Man, no one’s given me a BJ like this for years:

We had been told that [Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez] would take a couple of questions from us during the show. Quite a rare opportunity.

We probed him on a deal he struck with London’s mayor.

…

[London mayoral candidate Boris Johnson] has questioned why a country with such poverty is giving to one of the world’s richest capitals.

“This man is stupid,” Mr Chavez told us. “There are poor people in London. I have seen them.”

…

He answered a question on his links with Iran by calling President Ahmadinejad “an extraordinary man”.

He said he could deal with whom he liked and that he did not go round telling the UK prime minister that he could not be friends with the “genocidal George Bush”.

It was classic Chavez – he has never been one to mince his words.

There are a few rote sentences observing how staged and lacking in dissent the event being covered was, of course; that’s how you maintain “objectivity.” But just how “probing” could those questions have been if they could be answered with sassy little quips? A close buddy of mine, an Englishman whose politics are pretty close to mine, likes to raise my blood pressure by sending me links to these things. His comment on this one was “Oh, please….”

Oh, great. I hadn’t noticed that someone got the bright idea of remaking Halloween. And, this being 2007, the major change is that we now have way more backstory about Michael Myers. John Carpenter and Debra Hill kept it blessedly simple thirty years ago–the child had some inchoate evil in him that was crystallized by his sister’s sexual experience. He was a just plain wrong’un.

But that’s not good enough anymore. Now we have to have the over-worked and under-attentive stripper mom, the abusive step-dad, and the bullying meanies at school depicted in exhaustive detail so we Get the Message: What’s scary isn’t primal, unknowable evil. What’s scary is that Child Protective Services doesn’t perform more interventions.

And yes, I’m trashing a movie I haven’t seen. Perhaps it’s well-executed. That doesn’t make the concept any less tiresome.

No surprise here: Yasuo Fukuda will be the new LDP president. He’s the same age (71) as his father, Takeo Fukuda, was when he became prime minister. Oddly for such an insider-driven country, he’ll be the first child to succeed a parent to the position. (There are other children of former prime ministers active in politics, of course–Makiko Tanaka springs readily to mind.) My good friend and politics junkie Jun’ichiro commented the other day that Fukuda is a good technocrat but may not be a leader. I can see that. I’d have liked it if we could have had Taro Aso’s foreign policy approach without his power lust and general jerkitude. Unfortunately, you have to take candidates as they are.

I like confrontation, so Fukuda’s make-nice approach is not one I warm to easily, but I think it may actually work in the LDP’s favor for the next few months. He’s apparently planning to keep most key ministers in the cabinet, so there won’t be another upheaval. And looking outside, the DPJ is open about wanting war (between the ruling and opposition coalitions, I mean), so if Fukuda comes on all friendly, it could make the opposition look petty and mean. Not the best image to have if you want a dissolution of the lower house of the Diet to work in your favor.

BTW, Will Wilkinson has a long post up about research into the moral dimensions of politics. One of his throwaway examples caught my attention:

Haidt’s early research on moralized disgust shows that its cultural manifestations vary. The Japanese apparently find it disgusting to fail their station and its duties.

Well, I don’t know that I would refer to that as a cultural “manifestation” of disgust, exactly. I think it’s more accurate to say that the Japanese are acculturated in such a way as to attach reflexive, visceral disgust to dereliction of duty. Doing what you’re told…being what you’re told…is drilled into people to the point that it becomes second nature, so they tend to flinch with child-like “that’s yucky!” horror when someone harshes the wa. (Many foreigners are driven bonkers by the Japanese tendency, when asked to do something that doesn’t follow the usual rules, to grimace, pull the chin inward, and suck in the breath as if confronted with a slug in the salad.) From that vantage point, it’s interesting to think about how the commentators reacted to Prime Minister Abe’s sudden resignation. Faces registered shock but also revulsion. Of course, that’s just my interpretation based on what I happened to see on television. But I really don’t think I’m projecting.