All week the conservatives and lib blogs too have been discussing the whole Bain-Bane thing, some leak or nonsense that the Dems were hoping to keep focus on Bain, which is obviously true, with analogies to Bane. That's probably true enough, if the company were called "Battman" it would work nearly as well and if some film came out called "Shoal Indra" I'm sure there'd be an effort to play on Solyndra comparisons.

As for Rush, well there's been a lot of talk about Nolan's decision to go with Bane instead of the Riddler or another classic bad guy, obviously not with the premise of politics in mind, but the non-geek with DC comics background might not get that. More, there is something of a history of films being released by liberal directors right before elections. Some of which is fair, though a lot of times parallels to current events if placed in deliberately are merely meant as audience catchers. If your film revolves around a Nuclear Meltdown trying to heat the audience up on comparisons, subtle or overt, to the recent Japanese crisis or Chernobyl is kinda common sense. I personally think most of the liberal bias in films is just director/writer/actor subconscious effect, but doubtless some is deliberate and for impact it doesn't really matter. A piece of entertainment shouldn't effect people's voting but it does and of course a lot of the directors are happy when it does and even try to achieve that effect. Obviously something like Day After Tomorrow or Avatar wasn't devoid of political content and I don't think it's unfair to call them out on it or criticize their doing it.

That said, I really doubt Nolan even thought of the comparison and I don't think he has any particular political ax to grind, so I think Rush is wrong here. Let's keep in mind though that he talks for 3 hours a day every day and there are groups that literally sit next to the radio making notes on his comments looking for stuff like this. Rush unleashes about one gaffe every six months I've noticed, about 400 hours of talking and about 2-3 million words, the length of most doorstopper fantasy series. Most people would be lucky not to say something dumb in 1000 words. Seriously you put most people on TV or radio and their apparent IQ drops about 20 points, if you chop that up for negative soundbites most of us would be lucky to make it 15 minutes without sounding like a drooling idiot, bigot, fringe radical, fanatic, etc. Most politicians, professionals at this, talk less than he does and scripted, not unscripted like he is, and still produce a lot of gaffes. Anybody ever feels like recording themselves talking for about an hour about their views and politics, no prep, I'll be happy to pick out the dozen or so plus occasions you said something that would practically guarantee you'd lose an election in a landslide were that soundbite played. Rush probably says less dumb things than 99.9% of the population, he just has a very large audience and some very determined critics who have venues to air their gripes when they find something.