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

Friday, January 13, 2006

"Turn Out the Lights; The Party's Over" - Alito Edition 

...yes, as Dandy Don Meredith might have said - had he talked this way - "Time to put this ol' hoss in the barn, 'cause the day is done." Judge "(Your nickname here)" Sammy Alito is very, very likely to be confirmed next week or the week after to be the newest Associate Justice on the US Supreme Court, giving conservatives that power of majority on SCOTUS that they have been fighting to achieve for more than 20 years. The way will finally be clear for them to have the necessary judicial muscle to snuff the idea of a constitutionally protected right for a woman to have the ultimate say over what happens to her body, along with all sorts of other silly liberal notions about personal privacy, equal access, ability to redress grievances, separation of church and state, protection of minority rights, protection of individual rights in the judicial system, protection of workers' rights, health, and safety in the face of corporate power, or the rights of individuals in the face of the soverign power of states, just to name a few. Things don't look good for Oregon's "Death with Dignity Act", either. If the right wing plays their cards just right, they might even get a 'twofer' by quashing an attempted Democratic filibuster with the "nuclear option", eliminating that minority gambit in judicial confirmations for the foreseeable future...

None of this is by accident, of course. Conservatives began a concerted effort to build a farm system of future SCOTUS appointees back in the Reagan era, tracking down and scrubbing up movement conservatives to make them prettified enough to be offered as judicial nominees at the District and Appeals level whenever the opportunity presented itself. The payoff has come rapidly as, over a relatively few months, two vacancies will have been filled with reliable strictly conservative jurists who hold views that none on the left and damned few in the center would recognize as their own. Democratic Senators have simply been left behind and rendered impotent, hemmed in by their minority status, trapped in their efforts to highlight some truly disturbing aspects of Alito's views and rulings - aside from abortion - by a nominee who wouldn't give even a sad imitation of a straight answer, hampered by a press that (excepting this thorough Knight Ridder analysis) either can't understand or won't take the time to explain the issues they are raising questions about, and hamstrung by a confirmation hearing process that has become a cheap useless game and appears to have outlived any value it may once have had. Plenty of comment threads around the lefty side of blogtopia (y!sctp!) have excoriated the Judiciary Committee Democrats for failing to 'get' this guy, but - aside from some quibbling about tactics - the sad simple fact is that little short of leaping across the desk and holding a big friggin' Bowie knife to his throat would have compelled Alito to actually give something approximating a substantive answer to any question, and Arlen Specter would probably call such a move 'out of order' anyway...

As things now appear, there is no pressure on the Alito nomination. Press reports fail to adequately address any of the issues where his views run counter to the expectations of most Americans, so there's no sense of a building wave of opposition. About the only thing that could stop this now would be some pert young law clerk showing up in the hearing room to declare that Sam Alito was the father of that baby she was holding, and even that may lead to little more than the press reporting that the Missus lept up and ran from the room crying again. The struggle that movement conservatives have been engaged in for the last couple of decades is nearly at an end; they are about to assume control of all three branches of the Federal government. It may be that a taste of this is just exactly what the Democratic party and the progressive movement need. Maybe the experience of finally being totally, desolately without power or influence at the Federal level will help finally push the left over that ragged edge and beyond a point where arguing about the preeminence of a given issue or the litmus-test acceptability of a given candidate sucks up all the oxygen. Maybe this will bring Democrats at all levels to the understanding that Republicans have been at for some time now: Being in the Majority is better that being in agreement on all the issues. Then again, judging from some of the comment threads I've read, maybe it won't. In that case, turn out the lights...

...crossposted at Ruminate This...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:55 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

There He Goes Again 

...truck stop hookers, used car salesmen, and coke-heads needing money for their next ride all understand a simple truism: stick with what works. Gee Dub's handler's understand the same thing as these other fellow travelers, so today he was at it again, dipping back into the old "opponents are traitors" well that served Gee Dub and his Bush Monkeys so handily back in the early years of his Grand Iraqi Adventure. He's out on the hustings again, saying, in effect, that any sort of disagreement to the factors that led to this situation we find ourselves in - questionable intelligence; refusal to apply critical thinking skills to the intelligence we had; brutal personal attacks against anyone who disagreed with the administration's doctored assessment of Iraq's WMD programs; the failure to provide enough troops; a totally abject failure to acknowledge the fact of a subsequent insurgency; the further failure to provide enough troops to deal with such an insurgency - is giving "aid and comfort to the enemy". Aside from the fact that Gee Dub and most of his inner circle are poster children for the premise that actively evading opportunities to take up arms in your country's conflicts is the ultimate expression of aid and comfort to the enemy, it's become a tired and tattered line. It especially is losing its resonance solely from the fact that a significant majority of Americans don't approve of Gee Dub's handling of the Grand Iraqi Adventure...

