The Remake of Alfred Hitchcocks' 1963 classic The Birds is playing everywhere.
The original film was itself in select theaters across the country last night, part of TMC's special release of old blockbusters, and sure enough it entertained big screen audiences even as it did 49 years ago with the sudden, furious and even deadly attacks of gulls and crows on all manner of people in Bodega Bay, California, from school children to seamen to small town teacher and high society playgirl. It is too dated, too corny, to scare anymore, but it does entertain and often simply amuses for the cliches and the over-acting.
The remake is actually on the small screen, and is a serialization unfolding over many weeks as the Manhattan-Beltway media elite play the tole of the birds and the intended victims are all in Beantown, all part of Team Romney. Wave after wave of unprovoked attacks which began with isolated incidents of one or two journalists soon grew into mass attacks such as happened during Mitt Romney's London trip, and then into the full-fledged bird frenzies following Romney's press conference ten days ago on the appeasement-infused Cairo Embassy statements on the evils of free speech in America and then following the surfacing of the so-called secret video that had been shopped across the lefty-shpere for two weeks before finding a willing purveyor of old news disguised as new news in David Corn and Mother Jones.
Even previously well-liked and well-cared for birds caught the madness.
The remake is different though. Mitt Romney isn't driving away defeated. No one in the Beantown version of Bodega Bay is driving away. The birds are increasingly seen as pests, ludicrous, loud and absurdly ambitious pests. One character in the original --the elderly ornithologist Mrs. Bundy, played by Ethel Griffies-- says these birds have "brain pans too small to organize a war on people." She was wrong about the 1963 version. She is right abut the 2012 remake.
The birds of Campaign 2012 gather every morning and migrate from their staging ground in Chicago to their targets where they then repeat and repeat and repeat their screeches and caws as they flap their wings with increasing ferocity, flying against the various windows of the lives of ordinary Americans.
The flocks have very little to say about the murder of our ambassador in Libya and about who perpetrated it much less about what ought to have been done to prevent that but which wasn't done.
The flocks have very little to say about the president jetting off to Las Vegas on the day the news of the awful murders occurred in order to raise funds and glasses to the campaign's success.
The flocks wholly ignore a diplomatic gaffe by the president on the status of Egypt even as the president blasts Mitt Romney as a "shoot first, aim later" kind of guy.
In the greatest display of indifference to an easy target, the well-trained crows and the gulls pass over the president's remarkable turn on Letterman wherein the president manages in a matter of less than a minute to declare he doesn't remember the size of the debt he inherited, that most of the debt is held by ourselves, and that the debt isn't a short term problem.
Of course he inherited more than 10 trillion in debt and promptly added more than 5 trillion in new red ink.
Contrary to what the president says, the debt isn't owned by "us," but owned by individuals who have brought the bonds, though if the president treats those bondholders as he did the bondholders of GM, the bonds do belong to "us," meaning to the president's endless prerogative. And as for the short term free pass he thinks he has, he must have forgotten as well the downgrade the debt already brought us last summer and the other downgrades looming as well as the fiscal cliff.
The president reminded us of the deadbeat beseiged by creditors, with the repo man hooking up the car and the foreclosure notices piling up unread on the counter, but who has been offered a new credit card with $3,000 available at 18%. No short term problem there.
His "I don't remember" also brought to mind teenagers on being stopped while driving and being asked by an officer if they had been drinking.
So much was so wrong with that compact bit of disinformation that the flocks might well have grazed upon it for days, but they were busy elsewhere, with a Fox News poll of three states --an outlier-- and the Pew Poll, as opposed to the Gallup, Rasmussen, and AP polls of the same day all of which showed a one point race.
Astonishing behavior by the crows and the gulls, and even by a few conservatives who are afraid of losing their flying licenses.
Even with the mixing of breeds, which Mrs. Bundy assured us in the original could not happen, the remake just doesn't produce the havoc or the fear the makers must have hoped for.
Not only are the big polls --Gallup, Rasmussen and AP-- showing the slow, steady deterioration of Obama's position, but the increasingly clarity of the choice before the country is helping Mitt Romney. "The choice is urgent," Charles Kelser declared on my show Wednesday as he discussed his new book I Am The Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism. "And the stakes could not be higher." People know this. They are acting on that knowledge and will continue to do so, especially with contributions so a variety of conduits. (The best dozen places to invest are listed here, beginning with Romney/Ryan).
There isn't panic but indeed growing confidence, especially among the clear-eyed. Senator Rand Paul, interviewed on my program yesterday, flatly declared that Romney would win, and handily:
You know, I think I’m in the minority here, but I think the election is over. I think that Romney has already won. The people really are tired of the debt, they’re tired of irresponsible leadership. I think they’re tired of having 23 million people out of work. So I think you’ll find, and this is my prediction, and of course, I could be wrong. I am fallible. But you remember when Reagan just pulled away from Carter at the end? I think that’s what we’re going to see, is people coalesce and find that the country’s just not headed in the right direction with all this unemployment and economic stagnation, and that they want somebody who’s been in business, somebody who’s run successful businesses and created jobs. I think that’s the way it’s going to break down, simply on that issue, is which way do we take the country – with someone who likes American business, or someone who can’t wait to sort of punish, regulate and tax American business.
The left laughs and laughs at this, knowing that they have to make this birds-blitzkreig work. If they can't punch through the Romney lines now and get a panic started, the next jobs report is coming, heralded by news bits like Fed Ex's grim forecast. More blowups in the Middle East, more news from Libya, more aggression by China against Japan, more $4 a gallon gas, more anything and the tottering house of cards that is Obamaland crashes, and quickly.
So the birds keep swarming. Every single morning. And every single day they are more and more absurd, more and more a series of special effects from another era that are charming to look at and wonder how they ever worked, so crude are the tricks and so hysterical the role-playing.
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