The Grumpy Forester

THEY ARE COMING!

...one of the problems with wrestling with the serious problems over at Ruminate This over the last few days has been the inability to make observations (or, if you prefer, whiney rambling ill-formed quasi-intellectual comments) about all the things that have been going on. Some of them are a big deal; some admittedly aren't. There has been, for example, quite a discussion about who should be the next leader of the Democratic National Committee and the decidely uncooperative comments by Al From and others from the DLC. These are important issues to the progressive movement, as they can dictate for the next two election cycles how the Democratic party will present itself. On the other hand, not being a Democrat, I find that other issues can capture my attention pretty easily. This is one of those....

...they're coming. Cougars are moving east, a pulsating wave of powerful swift fur-bearing carnivores that your grandfathers' parents struggled mightily to eliminate from their particular corner of the face of the earth. This is great stuff, particularly for those of us in the rural intermountain west who have lived with cougars for generations. Now that we no longer have a sufficient supply of small yappy porch dogs to satisfy their prey needs, cougars are starting to explore new territories...

...as a life-long resident of small rural communities in the Pacific Northwest, I have always had a certain sort of agreement with Mother Nature. I will accord her free reign of all those hundreds of millions of acres of surrounding wildlands in which to do her thing, and I and my sparsely scattered neighbors will reserve our few little acres to do ours. As long as her furry woodland creatures don't cross the boundary to try to snatch my children from the backyard swing, I won't turn them into furry throw-rugs in front of the fireplace. It's not a particularly elegant or egalitarian approach to relations with one's environment, but it is an efficiently western approach. Over time, there has been an effort to eliminate what is viewed as non-sporting hunting of large fur-bearing carnivores in the west, particularly cougars. The restriction in hunting techniques - in particular the use of hunting dogs - has dramatically reduced hunting success for cougars (which are considered game animals in many western states) and has helped to increase their population numbers. Cougars, being rather solitary folks with large territories, became forced eventually to branch out. Moving east apparently seems to be the hot ticket, and only the Atlantic Ocean will stop this eastern expansion...

"There's more cougars in the western U.S. now than there have ever been. States protect them as game animals, and populations have expanded," said Nielsen. He believes wild western cats are moving east through wooded river corridors. They started arriving in the Midwest in the 1990s.

...yeah, well, no kidding. Several year ago a fellow that lived a five-minute walk down the hill from me in a small eastern Orygun town had to kill a healthly male cougar that had taken up residence in his woodshed after his first trip in the dark for an armload of firewood turned into a far more interesting experience than he could ever have imagined when he initially walked out the door. It certainly served as an opinion-changing experience for me, as the father of two (at that time) small children that I had previously let run relatively unsupervised in the large open yard and field behind our house. It quite frankly angered me that those of us living in rural areas were subject to the whims of urban residents who had provided the bulk of the votes to eliminate the use of dogs - a brutal but effective hunting tool - in the management of cougar populations; they could afford to have this attitude because their urban circumstances had pretty much already destroyed any semblance of a natural environment, while those of us living in a more rural setting would have to bear any burden resulting from a desire to see these large magnificant carnivores living free, even if that meant that - at the very least - the turnover of our household pets might increase substantially...

...but now here they come. It's not likely that the time will come when bright young investment bankers are being taken on the streets of Manhattan by powerful, sleek, tawny urban mountain lions, but there may well come the day when ol' Spot doesn't come running back to the porch when called in many a suburban neighborhood. That will be the point at which the cosmopolitan world comes to a better understanding of their actual relationship with the natural world than they have had for several generations. Any day those two worlds actually come together in people's heads is a good day, as far as I'm concerned....

THE MEMO WRITERS AMONGST US

...although I don't claim to be a constitutional scholar, I am confident in my reading and comprehension skills. They are at least sufficient to keep up with the normal run of the mill strict constructionist conservative, the sort who claims that the Constitution is to be interpreted as it is written. Try as I might, I have read and reread the worn coffee-stained printer copy that I've relied on through the years and I cannot for the life of me find any reference to unfettered presidential powers to wage war in the absence of Congressional concurrence. Others, apparently, have found themselves unencumbered with any reservations to this particular oversight. Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo wrote, just two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, that there were virtually no limits to the President's ability to wage war with or without the approval of Congress. Obviously there are some finer points of this strict constructionist thing that I haven't apparently quite gotten the hang of.....

...this, of course, was the first of a series of memo's that gave cover to the idea that the President had the authority to wage war against terrorists and the states that support them, whether or not they had any involvement in the attacks on the United States. This is typical of the robust foreign policy thinking of people who don't think too deeply about things (i.e., conservatives) in that it offers no consideration to the ramifications of categorizing any given group as being "terrorists". The old saw about " one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter" does have some credence; depending on one's definition of terrorism, it would have been - in the view of memo writers like Yoo and Jay Bybee - entirely appropriate for the U.S. to intervene in Palestine in 1948, capturing and torturing Zionists engaging in acts of terrorism against the British protectorate in place at the time...

