Here’s the full video of Hoffman’s speech at the Watertown rally last night, which gives a sense of just how un-politician-like he is.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during his presidential campaign (WDCpix)

In the final months of the 2008 presidential race, Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) campaign learned of a lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania that asked the state to strip Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) of the Democratic nomination on suspicion that he was not an American citizen. The complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief was filed by Phil Berg, a former deputy state attorney general who left government in 1990 for a series of gadfly political campaigns. His last round of notoriety had come when he filed RICO complaints against George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein and multiple members of the Bush administration for “accountability” for the 9/11 attacks. Still, Berg’s complaint had gotten glancing local media attention, and the Democratic National Committee’s counsel had filed a motion to dismiss it. One lawyer who was doing some work for the campaign was tasked with reading Berg’s lawsuit and gauging its chances of success.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“The conversation was along the lines of ‘this is idiotic, but explain to me why,’” said the lawyer, who spoke under condition of anonymity to TWI. “I looked at whether the lawsuit was going to be dismissed. I said yes.”

Berg’s main problem was the one that has bedeviled the small, but growing, number of lawyers and amateur attorneys who have filed frivolous lawsuits against President Obama on the “question” of his American citizenship. He and they have run up against the doctrine of standing, which requires plaintiffs to prove that they have been or will be harmed by the law that they’re challenging. Like the people who challenged McCain’s citizenship in 2008 and 2000, or the people who challenged Dick Cheney’s right to run for vice president because he, like George W. Bush, resided in Texas, “birther” plaintiffs have failed again and again to get their cases heard because they lack standing.

“We monitored the progress of these lawsuits against the Obama campaign,” said Trevor Potter, a Washington attorney who served as general counsel to the 2008 and 2000 McCain presidential campaigns. “The McCain campaign faced a series of lawsuits like this, too, alleging that he could not be president because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Both campaigns took the position that these plaintiffs lacked standing.”

But the flawed conception of the many “birther” lawsuits, coupled with the inexperience and foul-ups of “birther” lawyers, have only fed the frenzy over Obama’s legitimacy to serve as president of the United States. A survey of the lawsuits filed against Obama reveals a reliance on widely debunked rumors, bogus stories sourced back to web sites, affidavits from “experts” who refuse to provide credentials or even their real names, and frequent and blatant misunderstandings of basic constitutional law. The dismissal of “birther” lawsuits has allowed conspiracy theorists to believe that the information in those suits is accurate–a belief that manifests itself in the emails, phone calls, and town hall meeting rants that have pushed the theories into the mainstream media and the halls of Congress.

While they ruled out any chance of the “birther” lawsuits holding up in court, lawyers for the McCain campaign did check into the rumors about Obama’s birth and the assertions made by Berg and others. “To the extent that we could, we looked into the substantive side of these allegations,” said Potter. “We never saw any evidence that then-Senator Obama had been born outside of the United States. We saw rumors, but nothing that could be sourced to evidence. There were no statements and no documents that suggested he was born somewhere else. On the other side, there was proof that he was born in Hawaii. There was a certificate issued by the state’s Department of Health, and the responsible official in the state saying that he had personally seen the original certificate. There was a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser, which would be very difficult to invent or plant 47 years in advance.”

“Birther” lawyers and bloggers, who gained an unexpected prominence in the mainstream media, have consistently denied Hawaii’s own records of Obama’s birth. They have also built up a corpus of information which, they argue, would invalidate Obama’s claim on the White House even if he was born in the United States. These rumors, and the inability of “birther” lawyers to test them in court, have proven pervasive enough to fuel the conspiracy theories.

After the DNC requested a dismissal of Berg’s lawsuit, he responded in a Sept. 29, 2008 filing that cited numerous Internet rumors and incorrect citations of American and international law. Berg cited “Wikipedia Italian version” and “Rainbow Edition News Letter” as evidence that Obama had not been clear about which hospital he was born in; he alleged that Obama must have been adopted by Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian man who married Obama’s mother when the future president was five years old, because he attended elementary school in that country. Because a contemporary school record referred to Obama as “Barry Soetoro” and listed his nationality as “Indonesian,” Berg argued that there was “absolutely no way Obama could have ever regained ‘natural born’ status.”

