Chris Dodd a throwback after SOPA & PIPA

Chris Dodd is chairman of MPAA - Motion Picture Association of America. He's best known as a plain ol' politico, though.

A Democrat should know better. A Democrat shouldn't align himself with fat cat interests against a groundswell of popular will.

Chris Dodd looks like William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes trial. He comes off like Bowie Kuhn of baseball in the 1970s.

Reading Kuhn's memoirs, you can see he knew what happened. Kuhn wrote about the legal setbacks of baseball owners in the same light as the South losing the Civil War. It's not often a political setback reveals such a clear dichotomy of winner/loser.

We have a fresh example in the loss (at least for now) of SOPA and PIPA. Their pathetic intrusions on the people's will can join the Confederacy. They were tabled by political leaders in Washington D.C.
Well-placed advocates on their behalf, like Dodd, may be walking around mumbling now, disoriented by a changing world.

Dodd unlike the late Kuhn seems a little dazed. He'll be mumbling a while longer, unsure why the self-fashioned entitled folks like the Hollywood interests can't simply shove through legislation favorable to them.

I thought Dodd was an odd choice to head the Hollywood advocacy group. He's a politician with no ties or special insights with the moviemaking folks to my knowledge. He was just a white-haired politician.
It makes sense to me now, his selection as head of MPAA. He was the "hired gun" to pull strings in the Beltway with his fellow heavy-hitters. He probably knows as much about moviemaking as I do.
He knows the slimy world of power plays in D.C. He knows the levers.

But in the recent celebrated power move, this Democrat who should know better got his lunch handed to him. Just as bad as his failed lobbying was his reaction in the immediate aftermath. Was it denial or ignorance?

Much has been written of Dodd's flailing in recent days, but I think I have something fresh to offer. Dodd was clueless enough to go on the O'Reilly Factor (Bill O'Reilly, Fox News) and think he could embarrass the host with a quote. You simply don't win a jousting match with O'Reilly. Or if you do, it won't see the light of day on this taped program.

Dodd confronted O'Reilly with an O'Reilly quote that I'm quite sure was accurate. O'Reilly has techniques not to get cornered. He shouted down Dodd at the end. One technique is to ask the accuser questions until the accuser finally can't be certain (or sits mute).

"Where did I say it?" O'Reilly said with bluster.

"I believe it was on your show," Dodd sputtered.

"Wrong!" O'Reilly shouted triumphantly, as if he had shown Dodd to be totally wrong.

The tenor of this exchange was what you'd expect when a confrontational Democrat goes on Fox News. Beware, or simply stay off that network. Dodd didn't know any better.
He came away from the SOPA/PIPA debacle just as clueless.

The white-haired denizen of D.C. became head of the Hollywood lobby weeks after "retiring" from his elected role. He was a five-term U.S. Senator from Connecticut. He was a presidential hopeful for a while in 2008. He seemed pretty harmless to me then.
I didn't lose any sleep over his seeming involvement in the subprime mortgage crisis, though maybe I should have.

With MPAA his intrusion into our lives seemed more direct or at least more personal. He was a hired gun for Hollywood to protect its interests at the expense of a free and open Internet.

A war of sorts had to be declared. At least for now, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) looks like the Confederacy.
General Lee was a white-haired old man too.

Dodd talked like he was concerned about piracy but this has nothing to do with "talk like a pirate day." Like much questionable legislation it was a wolf in sheep's clothing.

No one likes piracy. Sometimes interests conflict in a way that demands close analysis beyond the inflections of a word like "piracy." Often the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Intellectual property isn't like real property. The word "property" suggests something essential to our well-being. But we can live without movies and songs, unlike food and shelter. My life isn't better for Hollywood having released such tripe in the '70s as "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" and "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea."
Songs like "Elvira" drag down our IQ.

We all know artists deserve a certain level of protection. But my concern is for the actual artists, the people often at the bottom of the food chain, and not the business interests that end up gobbling up those rights.
It's the business interests that enlist the likes of Dodd. And we who are enriched immeasurably by the Internet don't care much about them.

