Movies about the Iraq war are dying at the box office, as an article in the New York Times noted this week. The Valley of Elah, Rendition, Lions for Lambs and now the MTV-produced Stop-Loss have each sunk without a trace as audiences stayed away in droves. Now Lionsgate is trying to break the spell with The Lucky Ones, a stateside road picture modeled on Hal Ashby’s Vietnam-era The Last Detail and despite high marks from critics who’ve seen it, the producers are understandably trepidatious.

The president of the studio is quoted saying “nobody’s going to movies that look like homework”; people are sick of war (as polls indicate); and those who might want to see a film about it are leery of having it all explained to them by Hollywood liberals like Susan Sarandon (the mother of the slain soldier in Elah), Meryl Streep (Lions) and Sarandon’s husband, Tim Robbins, one of the stars of The Lucky Ones. Though it could also be that people just want a happy ending.

The 1973 Last Detail was not a hit. It got good reviews (notably for Jack Nicholson’s memorable performance as Navy Sgt. Billy “Bad Ass” Buddusky: “I am the motherfucking shore patrol!”) but ended on a dire note, in keeping with those dire times. Though the script (by Robert Towne) never mentions Vietnam, the war’s shadow falls over its doomed characters, and informs their hatred of the military. It was Ashby’s 1978 Coming Home that connected with audiences. It was a classic wounded-soldier story, a romantic-triangle film and a hell of an advertisement for cunnilingus.

It was also made three years after the war ended and no one needed convincing that Vietnam had been a fiasco, and taken a terrible human toll. With no end in sight, the war in Iraq is one rabbit hole a lot of moviegoers would rather avoid — especially on a date night. (Might I suggest more cunnilingus?) But without the draft, the nation faces a different divide than the one that existed over the Vietnam war. How many people do you know who have served, or have children who have served? The Iraq war is, in part, a class issue, as demonstrated daily by the candidates who oppose it but must dance around the delicate issue of the brave men and women who etc. It’s not their kids who are dying.

Maybe when this mess is finally over there will be some Coming Home equivalent, or even better: something along the lines of William Wyler’s immortal post-WW II film, The Best Years of Our Lives. That film managed to do the impossible: cross class lines, heal broken families and even make Americans take a hard look at soldiers with missing limbs, and contemplate their own loss. Maybe somebody could just try and remake that film. I see Bob Dylan in the Hoagie Carmichael role…

Do you a remember an episode of the Twilight Zone that featured Billy Mumy as a farmboy named Anthony who had special kinetic powers? On a whim he could put an extra head on an animal or change the weather, and when his experiments went awry — as they did when he turned a man into a human jack-in-the-box — he sent them into the cornfield. The adults who lived on the farm with him were scared of him, because he could also read their thoughts, and whenever he did anything gruesome they would force themselves to smile and say, “That’s a real good thing what Anthony did!”

I thought of that episode the other day watching the regulars on CNN interact with Lou Dobbs. The once mild-mannered business reporter has turned into a bloviating machine in recent years as his obsession with illegal immigration has made his show a ratings juggernaut, and the Dobbs brand a household word. He writes books, he has a radio show, and he is fond of answering email from adoring fans. “You are a breath of fresh air!” read a typical Valentine from last evening’s cable broadcast. “Thanks for holding Democrats and Republicans accountable.”

Whatever CNN’s faults (and they are legion), most of its political reporters are sober, objective types and when they appear interacting with Dobbs, as they must, they smile and nod and don’t scream what many of them must be thinking (“Shut up already, you pompous windbag!”) because, like those folks on the farm, they are afraid — afraid of his following. His show averaged about a million viewers in March, about a half a million less than the network’s 2000-year-old-man, Larry King, and significantly less than Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, who enraged about three million people a night that month, mostly with footage of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. If they aren’t nice to Lou he might just up and move to Fox.