“That’s just completely wrong,” said Mitzi Torri, an Arizona-based immigration lawyer. Torri pointed to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which sets a high bar for renunciation of American citizenship. According to the INA, an American can only forfeit his citizenship if he commits treason, if he makes a “formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state,” or if he becomes a citizen of another country “upon his own application or upon an application filed by a duly authorized agent.”

“Berg wants to say,” said Torri, “that this document from a school in Indonesia, which has no signature, which has no standing whatsoever, is more important than Obama’s birth certificate or our immigration law.”

Berg’s filings made other claims that have shown up in anti-Obama lawsuits and in the proliferation of “birther” Website. One relies on an audio tape of Obama’s step-grandmother Sarah Obama, who lives in Kenya, being goaded into saying (through a translator) that the future president was born in Kenya before quickly correcting herself. (A doctored version of this tape, which cuts off before the retraction, is posted on YouTube.) Another claim: Obama traveled to Pakistan in 1981, when it was illegal for an American to do so, suggesting that he used a non-American passport. The problem is that there never was any such ban.

“We have no record of any travel ban between America and Pakistan during that period or since,” said Noel Clay, a spokesman for the State Department.

“We got that from someplace,” Berg told TWI on Thursday. In an email, he added his paralegal was “reviewing” his files on Pakistan. Yet the false claim appears in Orly Taitz’s lawsuit on behalf of perennial presidential candidate Alan Keyes, which argues that Obama visited Pakistan “when entrance to Pakistan was banned to Americans, Christians and Jews,” proof that he gave up his American citizenship.

In October 2008, when Berg v. Obama et al was dismissed for lack of standing, the attorney told sympathetic reporters that the DNC had “admitted” the truth about Obama’s citizenship by not rebutting his claims. Joseph Sandler, who filed motions to dismiss Berg’s case and other Obama citizenship lawsuits as general counsel, explained why claims like these are never debunked by lawyers for the president.

“When you file a motion to dismiss, to try to get the case thrown out before any factual inquiry is made, the facts that the plaintiffs put into their complaint are assumed to be true,” said Sandler. “You have to show that even if the facts were true, they don’t have a case.”

As a result of that, extremely questionable theories and “facts” have become linchpins of ‘birther’ theories. ‘Birthers’ who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of Obama’s Certificate of Live Birth often cite the expertise of “Dr. Ron Polarik,” a self-described “expert in computer graphics” who maintains a blog at Townhall.com and has recorded a video, in which his face and voice are blurred, explaining how the image was “forged” with Adobe Photoshop. “Polarik” submitted an affidavit in support of Orly Taitz’s Keyes case that is signed “XXXXXXXXXXX,” making it inadmissible.

“If it ever comes down to it,” explained Gary Kreep, another lawyer for Keyes, “we’ll use his real name.”

Some anti-Obama claims take the issue entirely out of the hands of the president or Hawaii officials. Carl Swensson, a conservative activist from Georgia, has organized “Citizens’ Grand Juries” that have indicted the president for treason. Mario Apuzzo, a New Jersey attorney, has sued Obama on the grounds that he never was, and never could be, a “natural born” citizen. Both men pass over precedent for “The Law of Nations,” the 1758 treatise by the 18th century French scholar Emerich de Vattel. In one translation, de Vattel writes that “the natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” That’s enough for some Obama ‘birthers’ to say that Obama might be a citizen of Kenya–as one constituent of Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) put it–but he cannot be a natural born citizen of the United States. “It’s what the founding fathers used,” explained Swensson.

Constitutional scholars consider this a dubious argument at best. “The framers of the 14th Amendment thought about this,” explained Elizabeth Wydra, chief counsel for the Constitutional Accountability Center. “They wanted to make sure that the children of slaves who were brought here illegally, slaves who were brought into this country after the end of the slave trade, would be citizens.”

Apuzzo is not convinced. He argued that the founders wrote the phrase “natural born citizen” for a reason; to make sure that no one with “blood ties” to another country could become president. He speculated what might happen if Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), whose parents were Indian, became president. “India is a nuclear power. Here comes the president, who says we have to go in and attack Pakistan. Are we doing that because we are defending India’s interests? You just don’t know. You can’t have Constitutional rule if you allow this.”

