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

Thursday, August 31, 2006

At Least They HAVE A Plan 

...you have to almost feel sorry for Tracey Schmitt, the most visible face of the Republican National Committee. She has to be feeling right now like the one person trying to bail out the water leaking into the Titanic, given the fact that what was once a comfortably red-tinged map of the Senate and House Districts in the United States is beginning to shift through grey into purple and on towards blue. I mean, here she sits facing a country in which a growing majority feels that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea while at the same time Don Rumsfeld is stumbling around shouting that anyone who doesn’t support the President’s way - say, for example that growing majority of Americans - is an appeaser, if not a coward and a traitor and a fellow traveler. What’s a girl to do when the Democrats understandably respond to Rumsfeld’s diatribe by pointing out that what currently passes for the War on Terra - that would be our disaster in Iraq - is an embarrassing and horrible failure that all the freshly painted empty school houses in all of Persia can’t cover over?

Well, not much, except to cast a host of aspersions on Democratic motives and claim that their opposition to Gee Dub’s Grand Iraqi Failure will only lead to the U.S. being left in a weakened state in it’s War on Terra. Now, I’m not a politician or a paid political strategist, but I do deal professionally with people’s feelings,perceptions, and persuasions on a regular basis and I’m thinking that calling the majority of Americans weak on terror because they have finally grown tired of the hapless flailing that substitutes for actual direction in Iraq isn’t necessarily the sort of move that is going to bring the muddled middle back into the fold come election time. One may quibble with her take on Democratic strategy, but - even if she were right, which she isn’t - at least they have one. The sole Republican strategy, if one may be so bold to call it such, was to overthrow Saddam with a minimum of troops and then let the newly-freed Iraqi citizens dance in the streets for awhile before they decided to settle down to the business of hammering out a new secular beacon of Democracy on the banks of the Tigris. When the dancing turned into wild directionless looting and the only plan that Gee Dub’s minions and fixers in PNAC had collapsed in a heap onto its own rotten foundaton, they started making it up as they went along. “DeBaathification “ and disbanding of the military, forcing the only people who knew how to make things work into the woodwork, proved to be a master stroke, if the plan was to make Iraqi infrastructure and internal security grind to a halt. The election of an interim government and completion of a constitution were nice pieces of theater and all those purple fingers made for a heart-warming photo-op, but it all has been built on a nonexistent foundation that leads directly back to a series of wrong-headed, misguided, and just plain stupid actions by Gee Dub and his crew. Our ongoing failure in Iraq swings on one very important hinge that maybe only Colin Powell - if even him - understood even a little bit: the seeds of democracy will not germinate in a soil that is continually and freshly tainted with the blood of its innocent citizens at the hands of still-active combatants. The Bush Strategy never included any item addressing how to actually facilitate democracy beyond insisting on elections and a Constitution. No contingency to address the natural conflicts that exist between (or among) the three major religious sects; no contingency to run the country after everybody with a connection to the Baathist party had been purge; no specific plan on how to create a viable military after the entire existing army had been disbanded; no plan and insufficient allocation of resources to deal with insurgency...

The passage of time has shown that Gee Dub and his PNAC enablers had no plan beyond “INVADE IRAQ”. The reason was secondary, as was demonstrated by the shifting rationale that was offered for the act itself. The invasion of Afghanistan had a strong sense of righteousness to it - and even it was, and continues to be, mismanaged as a product of our little adventure in Iraq. Ms. Schmitt can, in her usually flushed, snarky way, make all sorts of accusations about Democratic strategies, but it seems that the only strategy that her bosses have is to grab the closest available friendly microphone to shout “appeaser” and “traitor” and “weakness” over and over loudly enough so the rest of us can’t hear the gunfire, explosions, and the cried of the wounded and dying…
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:34 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

