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

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Gee Dub Plays The Terrorist Card to the Hilt 

...in a perverse way, you really have to take your hat off to Gee Dub and his handlers, at the end of this long and strange day, if only to acknowledge the aplomb with which he stepped out on the stage to confirm the much-rumored existence of those secret detention facilities that most of the rest of the world would be more than happy to consider war crimes. After the better part of a year of simply refusing to talk about the possibility of secret prisons and mysterious foreign flights - that whole "extraordanary rendition" thing - while European governments, where Gee Dub’s Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure is about as popular as proposals to abolish soccer, turned various shades of unhealthy color at the suggestion that they might somehow be...well, if not involved, at least willing patsies to the sorts of action that a better generation of Americans had chased out of their nations at gunpoint, George W. Bush proves that nothing, not one simple thing in the world, is anything more than a cheap political bauble if he and his ilk can get a hand on it...

Dana Priest was called a liar by the faithful and a traitor by the careful insiders for first blowing the whistle on this enterprise, but changes in political fortune can apparently cheapen any currency, especially when political survival and continued political dominance is held up against the secrecy that has heretofore been the coin of the realm. Today’s revelation is, at one level, just simply another example of Bushco trying to go one more time back to the well and make the previously successful subject of national security the primary issue in the upcoming election campaign. Who know, maybe it will work one more time; Gee Dub was talking about masterminds and leaders and other allegedly really bad dudes today, the sorts of people who - if the charges are true - are exactly the kinds of fellows whose public executions most Americans would cheerfully abide. But it is interesting how casually, in front of a carefully orchestrated backdrop of 9/11 victims’ families, Gee Dub was able to toss such a deeply held secret under the bus. This whole little episode indicates how clearly George Bush and his cronies can hear the screeching of the buzzards through that fine multi-glazed bullet-proof glass of the Oval Office as they perch out in the South Lawn trees waiting impatiently for the remains of the next ‘left-behinders’ to be dragged out onto that finely manicured grass. The gang knows that the whole idea of capturing people far from the field of battle and removing them to undisclosed locations for unfettered and unmonitored “interrogation” sessions raises troubling questions both at home and abroad in any place where the fundamental rule of law is honored. At the same time, they understand that the majority of Americans are no longer behind them over this whole Iraqi mess, and that lack of support could lead to a final two years where they might as well pitch cots in various congressional hearing rooms to cut down their travel time to the daily beatdowns as the new Democratic majority hacks away at any hope of Gee Dub’s legacy coming out anywhere north of Hayes...or maybe Polk...

It’s all part of the same ol’ crap. There is absolutely nothing that the Bush administration is capable of looking at outside of the prism of electoral political advantage, but the joke is kind of on the rest of us because we had no idea how far this might go. It’s not surprising, though; it’s all about security, that’s the theme they’ve been rolling out over the last two weeks, so it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that Gee Dub wanted to throw this particular chunk of wood on the fire...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:30 PM 0 comments

Monday, September 04, 2006

Rumsfeld Flogs the "A" Word Again 

...news sometimes comes slowly to my wooded Cascade enclave, the printed word most slowly of all. So this morning’s reprinting in my local paper of Donald Rumsfeld’s L.A. Times rehash of last week’s Salt Lake City speech is no doubt a couple of days old, but it seems to be the framework of a "discussion" - and a campaign strategy - that isn’t going away anytime soon, so we might as well crawl in and wrestle this beast in its own pen...

