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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, March 12, 2005

TO BE THE HAVES OR HAVE-NOTS

...whether Tom Delay violated ethics rules again by accepting lobbyist money for a business-related trip to England that was actually a glorified golf junket is a simple call. Of course he did. Tom Delay is totally comfortable with the idea that he will probably have violated an ethics law or two before he's had his second cup of coffee in the morning. The entire ethics monitoring structure of the US House of Representatives has been carefully redesigned to address his congenital incapability of turning his back on an ethically questionable opportunity. Tribal and corporate gambling interests who wanted his support laundered money through a third party to pay for the pilgrimage to St. Andrews golf course in exchange for his vote in support of their interests in Congress. All of the principles will say all the things they need to say, knowing that the gilded perch of privilege that lawmakers like Delay is so high up in the branches that any simple facile-sounding excuse will suffice, given that the little people have no means of striking back and the hand-fed media, desperate to avoid the appearance of liberal bias, can be thrown off the track with any bit of red meat, like some ineffective half-bright guard dog, that sends them off down some other dead-end trail. In itself, its just another sordid little tale of hubris rewarded, and can be left at that. But then there's the "on the other hand" part...

...when Delay's minions have finished screwing his clothes onto his crooked little body, he will return to the haunts of the House and join in with other Republican House leaders to enact cuts to cut funding to Agriculture Dept. nutritional and land conservations programs to lessen the proposed cuts to all of those Republican farmers that Gee Dub stabbed in the back with his proposed farm subsidy reductions in the FY '06 White House budget proposal. Gee Dub has already proposed removing 300,000 people from the food stamp program, and Republican leaders think that's a pretty good start that can be expanded. As Saxby Chambliss, who stands as a huge dark continual festering embarrassment to any military veteran who voted for him over Max Cleland, says:

"I want this to be as painless to every farmer in America as we can make it"...

...not "painless to those who have been left behind in this pathetic little economic recovery that refuses to provide meaningful family wage jobs", mind you, but "farmers". Like Social Security, the food stamp program and Aid to Dependent Children and the WIC program have always been anathema to conservative Republicans. Despite their hopeless inability or total lack of desire to improve the lot in life of the common wage-earning American, they have never felt that it was the greater society's role to provide a helping hand to those in need. People in need are supposed to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps (like virtually none of these Congressional leaders have ever had to do), or - failing that - be taken care of by the smaller community and churches and such, or -failing that - just go away and...geez, who knows...die, I guess. They have never at the federal level willingly adopted or even acknowledged the simple Christian concept of reaching out and providing comfort to the less well off. Regardless of how the Lord Jesus felt about the little children, these creatures will never lose a night's sleep over the prospect of their smallest, most innocent and vulnerable constituents going to bed night after night without enough food to eat....

...the juxtaposition between these two stories has put me in a foul mood tonight. Each, by itself, is enough to strike some sparks, but when you hold them up side by side before a decent light you can more clearly see the gaping disparity between the haves and have-nots and the hopelessness the have-nots face in a world where the haves decide how their lives will go. Tom Delay jets off to England, along with his wife, a couple of aides, and a lobbyist who is facing a whole world of investigations, ranging from money-laundering to bilking Indian tribes for services essentially undelivered (there's a whole 'nother big story all by itself about Jack Abramoff's dealings with opposing tribes in the Congressional gaming vote that funded Delay's trip), not to mention his financial involvement in Delay's role in the Texas redistricting effort. Through all of this, Delay never had to take a single thin dime out of his pocket to pay for anything as they made sure to engage in a couple of limp meaningless official-business-looking activities to provide cover for the golf outing at St. Andrews that was the real reason for the trip. This same Tom Delay, who has lost any sense that he may have ever had about the plight of people trying to make ends meet in uncontrollable circumstances of under- or unemployment in an employment setting that is merciless to those who aren't in exactly the right setting to find a decent job, comes back from his all-expenses paid junket to slip on the hob-nailed boot to help kick hundreds of thousands of struggling Americans off of one of the few programs that are helping them to even hold the last desperate threads of their lives together. For reference, Cookie Jill over at Skippy the Bush Kangaroo has the changes in numbers of citizens relying on assistance over the period of Gee Dub's magical jobless recovery...

...it's like some cheap ugly story from the times of kings and fiefdoms, where the king and his court wallow in the excess of lavish luxury while issuing edicts that drive the kingdom's starving peasant subjects farther into the dirt. It's not just a tale of differing circumstances, it's a story of lives and the perceptions thereof heading in sharply different directions. If the very thought of it doesn't start stirring at least the glimmerings of a white-hot anger, then you're probably a Republican...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:27 PM 0 comments

Friday, March 11, 2005

GETTING IT VERSUS LOSING IT

...the spreading word that Democratic Congressional leaders are recruiting Senatorial and Congressional candidates with pronounced anti-abortion views is beginning to cause a certain amount of consternation to be stirred up out in grass-roots country. A number of observers have been simply shocked that someone like Charles Shumer could in good conscience recruit a Bob Casey to run against Rick Santorum in the Pennsylvania Senate race. Given that a prominent post-election theme amongst progressives has been that the party needs to become more progressive - or at least better at articulating and defending it's progressive beliefs , these anti-abortionist recruitments seem little more than a rude dope-slap and a powerful disincentive to get involved...

