<$BlogRSDURL$>

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

Friday, December 30, 2005

Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ver. 2006.1 

...times are grim tonight along certain bleak darkened streets in the tonier Power Neighborhoods of the Greater Washington DC Metropolitian Area. Behind a number of double-deadbolted locks, members of the Washington power elite - men, primarily, who are the slick smooth power brokers who lurk behind the throne or trot their power out in public for all the world to see, fear, and respect, people who by the fates of electoral politics are granted the right to have the word "honorable" stapled prominently in front of their names - are sitting quietly and fearfully in the dark listening to the wolves snuffling and clawing at the pricey veneer of the wood on those fine extravagent front doors. They've been brought to this fearful, ignominious state by the news that Jack Abramoff is just about to do a deal with the Man, just to save his own skin from a really long stint in the federal pen with large muscular men who have a taste for new meat and a twisted penchant for bragging about just exactly what sorts of things they like to do to a self-styled "Big Man in Washington"...

The hunt for Abramoff was never really about Abramoff. The story wasn't about Smilin' Jack currying favor with lawmakers, it was about just exactly with whom that favor was being curried. He may have done things to American Indian Nations for which some of them would cheerfully offer to apply traditional tribal punishment, but the larger fact was that, while he was playing both ends against the middle in these cases, he was also involving "honorable" members of Congress. The most amazing part, though, is that it wasn't even about all the insults and emails stemming from the tribal casino gaming games that he was playing. There was way more than that, all of it involving contributions from somebody to somebody that was followed by some sort of favorable action. Abramoff was the mechanic keeping a vile, dark political machine humming in find form, but the ultimate target all along for those sharp-eyed career prosecutors hasn't been a middling-sized fish like him but the big lunkers parading daily around the floor of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate...

Abramoff, seeing the writing scrawled on the wall in fresh blood when both of his closest cohorts elected to turn state's evidence, has the opportunity - along with Scalon and Kudow - to bring a serious beatdown to the lives of a number of your elected Representatives. There's a real possibility that not only the Big Dogs like Tom Delay but also lesser known entities will be looking at the very real possibility that a tough reelection campaign is by far the least of their worries. While any true progressive can only hope and pray to the spiritual entity of choice for the hope of seeing lots of leading Republicans frog-marching into various courtrooms, there is the possibility that some Democrats may be doing the dance, too. If so, that's the price of doing business. Corrupt politicians are corrupt politicans, and any of them that dealt in the slimy currency that Jack Abramoff offered are the sorts that we are better off without. As a whole, the Republican party has set records that may never be broken in turning the whole K Street/lobbyist/money game into a personal no-limit ATM machine, so they are more likely to suffer because of their obvious hunger to take control of the machine and "get" their's. Let come what may: there are far more wolves' footprints tonight on Republican porches than those of Democrats, quite simply because Abramoff - dating back to his days as a good buddy of Grover "bathtub-drowner" Norquist - is primarily a Republican animal who has come to prominence under Republican ownership of the government. If Smilin' Jack decides to sing, it will be primarily Republicans who will be hearing that tolling, tolling bell...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:53 PM 0 comments

Thursday, December 29, 2005

At My House, You're Grounded for This.... 

...I brought my 16-year-old daughter home tonight from an overnight stay with one of her closest friends who has moved to Prineville, a Central Oregon community 60 miles away from here and where her dear friend's family moved a few months ago. There was a major conflict that I let my wife win involved in this trip, one regarding just how OK it was for my first-born to wander the evening streets of Prineville as her friend showed her the highlights of that community. One can only imagine the sort of early grave to which I would be led if Farris Hassan was my child...

As the story tells, 16-year-old Farris - fired up with all sorts of youthful idealistic passion - managed without his parent's knowledge or permission to get himself all the way to Baghdad, Iraq, without being killed, assaulted, or sold into slavery. And I was worried about my daughter wandering the sidewalks of a small sleepy Central Oregon town in the evening with a couple of friends...

Remarkable as his story is, and regardless of how it will expand his view of the world and perhaps help him in his academic and life endeavors, if this was my kid he could be pretty confident that there's not going to be any X-Box, stereo, or TV for a good long while...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:56 PM 0 comments

Monday, December 26, 2005

Heralding the End Of A Strange, Sad Year 

...it's almost as if 2005 began a few days early, with the Indian Ocean tsunamis jacking up a news story that beat relentlessly at us for days on end and swept us into the new year missing noticable chunks of that hope and promise such annual transitions usually bring. The scenes of hopelessness and devastation were soon enough followed by the sight of George W. Bush, fresh from a surprisingly narrow victory for an incumbent, strutting around the Capitol like some victorious warlord, prattling on about some perceived "political capital" that it turned out was only apparent to him. In the months since, we've seen pitched battles over changes to Social Security that didn't seem to much benefit anyone, a host of legislative initiatives by the neo-con hoards that were clearly intended to benefit themselves and their investors, and an embarrassing dispute of the right of a brain-dead woman to be taken off of life support (featuring the first known use of a video diagnosis by a person who, by God, wants everyone to know that he is a doctor, even though his diagnosis was ethically challenging, not to mention outside his field of speciality). Greed has been rewarded, through the revision in bankruptcy laws, corruption at almost every level has generally gone - or at least its punishment has remained unrequited - and squabbles broke out all over the country over a push to force the teaching of creationism next to evolution that most common-sense folks - including Christians - think is just a silly, unjustified side show. And then there was Katrina, who's death toll wasn't as dramatic and the tsunami's and earthquakes on other spots on the planet but who's devastation and suffuring was just as real and who's effects will be felt for years to come...

Now we come up on the end, mercifully, having endured internal conflict over oil drilling in the Great White North, debates that we shouldn't even need to be having about torture and mistreatment of prisoners, and the revelation of a warrantless wiretapping scheme that would have had a Republican House of Representatives throw their Christmas vacation out the window in order to stay over during "The Holidays" to draft up articles of impeachment against any Democratic president that would have had the sheer totalitarian audacity to conceive of such a thing. We face the end of the year still trapped in a war that no truly objective observer can honestly explain how we got into in the first place and with only the desperate hope that three groups who dislike each other at a genetic level can put aside centuries-old cultural differences to hammer together a government and sense of citizenship that will at some point allow us to leave without having to shoot our way out or fly people off rooftops. We've watched hundreds more flag-drapped coffins come home, along with many more hundreds maimed both physically and mentally, too many of them not as a result of storming some beach or taking some hilltop or otherwise securing an objective that would lead to victory, but instead as a result of being blown up in their inadequately armored vehicles as they drove down some road...

And so the year winds down with few except Chicago White Sox fans having much positive to look back on. We seem to be really no safer than at the beginning, although we appear less secure, from a constitutional point of view. Next year, with it's mid-term elections, promises to be even more vicious and ugly that this one, even nonwithstanding whatever natural or man-made disasters that may come down the pike. It's hard to picture oneself dancing gleefully with the assembled throngs in Times Square as the incredibly life-like visage of Dick Clark announces the moment of the new year, but it's pretty easy to envision heaving a sigh of relief a few nights hence that this one is finally over...
Posted by: Jack K. / 2:53 PM 0 comments

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?