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

Friday, November 11, 2005

The Corps of Discovery Bicentennial 

...with all of the troubles in the world, it's almost refreshing to take a step back, right at this moment, to think about a time and place that have nothing to do with the wild angry partisanship of these times and everything to do with simple bravery, exploration, and - unfortunately - the beginning of the end of the traditional life that native Americans had lived for almost uncountable generations. This is a story that every American knows, without necessarily understanding, and something that has been underlying background noise in my entire life. Two hundred years ago this week, a corps consisting of thirty one men, one teenage Shoshone girl, her infant child, and a dog arrived at the Pacific Ocean after a journey of monumental proportion spanning the better portion of two years. After overwintering just off the north Oregon coast and establishing the rainsoaked reason that coastal motels and resorts two hundred years later have much cheaper winter rates that those they charge during the summer, this corps virtually raced back across the country in 1806, returning to a small nation that had long since assumed that they had perished with astounding stories, journals, maps, and drawings that led to the westward movement of the fur trappers and mountain men and dreamers, who themselves were followed within a generation by the settlers following the Oregon Trail and the subsequent creation of the western timber industry and other aspects of commercialism and all the things both good and bad that came as a result of this particular influx...

My whole life has been spent in relatively close proximity to the path of the Lewis and Clark expedition. During my youth in North Central Idaho, you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting some sort of signpost or banner trumpeting the Lewis and Clark trail or a Sacagawea Junior High School or Rest Area or Plumbing Supply Store. We all knew about Fort Clatsop (we called it Fort Catslop, just for the hell of it) and the overwintering and the crossing of the Bitterroot Range near Missoula and all the rest. Reading the diaries, which you can do here, brings the effort more fully to life, however, as you are exposed to the pure mind-bending agony of a group totally unprepared for the unremitting, neverending, torential Pacific Northwest coastal rain in a time long before God had created Gore-tex (which God created just for the Pacific Northwest, whether or not you knew that). Two hundred years ago tomorrow, William Clark wrote from their camp near Astoria, Oregon:
It would be distressing to a feeling person to See our Situation at this time all wet and cold with our bedding &c. also wet, in a Cove Scercely large nough to Contain us, our Baggage in a Small holler about ½ a mile from us, and Canoes at the mercy of the waves & drift wood...

It is a time and an anniversary that will go in large part without mention at the national level in this moment of partisan and intraparty political conflict and all that loud noise of the 'big' issues of the day that are dominating our attention, but it is one of the foundation stones - for good or ill - of the nation in which we live today and, in the process, exposed the vast possibilities of the unknown West to one of the Corps members, John Colter, who would later become his own legend as one of the premier explorers of this vastness. It is, objectively, an heroic story and yet one that in its full telling includes the eventual destruction of an entire universe of cultures that predated by centuries European arrival on this continent. All by itself, though, and absent all the ugly things that came after, it's a hell of a story, and we're now fetched up hard against the second centennial of the objective of that specific story; out here on the upper left-hand corner of the map, where this objective was achieved and played itself out, that pure story offers a nice diversion from all the nonsense swirling around us...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:35 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

The Stunning ANWR Switcho-Chango 

...over the last decade, the battle over oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge(ANWR) has been joined in the United States Senate, where narrow majorities and the risk of filibuster have held final approval at bay. This fall seemed to herald the end of the effort to protect ANWR from the speculative exploitation of a relatively small predicted underground oil reserve. ANWR drilling was approved as an amendment to the massive omnibus budget bill marching through the Senate, and even an effort by my Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden to ban exportation of any oil coming from ANWR was smashed beyond recognition. My Republican Senator, Gordon Smith, professed opposition to ANWR oil drilling but was going to vote for the entire bill - which contained the drilling - because he said there were items that he wanted that offset his professed opposition to ANWR oil exploitation. This was a difficult position for Smith to maintain, given how steep and slippery was the perch he was trying to occupy, but out there tonight in some flashy greater DC metropolitan suburb, Gordon Smith is on his knees thanking his God for a peculiar sort of salvation, a deliverance that has come from a shocking and bizarre source...

