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

Saturday, November 04, 2006

Happy 60th to the Angels 

...I have no particular recollection of where it came from. All I know is that from my youngest years what I wanted to grow up to be was a fighter pilot. My hero's flew P-51's over Europe and Corsairs over the Pacific and F-86's in Mig Alley over Korea, and the one person that I was always wanting my folks to invite to dinner was an old bachelor work friend of my Dad who flew Wildcats off of escort carriers in the Pacific in WW II; he couldn't tell his war stories enough for me. I could pin adults to the wall, eyes darting desperately in search for an escape route, with my detailed response to the simple, seemingly innocent question "So, what would you like to be when you grow up?" Silly goofballs expected me to say 'fireman' or 'policeman' or 'cowboy' or some damned thing, hopelessly unaware of the lengthy commentary that I was about to deliver concerning the relative merits of ripping holes in the sky in US Air Force fighter jets versus US Navy jets. One of the most vivid memories of my childhood was the time we went to an airshow featuring the US Navy Blue Angels. That one day cemented my determination to someday be sitting in the cockpit of one of those incredible machines, maybe even flying in close-formation spectacles like theirs...



My dream of flying these beautiful monsters died at the age of 14, when a sadistic optometrist chortled evilly as he saddled me with a pair of ugly black heavy-framed "birth control" glasses and the certain knowledge that a guy who couldn't see the writing on a chalkboard from the front desks in class wasn't likely to be trusted to pilot an F-4 Phantom safely onto the pitching rainswept deck of an aircraft carrier late at night somewhere out in the Pacific. Everything since then has seemed like a second choice. The passion has never died, however, and I will drag whoever is within arms reach to watch high-performance aerobatic teams - and especially the Blue Angels - anytime they are within a reasonable drive. So I raise a glass tonight - OK, so actually it's a can - and salute the Blue Angels on their 60th anniversary. They fired a child's imagination and still fuel a middle-aged greying, balding guy's passion with their precision and skill, even if the dreams have shifted from what could be to what could have been...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:15 PM 0 comments

Friday, November 03, 2006

OK, So Forget What I Just Said... 

...OK, so it's really a big deal when leading Republican pundits like George F. Will start expressing doubts about the abilities of the current administration to make a silk purse out of the Iraqi sow's ear that we are grappling with now. But, as it turns out, that's nothin', kiddo. Now - with the sudden unexpected violence of a midnight earthquake, we are looking at a complete collapse of whatever walls of unity that tied the neocons and warmongering wingers together in their cold-hearted lie-based efforts to drag this country into the current disaster in Iraq in which we find ourselves. This collapse most clearly manifests itself in the coming combined editorials in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps Times calling for canning Rummy for his mismanagement of virtually every aspect of the unnecessary war that he helped drag us into...

More to the point, the linked story lets us know that both Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman are now having second thoughts about the wisdom of the very invasion that they were so much a part of manufacturing:
I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam (Hussein) supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists..." Richard Perle


...(Bush, Rumsfeld and others) "turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional..." Kenneth Adelman


Well, heck, what's a good Christian boy gonna do faced with all of this news? The Good Rev. Haggard is copping a plea to massages and meth buys to avoid discussion of hot man-on-man sex and every other thing we hear suggests that the Bush administration views the religious right as useful fools - with James Dobsen doing everything in his power to ratify that viewpoint, and now we find that even the very drovers who herded this particular band of cattle into the box canyon in which it finds itself - some of the very engineers of this failing house of cards - are now attempting to stand off to the side like Peter just before the third cock's crowing, trying to claim that they did not know this man that went off to war in Iraq.
This line may sell in the short term, but history isn't going to treat these sudden purveyors of recrimination well, and we can only hope that their time of influence is about to draw to a tragic, bloody, but final close. The time has long since past when we need to be looking at photo's of death and dismemberment and find ourselves forced to answer the question "What For?"....
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:01 PM 0 comments

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Losing The Country 

...during the North Vietnamese/Viet Cong Tet Offensive in 1968, CBS Evening News icon Walter Cronkite ("the most trusted man in America") stepped outside of his anchorman role to to deliver a blistering editorial comment on the unwinnable nature of the Vietnam War. On the heels of this public whipping of his policies and prosecution of the conflict, President Lyndon Johnson is famously quoted to have said "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." While it would be an insult to Uncle Walter to even suggest that George F. Will is in the same league as one of Edward R. Murrow's most successful protege's, it is true that Will has been one of the most prominent voices espousing conservative thought over the last two decades. So, in his own way - in fact in perhaps a more important way, given that he is an insider to the innner chambers of the conservative hierarchy and not a trusted nonpartisan voice like Cronkite - Will has delivered a similar "if we've lost" moment to George W. Bush and even more so to Gee Dub's official and unofficial handler Big Dick Cheney...