What Really Matters Some Days 

...so, there are so many things going on today that seem to serve the sole purpose of hilighting the monumental disaster that the Bush Administration has been for the American people. But none of that matters in my life at the moment, when you get right down to it. Sure, Gee Dub is on my TV right this very minute telling Brian Williams that he stood in Jefferson Square in N'awleens and made promises "and we delivered", which will probably come as a surprise to many victims of Hurricane Katrina. One can only charitably assume that he isn't being kept up to speed on the actually progress of the delivery of promised federal help. His own words - captured at his own web site - show a man who clearly is, if nothing else, not an icon to his Ivy League alma mater based on the construct and meaning of his words. And, sure, we have the bizarre (or perhaps instructive) diatribe that Don Rumsfeld launched today at an American Legion gathering, basically saying that anyone who is critical of the Iraq invasion is a Chamberlain-level appeaser willing to let Al Qaeda terrorists move into the house, take the wife and daughters as sex slaves, kill all the pro-Bush neighbors, and drink all the beer without either pitching in money for more or making a beer run themselves. Given that Rumsfeld has for my whole half century of life been one of those iconic Republican mysteries, a truly second-rate intellect who manages to continually capture the attention of leadership and be placed in positions of authority for no apparent good reason, this is a certainly inflamatory episode, but not much more than an instructive moment for someone trying to read some tentative penciled roadmap to the upcoming campaign. But none of this really bothers me right now. This is what really bothers me right now....

Last winter, we bade a casual farewell to the ground surface of our world in November; we next saw the lawn in the midst of April. During the interim period we dealt with two feet or more of snow cover on the ground at any one time. Emerging from one of the coldest, snowiest winters in a decade, those of us trapped in the resulting Spring mud on the eastern slopes of the Oregon Cascades could only cough out a bitter laugh when the climate experts ominiously announced that the U.S. had just experienced one of the warmest winters ever recorded. This new prediction by the Farmer's Almanac of a colder snowier winter for the Pacific Northwest is, if nothing else, grim desperate news. There's a forest of 'for sale' real estate signs locally, many of them being planted on the property of newer residents who have quickly discovered that snowy landscapes look way far better on the front of Christmas cards than they do in your own front yard on Easter Sunday. Gee Dub may be a simple half-bright tool of a larger movement desperately trying to establish another set of false talking points for his admistration and Rumsfeld may well be simply spouting gibberish to try to rally the base for the upcoming election, but for a moment that is more important for my personal life has captured my attention...

...sure hope that Subaru I'm going to buy doesn't mean that the terrorists won...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:06 PM 0 comments

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Gas Prices are WHAT??!!? 

...maybe it's time to snatch up the pitchforks, flaming torches, and maybe a rope and go looking for whichever energy company executives are responsible for setting fuel prices in Oregon. I have spent some time on the road over the last week, travelling to Ashland in Southwestern Oregon (which sits on Interstate 5) for a weekend taking in some of its famous (and - I might add - always spectacular) Shakespearean Festival plays and I can say for a fact that - as far as Central and Southwestern Oregon are concerned - this report is bullshit. Gas prices as of TODAY are the highest they have ever been at well over $3.00 per gallon and haven't lowered a single penny since they last shot up a couple of weeks ago...

Paging Ron Wyden. Paging Gordon Smith and Greg Walden...well, ok, I'm just kidding about that last part. Republican Senator Smith and Republican Representative Walden would fling themselves into the flaming molten caldera of an active volcano before they would do anything to cause ripples in the serenity of Big Oil executives. But my Democratic Senator Wyden has a history of causing trouble over such things and now may be just the time to crank that action up one more time, especially if it is to the detriment of wingnut Republicans who have so much to gain from simply bloody raw profiteering by their good friends at Big Oil. This is something to get fired up over; it's one thing to have to put up with a deal that looks little different from ENRON'S manufactured West Coast electricity shortage back in 2000-2001, but it is another thing entirely for us Oregonians to have to put up with the patter of nonsense about plunging gas prices when there isn't anything even remotely looking like that supposed reality at our gas pumps. It's getting to the point where it would be worth it to storm the bastions of Big Oil corporate headquarters to flex a little bit of anarchic muscle; too bad we can't afford the gas it would take to get there...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:42 PM 0 comments

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