The Eye of Mordor?

Frodo Failed

The Republican Senator for Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, has compared the War on Iraq to the War of the Ring.

As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else.... It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States.

I guess the historical analogies from WW2 are wearing thin, so they're lifting them from fantasy books now. But really, Mr. Santorum, if we must make a strained analogy to Lord of the Rings, who would really best qualify as the Dark Lord? Who has got the devastating air-power? Whose hapless prisoners endure torment in Cirith Ungol?

If you want LOTR analogies, this one is a classic; New York to Build Barad-Dur on the site of WTC. An oldie but a goodie.

"I can understand the need for domestic security – and the attractiveness of the design," said Noah Jacobson, Secretary of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "The sheer, soul-annihilating power of this black monolith should serve to reduce all manner of crime and anti-social activity within 100 miles," Jacobson predicted, "reducing a once-free city to a necropolis of cringing slaves. We have no problem with that. But a Lidless Eye that interrogates the souls of every person who slinks or crawls through the five boroughs – this could raise some serious Fourth Amendment issues."

But enough of that. For some comic relief check out this brilliant "early version" of the Lord of the Rings, a never-released epic starring Humphrey Bogart as the indominatible Frodo and featuring Orson Welles as the Grey Wizard.

PS - thought I'd add this quote from J.R.R. himself;

"It is not unlikely that they [the Orcs] invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them"