...Will has never ridden all that comfortably with the mounted cavalry of the religious right that so control the Republican party, but he has generally been willing to carry their water. George F. Will is not, after all, a journalist per se but has instead been a card-carrying member of the partisan pundit sect. When the chips were down, Will could be relied on to be the faithful soldier, marshalling forth in defense of whatever rightwing value was perceived to be under attack. This commentary staring up at me from the back page of my new issue of Newsweek is truly a stunner, however. It represents the observations of a true-blue long-time traditionaly conservative drawing his own personal line in the sand. In Dr. Pangloss's otherwise perfect world, Big Dick is staring at his own reflection in the stained dirty strapping-tape-reinforced mirror hanging from the cave wall of whatever grim hiding place in which he passes most of his days, unknowingly reprising LBJ as he mumbles half-coherently at his own bloated pasty reflection "My God, if we've lost George Will...".

A common Democratic theme to this election cycle is the phrase "Have You Had Enough?", addressing the entire horror show/ comedy of errors that Republican dominance has delivered to us both domestically and globally over most of the last six years. Another important campaign issue for Democrats has been the failed prosecution of the war in Iraq. Will's last comment in this Newsweek piece could serve just as well, especially if coupled with some American flags at half staff, stories about brave Americans - people who had far more to offer this country - coming home in flag-draped coffins, or maybe the stripped bare bloody photo's early in the very same Newsweek issue: "For what." It's stark; it's simple; and it says it all...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:06 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Remarkable Quotes of the Day 

...fortunately for the hundreds of acres of virgin forest that would have needed to have been destroyed to produce the paper necessary to capture all of the childish, calculated whining about John Kerry's lame little joke, the internets tubes have been bursting to the seams with all of the manufactured outrage the that winger right has been investing in this last-ditch effort to turn the apparent tide of the upcoming election. The trees will live, and the embarrassing hypocracy of the right that has captured the Republican party will live on also. Still, for all the words on both sides, it's worth a second glance at Kerry's response to the reaction:

“I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed-suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have.”

...shame that he left out the part about the hillbilly heroin and the Viagra, but what the hell. And then there's this:

"...but I don’t know how else to respond when people call decent men like Jim Webb a pervert for no other reason than to win an election. I don’t know how to deal with people who think savaging a man with Parkinson’s for electoral gain is appropriate election-year discourse. I don’t know how to react to people who think that calling anyone who disagrees with them on Iraq a “terrorist-enabler” than to swing back. I don’t know how to react to people who think that media reports of party hacks in the administration overruling scientists on issues like global warming, endangered species, intelligent design, prescription drugs, etc., are signs of… liberal media bias."

Ah, but that second quote isn't from John Kerry; this particular quote comes from John Cole at Balloon Juice. Not all that long ago in dog years, you would have characterized Mr. Cole and his site as another haven of one of the pack of over-the-top right wing bloggers who insist that everything is still Clinton's fault, that Hillary had Vincent Foster killed, that Democrats should be happy that there isn't an open rifle season on their sorry traitorous hides, and that George W. Bush is not only right, but by all evidence is much smarter than the rest of us. Turns out, however, that Mr. Cole is actually the sort of Republican that we here in supposedly 'blue' Oregon used to send to office by the busload. He might not characterize himself or even see himself as a Hatfield/Packwood/McCall sort of Republican in the long-lost Oregon tradition, but he is...

Mr. Cole even has an observation about the Kerry joke dust-up that would on any average day get his keys to the men's room at Winger Central taken away from him, but it's probably the sanest, calmest thing I've read about the whole silly little episode today. (Parenthetic editorial aside: How intentionally stupid do you have to make yourself look to make it seem that you misunderstood that "get stuck in Iraq" is a direct reference - however abstruse - to the situation that Bush led us into instead of a reference to troops who aren't "stuck" in Iraq but were actually sent there? Troops don't get "stuck" places; nations and presidents do.) John Cole hasn't come over to the Dark Side; he won't be endorsing John Kerry for President anytime soon since they probably don't see eye-to-eye on much of anything. I wouldn't probably see eye-to-eye with Mr. Cole on numerous issues, although I would suspect that we could find some surprising areas of agreement. His current frame of mind is intructive, however, as to why Gee Dub is racking up the lowest poll numbers in the living memory of the 30-somethings who make up so much of blogtopia (yeah, yeah, skippy and all that). The root fascination of politics that I first acquired back in the early '70's has been long lost because nothing is about discussing the issues anymore. It's all about power and domination and has been for the last decade and a half. Ideas matter little when held up against the prospects and cash cows that control of the government can provide. Two voices stood up today against this now-comfortable Republican strategy of deceit, traps, intimidation, and "just say anything" drooling that has served leading-edged conservative stylists in such good stead for the last sixteen years. They are as far ideologically separated on the political spectrum as any two people could possibly be, but they are basically speaking the same language, the same "truth to power", as that tired phrase goes, and if there is anything that should - tampering of electronic voting machines nonwithstanding - cause the oddly confident Karl Rove to hurl his naked G.I. Joe action figures around his private heavily guarded penthouse apartment - these remarkable quotes of the day should be the thing to finally set him off for good...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:36 PM 0 comments

