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

Friday, September 15, 2006

News That Sells vs. News That Matters 

...OK, so we're back. After a couple of days of personal hell that kept me away from the keyboard and a day or so of being suddenly disconnected from the interweb tubes by some as-yet unexplained Blogger failure (you get what you pay for), I am finally able to step back up to fling some verbal feces. The thing that has captured my attention over the last couple of days has been the incredible volume that the MSM blaster has been cranking out over the really exciting issues of the day...and over the last few days, the really exciting issue has been the break between three leading Senate Republicans and the White House over Gee Dub's desire to write the approval of forced hypothermia and water-boarding into the Geneva Conventions by 'clarification'. It is big news that John "It's MY turn now" McCain, along with John Warner, Lindsey Graham, and Susan Collins ripped the guts out of the carefully crafted but threadbare Rovian strategy to force Democrats to pick their poison on a politically motivated White House initiative over detainee tribunals and interrogation methods in the months leading up to the off-year elections. But that's not the only thing going on; there are other outrages lurking out there that we just haven't been able to get around to chatting up...

Friday's press conference made for good theater, and one can only hope that some highly trained commando group is even now going over their final preparations in the operation to extract NBC's David Gregory from the dingy, rat-infested White House press facilities. He has clearly seen and heard too much and is suffering from some heretofore undisclosed form of post-tramatic stress disorder, judging from the increasing aggressiveness with which he is questioning both Tony Snow and George W. This isn't the sort of White House Correspondent behavior we've grown to expect, and it's hard to imagine that his wimpish fearful bosses will allow this sort of behavior to go on for very long; the MSM is no longer the sort of gaggle that will support - much less talk about - Gregory's recurring episodes that those of us who date back to the Nixon Administration think of as "Rather Moments". But Friday's failed attempt by Gee Dub to get ahead of the story and ahead in the polls has buried a couple of stories that all by their lonesome could make a big difference...

First, locally, we have the buried FCC report on local media ownership. Under Michael Powell, we faced the continual insistence that allowing increased monopolistic ownership of local television outlets would have no effect on the ability of televised news media to serve in its rightful roll of the fourth estate. It is now being reported that the first FCC report on the subject of singular ownership of multiple media outlets found that there was a reduction in local news and that report was ordered destroyed part and parcel by FCC managers. Powell denies any involvement, but there is no reason to doubt the person who revealed this tidbit. This is big news that dovetails nicely with increasing media ownership by conservatives and fellow travelers and a concerted conservative effort to gain control over the things we hear, watch, and read (yeah, you can refer to "Path to 9/11 here if you so wish). Within Federal agencies, the intentional destruction of reports that don't conform to a specific desired outcome is - at the very least - a breathtakingly unethical act, as if you didn't know that already, and the proper role of Congressional oversight would be to identify who ordered such an act so the perp's could be beaten, whipped, and driven out of Washington by angry mobs. Well, maybe in January....

And then we have The Pope. Joseph Alois Ratzinger, elected as Pope Benedict XVI, the Leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Not to be confused, you understand, with some lame half-talented Danish newspaper cartoonists from the Jyllands-Posten , but rather the head of the original Christian Church and the largest Christian denomination on earth. The fact that he chose - for reasons that only he could successfully explain - to refer to a quotation that equated Islam to violence , not to mention being evil and inhumane, and managed to throw in the 500-year-old name Constantinople in reference to Istanbul, Turkey, certainly suggests that you probably don't want to turn to Germans when it comes to reaching out a friendly ecumenical hand to the rest of the world (and I say this with the most heartfelt fondness for my German relatives, to whom I would loan my car but who I would never pick to front for me in any situation where sensitivity and emotion are involved). Muslims know how to spell "The Crusades" and have a long memory of their treatment at the hands of the Catholic Church five or six centuries ago, and the mere act of the highest offical of the Roman Catholic Church talking about their religion like he's some sort of Bushco Neocon isn't going to set well, and may do more harm to efforts to chill things in the Middle East than we have the intellectually creative capacity to even predict, much less understand. This could turn out to be a big deal, and have an impact on Gee Dub's efforts in Iraq beyond anything that lapsed Methodist or his handlers could ever forecast. The Middle East sees the United States as a Christian nation and a supporter of Israel. We have enough problems in Iraq and Afghanistan as it is carrying this cultural burden. The Pope's inflamatory comments, as casually divisive as they are, could cause way more problems in the near term for the U.S. in the Middle East (and Iraq in particular) than any of the hopeless drifting that represents "Staying the Course" in 43's White House...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:31 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Trying to Win the Wrong Hearts and Minds 

...well, of course we were going to get this little bit of good news from the war front. Ignore what you may have heard in recent days. We Are WINNING in Anbar Province! It's all just a matter of how you measure "winning". We are, in fact, "stifling" the brutal terrorists running wild in the province. Anybody of a certain age knows, from those formative years of watching Archie Bunker on TV, that "stifling" can be a powerful thing, indeed. OK, so we aren't actually "winning", in the sense that people can walk around in relatively security. We are, however, winning in the sense that we are in the process of training police and military forces, although we don't have enough forces sufficiently trained to do much of anything...

