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

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Whistling In The Dark 

...the first question you end up asking when you read a story like this one is "so just how the hell many number 2's are there in Iraq's version of al Qaeda?" I mean, I'm willing now and again to suspend that natural cynical sense of disbelief about anything that this band of cut-rate circus clowns has to say about anything in particular, but the fact remains that they just told me last week that they had offed the "Number Two Man" in al Qaeda in Iraq...

...but then we move to the nut of this strange story: the terrorist attack/insurgency/hearts-and-minds battle (circle one or more or your choice) is wobbling on shaky legs and may well be in it's last throes...

...yeah...well...

We have been hearing this same refrain for some time now. In fact, we heard this same bit of intelligence about 500 American deaths ago, and we heard something similar to this about a thousand American deaths ago, and we heard even more rosy sentiments than this 1500 American deaths ago. There is only one fundamental problem, and that is of the administration that has led us to this point. Nothing that they have said, and nothing that they have done, has resulted in the sort of outcome that they repeatedly told us was the real deal. It would be wonderful to think that the insurgency in Iraq is about to collapse of its own twisted misguided weight, but we don't have any meaningful baseline from which to operate here. We have been lied to and sweet-talked so often by a whole school bus-load of honey-lipped story tellers like Bryan Whitman that there isn't any longer any hope that we can muster the root-deep trust to actually take such talk at face value. The bottom line is simple: Don't tell me that you just killed Number 2 and then sashay onto the dance floor the next week to tell me that another Number 2 is saying anything at all about the subject at hand. It just doesn't work any more...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:55 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

The Big Game 

...tomorrow is Game Day for the voters of the State of Oregon. After almost eight years of votes, unsuccessful court challenges, revotes, and the invocation of the powerful ire of the right-to-life movement and its Faithful Squires in the Bush Administration, Oregon's Death With Dignity Act will finally go before the United States Supreme Court. While a previous suit by pro-life groups was denied a SCOTUS review back in the last century, this particular case has the entire power of John Ashcroft's lasting legacy and the influence of the religious right behind it and will finally make the nut. This isn't about abortion, doesn't even have a whiff of that intractable dispute about it, but the bit players scurrying around the edges of the stage are the same and the issues are just about as good a surrogate for the abortion debate as you are going to find on the mean streets of D.C. these days without ginning some sort of direct run at Roe v. Wade itself. On the shell-holed surface of this conflict stand, on the right side of the screen, a federal government that doesn't want to allow federally controlled drugs to be used for the voluntary ending of a personal life; on the left side stands the State of Oregon, insisting that an accrued Constitutional right to privacy and the 10th Amendment distribution of the accrual of rights grants the state the right to make certain laws concerning voluntary end-of-life issues...

This is the last battlefield that most knowledgeable folks knew we needed to finally get to. Two important issues are at play on this particular gaming field: the power of the state to make regulations regarding certain activities that can happen within its borders that are otherwise state regulated, and - perhaps not as prominently featured but just as important - is the right to privacy of a segment of society. SCOTUS is likely to address the more narrow issue of Federal control over the proper use of controlled prescription drugs, but the whole issue of a person's end-of-life choices is the underpinning of the law and is - at least in theory - in play...

Oregonians originally passed the Death With Dignity ballot measure by a 51 - 49 margin, indicating the close nature of the debate. After the Roman Catholic Church (which, quite frankly, should have lost it's tax-exempt status over this) pressured the Republican-controlled legislature to offer another ballot measure that would have revoked the law, Oregonians - displaying that finely-honed sense of angry rejection of outsiders honed through all those years of immigration - voted by a 60 - 40 margin to keep the law. Now, it's all in the hands of a bunch of outsiders who dress up for work like the Choir of Darkness and viewed the late Chief Justice Rhenquist's sewing a bunch of gold Broadway musical stripes on his sleeves as the final and most extreme expression of casual Friday. This sudden wave of SCOTUS nominations has fired up both extreme ends of the political spectrum, with the fuel being abortion. Gameday on Wednesday has all of the same liberal/conservative schisms as that tired old issue and, in an important way, points to the larger stakes that are at play in this most recent of Gee Dub's stealth nominees. More is at stake than just abortion; a fundamental right to make personal life decisions is at stake, along with the authority of the State to make laws that would support that private right. At the sharp end of the broken bottles people keep waving in this fight, it's a fight between the secular society and a moralistic minority that believes it has a biblical mandate to force it's views on that larger society. And that's what the whole fight over the Miers nomination is all about. But she's not in the house yet, so for now we're not looking at the sort of predictable outcome that a Bush-stacked Supreme Court would deliver. Tomorrow is game day for Oregon and a whole bunch of principles that people outside of Gee Dub's dimming perfect radiance still cherish, and - at least for now - we're still in the game...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:44 PM 0 comments

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