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

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Whistling in The Dark 

...the talk isn’t loud yet, but it does bubble up at occasional moments: which party will Ben Westlund hurt the most in the race for Oregon Governor? It’s not a leading subject right now, mostly because Westlund’s decision to set out on his Independent Quest doesn’t carry much weight in this early part of the election season when the parties are facing the prospect of determining just exactly who their nominee is going to be. In the midst of press release and lawn sign skirmishes that will decide to what degree Democrats are disillusioned with Ted Kulongoski and whether Republicans will pick one socially conservative candidate over the other, the mere fact that some state Senator from Nowheresville east of the Cascade crest might actually want to get into this gig in the role of "other" doesn’t really have much of a strong gripping power. Westlund has made enough of a name - for good or for ill - that the question does get raised, and for the moment the spokes-faces of both parties are whistling in the dark, hoping against hope to drive the looming boogey-man across the line to the other guy’s neighborhood...

Ben Westlund makes for a complex and compelling story, and there is probably enough bad stuff out there to profitably occupy the opposition research groups of both parties when it comes time to wheel out the big guns for the general election campaign. Republicans are fond of noting, when asked, that his efforts in the last year to create some sort of legal civil union right for gay and lesbian couples would lend him the sort of left-center cachet that would pull voters away from the Democratic nominee. That may well be, but it is also a fact that he has been successfully elected to the state Senate from Central Oregon, which in general isn’t the sort of country that one would normally associate with a left-central political viewpoint. It also misses an important point...

Oregonians living east of the Cascades are justifiably characterized as being dominated by a conservative viewpoint. That’s true as far as it goes, and voting patterns dating back to just after the Mazama eruption certainly serve as ratification, but the social conservatism that so dominates the Republican party these days is something of an artificial construct. This particular brand of party-dominating conservative belief may strike some chords with segments of the Eastern Oregon population, but the biggest thing that the small-town, rancher-farmer-logger brand of folks who live out in these parts want most of all is to be left alone. There is a strong libertarian streak detectable in the average person, once you get away from the bright lights of the big cities like Bend and Baker City and LaGrande. Republican candidates tend to do well in these wide open spaces not because they toe the right-wing line on social issues, but because they talk about reduced government interference and lower taxes and ending "handouts" and loosening up logging and grazing restrictions on public land. Greg Walden doesn't keep getting reelected as 2nd District Congressman because he talks about gay marriage and abortion - both of which he opposes - but because he talks about agriculture and natural resources (in particular, the use thereof)...

...Republicans, especially the party oligarchy that is so mad at Westlund that they would shoot him if this were Iraq, will keep insisting until milking time that ol’ Ben is mostly going to take a bite out of the Democratic candidate’s balance sheet. That’s not as true as they would really, really (no, I mean really) like it to be. Given that the run for governor is a statewide race where their natural advantages of demagoguery and local party control are blunted, Republicans have as much, if not more, to fear from a fiscally conservative candidate who believes that people should be left alone than do the Democrats. There is a sense of disgust with the dysfunctional nature of Oregon government felt by citizens across the entire political spectrum that cannot be overstated, and Westlund is making a major campaign theme out of his effort to tap into that disgust over the dominance of cheap partisan politics. While Westlund could be nominally characterized as a centrist who might pull votes equally from both Democratic and Republican candidates, he is 'center-right', not 'center-left', and with a sufficiently skillful effort at tapping into all that voter disgust, he could find a certain success with center-right voters. It wasn't all that long ago that candidates stood a pretty good shot at winning a statewide election in Oregon with that sort of cred...and they were Republicans...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:48 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Relearning the British Lesson 

...one of the great strengths of this vast, grand country of ours is that we have never granted conventional wisdom the power of guidance. That great strength, however, has had a downside. The country that beat immeasurable odds to stage a revolution against it's British overlords, fought them off again in 1812, and used it's youthful exhuberance to bring victories against dictatorial domination in 1918 and 1945 is the same country that also ignored the French lessons of Indochina in the '50's and that stands on the verge of relearning the lessons of the British Mandate in the Middle East after Lawrence of Arabia engineered the demise of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. It has been said often enough, but bears repeating as often as necessary, that two basic facts strongly pertain to the geographic entity that we call "Iraq": as a country, it is completely a creation of the League of Nations, and the three diverse cultures that were taken up within it's borders have neither a history or much of a concept of democracy. The only success that the British could claim from their neo-colonial control of this artifical country was that, for one brief moment in time, they actually were able to bring about the uniting of Sunni and Shia Muslims against a common enemy, namely the British. The only reason that there aren't pictures of
British subjects clambering onto helicopters close-hovering over Baghdad rooftops is that helicopters didn't become a functional reality for another 30 years...

The rest of what could be called Iraqi history is easily accessable, and is the sort of thing that one would have thought hot rod intelligence and foreign policy experts in this vast, grand land of ours might have been taken the time to read and ponder before embarking on a path that by the early fall of 2003 was looking more and more like the very sort of occupation that the British engaged in during their Mandate era after WWI. The dynamic is very different now; the alliance between Shia and Sunni against the western infidel would be extremely unlikely to be forged because of the brutal history of the Sunni-dominated Ba'thist control of Iraq for the better part of the last four decades. The objection to some sort of colonial-looking subjugation is still the same, only this time it's layered over with that history, along with another layer of sectarian hatred that not only covers centuries of religious differences but also includes various bits of mischief perpetrated against, by, and for the Kurds who occupy the northern part of this hammered-together nonsense out of which George W. Bush and his neocon handlers are trying to create some shining democratic beacon on this particular Middle Eastern hill...

We have had all the comforting words provided over the last couple of days, but the fact remains that - in the absence of strict control, curfews, and the like - Iraq has over the last few months, and particularly over the last week, looked remarkably like a country that is in the grips of the early stages of a civil war. Most civil wars don't have a Fort Sumter moment; they are the product of building tensions and increased conflict and expanding bloodshed that finally convince all observers that - by golly - we've got a civil war on our hands. Today in Iraq, with the end of the weekend curfews that seemed to quiet last week's building conflict, the likelihood of an old-fashioned bar fight between Sunni's and Shiites over control and personal safety while the nominal elected representatives dither over the creation of a real live government looks like a pretty good bet. What we are looking at right now is a nation-building "perfect storm", where factions who have no compelling reason to work together - much less even allow each other to live - are responding with violence to the pressures created by the Bush Monkey's efforts to implement Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Experiment. If we had the time to listen, we could have cupped our ears to history's rails and heard the lesson that all those British ghosts would have been more than happy to teach us. They have been in exactly this position in exactly this place before us, but for all sorts of dark ugly reasons we as a country decided to ignore all that. Just as the French offered us every lesson we needed to learn about conflict in South East Asia at Dien Bien Phu, the British offered a perfect lesson regarding nation-building in the Middle East with the British Mandate. Amlongst the failings of zealots and true believers, though, is their inability to either read for content or understand the ramifications of their readings. That's why we are where we are...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:04 PM 0 comments

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