Monday, October 30, 2006

Another Heartwarming Story Turns to Crap 

...little by little, one stinging slight after another, the tattered remnants of my faith in humanity takes a shot to the chops. In today's episode of "Jack's Cynicism Is Fed More Red Meat", we revisit a charming and improbable little story from last week, wherein young Emily Streight flung a message in a bottle into a small stream near her home and then last week - four years later - received a letter from a 16-year-old in Hawaii who had found the bottled message on some sun-swept tropical beach...

The odds were enormous. This brave little bottle needed to navigate its way down a series of tributaries, risking entrapment at every turn, before finally reaching the Willamette and then the Columbia River, after which it floated out to sea and somehow hit the incredible small bullseye of the Hawaiian Islands. A truly incredible story...and ever so very false. Turns out some clown found the bottle not far downstream from where she had launched it not long after she had launched it. For unknown reasons, he kept the bottle for all this time and 'discovered' it while unpacking in his new Hawaiian home. For further unknown reasons, other than a perhaps twisted sense of humor, he decided to write a bogus reply letter. I should have known better than this; for that matter, the media that is supposed to be the fourth estate watching over us should have known better than this, but the fault I see is within me for sucking up to this story, because I - unlike most journalists - have a pretty good working understanding about wildland stream dynamics and hydrology and such and should have been far more skeptical. Whatever the case, another pretty little story has augered in, leaving another smoking hole in our cultural landscape. Still, it was pretty cool while it lasted...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:51 PM 0 comments

Are Democrats Finally Joining The Vertebrate Class? 

...it's been way far too long in coming, and all the excuses and rationalizatons may or may not have some validity, but it's good to finally see Democrats seeming to start to grow some...er...reproductive glands. They are finally running ads (bottom of the story) against Republican candidates using those Republicans' own attachment to Gee Dub and support for his failed policies in Iraq against them. It's pretty late in the game for this, and won't call for a new chapter in any future revisions of "Profiles in Courage" given that Democrats have been trailing somewhat behind public sentiment regarding Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure", but at least now, it is finally happening...

The best part about this newfound aggressiveness is that it comes at an almost perfect moment in the election cycle. The media, always anxious to chat up the horse-race aspect of politics while giving short shrift to the nuts and bolts behind the scenes. George W. Bush, the absolutely last person in the world I would ever pick to make an emotional public plea on my behalf, is roaming around the landscape to whatever location where they will have him, screeching at one 'members-only' event after another about the path to destruction to which Democratic majorities will lead. There is no better time than right now to rub that whole theme in his face with specific questions about just what the hell exactly is this "course" that he and his candidates insist on keeping on. If this is the ground on which Bush wants to fight, Democrats are - finally - making the wise choice and take up the challenge on that very ground...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:38 PM 0 comments

Sunday, October 29, 2006

An Expert Weighs In On "Benchmarks" 

...yeah, so Atrios covered this commentary by Joe Galloway earlier this evening, but those of us who have been around for awhile - and trust me, I've been lurking silently around places like Eschaton and Daily Kos since the earliest days - have learned that lots of folks go to these dynamic commenter-heavy sites to get in the game and don't always click through on the link. This link is too important, for reasons that the sidebar biography doesn't ever quite get to, so let's give it my humble version of a little more exposure...

