towards corporate greed and people who do bad things while turning a blind eye to the realities of what they are doing) as Michael Clayton is a snazzy Hollywood thriller with: car bombs, clandestine surveillance, murder, mob shenanigans, corruption and all sorts of unsavory elements.

Clooney, of course, does a fine job as Michael Clayton, but there are some other good roles: Tom Wilkinson as the attorney gone to the other side is compelling and great, Sydney Pollack (hmmm.. Also in A Civil Action) brings along his usual believability and does a great job as the head of the law firm and Tilda Swinton plays the consul of the chemical company, and does an uncomfortably great job with that. And Tony Gilroy did a good job, especially as a first time director, and it is certainly a good movie, but I’m still not sure why all the Oscar buzz. Maybe the rest of the choices were crap?

What do you get if you take a ship and its crew, put them in hibernation and send them far out across space on a potential rescue mission to locate some folks who contact has been lost with? Then throw in the mystery of not telling them the whole truth about where they’re going and add some unwelcome stranger to the crew who is seemingly an “expert” (through they keep the whole story and their expertise a secret until arriving at the destination). Throw in a mysterious derelict ship and have that destination be an eerie and quiet place where some horrible violence obviously happened. And of course, have that due to some alien force that then unleashes more horrible violence upon these folks? I mean, what movie would you have aside from Aliens?

If you mix Aliens with a healthy dose of Alien, throw in some tastes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, The Shining and Hellraiser… And then cap it off with a generally lame script, you would have this film, Event Horizon. So, yes, it comes across as terribly derivative of a whole slew of films (and not vaguely… There are many scenes here that elicit an immediate “oh, this scene is from… select other movie” reaction), but it’s not all bad. In fact, it is one of my favorite science fiction films (though it doesn’t come close to the above films… Well, except for crappy old Hellraiser. It’s certainly better than that).

Event Horizon, for all of its flaws, is a fun and creepy movie that is also a great sci-fi story. The weakness of the script isn’t too unbearable as the story is presented in a very serious fashion and the cast is generally entertaining, though the two leads didn’t really do it for me. Sam Neill is hokey as always, while Laurence Fishburne doesn’t seem to take this too seriously (who could blame him) as he puts in a rather unconvincing turn as the hard-nosed ship commander, but the others have substantial roles and the movie is pretty action packed, so those performances can easily be overlooked… Especially with all of the violence and action!

While it starts off as pretty hard science fiction, it becomes almost metaphysical as it delves into black holes, other dimensions and alien forces… And though it ends up feeling like a haunted house in space, it somehow loses none of its hard sci-fi feel or starts to come across as corny. I think that Paul Anderson does a darned good job here, especially considering that the only other movies I have seen that he directed were both utter garbage, each almost unwatchable in their hackneyed crappiness, Resident Evil and Aliens vs Predator.

Though it tales a few moments to come to terms with the influences on display here (some must have been intended as homages), and it can be a tricky beast to pull off both serious science fiction and good horror in the same film, Event Horizon has a good back-story and after a point the movie comes into its own and it all works out pretty well. As a horror movie, it definitely has good tension, some great gore and a healthy dose of the unknown. As a Science Fiction film, it has some interesting science, great looking special effects (though some of the cgi is a bit too cgi-ish), and the all-important spaceships look quite good and not hokey at all… Though there is a bit of a mixed blessing as when the rescue ship comes into contact with the Event Horizon, the huge scale of the derelict ship is quite impressive… But it oddly seems quite small on the inside…

As I mentioned in my brief coverage last year, it still does feel like a half hour had been removed. I looked it up on wikipedia today where someone, in fact, stated that 30 minutes were excised due to it being perceived as excessively gory. Though it is still quite gory, I am always bothered by ripping that much out of a completed film and it would be nice if they would have been able to put the movie back together for the DVD. The added gore would be fun and I’m sure it would help out the movie with that strange sense of incompleteness that one gets from it. All in all, it is still a highly re-watchable Sci-Fi/Horror film.

Oh, take me back… So we watched the infamous Heavy Metal Parking Lot. A great little film (about 15 minutes long) that a couple of guys made interviewing people in the parking lot of a Judas Priest and Dokken concert in 1986. Though this was the period where I began to move away from metal (thanks primarily to the horror I felt upon hearing “turbo lover” and seeing Priest’s “fruit striped leather” look), watching this really rings true with me and brought me back to those folks I hung out with back in the early 1980’s (“it’s ’cause he’s evil, man, evil” Dave Murphy on King Diamond circa 1984) and, of course, seeing Judas Priest at the Memorial Coliseum in 1982. Though I didn’t spend any time in the parking lot. A good thing too, as the parking lot here is filled with lots of drinking, cursing, feathered hair, cool t-shirts (though I wondered about the Rolling Stones), shirtless guys and all of that good stuff.