Rumsfeld has crafted four of what he claims to be "the central questions of our time". Aside from the fact that they are so solely in his mind, the self-serving manner in which his "questons" are constructed demonstrates pretty plainly that these are less questions for objective discussion than just another effort to demonize opponents for political gain. A quick review of Big Don’s Big Four readily shows the lameness of the whole exercise:

1) "With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that vicious extremists can somehow be appeased?"
Aside from the reality-based disconnect between these two points, the purpose of this question seems largely to inject the word "appease" into the conversation. The "vicious extremists" have been been able to stay in the game without having been able to get their hands on the sorts of weapons that Rummy is referring to here, and until we begin threatening Pakistan with annihilation from the sky unless they stop their leaky nuclear program, one can only assume he’s not really serious about this point. More to the point, who is appeasing anybody, anyway? This is the fundamental question that needs to be flung back in his face. Who is seeking to appease "vicious extremists"? A name; all we need is a name of someone who has advocated turning Czechoslovakia over to the terrorists. Rumsfeld should be called out: Use the word "Iraq" so the majority of Americans who have come to the quite reasonable conclusion that you took us to war there for no good reason and with no good plan for success can decide if they really are appeasers of the terrorists who staged the 9/11 attacks...

2) "Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?"
Once again, who is doing this? Who is advocating this? What terrorists have been proposed as invitees to what peace talk table? Not even the most ardent opponent to the Iraq invasion has advocated seeking peace with anybody there. In the runup to the invasion, in point of fact, what was most often pointed out was that the inspection/sanction program in Iraq should be allowed to run its course. No serious critic of the Bush administration’s meatheaded strategy of "blowin’ stuff up" as a first priority has ever suggested that we seek accord with Iraqi militant Sunni’s or Shiites. Even a strawman argument should have some vague connection with reality...

3) "Can we truly afford to pretend that the threats today are simply "law enforcement" problems rather than fundamentally different threats requiring fundamentally different approaches?"
Several answers to this one:
a) Yep.
b) Who’s pretending.
c) Can we truly afford to pretend that there is some provision in the US Constitution that allows the President to choose to violate established federal laws on his personal say-so?
This "central question" falls into the "you gotta be kiddin’ me" category, of course, since the only measurable success that can be demonstrated - both here and in Europe - in the War on Terra comes directly from "law enforcement". More to the point, these are not "fundamentally different threats" that require ignoring existing Federal law or the rolling back of citizens’ rights to be left alone. We have been dealing with any number of home-grown groups, both in America and Europe, for longer than whatever start date Rumsfeld would like to assign to the War on Terra who have advocated the use of death and/or destruction to change society in one way or another. There is nothing fundamentally different about Gee Dub’s current "War" except the source of the bad guys. Abridging our rights and breaking our laws may certainly be a fundamentally different approach, but it fundamentally isn’t necessary...

4) "Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that American - not the enemy - is the real source of the world’s trouble?"
Well, Don, as long as we keep making sure that we are viewed as an occupying force that indescriminately kills and imprisons innocent Muslims in a sort of "let God sort ‘em out" approach to the War on Terra in Iraq, "return" to such a view isn’t necessary; that train hasn’t yet left the station. In fact, it can pretty persuasively be argued that this administration is neither emotionally nor intellectually equipped to handle this world-wide struggle when the first example offered for misguided dialogue is the complaint that a soldier involved in the Abu Ghraib abuses got 10 times the press of the first Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. If you can’t intuitively understand how that doesn’t in any way serve your "America as a force for good" argument, there is slim hope of ever explaining it to you. The same goes for your Amnesty International/Guantanamo riff, too, Sport. The existence of baskeball and volleyball courts and culturally appropriate menus doesn’t let you off the hook for documented interrogation techniques or the simple specter of permanent incarceration without trial for the inmates at that facility. In fact, they make you - and, by reflection, the rest of us - look stupid as well as cruel, lacking even the basic sort of brutal point that the gulag’s held for the Soviet system...

Rumsfeld’s performance is just another example of the grasping at straws to which Gee Dub’s Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure has devolved. It’s all about terrorism, even though it never was, and anything that doesn’t look like his failed policy is appeasement. It’s name-calling brought to the main stage, contributing nothing to actual dialogue and serving only to establish false bright lines for the upcoming election season. Hopefully, voters will come finally to the conclusion that we can do better than this...
Posted by: Jack K. / 11:32 AM 0 comments

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