...there is a battle that remains to be fought within the Democratic Party - to the death, if necessary - that will settle once and for all the question of whether the party competes for electoral success from a position of ideological purity or operates from a cruder foundation of pragmatism. Without a settlement of that argument, the return to Congressional majorities would seem to be an unlikely prospect, for all the obvious reasons. If you listen with the right kind of ear, you can already hear the lack of support for a Casey nomination by those concerned about preservation of core Democratic values, and the schism that this creates is a guarantee for failure.

“It is a problem when leading Democrats publicly recruit candidates who do not share the core values of the party," Democratic consultant Kate Michelman, the former head of the abortion rights group NARAL, said Thursday. "I don’t think you ever win in the long term by sacrificing core principles. The right wing has never done that.”

Michelman asked, “Can you imagine recruiting people to run for the Senate with a record of opposition to affirmative action or to Brown v. Board of Education (the 1954 school desegregation decision)?”


...what Ms. Michelman is talking about here is the application of a litmus test, perhaps understandably given that this is her area of advocacy. Where she is wrong is in stating that the "right wing" has never sacrificed core principles. Aside from being an indefensible statement, it misses the core of the issue. The "right wing" doesn't argue visibly within its own ranks over the disputes that it most certainly does have over "core values" such as abortions; there are, in fact, at least as many pro-abortion Republicans in the Senate than there are anti-abortion Democrats. What Republicans came to understand that Democrats yet haven't is that unity for the sake of winning beats minority-status ideological purity seven hands out of ten. There is a broad spectrum of philosophies within the Republican party, just as there are among the Democrats; they learned to manage their differences better (absent that one huge White House miscalculation over Jim Jeffords) in order to maintain the unity necessary to achieve majority status...

...now all of this isn't to say that Democrats somehow need to sacrifice all or even most of their core principles to get elected. Support for the President's war, support for the President's lopsided tax cuts, support for the President's Social Security reform plan...hmm, this is starting to sound like somebody in particular...anyway, these are things for Republicans to do, especially if they don't serve the needs of the Democratic constituency. Single-issue litmus tests, even on an issue as heavy and freighted with political symbolism as abortion, are a dangerous pastime with an impact far out of proportion to cheesy bone-headed comparisons to affirmative action or Brown vs. the Board of Education. I have to confess to my particular bias: I tend to come down in the pragmatist camp to a certain degree for both professional and personal reasons. Even with that, I don't especially care whether or not somebody actually "wins" the necessary great Democratic debate; I'm just hoping that a time comes where everybody ends up being on the same page, regardless of whose book it is, because otherwise I suspect I'll be rambling on about those stupid majority Republicans for a long time to come....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:51 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

ST. HELENS REDUX

...I was just sitting here, wallowing in the filthy luxury (a refrigerator, microwave, and a wet bar; this is truly living large) of the spacious hotel suite in which a traveling business trip has caused me to be lodged in Portland, the cultural hub and largest metropolitan area in Oregon, thinking about my last such business visit, thinking about the last time I was in town for business purposes. It was a year and a week ago, and the local Multnomah county government had just begun to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples. The streets were wild with happy newlyweds cherishing the first sharp moments of a finally legitimized personal commitment, the sidewalks slick with the anguished tears of those protectors of traditional marriage cringing in anticipation of the anticipated dope-slap from the righteous hand of God. Local TV news was a vast entertaining bonanza of wildly contrary stories of viciously competitive cultural ideals clashing somewhere just - literally - over the next hill here in the Rose City. So, as I was saying, I was just sitting here, ruminating over a cold evening post-meeting Mexican beer, thinking about the dramatic events of last year and how nothing of major impact was roiling the cultural waters this year. These temporally separated snapshots of the highs and lows of the big city's life are interesting, I was thinking...and then things changed:

MSNBC.COM

...and the TV went wild again. Local stations broke into their national news programs at just after 5:30 pm as Mt. St. Helens threw an ash/steam plume into the unseasonably warm Southwest Washington sky the likes of which the local population in Portland or across the Columbia River in Vancouver, WA, haven't seen in years. Traffic jammed on the freeways as motorists slowed down or pulled off onto the shoulder to take in the spectacle. Local cell phone service actually failed for over an hour because of the network loading. Unlike last year's surging emotional courthouse action, this event had a far less personal grip. I could have walked out the door and seen nature's show being performed off to the north, but there's too much personal history for that...