The folks who populate Heavy Metal Parking Lot are all pretty drunk and excited, and nice and friendly (though “zebraman” (shown above) does have some harsh words for punk rock and Madonna). The trouble with this film is that most youngen’s now think of it as a comedy, when for some of us it is more a slice of our youth being offered up for display. Though I guess that all teen scenes seems pretty funny in retrospect… And the movie can be pretty funny.

There are a lot of special features, most of which aren’t that great… Neil Diamond Parking Lot is somewhat entertaining, but Harry Potter Parking Lot is pretty dull. One of the features that is somewhat interesting is the HMPL reunions. They find and interview 4 folks who were in the movie, none of whom had seen it (or even known about it) until recently, if at all. So it’s somewhat fun to see these folks 20ish years later. But they were more fun in the feature.

The best part though is one of the special features, Heavy Metal Basement. Some 40-something guy (Jim Powell of Metal Grind Records?) walks us down into his basement, which is an slice of 1980’s metal heaven… Thousand of LP’s, posters, bits of memorabilia, a wall covered with interesting beers cars, a kiss pinball machine… And more. But the high point is that he has a stack of records on the floor, and he goes through them one by one. There are about 65 records in all and they are all Judas Priest records. They actually let him spend 28 minutes guiding us through the history of Priest, record by record. I thought it was pretty neat, lots of bootlegs and all… But I wanted him to move on to the rest of his records. One of these days, I’ll put all my crap in a room like this too…

A young wife, unsatisfied. A young husband, naive yet kind. A hardened criminal on the loose. An old bitter ne’er-do-well… And a town so dull that it couldn’t be filmed in color. These are not the elements for a day that turns out well. But, alas, all of these come together in a great tragedy befitting the works of Shakespeare! Lorna is Russ Meyer’s first attempt at making a “regular” dramatic film (meaning a non-nudie) and here Meyer has created one of his most classic films. Filled with longing, lust and betrayal. All against his standard backdrop of a colorless, tired poverty.

Lorna (played by “Lorna Maitland”, also the star of his greatest film, Mudhoney) is a sad and lonely figure. A year married to James, a man who loves her dearly but ranks a little too high on the ignorant goodie-two-shoes scale: decent, polite and dull. His promises of getting her out of this dead-end town have yet to come to fruition and though he studies diligently to become a CPA, she feels neglected and let down. This life of spending her time feeling alone and saving dollars in a jar with the hopes of buying a new dress is not the wanton glory that she had hoped for. It is all much too dull for dear Lorna, who dreams of the bright lights, flowing liquor and night-life of the big city. Instead she is stuck living in this secluded swamp shack on the edge of a desolate little town where there is nothing to do with her nights but feel bored and ignored.

Of course, generally her days are boring too, sitting home by herself with nothing to do as James works away at the salt pit all day. He works there with his friend, the local bad boy Luther (played by the great Hal Hopper, also to be in Mudhoney), a friend who spends his days dreaming and drinking of good old Lorna.

This particular day is Lorna’s 1st wedding anniversary and as her husband sets off to work, his lack of acknowledgment of the day just aggravates her growing boredom and bitterness. After he sets off to work with Luther and his dull-witted pal Jonah, Lorna heads off to wander the countryside. After taking a quick dip in the river she dozes off in the grass, unaware of the excitement that is soon to come her way. See, the previous evening a violent criminal escaped from the local prison and has been making his way across the countryside. Stumbling across this young lady laying in the grass, he being violent and fresh from 3 years in prison, well… You know what happens next. As he forces himself upon her, she fights at first, but then the long forgotten feelings of excitement overwhelm her and soon she is not only partaking in this ravishment, but she actually falls for the guy!

Over at the salt pit, as this is going on, Luther’s drunken comments about Lorna are slowly beginning to overwhelm Jim’s mild-mannered ways. As things begin to heat up between them, things heat up back home, as Lorna invites her new pal over to the house. Obviously, all of these situations are headed for an unsavory conclusion! Lorna is actually a bit less amoral than most of Meyer’s other films. Though, yes, there are sexual assaults, fisticuffs, drunkenness, and violence, there is also heart-felt apology, regret, remorse and kindness. It is a fine moralistic little tale. Oh yeah, and it has Lorna in it.