It's hard to state it simply: there is the 101st Fighting Keyboard Brigade, and then there is Joseph L. Galloway. If you have never done so, go buy or check out the book "We Were Soldiers Once and Young" by Harold Moore and Joe Galloway, or rent the movie of the same name - starring Mel Gibson (just get beyond that part) - from a couple of years ago. Watch the movie or read the book, and remember at the end of your experience that Joe Galloway was there when the 1st Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry choppered itself in on top of a significantly superior force of North Vietnamese troops in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965. There isn't a word that Galloway writes to this very day that isn't informed by a full and personal understanding of just what it means to commit Americans to a situation where they face death and maiming by enemy weapons. Neither George W. Bush, Big Dick Cheney, Big Dumb Don Rumsfeld, or any of their minions have an understanding of the full ramifications of just exactly what they have wrought in the way that Joe Galloway does. The boys and girls of the 101st Keyboarders can write all of their lofty appreciations for the sacrifices of the troops and the treason of those who don't agree with them, but then there is someone like Galloway, who is there to tell us what it sounds like and smells like and feels like when the boys are actually fighting and dying all around you. That's when you realize that pretty much every winger pundit spewing the "stay the course" mantra or it's new mutant offspring "benchmarks" just don't have anything to say. They don't understand the cost; they've never felt the pain. Galloway has - more than once, but at the very least that once, famously. He knows just exactly what it is we are spending in this misbegotten adventure that Gee Dub and his handlers were longing for from the day he first was installed in office by the United States Supreme Court, and money is the least of the bill these waterheads are ringing up in our name. Galloway's current piece deserves the widest possible distribution. Let this be my humble effort...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:06 PM 0 comments

Striking a Blow for the Little Gal 

...yes it's true that the contest for Oregon's Congressional District 2 isn't one of those hotly contested races that Kos or Atrios or Zogby or various political reports are keeping an eye on. This contest, between Democratic challenger Carol Voisin and Republican incumbent Greg Walden, is the sort that serves as a classic example of the advantages of culture and incumbency. Walden, while styling himself publicly as a man of the people, has voted just about as reliably for the Bush administration and Congressional Republican leaders to the detriment of the common working folk who make up 95% of this district as anyone you could hope to find. Walden can usually be found on the side of the rich, big business, big pharma, big oil, and all the other users, fixers, grifters, and the usual sort that latches so readily onto the current Republican wagon and sees all of us as large bovine creatures with ripe udders. District 2, however, is a long-time staunchly red district, the sort of place where a dead Republican would probably make easy sport of a live Democrat, and Walden's 60:1 campaign finance advantage isn't much different from any election for this particular House seat anytime over the last three decades. Still, Walden's huge advantages don't mean that Voisin's campaign can't fire off a few shots:


Walden's campaign gets all sniffy about this little YouTube offering, insisting that he has done nothing but stay to the high road and discuss the issues while his opponent is getting down in the dirt. That, of course, is true as far as it goes and - at the same time - is nonsense. Walden hasn't come close to being required to explain his votes for the big dogs who have launched a virtual war against against common folks who are simply trying to get by, and that fact all by itself is a damned shame. Walden and his handlers would have done better to simply refuse to comment on the new YouTube ad, but they didn't, so it only seems fair to let folks see just what exactly is being talked about, eh?
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:08 PM 0 comments

The Return of the Illegal Shakedown 

...years ago back in high school, and I mean years ago (as a reference point for all these 20- and 30-something bloggers out there, we're talking about the calving rumbles of the retreating glacial ice sheets just barely drowning out the anguished trumpet-note screams of the last dying wooly mammoths outside one's bedroom window...night after night...it's a wonder we could even concentrate long enough to invent Euclidian geometry), we had a no-notice vehicle safety check at Windswept Prairie High School on the high Central Idaho Plateau. All the exits to the high school parking were plugged with city police and sheriff's deputies, ostensibly doing checks to make sure that our community's contribution to tommorrow's leaders were driving safe vehicles. Oddly the only thing that the safety inspector/law enforcement officers did was to ask drivers of cars and trucks to open their hoods for a casual and brief peak; motorcycle riders were waved through the line without inspection. The fullness of time and a bit of inductive reasoning finally led to the explanation for this strange 'inspection': There had been a case of vandalism and theft at the local ski area involving the theft of a snow grooming machine's automotive-style battery and arson destruction of the groomer. What we had just experienced was something very close to an illegal search for that battery, with no excuse or explanation offered after the fact except for the lame "safety inspection" ruse that didn't actually inspect any safety-related aspects of our cars. I come by my poisonous cynicism honestly, but that's not the point here...

Now we see a "training exercise" at this Michigan middle school. Students were placed against walls, patted down, and interrogated about their pocket contents. This just reeks of a shakedown, a fishing expedition that has nothing whatsoever to do with any sort of actual training exercise. It doesn't fit the story of virtually any case of school violence that has occurred over the last 10 years, so it's a bit of a mystery just exactly what the SWAT team was training for. On the other hand, it does sound an awful lot like someone cruising for some easy marks with a search that no half-bright adult would allow to be conducted on his or her person without a clearly defined probable cause being specifically articulated in advance. But these are just kids, so they don't know any better and, besides, this is the sort of thing that we should expect in Bush's World...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:31 PM 0 comments

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