In the past, the masses might not have been able to confront a well-oiled (with money) lobbying effort rammed through by the chest-thumping Dodd. But now we're living in a new world.

Dodd is left dazed along with perhaps many of his Beltway cronies. He gave stunningly inartful quotes in a Fox News interview - not O'Reilly this time. He basically came right out and said. . .well, I'll quote him: "Don't ask me to write out a check for you when you think your job is at risk, and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake."

And more: "Those who count on Hollywood for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them."

One critic dismissed such statements as "general sliminess and hypocrisy."

So, let's move on? No so fast. A petition quickly sprouted, using the power of the web of course, to get Dodd investigated for bribery. If the words he chose don't smack of bribery, or aren't bribery per se, there's no such thing.

In a span of 48 hours, 17,000 signatures were garnered. The effort swelled on the White House "We the People" website. The petition suggests an "open admission of bribery."

I knew I needn't hold my breath on the outcome of this. It's a very effective shot across the bow, to be sure, kicking a guy when he's down also, but don't expect formal action to be taken against the beleaguered old Senator from Connecticut.

The inside players in D.C. are running scared the way it is. "The old ways are fading."

We can just feel amused when the politicians play their partisan games, sniping at each other and looking for photo-ops, but please leave our Internet alone.

It was a Republican who sponsored SOPA: Lamar Smith. I might expect a devious move to be made by a Republican. That's my bias.

But SOPA and PIPA broke down as non-partisan, or as more of a conflict between old and new, entitled and non-entitled, moneyed and modest - not as Democrat and Republican, progressive or tea party.

Normally we see political grandstanding as a mild irritation. We proceed with our lives. We often don't care much about these hamsters running in their treadmills. But don't touch our quality of life please.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) were going to be monumental intrusions into our trailblazing world of the Internet. What's scary is how close they came to being ramrodded through.
The power players were banking on the usual public inattention.

But the world is changing. The Internet functions in a bottom-up way, not top-down. It is the most uplifting grassroots phenomenon you can imagine. And Washington D.C. isn't sure it should feel comfortable with it.

Washington is populated by up-in-years men not so different from the baseball owners of the '70s who had their lunch handed to them.

I read Kuhn's memoirs and came away with a better opinion of the man than I had previously. He was a lawyer basically who represented the owners. He did his job. He made the "Confederacy" analogy.

I wonder if Dodd will ever wake up and smell the coffee. He's in a daze now. I wonder if the cigar-chewing fat cats of Hollywood want to fire him. He's wandering in his thoughts like he's just been hit in the head with a frying pan (like in a Hollywood slapstick short).

He said the groundswell of web-based opposition to SOPA and PIPA was "an abuse of power." It's the power of the people, Chris, which you should recognize as a Democrat.

He so openly spoke of trying to buy legislation. I suspect he's disoriented because he knows he lost so completely. You may join General Lee, you annoying anachronism of a politico.

The Internet groundswell shocked politicians and caused some to switch sides, including PIPA co-sponsor Senator Marco Rubio, with tail between legs I presume.

Rubio is a darling of Fox News. How can Fox now explain Rubio's "finger to the wind" behavior, suggesting spinelessness?

Well, Rubio is actually doing what we want politicians to do. We don't elect them to be geniuses, we elect them to reflect the will of the people.

The masses got on board with the Internet and made sure the Internet wasn't going to be compromised by the big and amorphous interests of the likes of MPAA or RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). These are many-headed hydras that don't promote copyright in an organic way.

We've seen for a long time that such interests use copyright as a means to block, censor and regulate our civil liberties. These interests didn't even approve of the player piano.

President Obama showed wisdom about all this. He expressed skepticism about the two measures in question. Is that why some Republicans supported them? Lamar Smith is a Republican. And Marco Rubio.

But in the end, this wasn't Fox News vs. MSNBC or the tea party vs. George Soros, or Glenn Beck vs. a whole lot of people. All that stuff is a circus. We can be amused by it.

SOPA and PIPA would have impacted our lives onerously. So we collectively said to the likes of Dodd, "Back off." It worked.

But let's keep watching our backs.

- Brian Williams - morris mn Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com