Free Republic

I agree that in assigning something as “the worst” it can’t be just schloky bad like “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”. It has to be a movie that was intended to be good with names associated with it that had done well before and/or did well afterwards. To me, the worst movie I ever saw was 1968’s SECRET CEREMONY starring Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow. This was Farrow’s first release after the tremendous success she had with ROSEMARY’S BABY and there was much anticipation that this would be a worthy next step and the night I went to this movie the theatre was packed. It turned out to be the first movie I ever attended that people actually walked out of in droves. By the end of the movie (I stayed until the end thinking, mistakenly, that it HAD to get better) over half the audience had left. A close second has to go to Jeremy Irons’ DEAD RINGERS from 1988. This was another movie with an actor that I liked that had the audience walking out on.

Score one for those supporting the law as these "victims" took matters into their own hands!

I wrote my brother in Indiana about this and he provided us with this account:

I can offer a little help, but not sure if there would be any stories online about this event. It's about when Rick McIntyre (R) ran against incumbent Frank McCloskey (d) for the 8th Congressional District in the House of Representatives. I'm pretty sure it was the 1984 election.

The district is pretty evenly divided between Democrats (mostly in the urban Evansville area) and Republicans (most of the rest of the largely rural district). McCloskey was not well liked at all by Republicans, and he'd apparently dissed some of his base by '84, so the vote really did come down pretty much to the wire. Initial counts had McIntyre in the lead, however, though exactly what the margin was I don't remember without digging through some old correspondence. Whatever the actual numbers were, it was fairly clear that McIntyre had won, but because it was relatively close a recount was called for. The recount also resulted in a Republican victory.

In the years since I've talked with people who were directly involved in the fracas, and here's a summary of what I learned. Given that Washington wasn't happy with the loss of another democratic seat, they decided to send their own officials (read "democrats") to Indiana to count the ballots again. Those in the know related to me that this group tried counting using a variety of criteria, but however they twisted and turned McIntyre still won. Finally they arrived at a McCloskey victory by throwing out any vote on a hand ballot in which any part of a mark went outside the circle or square next to the candidate's name. The balloting instructions were to place an X inside the square (or circle, depending on the ballot used) next to the candidate's name. Obviously, scores of people will allow a millimeter or so of an X to cross the boundary of the square, so that even if the center of the X was placed solidly in the middle of the square, because a microscopic part of the X landed outside the box they'd consider the ballot invalid. By doing this they ended up with an EXTREMELY narrow "victory" for McCloskey.

These shenanigans were, of course, challenged, and the immediate result was that our district faced taxation without representation for several months (I seem to recall a revolution taking place over something similar once long ago), and the end result was that McCloskey was "declared" the winner by the 99th Congress pursuant to H. Res. 146. McCloskey finally took his seat on May 1, 1985.

Because the race had been so ugly and the aftermath so badly handled, McIntyre abandoned politics (many felt he had a very bright career ahead of him) and continued in his law practice in Bedford until he was appointed a judge. He has been an admirable judge in Lawrence County ever since.

To his credit, and possibly because there had been so much ranor over the election, McCloskey served our district respectably well after 1985. He seemed to want to heal some of the bitter divisions between the parties that had resulted from the embroglio, and all in all I'd have to say he did a pretty decent job representing all persuasions. He continued serving in Congress until 1995 when he was finally defeated in an attempt to retain his seat for the 104th Congress after in what I considered to be a rather halfhearted campaign on his part.

Though I despised what McCloskey and his cohorts did in their travesty of democracy in 1984, and while I disagree with much of his politics, he turned out to be a not-so-bad representative. Perhaps the turmoil sobered him. I've no doubt McIntyre would have served us all better (most of us wanted him anyway, as the counts revealed), but given that we had no choice in the matter McCloskey conducted himself fairly well after that mess.

Let me know if I can maybe help provide any more details.

Christians are often torn between the call to be peacemakers and the desire for justice. This brief article offers needed perspective, I feel.