Asawin Suebsaeng

Ed Koch, left, with President Jimmy Carter in 1978

Koch
Zeitgeist Films
95 minutes

This fiercely honest tribute to Ed Koch, the hard-nosed and exuberant figure who ruled New York City from 1978 to 1989, briskly strings together interviews with the late former mayor, grainy archival footage, harshly critical testimony from Koch's contemporaries, and a rollicking classic-rock soundtrack. The result is a documentary that intrigues and intoxicates like a David Mamet stage play.

The finest moments in the film, which premieres Friday in New York City, focus on Koch's rise to power in the late '70s, when the Big Apple was a powder-keg metropolis engulfed in financial disarray and a crime wave. Koch—a closeted homosexual and iconoclastic liberal—is depicted as the consummate political shark, siphoning off key constituencies during a gang-fight-like mayoral election in 1977. Neil Barsky, a former hedge fund manager and economic reporter for the Wall Street Journal, directs with a gritty cinematic zeal.

Ed Koch spent his final days as he always was: charmingly megalomaniacal. "This belongs to me…Thank you, God," Koch, 88, says as he reminisces about his tenure as chief of the Empire City—where he pissed off scores of feminists, Jews, African Americans, and hardened lefties alike. Overall, Koch is a riveting portrait of a towering and polarizing man.

It's also great fun, so watch it with plenty of buttered popcorn. Trailer here:

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Official White House photo.

According to a guy who's questioned Barack Obama's citizenship, thinks America is headed for a Leninist dictatorship, and has called evolution and other science "lies straight from the pit of Hell," the president and his congressional allies are taking their marching orders from the Constitution...just not the American one.

"I don't know what Constitution that other members of Congress uphold, but it's not this one," Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) said on Tuesday afternoon, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Jim Galloway. "I think the only Constitution that Barack Obama upholds is the Soviet constitution, not this one. He has no concept of this one, though he claimed to be a constitutional lawyer.”

The Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991. For all his years in the public eye, Barack Obama has only ever had mean things to say about the former Communist state. It's pretty clear that there's nothing to suggest that President Obama adheres to the "Soviet constitution." What isn't clear is which Soviet constitution Broun was referring to.

During the seven-decade existence of the Soviet Union, the government approved three separate constitutions. There is the one approved in 1924, which defines the "camp of capitalism" as "national hate and inquality, colonial slavery and chauvinism, national oppression and massacres, brutalities and imperialistic wars." The one adopted in 1936 (also called "Stalin's Constitution") actually pays a lot of lip service to universal suffrage, individual rights, health care, and the like. And the constitution adopted in 1977 (also called the "Brezhnev Constitution") praises the Soviet people, their army, and Vladimir Lenin for winning the Russian Civil War and therefore starting the "epoch-making turn of mankind from capitalism to socialism."

I reached out to the congressman's Washington office to ask which of these three he meant. Perhaps Broun was referring to all of them. I will update this post if I get a response.

h/t Pema Levy

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