It's the same ol' bottom line. For any little bit of leaked-out truth, there will be a barrage of "official statements" telling us that everything is progressing according to plan, even though there isn't much of a plan or anything that really looks much like progress. It's all good; everything is going according to plan; ignore the man behind the curtain. We are winning in Fallujah, just like we've won in Falluhjah two separate times in the past, and don't you dare make any comparisons with Vietnam and the constant retaking of the same ground over and over again. If nothing else, the Bush Administration is going to go the route of winning hearts and minds; unfortunately the hearts and minds that need to be won over are in Iraq, but the 'hearts and minds' effort is all happening in our newspapers and on our TV's far from the actual war front. The whole reality that we are fighting the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time has once again taken on a whole new meaning...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:43 PM 0 comments

Losing for Winning In Rhode Island 

...in a gentler, more polite past, the success of a moderate Republican in his primary campaign would have received little attention on the national political stage. But in these brutal times, Lincoln Chafee's victory - rather than representing a victory for someone Democrats can work with - is an impediment to any logical rationale for Democrats to have any interest or concern in working with anybody on the other side of the chamber. Such is the level of perversity to which modern Republicanism has forced us to sink. While Chafee isn't the sort of Republican that the leadership would normally wish to have in place, he is a counter and Republicans, better than Democrats - and especially the left side of the Democrats - understand that the little letter nestled in parenthesis behind a Senator's name matters way more than each and every personal and policy belief of that particular Senator...

The left would have been far better served in its efforts to capture a Senate majority if Chafee had lost, because it was pretty clear that his wingnut opponent would get hammered by the apparent Democratic nominee. It may still be that Sheldon Whitehouse can run a competitive campaign against Chafee, but the odds are steeper than they otherwise could have been. Chafee has a record that needs to be defended in a general election campaign, but in a state attracted to moderation his victory makes a Democratic victory a bigger challenge. Sadly for Democratic chances to take over the Senate, there just aren't enough Katherine Harris's to go around...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:07 PM 0 comments

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Barkeep, Give Me What He's Having 

...whatever else goes on with the peculiar pathology of politics, it is clear that it’s insider practitioners don’t think much about the sense of awareness - or perhaps the intelligence - of the rest of us. Nonwithstanding the fact that there is ample evidence to support this disdain, you still have to marvel at some of the techniques that those insiders employ to get their point across. In recent days we have seen another example of that effort, as the Bush White House and it’s supporters have worked like coal miners to get a new term into the public debate: “Islamic Fascism”. You can’t swing a dead cat these days without hitting some speechifier or spokesman flinging the phrase around like a two-year-old with a newly-learned word. While Rumsfeld and Gee Dub have gleefully stuck this cool new word into every speech they can find without much in the way of explanation of what the heck it means, it is left to the neocon talking head and pundit class to try to smear some sort of lipstick onto this particular pig. Only a true drinking man could find the time to actually go along with them...

Although it’s probably a couple of days old, today’s example comes to me in my local newspaper by way of this particular opinion piece by Victor David Hanson of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, which is just another reason to celebrate the college football butt-kicking that the Oregon Ducks gave to the Cardinal last weekend (as if we needed another reason). It demonstrates a perfect example of the twisted route that the neocon crowd has to go to in order to find a sufficiently scary evil sounding term to replace the fairly vacuous and threadbare phrase “War on Terra”. “WOT” worked for Bushco as long as the American people were willing to conflate our major commitment in Iraq with that ‘War’, buttressed by outright lies, misrepresentations, and its own faithless hunger to believe anyone the wiley Mr. Chalabi could drag out of the underbrush over the studied professional considerations of our own intelligence agencies. Sadly, all of that, combined with an almost ruthless refusal to fully take the steps necessary to be successful in Iraq, led to most of us no longer believing that a) Iraq had much of anything to do with the WOT, and 2) Gee Dub’s tactics and strategy were necessarily the way to go on the WOT. So, here comes Victor David Hanson, along with others, trying to pound a cast iron square peg into a nickel-steel square hole...

