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

Saturday, April 02, 2005

BEING TOM DELAY

...it would be a fascinating experience to somehow discover some previously unknown slime tube that would allow one to belly crawl down inside the essence of what is
Tom Delay, to experience what he experiences. To be able to sense that awesome, almost erotic sense of pure extra-democratic power that he feels coursing through his veins, to see the world through the particular crazy-mirror lenses of his eyes, where everything and everybody is reduced to some sort of extremely short, extremely wide object that deserves little but scorn and abuse, these sensations would truly be worth whatever price needed to be paid. There simply has to be something remarkable happening inside his head that none of the rest of us ever get to have in our lives; nothing else could explain his almost casual disregard for even the minimal trappings of ethical behavior and democracy. That's the only thing that can possibly explain his current little trip into fantasy, during which he is insisting that the House Judiciary Committee investigate why Federal judges didn't do just exactly what he told them to do in the Terri Schiavo case...

...one would think, apparently operating under the false assumption that one was dealing with a rational man, that Delay's comments shortly after Schiavo's death threatening an accounting for the men who caused this to happen - which apparently included all those federal judges who didn't do his bidding - would have been enough action in an effort to short up the Pharisee right-to-life religious base that appeared to be the only group in American that actually supported Congressional intervention. You would be wrong. Having helped to overturn the rule of law and tossed the concept of federalism out in the road in front of a speeding semi by helping to engineer a special, one-person-only law allowing federal courts to intrude into personal matters that are supposed to be handled in state court, a move that truly impressive majorities of Americans said in polls that they disagreed with, Delay - apparently bloated to the point of day-blindness with that particular poisonous hubris borne of unfettered power - apparently has decided that he wants the Judiciary Committee to perhaps subpoena some of these recalcitrant "activist" federal judges so they can come up to Washington and sweat under the hot lights explaining why they didn't do what they were told. Perhaps impeachment articles are in the offing if they don't show the proper respectful remorse in this proposed Star Chamber. Who the hell knows anymore? All we can see is some out-of-control Boss Hog of the House of Representatives throwing his considerable weight around in a fashion that threatens some of the basic functional precepts of our form of government, almost as if he's privy to some personal secret polling data that suggests that this is the best and purest course of action to take in order to create the Thousand Year Reich that Delay and his storm-troopers would like to create. It's an amazing sight to see, given that - were he a humble General Service Federal employee instead of being the infamous "Hammer" - he would currently be on administrative leave without pay under the impressive burden of ethical misconduct in which he has engaged...

...it's gotta be a great thing to be Tom Delay. You or I would have long ago frog-hopped our way out of a Federal court in ankle chains on our way to prison for actions similar to some of the things he has done, and our lives would be filled with the constant companionship of federal agents for some of the things he has said. Tom Delay and his ilk have made it ok to physically threaten State and Federal judges for decisions that some wacko doesn't believe in. He's also been a party to making it ok to intrude into two hundred years of established case law. Through all of this, he remains totally in control of the reins of the House, all the cheap public relations talk about the power of Denny "Hey, I'm Somebody, Too" Hastert nonwithstanding. Even though he should become the poster child in the campaigns of every Democratic Congressman and challenger, you still have to admit it's gotta be a great life to live....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:53 PM 0 comments

Thursday, March 31, 2005

YOU'RE WRONG...AND YOU'RE UGLY, TOO

...“we conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure...”

...that's it. That's the list. There are pages and pages and thousands of dollars of effort beyond this simple phrase, but it's all little more than filler, extra colors in the crayon box to add a little depth to the picture, but that's about it. There isn't even anything suggesting a light at the end of this long grim tunnel, according to the report from the President's special commission on weapons of mass destruction; we are no better off in our intelligence assessments of Iran or North Korea than we were on Iraq...