No, I don’t know why I watch these political documentaries either. Sure, the recent ones are bearable in that, “it’s all a lost cause, but at least everyone knows it” kind of way. But some of these? They hurt. Tonight I watched One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern. Man, what a harsh trip. Sure, there are endless documentaries about the good guys (those who actually uphold the laws of the nation and work to benefit “the people”) losing out to the bad guys (those who see the government as nothing but a device to funnel tax money into their own pockets and have no regard for anything except furthering their own power through whatever lies, misrepresentation and law-breaking are needed), but this goes farther back then most, as it is the story of George McGovern and his presidential campaign of 1972.

From the looks of it, had he and his group been somewhat more professional and prepared, then we quite possibly could have avoided: the last couple of years of the Vietnam War, the divisive economic “redistribution” of Reaganomics, the terrible selling off of America to foreign powers to pay for unconstitutional wars (that only exist to keep the masses in fear and stuff the pockets of the white house and it’s associated war profiteers), both of the “gulf wars” and the thousands of American lives snuffed out in the pursuit of oil possession and getting a second American possession in the Middle East to back up Israel… The mind boggles at how many hundreds of thousand of lives (or millions if we had prevented the dirty deeds of Kissinger) could have been saved and how many hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of American dollars could have gone to secure the people, industry and economy of the United States, rather than get laundered through the Department of Defense into the pockets of corporate interests. So much was at stake, and the good guys lost. I find it humiliating that in seven of the ten Presidential elections of my lifetime, the “average voter” has failed to even try to see through the spin and has been hornswoggled into voting against themselves to put a Republican into the White House. Maybe that would have changed with a McGovern victory, but then, maybe not.

McGovern tried hard, he meant well and he was fighting on the behalf of honesty, the people and doing the right thing. But a lot of people aren’t really interested in stuff like that. As Dick Gregory said, “once you’ve been in the dark for so long, the light hurts your eyes”. The title of this movie really sums up the feeling that you get watching it. I may be overly optimistic in saying that the despair, alienation, greed, dishonesty and general poverty of the 1970’s and 1980’s might have all been avoided had the McGovern group (and I don’t say the Democratic party, because you don’t get the feeling that the party wanted McGovern anyway) spent more time on thinking about how to win the election, rather than just win the nomination, but that is the feeling that I came away from this with. Of course, one might argue that they fell victim to Republican dishonesty, like the Democrat’s of 1968, 1980, 2000 and 2004, so it didn’t matter what they did anyway. But I don’t know.

Well, sure, Dickie and Kissmyassinger, but who’s that behind them?

Oh, him? I guess he learned from the best.

In One Bright Shining Moment we trace McGovern from his younger days growing up during the depression through his days as a bomber pilot in WW2, his brief stint as a minister, his time in the Kennedy white house (where he served as director of the Food for Peace Program), his time in the senate and his staunch and continual (well, except for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution) opposition to the Vietnam war and then forward to the great ups and downs of the debacle of the 1968 convention, Kent State, the seeming (yet fleeting) greatness of the 1972 convention, the missteps that followed it and his resounding defeat at the hands of Nixon. I do find it somewhat surprising, considering that I was five at the time of the 1972 election, that until this evening I knew nothing about George McGovern except for his name.

Told through lots of footage from the time and plentiful interviews with McGovern himself, Gore Vidal, Howard Zinn, Gloria Steinem and the wonderful Dick Gregory, who has the best, most profound and boldest statements to make of all of them. This film is another re-eye-opener to how American politics really works, to the general corruption of our two-party system, a re-introduction to the pervasive power of greed and a testament to the self-induced ignorance of the average person. Though it was a bright and shining moment, it certainly wasn’t the light at the end of the tunnel. On the bright side, the grass-roots upheaval that lead to his nomination, four years later led to the election of the best president of modern times, Jimmy Carter. Unfortunately, Carter turned out to actually be too good and honest a person to be an American President… And with help from the Republicans once again (can’t they just win an election honestly?), this time conspiring with the Ayatollah Khomeini to keep our citizens hostage extra long to hurt Carter’s chances (strangely similar to Kissinger’s tactics of killing the Vietnam peace process to hurt the Democrat’s presidential hopes in 1968, a mere dozen years before), the Democrat’s were out for the next 12 years… And the office of the President would never be the same.