The problem at the outset with WOT as a rallying phrase was that it made no sense. Terror is a strategy, not an entity, and the evident failure in Iraq - widely seen as no longer an element of that war in any case - and the looming loss of the facade of success in Afghanistan made it clear that some other ‘thing’ needed to be targeted as the boogeyman. The fundamental problem in finding a new catchy phrase to bring back the American people and - not incidentally - secure Republican majorities in Congress is that there is no single entity to point to as in past conflicts. There is no German National Socialism or Italian fascism that leads to the targeting of a particular state as an enemy. Ah, but there is this religion, however, that has a militant conservative wing and an unfathomable ability to convince it’s adherents to target innocent civilians and sacrifice their own lives under terms we of a western Christian persuasion would view as suicide toward the advancement of that conservative movement’s goals. Because various elements of these groups advocate to one degree or another the establishment of wide-ranging Islamic states under the rule of Sharia law, the coast was clear for a naming solution. Why not call it Islamic fascism?

Why not, indeed. As offered by Hanson’s piece advocating this new nomenclature, these villians are Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo in one tight package modified by a conservative religious overtone and a desire for a pan-Islamic theocracy, even though many of the classic tenants of fascism are missing. He even manages to throw in the current story line of liberal appeasement and Clinton Administration failure into the mix to support what is actually the basic line being offered by Gee Dub and his minions. While sounding smart and catchy and all ‘inside baseball’, Hanson’s effort fails on a number of levels:

1) Far too much of what is viewed as Islamic terrorism is a direct output from the creation and continued existence of the state of Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah may be conveniently lumped into the greater Islamofacsistic empire, but the fact remains that they are in reality almost exlusively anti-Israel. Whether it be as a result of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza during the Six Days War or Israel’s later invasion of Lebanon, the general focus of both of these groups is the elimination of a Jewish Nation of Israel in Palestine rather than a world-wide Islamic Theocracy, although they do make all sorts of obligatory noises about the Great Satan (that would be the US).

2) We have never fetched ourselves beyond the 1979 overthrow of the Shaw of Iran and the 444 days of hostage-dom of our Iranian Embassy staff. As a result, we are incapable of dealing with Iran outside of an environment of hostility and threats and emnity. Iran is a known sponsor of both Hamas and Hezbollah in its stated efforts to destroy Israel and is a controlling theocracy itself. On the other hand, Iran seems most of all to want to be a player in the Middle East, if not the Big Dog, and its ‘fascist’ desires seem, as is the case with Hamas and Hezbollah, to be centered on the existence of Israel rather than any desire to supplant the current U.S. Government with an Islamic potentate.

3) The ‘appeasement’ line is pure bovine feces and needs to be directly repudidated. Some of the offered examples - ending the UN embargo of Iraq, ending the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank - never actually happened either as events or acts of appeasement. Treatment of the first World Trade Center Attack as a “mere criminal justice matter” is, at the end of the story, nothing more that political sweet whispered nothings intended to hope that we don’t remember that bad guys were caught and prosecuted for the attack. The suggestion that there was no response at all to the attack on the USS Cole is little more than creative lying in a furthering effort to smear the Clinton administration at the behest of Bushco, given the parallel facts that that the attack on the Cole occured in Yemen - hardly a freindly country under the best of circumstances - just barely three months before the end of Clinton’s presidency and that the resistance of the Yemeni government to allow FBI and other US specialists to partake in the investigation resulted in a congressional report the day after Gee Dub took control that couldn’t actually pinpoint the actual culprit.

Gee Dub and the neocon gang are going to stick with their newfound mantra of a growing threat of a pan-Islamic theocracy and...what the hell...more power to them. An insistence that anti-semitism and a hatred for gays and blacks is all part of that peculiar form of facsism is just one of those strange insistences that we need to live with...for now. The fact of a hatred for Jews, blacks, and homosexuals has powered any number of Christian sects for decades, if not centuries, and is probably the silliest excuse for laying a rap on something that somebody want’s to calll “islamofascism” that you will run across this year. Objection to Jews and gays as a measure of fascism would put both most of Reformation Christianity, not to mention the southeastern United States, firmly into the ‘fascist’ camp. “Islamofascism” is just a another phrase that is considered to be sufficiently evocative to create a bad guy on which we as a country can focus, but it doesn’t do proper service to the actual issues at play. It doesn’t explain the free pass that we continue to grant to Saudi Arabia in this ‘war’, it doesn’t explain our abandonment of the search for the spiritual leader of the only Islamic group that has actually taken action against the US (that would be Osama bin Laden), and it doesn’t even begin to explain why we are still suffering casualities in Iraq. It sure makes for a heck of a rallying point for Gee Dub’s hard pressed, desperate supporters, thought, and these day that’s all that seems to matter...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:10 PM 0 comments

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