'Not that bad a sequel', says Die Hard code hidden in Jeb Bush website

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/16/die-hard-code-jeb-bush-website

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It was a case of Die Hard with a Jeb-geance.

For a few hours yesterday, as Jeb Bush joined the Republican presidential race, his campaign website left an extended reference to the action classics starring Bruce Willis embedded deep in its source code.

Buried in the javascript of Jeb2016.com, in the site’s scaffolding of code, Bush’s web developers had inserted summaries to the five Die Hard films, complete with customized subtitles reflecting the coders’ thoughts on each film.

But the coding, first noticed by the New York Times’ Jeremy Bowers, had vanished by Monday evening, and a spokesperson for the campaign did not respond to questions about the origin or fate of the minor shrine to Die Hard placed within the former governor of Florida’s site.

Seems like an odd thing to include in the JS of your presidential announcement page. https://t.co/bA8DeSzeyk pic.twitter.com/vwfUbBLt0M

The code mostly consisted of quick summaries of the films, for example: “The first film begins on Christmas Eve when McClane comes to reunite with his separated wife” and “McClane throws the terrorist leader, Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), out the window to fall thirty stories.”

The developers also attached fake subtitles to each film’s title, for instance Die Hard, “subtitle: ‘Also starring Severus Snape’” – a reference to Alan Rickman, who played that film’s villain as well as the Harry Potter character.

The “easter eggs” of other political website developers have not been so cryptic. Those who descend into the code of senator Rand Paul’s campaign website discover an invitation to join his team: “I bet a person like you would love to work on a team like ours!”

The site adds: “We put other political tech teams to shame!”

Casting subtlety aside, the team for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has gone for a gigantic H composed of two pillars and a cascading banner of stars and stripes. It evokes the regal but stony and cold architecture of Washington DC and ancient Greece, the patriotism of the American flag, and a monolithic will to win over voters’ hearts through sheer attrition, whether Americans like it or not.

Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, all declared contenders for the Republican nomination, just have plain old code without intriguing filler in the spaces.

While the synopses of the Die Hard films had no actual consequence on the makeup of Bush’s website, they do reflect something of his campaign’s ethos and motivation, as do Clinton’s neoclassical H and the insecure-sounding boasts of Paul’s tech team.

Die Hard is a movie about John McClane, a cop who’s also an urban cowboy, a balding, middle-aged husband who cracks self-aware jokes, who takes down the corporate establishment while affirming family values and throwing German terrorists off buildings. He is scrappy but indomitable, intimidating but vulnerable, strong but a little paunchy too.

He is not a steroidal Stallone or cyborgian Schwarzenegger, nor a scrawny adolescent who owes everything to a mutant spider, or to a revenge obsession and a father’s fortune squandered on bat-suits. McClane is the man many a red-blooded American in the late 20th century might want to be.

Jeb Bush has yet to burst through a pane of glass or walk in slow motion away from an explosion, but he promised on Monday to restore America to a place that looked like the post-Reagan era in which John McClane was king. He vowed to take on corporate lobbyists and rebuild American authority in the world. He presented himself as a familiar American archetype – your friendly neighbor – who could talk tough and shout about immigration when necessary. And he would wink at what you know about his family history all the time.

But as David Foster Wallace once noted, for all Die Hard’s wit and appeal, it’s “also very formulaic, and rather cynically reuse[s] a lot of formulas” – it is more about how “to separate you from your cash” than substance. The Bush campaign has proven it can separate donors from their cash, but it and Clinton’s effort share the same insecurity: can they convince Americans they want more?

America saw its first “Bush for president” sign in 1988, the same year that Die Hard made Bruce Willis a star. Willis starred in four sequels, including two that featured his character’s children. Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign is the fifth in the series for the Bush family.

The website code may suggest a feeling of diminishing returns.

The subtitle given by the coders for the second film is: “Not that bad a sequel.”

The fourth is billed: “Another one 12 years later.”

The fifth: “Please God just let this franchise die.”