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

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Conrad Burns - The Worst Person in The World 

...ok, so Olbermann and "Countdown" probably have that phrase trademarked, copyrighted, and patented to the gills, but it still fits in the largest sense. So before some sleek dark SUV full of MSNBC goons slides to a stop out front and tries to fight it’s way through the pit bulls, trip wires, poison oak, and highly trained attack squirrels that represent my layered defense against earnest young well-dressed Latterday Saints missionaries, the "Watchtower" gang, and strangers in vans with an insatiable need to clean "at no cost to you" the carpet in the room of my choice, we need to chat a bit about why Conrad Burns is an asshole...

The Basic story is told here. The Basic Story, sadly, is not enough. The Basic Story doesn’t tell the necessary volumes about the depths of desperation into which ol’ Conrad is sinking, the ugly empty feeling that is gnawing at his gut as normal God-fearing, conservative Montanans who have been the ridgepole holding up his particular tent begin...well, not defecting, necessarily, but at least becoming more distant, a little more remote, a little reluctant to return his calls and a little less forthcoming in writing those big checks that the landed gentry have fed his campaigns with over the last several campaigns. These are conservative people, but conservative in the proper way; they don’t hold much for politicians anyway, and aren’t really interested in lashing their good family names to a wagon that might just fall to pieces in a major - and very public - corruption scandal. Conrad has to - he needs to - win these folks back if he has any hope of saving his own skin and that of his party in the US Senate. Thus, through luck, circumstance, and proximity, we are led to this episode last week....

A few facts need to be established to demonstrate the worthiness of this Olbermann-like award:

1) Conrad Burns knows somewhat less that my thirteen-year-old son does about the art and science of wildland fire fighting. No, let me state this right: Conrad Burns knows a hell of a lot less than my son does about wildland fire fighting. Conrad is surrounded by bright young (and not so young) functionaries, true believers, and hanger’s on, pretty much none of which, judging from his actions in the Billings airport, have any experience in the art beyond having watched Discovery Channel specials and made-for-TV movies. Had some underling in his entourage had a bit of experience, that person might have been able to have turned him away from engaging in some sort of ‘get out the vote’ confrontation with a fire crew on its way home from one of the Montana fires. If Bobo Burns or anyone in his gaggle of halfwit minions actually had any experience in wildland firefighting, he or they would have known two facts right up front: A) Hot Shot crews are fire fighters who go where they are told and do what they are told and do both with a degree of professionalism that the Pentagon might give some consideration to emulating and 2) Hot Shot crews do not manage fires, they merely fling themselves out into the wilds to use their muscles and brains to stop them; there is an entirely other group of people who make decisions that cause crews like this one to be moved around like chess pieces...

2) Casino-boy Burns is lucky to be up and walking around today. Wildland fire-fighting is tough, dangerous work that folks do for far less money that you would suspect, as Ms. Rosenthal indicates in the article. Although I did it as a colateral duty in the past, I don’t anymore because it is a younger person’s game generally (it’s exceptionally rare to see a 50-something like me out there humping a tool on the fire line) and crews are generally in their mid-thirties or younger. Fire-fighting - in the moment - takes a huge physical and emotional toll, even in younger employees; assignments are as long as 21 days, not including travel time, of getting up at 0500 or earlier, eating a mass-produced breakfast of indifferent quality, spending 10 -12 hours at hard physical labor of the sort for which exercise gyms and spa’s charge outrageous prices - broken by a lunch break spent consuming "mystery meat" sandwich (so named because nobody can name the type of meat) crushed paper-thin flat by the warm can of apple juice, melted candy bar, and well travelled orange that came in the same sack lunch that was stuffed in your fire pack, followed by a mass-produced dinner of indifferent quality and - if you’re lucky - a trip to the shower module, when there is one, then off to bed in an effort to get some sleep under the roaring noise of the surrounding fire camp. You will not get anything remotely approaching 8 hours of sleep during this period, unless you decide to foresake eating and showers and washing out your socks and underwear in some cold-water cattle trough to maintain a minimum degree of cleanliness, and it just seems to go on and on and on like some ugly Groundhog Day reprise and there is no end in sight because you don’t know when or even if you are going to be done with all this madness until somebody finally shows up and says "Now...now you can go home". The grind of of this routine tends to make the calmest, most loving, caring Christian person in the world into a raving homocidal fascist serial killer over time, and that is why ‘Jack’s Boy’ Burns is a lucky man. Confronting a fire crew on it’s way home after an assignement to tell it that it did a piss-poor job (whcih isn’t true in any case) would be a guaranteed trip to the emergency room if Jack Abramoff’s best friend Conrad Burns and his pasty-faced gaggle of doughy minions had elected to try this stunt in a bar instead of in the oh-so-public venue of the Billings airport...

3) Fires get put out when they are ready to get put out. Weather, terrain, and available resources have a great deal to say about when that is, and if there is a problem here, Jack Abramoff’s Good Boy Conrad Burns has a big question to answer about the general lack of resources that federal land management agencies are grappling with right now that are making a whole hell of a bunch of fires in a whole hell of a bunch of more important places in other western states a lot more difficult to control. Casino Burns’ complaints about ranchers not being allow to fight the fire the way they wanted to on their own land is a lie, the same sort of simple dissembling that he has grown so accustomed to as he raked in the Abramoff cash. Federal agencies don’t fight fire on private land unless invited onto it, and they don’t dictate who fights fires on private land, so to say that ranchers were prevented from fighting fires the way they knew how on their own land is a nice bit of artifice that feeds the natural antipathy western ranchers have for the federal government (having more to do with federal public lands grazing regulations than anything else) but doesn’t have any more connection to reality than your typical tavern barstool "black helicopter" discussion....

Conrad "Jack’s Friend" Burns is a luckier man than he knows. Back in the day, his embarrassing frontal assault on a highly trained, proud, and somewhat cranky crew returning home would have resulted in fists, spillied blood, and an embarrassing scandal. As it is, we are clearly looking at a man who has lost his way, grappling around for some sort of magic bullet that will make people forget that his name drips like sordid blood from any number of Abramoff documents suggesting that he is just the sort of fellow that can be bought for a few cheap praise words and some cash. This effort at recovery is both an embarrassment and an insult. The only thing that even remotely redeems Slot Machine Connie is the fact that those of us who know how this stuff goes down know pretty well that he doesn’t have a clue - doesn’t even come within spitting distance of knowing what the hell he is talking about - so we can clearly understand that he’s just playing another political game in an effort to save his lucrative Senatorial position, hoping desperately that he can weather this very real Democratic challenge and move on to find a new post-Abramoff sugar daddy, so he’ll say anything to anybody to make that happen....
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:43 AM 0 comments

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