...the idea that, after 9/11, we were in some sort of "new war" against militant Islamic forces both inside and outside the influence of al Qaida seems to suggest a certain simple racism at best, and - as Douglas Feith's memo arguing for a "surprise" attack against Iraq (which he admitted was a non-al Qaida target) a grab at nation-building opportunism at the least. PNAC's well-known desire to make the conquest of Iraq the cornerstone of an effort to install regimes more comfortable to American conservatives is directly served by these memo's, regardless of the objective constitutional authority that may hover behind them. It's the memo's, then, that have helped us to get where we are today. Unsubstantiated thoughts by lower-level Justice Dept. minions, unelected bureaucrats crafting the fabric of a new presidential authority out of a peculiar sort of rotting thread, without the review of the members of Congress who actually directly represent the citizens of the country, have led to an incursion into a country that these clowns knew weren't involved in 9/11. Uncountable thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of citizens have been killed and tortured, the country's economy has been destroyed, the people live in conditions that hurricane survivors wouldn't tolerate for the period of time that they have been subjected to those conditions, the country has become one of the most dangerous places on earth, and we are not even a little bit safer as a result, as is witnessed by the stepped up security we all seem to be facing in our public travels....

...revenge is a clean simple motive. For all the talk about the horrors that an invasion of the Japanese mainland would have visited on our troops and Japanese civilians in 1945, the taste for revenge greased the skids that led to the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It could clearly explain the desire of the U.S. to track down and kill every human being involved even tangentially with the 9/11 attack. Other political motives must serve to explain any adventures outside of that particular decision sphere. The memo's serve nicely as footprints, leading back to those motives that led us to abandon the battle against those who have clearly declared war against us and instead take action against a different foe in a battle that has lots to do with the balance of power in the Middle East but virtually nothing to do with the safety and security of American citizens. Who said that a little nameless faceless guy in a big bureaucracy can't make a difference in the world? Whoever said it was clearly mistaken....

Unintended Consequences Can Be A Bitch

...and so it just keeps getting worse and worse. The abuse, torture, and possible murder of “detainees” under the color of opinion produced by the man nominated to be our next US Attorney General keeps expanding far outside of Abu Ghraib and begins to paint a picture that, were one to engage in a little casual speculation, seems to suggest a cultural taint of racism fostered by this administration’s rather cavalier differentiation between true bad guys and people who just don’t happen to speak our language or worship out of the same book we do...

...despite Alberto Gonzales’ observations and ‘legal’ opinions regarding those detained in this conflict, wars have rules. The various Geneva Conventions established those rules to guarantee humane treatment of prisoners and occupied people, primarily in an effort to control long-term passions and provide a degree of protection to defenseless prisoners and civilians. We are, either through the cover provided by Gonzales’ opinion or through a cultural dehumanization of the ‘enemy’, pissing away any slim chance we ever had of emerging from this manufactured nightmare as some sort of good guy. Memory has a long half-life in the Middle east; in fact, anywhere where a cultural identity remains intact, the grievances of many generations past can still burn if unrequited. We in the United States were outraged by the wanton murder of almost 3000 people in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but we don’t have that monocultural aspect that allows us to nurture those sorts of outrages for long. If we could, there wouldn’t be a Japanese or German auto manufacturer’s dealership on any street corner in the country. Since we can’t and don’t culturally nurture these long-term slights, we probably aren’t well equipped to understand the damage we are doing to our long-term interests in virtually every Muslim country in the world. The stories are out, or will get out, and we are just simply toast insofar as our ability to be a meaningful player in the Middle East is concerned....

...our troops are not to blame solely for this situation. They have been put into a difficult position that is not of their choosing, forced to deal with an insurgency that is the product of wee Donny Rumsfeld’s personal effort to field-test his unsupportable new ideas about how the US military is constructed that resulted in insufficient forces to manage the occupation, coupled with the administration’s insistence that we could toss Geneva Convention protections out the window with regard to the prisoners we captured (regardless of their involvement in the actual insurgency). The insurgency in the midst of the civilian population was the very first thing we should have tried to defend against with sufficient troops and timely reconstruction, but none of that happened and here we are. We have earned an undying enmity within some segments of Muslim society that generations will not erase, regardless of how Gee Dub’s Grand Iraqi Adventure turns out on the surface. We are not safer now than we were before the invasion and, paradoxically, it’s our own fault....

Scarborough on Moyers: He shoots, he Misses!

