Sammy was a Bronx born actor and comedian who had some minor success in the 1950s.  He took his physical similarity to Jerry Lewis and ran with it.  He became known as the “fake Jerry Lewis” after creating an onstage and onscreen persona that mimicked Lewis’ shtick.  He even went as far as to hook up with a Dean Martinesque straight man named Duke Mitchell.  The real Jerry Lewis wasn’t amused and even went so far as to intimidate others in Hollywood not to feature Petrillo on their shows and bullied Vegas venues into blackballing his act. 

Most reboots are epic fails.

The point of bringing up Petrillo (besides encouraging you to watch his funny performance in “Bela Lugosi meets the Brooklyn Gorilla” on YouTube) is to illustrate that the “trend” of ripoffs, remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings is nothing new. Take it from me, the guy who shamelessly made “Transmorphers,” remakes and ripoffs are part of Hollywood history.  What is more depressing is the fact that re-imagining and remakes are also part of the political culture.

Our society has a sort of “political amnesia”; forcing us to repeat the same economic and policy mistakes every thirty years or so.  What else is the Obama administration but a “remake” of the Clinton administration (with almost half the original cast!)?  You can almost hear the pitch meeting.  “It’s FDR meets Clinton!  We reboot the franchise.  We forget about the Carter episode just like we pretended that Superman III and IV never happened.”

It’s the same tired ideas.  Same scripted attacks.  Same demagoguery.  Just listen to mental midgets like Paul Krugman discussing Keynesian economic models and talking about getting the “factories” started.  Hey, Knuckleheads, in the modern world the factories are all in China and Wal-Mart is the nation’s largest employer.  Let’s get “shovel ready” projects going so we can help out all those Starbucks baristas who are unemployed.  Let’s pretend that race relations today are only slightly different than they were in Mississippi circa 1950.  These clowns live in the past.

It’s maddening that this amnesia also affects our ability to learn from global history.  How well has pandering to maniacal, tin pot, dictators worked out in the past?  Why don’t we ask the Eastern Europeans how cool it was to have centralized everything and a government that spied on average citizens?  Yeah, that flag@whitehouse.gov thing was a great idea.

I’m sure that every evil dictator started out by laying out his case for evil fascism.  Stalin, Castro, Idi Amin, and yes I’ll go there, Hitler all showed up twirling their mustaches and telling everyone how great its going to be living in a statist hell hole.  No, it always starts out with smiley faces and unicorns, but it ends in bread lines and political prisons.

While I don’t advocate a wholesale freak-out at this point, a little perspective would be refreshing.  Anything resembling a massive clusterfark should ring alarm bells for all citizens, regardless on which side of the left/right paradigm they sit.  We should be past the point of deficit spending orgies, head-in-the-sand foreign policy, and irrational discussions about impending Christian theocracies.

I like to smack around my leftist friends by pointing out that since 1970, for the past 38 years, we’ve had 26 years of Republican administrations and 12 years of Democratic presidencies.  Yet, we don’t have prayer in school, forced Christian conversion, film and television censorship, book burnings, gay concentration camps or back alley, illegal abortions.  Still, you can bet that in early 2011, the news media and the wunderkinds of the left will start crying about Palin’s book banning, Romney’s Mormon proselytizing, and Huckabee’s closet desire to turn the airwaves into 24/7 Christian programming.  I can’t imagine what they will dredge up about my homeboy Bobby Jindal (oh, wait didn’t he perform and exorcism?  Frack!)

I’ve seen this movie before.  Several times actually.  It is old and busted.  Where is the new hotness?

There is a bright side.  The latest episode of leftist nincompoopery seems to be particularly inept.  Too many development execs and a weak, first time director.  They had a big opening weekend, but their box office is down, and dropping fast.  In 2010 and 2012 the other side may have an opportunity to return to the top spot.  The question for us is this; do we want another lame remake or sequel of our own?  Do we want our own “Transformers 2” or a remake of “Nightmare on Elm Street”?

I dig the original, but give me something new.

I vote that, at a minimum, we push for a re-imagining like “The Dark Knight.” I want familiar concepts and ideas but told with a new spin and by really talented people.  I want it to be multi-layered and complex.  I want a classic.  I want something with staying power that resonates for generations and changes the landscape for the foreseeable future.

Even better, I want something completely original and fresh that changes the political landscape forever.  Just look at the cinematic world before and after “Star Wars”.  That’s what I want for politics. A reformation.  I want to build on the successes of the past and avoid the obvious failures.

I want politicians who don’t want to be politicians.  I want senators and representatives who push for term limits, and drastically reduce their pay.  I want them all to understand the concept of “public service”.  I want a massive dismantling of our government’s bureaucracy.  I want a complete rethinking and overhaul of the tax code.  I want massive, massive privatization.  I want people of all races, creeds, religions, and sexual orientations to put aside their differences and join together under the banner of national pride.  I want politicians who not only preach the dangers of socialism, but also extol the virtues of liberty and free markets.  I want my fellow countrymen and women to understand that the true path to success for all people lies in self-reliance, responsibility and national brotherhood, not in the suffocating embrace of big government.

Any politician or movement that can capture that sentiment and actually deliver will get boffo box office.  I’m talking “Titanic” numbers.

After eight years of George Bush bashing, a financial meltdown and a general desire for “change”, the left waltzed into total control of the nation.  The right and the middle may find themselves in the exact same position in a very short time.  When we do, let’s not make the same mistakes.  Lets not accept another retread, no matter how nostalgic it feels, and demand something bold and totally different.

We are Americans.  We deserve nothing less.