Calls for elected Democratic leaders to grow a friggin' spine and stand up to these misbegotten losers and all their sputtering malicious lies have filled the internets, and this continuation of the "aid and comfort" line is a clear example of why all those calls are on the mark. "Staying the Course" is becoming a grim knowing joke to which no one laughs. Case in point: Oregon Governor Kulongoski has called for flags to fly at half-staff for the most recent Oregon resident to die in the violence of the last few days, the fifth resident of Northeast Oregon's Umatilla County to have done so in either Afghanistan or Iraq (which, given the relatively small population of that rural county, must rank Umatilla County near the top nationally in terms of per capita combat deaths). This is the cost that George W. Bush insists that we keep bearing without criticism, even though he and his hand-picked underlings have mismanaged the "democratization" of Iraq (the only justification they have left) to a degree that would have led to impeachment charges if we were talking about a Republican Congress and a Democratic president. It's a sucker's game that he is trying to reestablish - just like in the good ol' days when folks liked him - where any sort of criticism is a failure to support the troops. Claims that "honest debate" about the administration's conduct of this war are acceptable is hogwash; there is no such thing as "honest debate" because anything that smacks of disagreement is claimed to be manifestation of a lack of support for the troops...

It's well past time to quit playing this game. The polls to which Rove and his mechanics claim to pay no attention indicate that the American people are just about to pull out in the lead on this story, and there will be neither popularity or electoral success for Democrats who can't figure this thing out. Gee Dub has a powerful forum as president to keep his discussion points in the public eye. Problem is, the public is getting to the point of no longer buying it. It's time for Congressional Democrats to step up and support that 60-some percent of their fellow citizens who object what's going on these days. It's time for Congressional Democrats to take back the debate...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:05 PM 0 comments

Monday, January 09, 2006

Ethics Reform From the Eye of Newt 

…even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is weighing in on the plague of corruption problems that are currently belaboring the Republican party these days. He offers his ‘solution’ in this essay broadcast this morning on NPR’s “Morning Edition”, demonstrating that – if nothing else – he’s still the same old lovable Newt. Aside from the fact that today’s Republican leaders probably aren’t interested in listening to anything Newt might have to say on the subject of political money corruption (and he has been speaking out plenty about it recently), the focus of his ‘reform’ sounds more like the first campaign pledge of a “Newt in ‘08” presidential run than anything that actually takes a poke at seriously reforming what inevitably ails the party in power. The size of government isn’t the problem; reducing it certainly responds to a laundry list of conservative and neo-con desires, but it doesn’t fix the problem - doesn’t even pretend to address it, in fact…

…one only needs to look for a moment at a casual, off-the-top-of-my-head list of political scandals involving money to figure this out: Credit Mobilier, The Whiskey Ring, Teapot Dome, Abscam , Koreagate , wedtech , the Keating 5. Making government smaller, at least in the sense that Gingrich and other “small govermnent” supporters mean it, doesn’t address the foundation of most of these scandals. The foundation of these sorts of scandals is the seeking of influence or favor. Members of Congress or of the Executive branch presiding over a smaller government - especially the sort that Newt is talking about – are still going to be wielders of tremendous power over the things that the federal government will still be doing. There are still going to be people looking for their little piece of the pie or their little personal dispensation, and those people are going to have wads of cash to lubricate the machinery to get what they want. That’s the nickpoint; that’s the place where eithics problems either begin or don’t. For all of the self-serving commentary by Gingrich and others about how reducing the size of government or getting back to the principles of the Contract with America are the perfect medicine to fix what ails us, the simple fact is that electing a better class of citizen to office, one who doesn’t feel a need for personal enrichment from that office, is really a pretty good first step. Step 2 – the one that will never happen – is to endeavor to the degree possible to get the money out of political campaigns. As long as under-regulated campaign contributions used to purchase favor and attention are considered to be “free speech”, this step will never be taken and the risk – perhaps ‘likelihood’ is a better choice – of corruption will continue. We don’t need the likes of Newt Gingrich running around trying to change the subject in service to his own agenda; most people pretty much understand where the Republican ethics problems come from…
Posted by: Jack K. / 12:17 PM 0 comments

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