Because of the dismissal tactics used by lawyers for the president, John McCain, and both political parties, believers in these various theories and readings of the Constitution argue that they have never been proven wrong. Although Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) explained his support of a House bill that would require copies of birth certificates from presidential candidates by saying it would “put all this to rest,” the very frivolity and obscurity of the challenges to Obama suggest the beginning of a conspiracy theory that will never be debunked to the satisfaction of its believers.

–

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A review Blagojevich’s campaign contributions show that he received at $80,000 in contributions from firms with connections to state road building companies last summer and fall, including a $10,000 cash infusion the day the governor announced a series of toll road projects worth a total of $1.8 billion.

This series of toll-related projects was later mentioned in the federal criminal complaint filed against the governor in December. The complaint alleges that Blagojevich told an associate on Oct 6 that he was deliberately underplaying the announcement to see if a particular contractor would make good on a promise to raise $500,000 for Blago before the end of the year.

Tollroad News hints that Blagojevich, while not officially in charge of these toll projects, had an unusually close relationship with the corporation that manages Illinois’ toll roads. Other states with major public toll systems, like Pennsylvania and New Jersey, have stronger firewalls between the governor and the corporation to minimize untoward political pressure.

Blagojevich is an extreme example, but corruption at the state and local levels should not be discounted when the merits of the stimulus package are debated.

For comparison, I dug up a presentation (PDF) by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe from the same month.

The result: The Obama campaign was spot-on in its assessment of its prospects, while the McCain people were way off the mark. Let’s take a look.

First, here’s Davis’ perceived electoral map, just four months ago:

Looking at today’s RealClearPolitics map (below), we can see that every single toss-up state is now in Sen. Barack Obama’s column. While all the “Lean GOP” states have held, three of the “Solid GOP” states — Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana — have turned blue:

Meanwhile, Plouffe was announcing the Obama team’s plan to turn these red states blue:

Lo and behold, every one of these is now in Obama’s column, mostly by substantial margins.

Another slide in Plouffe’s presentation indicated the states in which the Obama campaign would be advertising early and extensively:

Admittedly, a few of these are still unlikely to go for Obama — Alaska, for instance, effectively came off the table when Gov. Sarah Palin joined Sen. John McCain’ticket — but for the most part, Obama’s strategy paid off.

Here’s proof:

Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana, which McCain considered in the bag, now lean Obama by 7, 2 and 2 points, respectively, according to RealClearPolitics.

Connecticut, which McCain hoped to nab, is going for Obama by 19 points.

In the week since Melzer broke the news, exposing Macomb County G.O.P. Chair James Carabelli’s intention to use a list of foreclosed homes to “make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” Sen. Barack Obama’s national campaign filed suit to thwart the practice; local officials in Michigan have been trading allegations about the news; and on Wednesday, influential MSNBC host Keith Olbermann spotlighted the issue, questioning whether Republicans are rolling out a suppression strategy of “caging” Democratic votes. Caging, as The Messenger explained on Tuesday, involves challenging voters by using returned mail to accuse voters of no longer residing at their registration address.

Bob Bauer, general counsel for the Obama campaign, maintains that caging via foreclosure is illegal, since a foreclosure notice does not establish that a voter’s address has changed.

An entire presidential election can turn on the execution or prevention of these suppression tactics, argue Democrats, who emphasize that roughly 35,000 voters were targeted for caging in the pivotal state of Ohio during the 2004 campaign.

With a pending lawsuit and mounting pressure from the national media, this suppression story will surely take more turns, and The Michigan Messenger obviously remains the best place to get on-the-ground reporting and analysis.

From the national perspective here at TWI, however, it is striking to watch the Michigan Republican Party use the same false playbook as the McCain campaign in an effort to intimidate the press. Without even making a pretense of contacting The Messenger, the state party circulated a press release last week claiming that the article’s quotes from party officials were “fabricated,” and conservatives tried to change the subject by attacking the source as a “liberal blog.”

The Messenger, to its New Media credit, not only reiterated that it stood by its reporting “100%,” but also published a transparent, first person response to the G.O.P. attack. That piece provided even skeptical readers with extra information about how the reporter, who has been honored for prior investigative work, and the editor, a 28-year veteran with 15 years at The Washington Post, researched, fact-checked and published the article.