Not that he would necessarily fit in there. As a self-proclaimed defender of the middle class, Dobbs loves to tweak the US government for its dealings with China, or US corporations for shipping jobs oversees — unpopular positions at the Murdoch owned, business-friendly Fox. But he likes his vendettas almost as much as O’Reilly does and for good old-fashioned Obama hating, he gets marks for persistence. Last night’s panel of regular suspects (former Huckabeee flack Ed Rollins, Clinton-friendly Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin, and Clinton-pledged superdelegate Robert Zimmerman) provided the amen chorus before the backdrop of Dobbs’s question of the evening: “Do you believe there is a media bias against Hillary Clinton in favor of Barack Obama?”

Dobbs is best known, though, for frettin’ about our friends south of the border. His broadcast is a litany of NAFTA-bashing, drug-smuggling stories and decent folks who’ve had enough of wetbacks stealing their jobs. His gravest nightmare is probably captured in this video which features a norteno of the future recruiting accountants and programmers from the sidewalk, where they have lined up, looking for work (“But you must speak Java”). Me, I keep wishing CNN would send this guy to the cornfield. When he got there he’d find out that everyone spoke Spanish. After all, America runs on Mexican.

As readers of this space know, I like my political palaver better than most. I wake up to NPR, and spend part of my afternoon with the pedantic Wolf Blitzer and the Best Political Team on Television; I always stop to watch Mark Shields and David Brooks on Jim Lehrer’s show and sometimes go to bed with Rachel Maddow. (Not literally, of course. Her bio confirms what the suit and haircut she sports on Keith Olbermann’s show led me to believe: that she is, as Russell Crowe said of Jody Foster, “playing for the other team.”)

But even I am weary of the Clinton-Obama battle, and the prospect of this dragging on until June fills me with ennui. This week saw some killer endorsements for our man in black (first Bill Richardson, then PA Senator Bob Casey), as well as calls from other party machers (and Obama backers), Sen. Patrick Leahy and Rep. Christopher Dodd for Hillary to quit her campaign.

As they say here in Brooklyn: It’s going to happen.

First, as much as I wish we could lay down our arms and get to the business of Republican bashing, Hillary Clinton has every right to stick around and spend as much of her donors’ money as she wants. The fact that it is statistically impossible for her beat Obama on delegates, barring a disaster (and polls indicate that the Wright contretemps wasn’t it) that makes superdelegates run away from him. Second, the robotic business is real: she literally can’t stop herself. There is no off switch if you’re a Clinton. You just keep going and going, as she learned up close and personal at the White House, watching her husband’s endless campaign.

“The main thing,” as Bill famously said, “is never quit, never quit, never quit.” I run, therefore I am — it’s emblazoned on the family crest. I was in the minority, at least among the Democrats I know, who thought he would have done us all a huge favor if he had stepped down after he admitted to lying about Monica Lewinsky. Gore would have been president long enough to convince everyone he could do the job (instead of standing, stricken, through much of his campaign, afraid to associate himself with the administration he had just served), Bush never would have been elected and we certainly wouldn’t have invaded Iraq.

Well, nap time’s over. Whoever emerges the victor from this campaign (and even if you don’t agree that black is the new president, he’s almost certainly going to be the new presidential candidate, bitch) should be able to beat McCain. He just released his first national campaign ad that features footage of him in captivity during the Vietnam War (Thomas Edison introduces the use of sound in motion pictures first) and employs the voice of actor Powers Boothe. Boothe, it has been noted, most recently played an evil Dick Cheney-like vice-president who tries to steal the government from a black president in 24. He also played Jim Jones in a made-for-TV movie about Jonestown. Jones taught people what it meant to drink the Kool-Aid, and he, too, was fond of saying things like, “We’re Americans and we’ll never surrender!”

We were vacationing at an eco-tourist resort on the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica a few years ago (where the picture of me sitting barefoot to your left there was taken), learning about the rain forest and the peninsula’s micro climate when we weren’t drinking fruit juice and relaxing. The resort had a naturalist on staff who would take you out and introduce you to the many worlds beneath the surface of everything — the colonies of cutter ants, the fruit bats that swarmed the skies at dusk. it was a little hair-raising at times to learn just how much life was teeming all around you.