...over 1500 dead American soldiers, with way more than 10,000 wounded; no clue as to how many Iraqi civilians killed, but numbers range from the thousands to almost 100,000; as many as 10,500 Iraqis held in prisons with no release in sight; closing in on $200 BILLION spent...and Bush economic advisor Larry Lindsay was seriously wrong about this - on the light side - and still got fired. All of these tragic statistics piling up almost exclusively because we had nothing approaching a clue about what was going on in Iraq. We had a chance to find out, using a utility called the UN WEAPONS INSPECTORS who were in place and functioning - finding nothing, by the way - during the period when we were busy not finding our collective ass with both hands. It appears from the report that our only rare good fortune in this mess was that at least one intelligence specialist with a long-term subscription to National Geographic apparently had one of those cool multi-color map inserts showing Iraq from an issue containing a story about the Middle East, thereby at least enabling us to identify and invade the right country that we were hopelessly wrong about...

...all the pain, all the national divisiveness, all the cost in blood and treasure that is still accumulating, and it was all because we were so spectacularly wrong from an intelligence standpoint. The nation would have been as well served if we had casually scotch-taped random intelligence assessments to a wall in some Eastern Oregon cowboy bar and turned a bunch of dart-flinging drunks loose on it, calling anything a dart touched "solid intelligence". The worst aspect to this whole sordid story is the severely damaged sense of trust hanging like some foul stench over the intelligence apparatus. When the "next time" comes down the trail and the pro's from Dover are gesturing wildly and shouting about the dire threat that we are facing from some perceived enemy, we just aren't going to be able to know for sure just how bad it actually is. That's not a good way to live...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:05 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

HEY! I'M SOMEBODY!!

...over the last several days I have been noticing some of the big dogs in blogtopia (y!sctp!) complaining viciously about the brutal but unspecified beatdown that Blogger has been administering to them. We're talking about the 800-lbs. gorillas here, people in or near the top 100 in the Technorati ratings (which, come to think of it, was where Ruminate This used to be prior to my becoming the only poster on that blog, but why dwell on that), having all sorts of trouble with their postings. I thought this was odd, because I wasn't having any trouble at all with posting or editing or anything else....and then there was yesterday...

...ah, yesterday, when two posts disappeared into a cloud of unresolved electrons and a third insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it was a document devoid of data, even though I was able to copy it over to Ruminate This and post it there. Logging out of Blogger was impossible; logging back in was even more difficult. Through it all, however, a little smile of triumphant satisfaction was able to steal across my haggard but still ruggedly handsome visage. Now I was SOMEBODY! Blogger was treating me like crap just like it was the big dogs; that warm sense of belonging, the enveloping feeling of community, truly warmed my soul on another rotten snowy Central Oregon Day. Now if I could just get the damned thing to let me sign out...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:20 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

HILLARY'S AMAZING REACH

...you wouldn't think that the image of Hillary Clinton could become an icon in a potential primary campaign between two Republicans in Texas, and you would, I imagine, find yourself particularly hardpressed to imagine her being a point of dispute in a potential Republican primary for the governorship of Texas. You would be wrong, however, because she is, which is probably as good an indicator as anybody needs as to what kind of circus we'll witness if she even begins hinting that she's actually considering running for President...

...the current dispute in Texas is between currrent Governor Rick Perry and US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who is suspected of having designs on his current residential address and the job attached to it. The dispute itself, which is good for a real chuckle, especially when you realize that these people are serious, is over who has more cordial relations with the junior Senator from New York. Perry's campaign got off to a good enough start with the "hugging" video; the mere word "Clinton" incites wild passions in just exactly the portion of the base that Perry will want to have in his corner in a difficult primary fight against a high-profile opponent who has also demonstrated success at this state-wide election game. Sadly, as is usually the case since we are - after all - talking about Republicans, there's always that one crucial intellectual failure waiting like a baited trap. One might escape that trap being sprung if one is dealing with the sorts of timorous sissies that have been passing themselves off as the Democratic leadership for the last several years, but here we're talking about playing the mudslinging game against a fellow Republican, a red on red friendly fire incident being directed against a gang that's perfectly happy to leap over the fence into the stye and start slinging it back; under these circumstances the prudent and intelligent thing to do would be to make sure your own closet is clean. And so, now we have "the Letter", offering praise for Hillary's health care initiative that was widely viewed by righties as the ultimate vile manifestation of 'socialized medicine'...