Lately the presidential campaign has felt like a battle between not only McCain and Obama, but McCain and the press, which he and his allies attack from St. Paul to Washington as biased, elitist and sexist. In the meantime, the press has long struggled to confront a string of falsehoods from McCain, though the media fact-checking clearly intensified over the past two weeks. The Michigan battle reverses this exchange, at first glance, with Republicans accusing the press of not telling the truth. On closer inspection, however, The Messenger reports that it’s actually the same old pattern. The Republicans are still the ones making things up.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)(WDCpix)

For a man who once considered the press his “base,” and the truth a trusted ally, part of a package of integrity and “Straight Talk,” Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, finds himself on unfamiliar terrain these days. Now, on the verge of the apex of his political career, McCain is in the dead center of a whirlwind of honesty issues that he might not have foreseen when he began this campaign.

He is a now man surrounded by a hostile press that questions his truthfulness, running a campaign that even former Bush strategist Karl Rove is calling “one step too far” in its attacks on Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee. McCain, the one-time avatar of transparency and candor, finds himself shadowed by the media –people he now tends to call ” little jerks” — yelling “Liar! Liar! Pants on Fire!”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Of course, McCain still literally rides the Straight Talk Express, both in the air and on the ground. He still belts out the same jokes about lawyers and congressional approval ratings and has deep rhetorical grace when speaking about his experiences in Vietnam and his concern for soldiers in the field. He still stumbles through prepared remarks as if racing to get to the town-hall portion, where he eagerly speaks to admirers.

But the old soldier, who watched his 2000 presidential ambitions felled by dark tactics, ugly rumors and outright falsehoods during the GOP primary campaign in South Carolina, is now orchestrating those same kind of attacks. Instead of being the one standing up to mis-truth, he is mis-truth’s master — using outright lies about his opponent’s record and stands, while exaggerating the strength of his own campaign.

This is not a statement created by the Obama campaign. This is something based, as Marlon Brando’s Jor-El once said in “Superman: The Movie,” in “undeniable fact.” The New York Times, in a news story — not an editorial – chronicled McCain’s misdeeds. First, the GOP campaign twisted Obama’s words regarding lipstick-gate; then it ran an advertisement suggesting Obama supported “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners as well as complete distortions of his rivals tax, energy and health-care plans.

Both the Washington Post and The Associated Press ran pieces in a similar vein and Bloomberg News questioned — correctly — whether McCain officials had begun over-estimating the crowd size at McCain-Palin events. For god’s sakes, a hapless McCain was taken — quite effectively — to task by the hosts of “The View.”

“I am always reluctant to use the word ‘lie’ — but in this case there is no alternative,” said Dee Dee Myers, the former Clinton White House press secretary who now serves as a commentator on MSNBC. “I think the McCain camp thinks the mainstream media is so discredited in the eyes of the Republican base, that they think any red flag raised will be ignored as something created by the liberal establishment.”

The more pressing question, however, is what should be the proportional level of response?

History doesn’t do Obama any favors here. Certainly he can find little that is instructive in the 2004 election, when the Vietnam career of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who had earned two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star, came into question though the facts said there should have been none. As a relative new player on the stage, Obama cannot appear to whine, though both the age and experience he brings to the Oval Office have been viewed scantly by even some within the Democratic Party.

Should Obama decide to remain above the fray and not answer these continuing attacks, he risks falling into the same dark hole that Michael S. Dukakis did in 1988. He was called a “card-carrying liberal” again and again and again, which in Ronald Reagan’s America was a label only slightly less sinister than Communist smuggling atomic weapon plans to Fidel Castro in exchange for cigars.

Only a few weeks ago, on a warm night in Denver, Obama stood before the world and declared he would not be a punching bag for the Republican Party. The question now is “How?”

“One of the problems we had is that we simply didn’t have the money to go after the Swift Boaters and for the general election,” said Robert Shrum, the Democratic political adviser who served as the campaign manager for the Kerry effort in 2004. “That’s a problem the Obama campaign simply doesn’t have.

“The fundamental challenge of the Obama campaign is to get this back to the issues,” Shrum said. “More than simply pushing back, he has to get it back to what was for at months was the center of the campaign — change, the economy, the war in Iraq. The only change McCain offers is in subject matter, not in substance.”

Gerald Rafshoon, President Jimmy Carter’s communications director, has also dealt with his share of political attacks.