...tonight the Republican leaders of the House of Representatives decided to drop the provision authorizing drilling in ANWR (let me text attribute that link for you just so you don't miss it). This is a stunning reversal, given the annual reliability over the last several years of House passage of some sort of bill or amendment authorizing that exploration. For once, unbelievably, the usual solid wall of House Democrats joined with a core group of moderate Republicans, who found themselves stripped of their usual Senate protection in defeating the drilling proposal, to send the clear message to Hastert and the boys that they would not support any bill coming out of conference that had drilling. Those moderate Republicans, no longer having a popular president to fall back on and facing guilt by association with a leadership that polls worse than Gee Dub and representing as they do toss-up districts where not much of a slip could tip the scales to a Democratic challenger, have now been faced with the need to step up to the plate and take a hefty swing on behalf of their constituents. This is just one more thing, another bad day, for a Bush administration that has made drilling in ANWR a major campaign promise and the strange, silly centerpiece of it's energy independency program. You can almost envision all those Starship Enterprise alarms going off in the White House hallways, complete with flashing red lights and scurrying members of the away team rushing to the transporter room (devoted lefty trekkies at this point hoping that Karl Rove is the one in the Red Shirt) to beam down to the House floor to blast the alien Republican Representatives with phasers set to "vaporize". But, sorry, Gee Dub, it's all just a sad little dream. An unlikely knight in shining armor has come galloping to the rescue of those opposed to drilling in ANWR, and the flag flying over that knight is a stunning one, indeed...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:08 PM 0 comments

Better Than Nothing At All 

...when you don't have a good strategy, apparently a bad strategy is better than no strategy at all. The Bush Administration is advertising this today with the revelation of the less than closely held secret that they are going to employ a "hit back" strategy. This strategy is apparently designed to show that all those yappy Democrats were saying the exact same things as Republicans in Congress and the White House in the time leading up to the Iraq invasion...

...unfortunately the "we were working from the same set of facts" story line has a certain weakness. Many members of Congress were working off of the same set of facts that Bushco was relying on - this is certainly true. On the other hand, those many members of Congress were working off of those facts because their facts were provided to them by emissaries of the Administration, since access by members of Congress to classified information was limited by the White House after 9/11. Much of their information leading to whatever statements that they may have made came as a result of intelligence briefings presented by the White House or information funnelled through the White House. The Bush Monkeys, though, are banking on the relatively short-lived nature of our national memory and the by-now tradional failure of mainstream media to do any meaningful front-page analysis of the claims that might come from their new strategy. Creating those simple sound bites that casually misrepresent the truth has been a winning formula, and in these difficult times it's obviously necessary to go back to that well one more time. It will be more difficult to run that gambit this time, though, because there has already been too much talk about through whose hands intelligence information passed on its way to the proper ears. This shines a bright light on WHIG, on Douglas Feith and his "Office of Special Plans", the Niger uranium scam, the aluminum tubes, and all the rest. There's a big, well-known body of evidence out there that is going to serve as it's own compelling argument against the proposition that "the Democrats said the same thing." The boys in the White House have openly signalled that this is going to be their strategy to get back in the game, though. Good luck with that...
Posted by: Jack K. / 3:05 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Inmates Burning Down the Asylum 

..."Cat Man" Bill Frist (and Denny "The Rock" Hastert):
If the Post story is accurate, “such an egregious disclosure could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences, and will imperil our efforts to protect the American people and our homeland from terrorist attacks...”

...just dwell on that thought for a moment. The disclosure prompting a CIA request for a leak investigation threatens our safety. The revelation in this story about the existence of 'black' CIA managed detention facilities "will imperil our efforts" to preserve our safety. That's what they say...

It is becoming harder and harder to suspend one's sense of incredulity long enough to try to come to grips with the amoral monstrosity that we have allowed to gain power over this country. These people are able to say these sorts of things with a straight face, for which you really do have to envy them, but they plainly don't understand the plain absurdity of the words that they use. In the first place, the CIA isn't even supposed to HAVE prisons; that's not their job. In the second place, if they feel that prisons are a vital component of their mission to collect information, Dick Cheney's insistence that John McCain's torture ban amendment needs to have an exception for the CIA probably tells you all you need to know about what's happening in those secret prisons. Given all that, hell YES such a revelation could lead to an increased threat to our collective safety. Once again we are displaying just exactly those sorts of traits led us to invade a soverign nation that engaged in those sorts of behavior. The secrets in the WaPo story don't threaten our safety because they reveal gaps in our security or otherwise make it easier to attack the US. Those revealed secrets threaten our safety because they are going to piss people off about our behavior...