Because of its proximity to Southern California (the Osa is a straight shot, via plane, from LAX) and the excellent surfing to be found on its beaches, the place got a lot of Hollywood traffic. The guide told us about one tour he gave to a famous movie producer, a one-man show in keeping with the producer’s schedule and need for exclusivity. This mogul was famously ADD and grew flustered as the guide explained in great detail what was going on in the ecosystems at his feet and above his head. “Too much information!” he shrieked at our hapless docent, putting his hands over his ears like that fellow in The Scream. “Can’t you just make it simple?”

This was clearly a man who had heard too many high-concept pitches but our guide was obliging and started giving the producer the bare bones that’s-a-bird-and-that’s-a-bee version of his tour, but before long he found himself on the receiving end. His guest began bragging about his sexual conquests — from the models in surfing magazines to A-list movie stars — none of which the guide gave a damn about. “I wanted to cover my ears and yell back at him: ‘Too much information!'”

Having heard yet one more report about newly inaugurated New York governor David Paterson’s life as a legally blind buccaneer, I’m starting to appreciate how he felt. In the wake of the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal, Paterson thought it best to talk frankly about his own sexual past before he was sworn in, and in a bizarre news conference, the former lieutenant governor and his wife answered questions about their past infidelities. Then it turned out that there may have been more than one extramarital adventure (bringing to mind one of David Letterman’s Top Ten Eliot Spitzer Excuses: “Have you ever been to Albany?”).

Now he would like us to know that he also used pot and coke — okay, I got the message! If you want to get the party started, call the governor. I’d just like to say that if getting high and messing around was all it took to get appointed to political office, I should have been king of the world a long time ago. But for the time being, can’t we just give it a rest? Unless you were using the public’s money to cover up your shenanigans like the mayor of Detroit, I don’t really care what (or who) you were doing. Last I heard, New York State has a $5 billion budget deficit. Why don’t you work on filling that hole, and leave the partying to the folks in New Jersey?

I had lunch with my old friend David Talbot last week. He was my boss at Salon and my editor at a number of places before then. Last year David published an illuminating book about JFK & RFK, Brothers:The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, which championed Bobby as one of the first of his brother’s assassination conspiracy theorists. Before he himself was assassinated under shadowy circumstances.

We talked of Obama. I had just seen his speech on race and David, who has the same hopes for the candidate that I do (a president we can finally believe in again) said, “He needs a Bobby.” The younger Kennedy was the guy who could do the street fighting while his older sibling played statesman and kept his campaingn, for the most part, on a higher plane. When the Clintons, or whomever, sling mud and Obama retaliates, the press and his detractors react by saying, “Ah, he’s just like them! Politics as usual after all.”

I thought of David’s words this afternoon as I watched the latest bit of Clinton mud fly. It was Bill, Hillary’s own personal Bobby, getting his hands dirty again as he addressed a veterans group in North Carolina. “I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country,” said the former president. “And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.”

Gee, what stuff could that be? And I wonder which two candidates he means?

Rather than let the candidate himself respond, retired Air Force Genreral Tony McPeak flung the dirt back. “I grew up, I was going to college when Joe McCarthy was accusing good Americans of being traitors, so I’ve had enough of it,” McPeak said. The Clintons of course screamed outrage (Uncle Joe is Satan for members of the old left, though a lot of Obama’s younger supporters might be hard pressed to tell you who he was) but what I thought was most interesting was seeing Obama, standing on the stage with his arms folded, while McPeak took his wacks. Maybe instead of one Bobby, Obama will find a chorus of them. Critics of the critics, fighting the armies of the night.

Sure, Obama looked a little awkward letting someone else fight his battle for him. But as Bill Richardson said, standing with the senator at another rally when he endorsed the “once in a lifetime” candidate, his speech Tuesday contained “the eloquence, sincerity and optimism we have come to expect of him.” It’s hard to handle all that and a switchblade, too.