River Skylan and Hadley Van Dyne face off week to week as they stalk the campaign trails of President Obama and his opponent, Mitt Romney. This week, Hadley gets the first punch while River gets the rebuttal. Tune in next week for more he said/she said of the left and right and to find out just where this debate will take us in time for Election 2012.

Hadley Says:

Christopher Nolan, director of the Dark Knight trilogy, has admitted to creating political parallels in 2008′s The Dark Knight that matched America’s war on terror. In one corner we have the Joker; assumed insane, misunderstood, trying to send a message by bombing civilian buildings, tricking his minions into suicide missions and even threatening one of his own. He wreaks havoc on Gotham and sends citizens and leaders alike into a whirl of panic, fear of the unknown attack that will inevitably come next. In the other corner we have the Bruce Wayne/Batman aggregate; Bruce is a trust fund brat with entitlement issues and a case of bad decision making. Meanwhile Batman’s initial response to fighting Gotham’s crime is hailed but soon after, the city turns against him. He searches for unorthodox means of protecting the people of Gotham, which includes developing a “government contract” to use sonar technology to monitor images and sound from every cell phone in the city. Wiretapping much?

With the third and final film of the trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, opening in theaters at midnight tonight in yet another presidential election year, few have questioned what political message could be sent this time.

During his radio show, Rush Limbaugh added speculation that this time around, the film is doing a bit of Pro-Obama hinting. Here’s what he had to say about the film’s Probamaganda.

Have you heard this new movie, the Batman movie… The villain in The Dark Knight Rises is named Bane, B-a-n-e. What is the name of the venture capital firm that Romney ran and around which there’s now this make-believe controversy? Bain… Do you think that it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire-breathing four-eyed whatever-it-is villain in this movie is named Bain? A lot of people are gonna see the movie, and it’s a lot of brain-dead people — entertainment, the pop culture crowd — and they’re gonna hear ‘Bane’ in the movie and they’re gonna associate ‘Bain.’ And the thought is that when they start paying attention to the campaign later in the year, and Obama and the Democrats keep talking about Bain, not Bain Capital, but Bain, Romney and Bain, that these people will think back to the Batman movie.

River Says:

It hurts. It actually hurts to hear things like this come out of peoples’ mouths. Can we at least wait until we’ve seen the movie to start making our ridiculous assumptions public?

Funny thing about the Bane/Bain conspiracy is: Bane was a comic book character created in 1993, long before Barack was defending his American citizenship and Mitt was making  YouTube videos about how much he hates gay people.

The Dark Knight Rises itself was written over a year ago, long before the Bain Capital controversy even existed.

There’s also the minor detail that Bane is a crazed anti-capitalist terrorist and if that’s the kind of tie Rush Limbaugh makes to Mitt Romney, well then I guess we’ve all learned something new about Mitt.

And while I wholeheartedly admit that the world of entertainment does have remarkable power over us and what we choose to believe in, I just don’t see this happening. Can you picture it now? The masses standing around the polls at crunch time; undecided, confused, reaching for their only possible saving grace which is to make connections between Bane, the bad guy in the Batman movie from 4 months ago, and Bain, the venture capital firm who played such a minor role in Romney’s campaign, thus leaving them with no other option than to vote for the dark knight indeed.