…I don’t normally spend a lot of time messing with pundits and their foibles. I don’t need their help in forming my opinions and, since I’m generally better looking and smarter (did I mention my superlative straight white teeth?), I don’t generally seek out their views – unless, of course they ratify some strongly held belief of mine. Today, however, I must say that Joe Scarborough is – to phrase it politely – looney. At his MSNBC blog, he goes all crazy on Bill Moyers over Moyers’ departing comments as he leaves the PBS series NOW. Moyers said that, in his retirement, he is going to devote time to reporting on the introduction of agenda-driven conservative ideology into the world of mainstream media and the devolution of mainstream media to a mere profit-driven business, all of which robs the American people of a vigilant independent media…

…Scarborough, being incapable of assessing Moyers’ actual career honestly because of his inbred conviction that ALL of the media prior to the advent of Rush, Drudge, and Fox, was one massive liberal effort to drive conservatives into caves, obsesses over the fact that Moyers, as a one-time assistant Peace Corp Director and speechwriter in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, has – as a result of that damning fact – spent his entire journalistic career carrying water for the Democratic Party. As is the case with the neocon crowd, ol’ Congressman Joe is good on the attack message but trusts that we are either to lazy, too inattentive, or too young to actually put his attack into context. Sadly for Smokin’ Joe, some of us are none of those and we know how unavailingly stupid his embarrassing little screed is…

…the major share of Moyers’ journalistic career has been spent as a point of view commentator. While his point of view may be reflected as unabashedly liberal to those like Scarborough, the tone of his commentary has always struck me as good old fashion Texas-bred populism, a grass-roots feel for the people that neocons have been able to exploit at the margins with the attacks and slogans but have never chosen to actually get down and roll around in (mostly because it’s about people and neocons aren’t about people, they’re about the accretion of power, with common folk and their concerns being a simple nuisance that must be ephemerally indulged order to get that power). In cases where he delved into straight up journalism, such as during his exposure of aspects of the Iran-Contra cover-up, nothing he found or said was wrong; it was simply upsetting to conservatives in its chiseling at the cheap mortar foundation they had built under that stature of their hero Ronald Reagan and therefore must be the doing of the hateful liberal press, even though the information was correct and all of it exposed fundamental threats to our constitutional form of government. Moyers was fundamentally different from the Drudges and Limbaugh’s, and even from Fox news; his work talked to people about issues that interest and affect them, issues of race, class, power, and the operations and occasional failings of democracy. Neocons like Congressman Joe may point and screech "See! There it is!”, but the bottom line is that these are “liberal issues” mostly because conservatives only talk about them in terms of the negative or in terms of attack. Conservatives don’t talk to people about people because it’s not part of their equation; they talk about the evils of liberalism that they want to strike from your lives: forcing your children to go on overnight camping trips with gay scoutmasters; making you pay ever-higher taxes so lazy minorities can get those welfare checks to buy gas for their Cadillac’s for their weekly drug runs; requiring that your beautiful innocent high school daughter memorize the Kama Sutra for her health class mid-term; mandating that gay couple be allowed to have wedding ceremonies with full communion on your front lawn and then consummate their vows in your living room, blocking your view of the last 25 laps of the Daytona 500. All these things strike at primal fear centers deep in the human brain, like the fear of fire or being devoured by large fur-bearing carnivores, and they can stir up the base and get out the vote, but they don’t touch on real people’s daily concerns on how to get by in life: having a decent job that your boss can’t take away because your team beat his in the Series; having a government that is responsive to your needs for clean air and water, safe food and drugs and streets, and decent schools that teach your kids how to think instead of how to take a test; having a fair shot at opportunity even though you can’t rely on ‘good ol’ boy’ connections…

…Congressman Joe seems particularly obsessed with the notion that Moyers’ past connection with Democratic administrations somehow brands him as little more than a Democratic shill. Mr. Scarborough, meet Mr. Buchanan….or failing that, Mr. Scarborough, meet Mr. Safire. Am I to understand that for all of these years William Safire has not, in fact been cranking out columns of carefully crafted political thought, but instead has been simply a mouthpiece for the Republican Party? An objective response might be that Mr. Safire is writing from a point of view, but that is my point about Moyers. Most of his work is from the so-called “Deep Thought” school of journalism created by Edward R. Murrow (another noted vicious unrepentant liberal, although I think we are all better off for his role in the Joe McCarthy takedown) and it has a point of view, being less about straight news delivery and more about conversation. Fox News reporting is not conversation, nor is Drudge; nor, really, for that matter are Limbaugh and his clones; they are unabashedly driven by a fairly narrow agenda that is more pronounced than a few quotes scrounged up about Moyers’ observations on the ’02 election…