“You have to respond to it and you have to knock it down,” Rafshoon said. “You can’t let his message dictate your message. He does this by coming tight back at them, as fast as he can. He does it with surrogates and he does it with advertisements and you hope it will boomerang negatively for McCain.”

Complicating matters is the way that many in this country feel about news outlets. McCain has not actually talked to the reporters spending thousands of dollars to travel with him since before mid-August. Palin herself has sat for two interviews, one with ABC and the other with Fox News, and has remained at arms-length from anyone else seeking to speak with her. Moreover, as Myers pointed out, news outlets have become the virtual bogeymen in the eyes of the GOP’s conservative base.

This makes fighting a proxy war through the press nearly futile. We — and I include TWI here — are caught in the cross-hairs of the culture wars that still burn with fury in America. We are mistrusted by both left and right.

On one hand, is the image of a scoop-driven machine gone mad, going to any lengths to humiliate conservatives, overstepping our bounds — as many would argue Dan Rather did in 2004, while investigating President George W. Bush’s time in the Air Force National Guard. To the left, we are the weak lackeys who showed no vigilance in reporting the evidence that the Bush administration used to take us to war in Iraq.

Thus, if this McCain no longer cares about the press, or, for that matter, the truth, the key could be to use these well-documented fabrications to attack something he does care for: his moral code.

“He’s based his whole campaign around ‘Putting Country First’,” Myers said. “These attacks have begun to erode at something much more important. It’s eating away at the foundation of his campaign. McCain’s not a policy guy. He’s an honor guy.

“Obama, when talking about these attacks on the stump, should use the word ‘honor.’ Use the word ‘honor’ and McCain’s head blows up. On some level he McCain knows what he’s doing. He’s going to a very dangerous place with all of this

“To question his honor, the very thing he thinks about in the dark of the night is the one thing that would work,” Myers continued. “I think for Obama to do it in person, during the debates, would be pretty powerful. You know, it would get McCain really mad, and it would have to force him to answer for his deeds. No one likes negative ads — with the exception of Paul Begala — but Obama has to show he can throw a punch. We’ve seen that he can take a punch. Now we have to see more.”

Obama’s true plans for dealing with these lies will certainly unfold quickly, for Nov. 4 is ever closer.

McCain’s ads and actions have not only damaged his reputation as a maverick and besmirched his honor, they hold greater consequences for the American people. The philosopher Sissela Bok wrote in her landmark book, “Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life,” about the consequences one faces when lying becomes part of the norm. Bok explores consequences not only for an individual, but assesses the damage on a wider level.

“I don’t think people understand how much it damages them,” Bok said on the telephone from her home in Cambridge, “maybe not in the short run. In the short run, the cost of integrity, for instance, it might not seem to matter. But they have to understand that when they lie simply to win an election, they must be prepared to sacrifice their self-respect.

“Moreover, they’re doing harm to society,” Bok said, “Once people have the notion that people in public service are all dishonest, the whole profession of public service, or journalism, is damaged. Everyone is seen as dishonest — when we know there are good, honest people who choose to serve in public duty, in public life.”

Now, McCain must ask himself the cost of such lies. Has he come all this way, run this strong campaign, to win in this way? This is something only he can answer — and something he must ultimately answer for.

Anyway, in a segment on Friday, a caller raised big questions about how Republicans can possibly seize the change mantle, if that means they’d have to clean up their own mess; while another suggested that the public is partly complicit in supporting a failing press.

Below are excerpts for interested readers:

Michael (Carmel Valley): Thank you, Peter. Hello, Ari. I just wanna make a couple quick comments about the Palin-McCain ticket, which I think, in some ways that’s what it’s become….one of the most important comments made during this campaign has gone almost under the radar, and it happens to be Jon Stewart interviewing Mike Huckabee—do you remember this one, where he [suggested] to Mike Huckabee that his position is basically, quote, “Our party is the only party that can clean up the mess made by our party.” And I think that’s the sort of thing we have got to get our arms around.

Ari: I think Michael’s right. I think that is the narrative that the Republicans settled on. But we should be careful here, in this sort of season of discontent, to understand that just as Democrats dislike it when politicians in the party move to the right — out of the perception that they can get votes that way, right or wrong — that worries the left.