...so here we are, watching this richly entertaining game of "No, YOU'RE more friendly with Hillary!" as charges of duplicity, hypocrisy, bad posture and mis-colored roots zing around in the fresh springtime Texas air. With the right sort of lens filter, you can almost capture the bemused visage of Hillary Clinton, marveling at the sight of two Texas politicians using each other's cordial dealings with her as negative advertising. Some days you can just feel the love...
Posted by: Jack K. / 12:40 PM 0 comments

Sunday, March 27, 2005

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS

...just some wandering thoughts on this most important and holy of weekends (Easter, after all, being what this whole religion thing is about for Christian folk)...

...President Bush decamped today from the certifiably cattle-free environment at his Crawford, TX, pretend ranch to chopper 50 miles down the road to Fort Hood with the family for Easter services. During this service the assembled congregation prayed for world peace and safety for the deployed American troops. Amazingly, at my church's Easter service here on the eastern hip of the Oregon Cascades, we also prayed for world peace and the safety of American troops in harms way, but - in a cruel twist of irony - there wasn't a single person in our congregation who has had nearly the impact on world peace or the placement of our troops in harm's way as has the President. At the moment of this reporting, it is uncertain just exactly which prayers God took seriously...

...it apparently comes as a stunning revelation to the news media that RV owners aren't being deterred in their travels by the current high gas prices. This falls into the category of media revelations we usually file in the "well, DUH" category around here. I'm an RV'er, although I reside at the low-rent, Poverty Flats end of the recreational vehicle spectrum as the owner of a 19-foot-long camp trailer that, while technically being just the sort of RV that Tom Sellick so warmly discusses in all those "Go RV-ing" commercials, actually isn't even allowed in some of the better RV resorts, such as a particularly exclusive set-up on the Central Oregon coast at Newport, where my gas-guzzling pickup and trailer would be chased away at gunpoint for not being - get this - big enough. When you are talking about people who have sunk anywhere from $150 K to nearly one million dollars into a rolling hotel room, even fifty cents extra to drive every five miles down the road isn't going to make you park that baby on the back of the property and cover it with a tarp weighed down by water-filled milk jugs just because of gas prices...

...President Bush (who keeps coming up because it's so cheap and easy) somehow found it possible to fly back to Washington, DC, from his current vacation to be available to stumble out of bed in the middle of the night to sign a Constitutionally questionable bill ripping jurisdiction of the Terri Schaivo case out of the hands of state courts and granting federal jurisdiction. Oddly, during all those trips back and forth from Crawford and during his time at the ranch, during which time he was surrounded by a suite of sophisticated telecomunications so complete that at the twitch of a finger he could converse with any human being on the planet with access to telephone, cell, satellite, or radio communication, he was unable for over FOUR FULL DAYS to make a simple call to express his sympathy to those caught up in the shooting tragedy on the Red Lake reservation in Minnesota. One can only charitably assume, this being the Easter Season, that he mistakenly presumed that "Red Lake" was some sort of Army base in Iraq and the fatalities were American soldiers, which would explain the fact that he refused to acknowledge their deaths or sacrifice, in keeping with a long-standing Bush administration policy...

...and, finally, we are now able to more clealy understand that the detention of assorted Arab-looking fellows at Guantanamo Bay has more to do with some visceral interest in seeing Arab-looking fellows spend the rest of their lives in custody than it does with any sort of actual evidence or testimony or all those other nusiances that we here in this supposedly free and democratic country tend to insist upon. From the Washington Post, we learn that the generally incompentent 'tribunal' reviewing the cases of Gitmo detainees decided that one Murat Kurnaz, a German national experienceing the pleasures of an all-expense-paid Carribean vacation on the east coast of Cuba courtesy of the American government, was a truly dangerous Al Qaeda operative and dangerous terror threat despite the fact that the evidence pretty much indicated that he was no such thing. In fact, the only evidence against him, offered in the face of a substantial amount of information from both US and German intelligence sources, was one brief memo of uncertain origin and attribution that suggested that he was a bad guy. He is still being held, contrary to the recommendations of US and allied intelligence agencies, based on this one thin memo. Mountains of words could be piled up to suggest the potential outrage that is represented by this particular case, but just one thing comes clearly to mind: so, how do you feel about that Patriot Act reauthorization and expansion, now, Sparky? It does give one pause...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:15 PM 0 comments

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