…Congressman Joe seems almost offended that Moyers considers this change in the media to be a more important event “in our time” than 9/11 or the war on terror, no doubt in large part because Joe doesn’t understand the meaning of “our”. Moyers, having been born almost 30 years before Scarborough, is a product of World War II, Korea, the Civil Rights movement, Viet Nam, the summer of ’68, and the Global Fight against Communism. In that context, this whole “War on Terra” thing, including the Iraq invasion, is almost hobbyist action. It may seem gripping and dramatic at the moment, but it is more a construct for conservatives anxious to reaffirm their tough-guy image in grim battle with an external enemy than the real conflicts that have transpired in Moyers' time…

…this is why I don’t bother screwing with these guys. Congressman Joe’s little screed is just another bit of cheap neocon hackery, an attack generally free of content or context, capable of stirring up the masses and giving the choir a starting note to sing to, but doing nothing to actually advance meaningful political discourse (which, of course, is the same reason I wallow in the same cheap hackery, although my effort – being unpaid –must surely be more noble). I hate it when I fall into this particular mud hole….

The Hunt for ElBaradei

…one of the most grimly compelling and fascinating aspects of the Bush Administration is it raw feral vindictiveness toward those who have opposed it in the pursuit of its personal agenda. From the simple act of speaking out against their agenda to disagreements within the actual corridors of policy-making, if you elect to take a stance in opposition to the direction in which Gee Dub and his Bush-monkeys are straining at the leash to tear off toward, you need to know that you better cowboy up for the guaranteed personal and professional attacks that are bound your way. Opposition to the war in Iraq earns the title “traitor”; professional disagreements over intelligence means that you will soon be cleaning out your desk at CIA headquarters; if you bust their chops over their fabrications about Nigerian ‘yellow cake’ uranium sales to Iraq, your undercover spy wife is going to find her name and CIA affiliation splashed all over the editorial pages of every newspaper to which Robert Novak is syndicated. Now it is Mohamed ElBaradei’s turn…

…the administration’s spin weasels, using telephone intercepts captured by our vaunted intelligence apparatus, are trying to poison the well for the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, painting him as being everything from soft on to a full-blown collaborator with Iran in their current nuclear production controversy. Their desire is to either remove him outright or make sure that some other Bush-compliant candidate is selected to fill the next term of IAEA director. Not many people are having any of it, unfortunately, and see this maneuvering for what it is: an effort to punish ElBaradei for his disparagement of U.S. evidence of Iraqi nuclear programs and subsequent criticism of the invasion on that basis. The Bush-monkeys face a now familiar problem that we might as well start calling “The Snow Conundrum” in honor of the most public recent example: nobody wants the job, particularly under these circumstances, and particularly if it comes under the grim cloud of association with the Bush administration. When you are striving to be the world’s number one bully, some sycophants may try to suck up to you for personal protection purposes, but not many people want to be thought of as your friend or colleague. This is the problem facing Gee Dub and the boys as they seek a candidate to thwart any thoughts ElBaradei may have regarding a third term at the helm of the IAEA…

…yesterday, Digby, in a somewhat different context, wrote that the father of the modern Republican party is Richard Nixon. It has to be said that, if one were to be casting around for an historical model for this current band of thieves, zealots, and fixers with which we are afflicted, one wouldn’t have to delve too far back in presidential history to find a pretty good fit. The secrecy, distrust, connivance, and vindictiveness of this crowd seems an apt comparison to that gang that some of us are old enough to vividly recall. It’s all in the cheap style, the hunger to go beyond just disagreeing with ElBaradei’s less confrontational, less in-your-face saber-rattling approach to dealing with the Iranian nuclear impasse, but instead reaching out to try to find some sort of misbehavior on his part. It’s not just a matter of running a candidate more favorable to the Bush-monkeys’ provocative militaristic style. The effort needs to go beyond, to take a crowbar to his reputation, pounding it into an unrecognizable pulp so that not only will they then have firm footing to jerk him out of his office but also so it will be a solid guarantee that there won’t be a sufficiently substantial pile of wreckage from his reputation to worry that his voice will ever again get stage time as an honest opinion broker speaking words contrary to the administration message. It’s the old “you’ll never work in this town again” gambit being worked over in an international arena…

…it’s all so very Nixonian. It only lacks the tax audit gambit because of the obvious inconveniences attendant to pulling that one off, although I know I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the victim was pulled off a flight because alert TSA agents discovered a few grams of pure uncut Columbian skag in the shaving kit in his checked luggage. Tricky Dick’s henchmen showed that it was only a small easy human step from simply keeping the oppositional wolves at bay to actively pursuing them with high powered weapons. We’ve seen the vindictiveness enough over the last four years to understand that it isn’t some quaint, mathematically improbable coincidence that these things are happening. At least we have the perverse satisfaction of knowing that this current class of clowns isn’t adept enough to hide their moves….at least I hope that’s what’s going on. The idea that they are doing this in the brazen open because they know we can’t stop them says things that I’m certain I don’t want to hear…