Well, there is something positive for Barack Obama here, that after months of “Experience,” [and] “Ready to Lead” and “Country First” from the McCain campaign, they have settled here, in their final hours, on his message of “Change.” Now it’s working — that they’re co-opting part of it — and that Sarah Palin brought, as The New York Times put it, the “stamp of history to the ticket.” That’s not an insignificant thing — apart from ideology and apart from the lies we were discussing earlier.

But it also represents Democrats, for once, defining what is politically palpable and nationally desirable, and the trick for Obama is not to let it be co-opted. But they’re running on change because Obama made change universally desired in this electorate. That is something worth remembering…. they [now] value change over experience in their own politicking.

Pat (Humboldt): Hi Peter B. and Ari. The media will keep lying to us as long as we keep paying them to lie to us. As long as we subscribe to cable, as long as we subscribe to newspapers, they will keep lying to us…

Peter: Well, they’re trying to distract their way to the finish line, and some of it is working, right, Ari?

Ari: Yeah, I think distracting works. I think you’re right that there’s a market here, and if you can get away with it, it’s supported. There are changes–I was on Rachel Maddow’s radio show tonight before this. I think she’s great and I think she’s doing well with a marketable, successful show on television now. And then obviously, I’ll say it out of self-interest but not with any ambivalence, the places that I write for—The Nation, reader-supported since 1865 and not corporate; The Washington Independent, a different model but a non-profit, which allows us to do different things than corporate media. And you can go to those sites and support them any way you can. We appreciate it—it helps.

But, when campaigning in Michigan, back when the Russians invaded Georgia, Sen. John McCain stood next to his wife, Cindy, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, and insisted that he didn’t want to restart the Cold War.

Apparently, though, it’s game on.

Remember that in the actual Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union fought through proxy conflicts (Korea, Vietnam) and never came to full blows. Leaders on both sides understood where full blows would take them — the bomb.

Maybe it’s piling on to take Palin to task for such remarks. And in no way am I trying to defend the Russian government since Vladimir Putin came to power.

But from 1945 to 1991, the world lived under a cloud of fear — knowing that one word, one diplomatic slip-up, could cost millions of lives. Even the relatively inexperienced President John F. Kennedy understood the consequences of killing Soviet personnel, and so, working against the advice of his own military leaders, did his best to prevent escalation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Yes, these are just words. And we are all Georgians. I get that. But Palin has a great deal to prove not only to the country, but to the world, that she’s ready for the job she is seeking.

A hypothetical war with our once adversary is not the best way to start.

Following big crowds, the two will now split their forces and travel alone. Of course, this is not unexpected — but they risk risk facing the same downfall of other dynamic duos. Here are some examples that the McCain camp may want to consider before making this a situation permanent:

1) Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Giles — When Buffy’s watcher, Giles, left to return to Britain, the slayer was left not only to fight the forces of darkness alone, but to lead her friends and keep her little sister Dawn in line. She no longer had a guiding hand, and, without his battlefield avatar, Giles no longer had a sense of purpose. The show wandered into predictability without Giles’s dry humor and wit in beating back evil while putting out one-liners.

2) Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin — One can argue that neither recovered from the split. Martin became more and more part of the Vegas scene, tooling around with the Rat Pack, doing bad movies and ultimately hosting a series of terrible celebrity roasts. Lewis, meanwhile, never found his comedic timing again after he lost his straight-man. Lewis eventually made a film about the Holocaust called “The Day the Clown Died” considered so bad it never released and probably will never see the light of day. Now we know him best not for his physical comedy but for his ability to stay awake through Labor Day telethons.

3) Ricardo Mantalban (Mr. Rourke) and Herve’ Villechaize (Tattoo)–Ah boss, de plane, de plane. It’s hard to imagine the strange ABC weekly series “Fantasy Island” now without the accented island overseer and his little friend. However the might-sized sidekick was fired before the 1983 season in favor of Christopher Hewett, who would later find sitcom success as “Mr. Belvedere.” But he would not find it on the Island. The series quickly tanked, and the TV-viewing public was robbed of at least two more seasons where celebrities like future congressman Sonny Bono and Bill Bixby found peace and contentment in the magical place where they only asked you to come aboard because they were expecting you. Wait, that’s “The Love Boat.” Never mind.