TWINKLETOES EMANUEL: Alright, alright! Give ‘em some air, you mugs! 

PAPPY AXELROD: Can you hear me, Champ? 

BAM BAM: We would save enough money… uhh… we would… money save… the ones we are looking for… 

PAPPY AXELROD (gently slapping Bam Bam’s face): Champ, Champ! Look at me! How many teleprompters am I holding up? 

BAM BAM (giggling): Special Olympics… Heckuva job Timmy… 

TWINKLETOES EMANUEL: Somebody get me the stimulus salts! 

Twinkletoes opens a wallet under Bam Bam’s nose and he groggily regains consciousness

BAM BAM: Whuh… huh… whuhappened? 

RED KRUGMAN: Yeah, dat’s what we wanna know! What happened to the kid’s uppercut? C’mon, Pappy, we got a deadline for the morning edition! 

BAM BAM: How… duuh… did I do? 

SPITBUCKET BEGALA: T.K.O., 13 seconds in the first round. Lucky shot. You’ll get ‘em next time champ! 

SCOOP KROFT: Champ, champ! Scoop Kroft, Columbia Broadcasting System. Are you punch-drunk? 

BAM BAM: heh… hehheh… wheeee! 

TWINKLETOES EMANUEL: Put down da notepad, Kroft! You an’ da rest of you scribes! Let the kid come to. Give ‘em a chance to clear out da cobwebs. 

PAPPY AXELROD: C’mon kid, shake it off. What’s the last thing you remember? 

BAM BAM: I… uh… remember getting, uh, fit with the new, uh, silk robe… then the, uh, Ring Magazine cover shoot… duhrrr… I remember people cheering… after that it’s kinda uh, all fuzzy like… 

PAPPY AXELROD: You were doing great, champ! You were magnificent in the walk-in. Magnificent! You shoulda seen the crowd go wild, all the way up until you stepped through da ropes. 

RED KRUGMAN: That was one helluva tumble you took there, kid! Are you still feeling that concussion? 

BAM BAM: Is dat where I got dese rope burns? 

SPINDOC GREENBURG (examining Bam Bam’s face): Damn! Dis ain’t no cut, it’s an irrigation ditch! I ain’t got enough styptic to close this thing. Somebody fetch my stitch bag and polling charts. 

FRANKIE RICH: Hey, what gives, Axlerod? You told us this kid was a natural. You said he was ready for a title shot. I even said so in my column! Now there’s an arena full of angry jamokes out there hollerin’ for a refund! 

RED KRUGMAN: Yeah, I told everybody dis was a sure thing. I put 50 bucks of my own 401k on the kid myself! 

PAPPY AXELROD: Aw hell, he just had a bad week. Everybody has bad weeks. He just wasn’t used to fighting without his headgear. You saw him win the Chicago Golden Gloves in ‘04, you all saw that unanimous decision over Johnny Arizona. 

SCOOP KROFT: That old crippled tomato can? C’mon! If I didn’t know better I’d say the kid took a dive tonight. 

PAPPY AXELROD: Dive? C’mon you mugs, you saw it. You saw Bam Bam open up with that flurry of jabs. You saw him connect with that huge left hook haymaker! 

RED KRUGMAN: Yeah. We saw it. We also saw him land it square on his own damn glass jaw. How are we supposed to make that look good? Half the dopes in this city lost their entire paychecks wagering on this stumblebum, and now they’re gonna blame us newspaper boys. 

TWINKLETOES EMANUEL: Okay boys, here’s how you’re gonna play it. Three column headline, 60 point type: “BAM BAM SCORES FIRST ROUND KAYO. ECONOMY FAILS TO LAND SINGLE BLOW. CHAMP READY FOR NEXT TITLE BOUT.” 

SPITBUCKET BEGALA: Yeah yeah! That’s the ticket! 

BAM BAM: I like tickets. 

TRIXIE DOWD: C’mon Pappy, the only people drunk enough to swallow that line of malarky are the winos down in the Nutroots skid row. 

BIFF OLBERMANN: Don’t listen to her, champ! I still believe in you! 

TRIXIE DOWD: See what I mean? If we keep printing this stuff our circulation is gonna drop below Newsweek! 

TWINKLETOES EMANUEL: Let me remind you that you’ve got as much riding on Bam Bam as me. Do you really want to help him? Here’s how you can help him. Leave him alone. Print the headlines like I told you, and let the Champ train for the next main event. 

FRANKIE RICH:  I dunno, Twinkletoes. He don’t look so good. 

TOMMY FREIDMAN: Yeah, dose are da worst pair of cauliflower ears I ever seen. 

BAM BAM (singing): Don’t stop! Be-leeeee-vin’! 

TRIXIE DOWD: You sure he’s ready to go up against Max Tehran? I heard he’s kind of a scrapper. 

PAPPY AXELROD: You just leave him to us. Bam Bam’s got some new fancy footwork that’ll make Tehran unclench his fist. Guaran-teed! Ain’t that right, Champ? 

BAM BAM: I extend my hand like this, right? 

RED KRUGMAN: Okay Pappy, we’ll hype his big comeback. But eventually the public is gonna start noticing the bookie odds. C’mon boys, let’s go. 

The reporters leave, morosely. 

TWINKLETOES EMANUEL: Okay champ, let’s not let a good disaster go to waste. Get a good night’s sleep ’cause tomorrow we start training bright and early. 

PAPPY AXELROD: See you at the Oprah studio gym at 5 AM. 

The handlers leave.   

BAM BAM: (sighs) I coulda been a contender.