Sunday, 26 June 2005

Lining up the redshirts

The Baseball Crank notes that Joe Biden is throwing his hat—or at least his hairpiece—into the ring for 2008, while the SoCons are apparently in the market to coalesce behind a single Republican contender already, according to this piece linked by John Cole—after all, there’s only 1,226 shopping days left before the next presidential election. All hail the permanent campaign.

Of course, the drawback of predicting the “redshirts” at this point is that, unlike in Star Trek (or, in general, when using the Law of Economy of Characters*), you don’t know who is going to buy it until after the fact.

* These two laws intersect in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, where the Valeris character clearly only exists to be one of the villains (and the assassins get dialogue in the transporter scene just so we know who they are when they turn up dead); had Gene Roddenberry not been a complete idiot when it came to drama, the Valeris character would actually have been (as originally scripted) Saavik and her betrayal might have meant something. See, for example, Talia Winters in Babylon 5 (“Divided Loyalties”) or Jayne in Firefly (“Ariel”) for counterexamples.