Now Frist and Hastert want congressional investigations over the leaks. It's apparently not that big a deal to them that a CIA agent and her network dealing with the actualy WMD threats hanging over our heads got outed, but it is a big deal when our big shiney naked butt gets caught hanging out engaging in activities that shine a glaring light on the rank hipocracy of this gang of brutal murderous fools that are at the controls right now. We've - on the one hand - socked away alleged al Queda prisoners so deep that God may have trouble finding them while at the same time we play a cheapskate game in actually trying to deal with al Queda leadership along the Afghan/Pakistan border as we dump a billion dollars a week into a nation-building exercise in Iraq that never had, has, or ever will have any direct bearing on our internal safety. In the meantime, we act as though we have a task force actually working overtime trying to come up with new ways to enflame and radicalize the very Muslim world that we fret over as the source of the terrorism that threatens us (which isn't necessarily true, but accurately describes the mind set of the clowns at the wheel). The leak isn't the problem, regardless the desperate embarrassed nature of the CIA' and Republicans' response. Their actions are the problem, and those actions are what makes us less safe. This sudden Republican zealousness about CIA leaks, aside from being just plain silly, is a perfect example of the asylum inmates putting a torch to their own domicile...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:50 PM 0 comments

Sunday, November 06, 2005

When "Political Stunts" Matter 

...the outraged cries from Republican Senators over Harry Reid dragging them into closed session were barely just echoes bouncing through the halls of power this weekend when this particular nail started getting whanged into the Administration's Iraq War coffin. The report itself is just another example of how the Bush Monkeys were so anxious to manufacture any reason whatsoever to take on Iraq that they would, depending on your taste, either A) naively accept any sort of information buttressing their insistence that Saddam was a direct threat to peace and stability, regardless of specifically expressed concerns about that information, or B) intentionally used discredited information in order to fabricate a rationale for invasion that would not have otherwise survived even the most casual scrutiny. In either case, the apparent refusal of the Republican-led Senate Intellegence committee to actually complete a report on intellegence and the failures thereof leading to the decision to invade is important, not only because of its post-mortem aspect but also as instruction as to the caution that should rightfully be applied to any intelligence that commits American troops to combat...

...was Reid's move a partisan stunt? Well, yeah, there was no doubt some of that. I mean, why not? Back in the mid-nineties, Bob Dole and the minority Republicans did everything possible to stymie any sort of reasonable work in the US Senate so they could run in part on the premise that the Democratically controlled Senate was a "do-nothing" body. The law-making function in all of Congress has become little more than a game of 'capture the flag' over the last decade, and nobody in the minority is going to pass up any opportunity to inflict damage on the majority's hold on power. In most instances, however, the headstones of 2000 American soldiers or the missing limbs or dramatically changed lives of thousands of others or the unremarked graves of many thousands more residents of another soverign nation aren't part of the political equation. Those things are in this case. Cindy Sheehan isn't the only angry loved one out there; there are plenty of other moms and dads and siblings and spouses and childred who are upset but who don't get the press because they haven't gone public. There are even more friends and relatives of those who have returned with life-altering wounds who are unhappy, but they and their wounded soldiers are the silent cost of this war. They are never talked about, they are never talked to, and there is no instrument to measure how they might feel about the validity of the reasons they ended up being in the situations they are in. And then there is, after all, the rest of us. We deserve to know why and how we ended up in Iraq; Saddam Hussein being a bad guy wasn't a sufficient reason; neither was any involvement his regime might have had in the violence in Israel...

...yeah, maybe it was a political stunt, but it goes to the heart of why we decided that invading Iraq was part of the War on Terra, which itself appears more and more - every day in every way - to have been little less than a political act of its own. Other "slam dunk" intelligence and other firmly embraced informants have proven to be either a product of the cavalier embrace of bad information by an all-too-willing administration or the deliberate creation of a rationale for war that was otherwise unjustified. The production of the Intelligence committee report, especially in light of this new information about DIA doubts about one of those intelligence cornerstones, is of legitimate concern to this country's citizens, and Republican stonewalling - itself a political stunt - deserves to be challenged by a 'political stunt' in kind for the sake of truth...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:48 PM 0 comments

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