...I first went to work as a full-time permanent employee for a local Federal land resource land management agency in 1979, after college graduation. My first duty station, one that I spent almost nine years at, was at an office approximately 20 miles southwest from the tippy-top of the then Mt. Fuji-like Mt. St. Helens and my duties caused me to travel all over the eastern flanks of this docile dormant landscape feature, as well as to the blissful pristine tourist magnet of Spirit Lake, nestled on the northeast side of the mountain. My world began to change, not on May 18 of 1980, but rather on March 27 when the mountain first popped a hole in its top after a week of much-discussed seismic activity. With all the excitement that this particular moment generated (wild media reports from every aerial traffic reporter in Portland; worried phone called from local residents who's sister's brother-in-law's best friend's cousin's father had heard that the entire mountain had been fractured by the event - which we had all heard, like a weird sonic boom - and was about to collapse and was wondering, you know, should we evacuate since we aren't that far away), the final chapter of this story, written with absolutely no advanced warning at 8:32 am on Sunday, May 18, 1980, threw a serious jog into many lives, including mine, that could clearly qualify as life-changing experiences. I was faced with dealing with the aftermath of the eruption. There was the immediate aftermath - trying to talk my way the next morning through a State Police road block that denied access to my office by trying to convince the incredibly large State Trooper at the road block that the early-twentysomething bleary-eyed long-haired punk he was looking at was actually a federal employee who had spent the previous afternoon engaged in an "end of the world" party with coworkers after having been called by the boss and told not to come to work in the morning...who called much too late in the day afterwards to tell us to go ahead and come to work after all and not some lame doper looking for cheap thrills. There was also the extended aftermath: the wife that I never would have met if not for organizational changes that resulted from the eruption; the home and travel and children and pets that have accrued as a result of the acquisition of that wife; the place in professional life at which I find myself solely because of having met that particular woman as a result of that particular act of nature...

...I have a history and memory of that particular gripping sunny Sunday in May from - my God, can it really be - almost 25 years ago. That history includes several years of scrambling up and down steep ash-blasted slopes stacked head-deep with blown-down trees; flying out to project sites as part of a small army of helicopters that had become the new means of transport in replacement of the typical Suburban-sized crew vehicle because of the need to evacuate the area at a moments notice; packing gallons of water and pounds of survival equipment to provide for respite in the event of being caught in an ashfall; the sheer exhilarating terror that can come from flying in a helicopter being piloted by a Vietnam veteran who occasionally got bored with being a glorified taxi-driver and decided to just show off his stuff now and again with a screaming diving "hot LZ" approach to an otherwise perfectly safe forest landing zone...

...if all that memory weren't enough, there's always something like this, the entirely encompassing concept of a natural volcanic event that makes Mt. St. Helens or even the prehistoric eruption that ended in the formation of Crater Lake look like some whiney little bit of nonsense unworthy of our attention. The combination of my memory and this particular report somehow make today's wild local reaction to an unforecast random steam/ash eruption something of a strange exercise. Many of my temporary neighbors - at least those in the right position - grabbed a grip on today's action and embraced it as some weird version of the real deal...but there are those who know that this isn't really the real deal, not even close. The mountain will speak again, with its own voice in it's own true time...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:38 PM 0 comments

Sunday, March 06, 2005

SUPPORTING THE TROOPS, SORT OF

...there have been plenty enough stories about the disparate treatment being accorded National Guard troops vs. the boys and girls in regular military service. Lack of equipment, lack of logistical support, seemingly shoddy treatment of the wounded once they return to the States. This is only just another story, but this one has a twist. Instead of being mostly anecdotal or the product of the outcry of angry and confused relatives, this one has the backing of the General Accounting Office...

...think of the numbers; 34% of 867 National Guard troops studied over a two month period were basically cut loose from the care and benefits of federal service that they should be entitled after having made a significant sacrifice on behalf of the nation. That even a single trooper should be shown the door because of the building incompetence of an Army that seemed to give little thought to the ramifications of jerking our friends and neighbors out of their lives and jobs and homes for up to a year and a half should be sending outraged citizens into the streets. A big friggin' poster showing likely deployment lengths and the equal likelihood that, if you are wounded, you will rapidly find yourself back home on the streets facing the full cost of medical treatment and rehabilitation should be hammered into the door of any office that even remotely passes as a recruitment center for the Guard and Reserve...

...there's a reason that "military planning" is considered an original oxymoron. It shouldn't take someone versed in the science of rocketry to arrive at the conclusion that the constitution of 40% of the Iraqi force out of Guard and Reserve troops would require bolstering those programs directly involved in supporting those troops, especially were they to be injured. Apparently, however, it was beyond the reach of Army planners. The fact that they have begun to turn things around over the last few months is little comfort, especially to those Guard troops and their families that have been wrapped up in this situation for the better part of three years. If the "be all you can be" boys had their act together from the beginning, none of these depressing individual stories that have been circling for the last couple of years should have ever needed telling. It didn't happen, however, and all those stories are out there. It's no longer necessary for minions of the pro-war faction to attempt to give me lectures on supporting the troops. I've seen how the Bush administration has done it with regard to the citizen-soldiers of my state, and that tells me all I need to know about what they actually mean...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:07 PM 0 comments

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