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

Saturday, November 18, 2006

The Unitary Presidency Rides Again 

...legal opinions are like...well, like belly buttons (yeah, I know that's not the normal phrase, but this is a family blog); pretty much everybody has one, and those that don't just aren't in the game. Amongst those folks who threw off the burden of public disdain and actually went to law school so their legal opinions would actually have the weight of knowledge, most are of the opinion that the warrantless eavesdropping program that Gee Dub's White House ginned up after 9/11 is probably illegal under both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Constitution. Back in August, Federal District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the Eastern District of Michigan rules that these folks were actually correct. Her decision is currently stayed while under appeal by - who else - Abu Al Gonzalez and Gee Dub's happy little gang of dominionists, and now, with any vestige of a sympathetic Congress willing to lend the color of law to their vandalism against the Constitution disappearing over the horizon, the public relations full-court press is on again. Now we have Abu Al, this country's Number 1 candidate for a bit of demonstrative full-bull-screaming-interrogator waterboarding (perhaps on Fox News) just to show how benign that whole thing is - is trashing the reasoned ruling of an independent jurist as - if not treason - at least a profoundly dangerous and misguided assault on this White House's patriotic desire to protect us from ourselves, each other, swarthy men who are even now swarming across the border with death in their pockets and hate in their hearts, and all those other bogeymen who make strange banging noises against our walls late at night when no help is around and we're in the shower...

Under the best of circumstances, I wouldn't trust Al Gongalez any farther than I could hurl the pile of tortured bodies that he has authorized through his twisted sleight of hand in making the requirements of various Geneva Conventions disappear. These aren't the best of circumstances. The Bush administration is starting to look like a dangerous wounded animal, stripped of the protective cover of a Republican-controlled Congress that prevented it from having to answer any of the hard questions about just where the hell it came up with the justifications for some of its actions. Now we are looking at the reprise of Rovian campaign tactics to try to rally the base or change the subject or deflect the oncoming onslaught of Democratic oversight or...well...something...anything that might divert the eye from the sorts of revelations that would so incite the ire of the American people that all those Pelosi promises about impeachment being the farthest thing from anybody's mind would become a useless artifact. We're not going to be rid of this assault on the core documents that make us who we are for the next couple of years, so we might as well get used to it. We need to make sure, however, that we call B.S. on their efforts everytime they make the try, because Abu Al is demonstrating that they are certainly going to keep trying...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:18 PM 0 comments

Friday, November 17, 2006

The Difference An Ocean Makes, Korea Edition 

...a few years ago, George W. Bush chose the most important forum that an American president has to announce that North Korea, along with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and our old friends in Iran were a new 'Axis of Evil'. As the leader of what we then referred to as "The World's Only Superpower", his assignment of these three nations to international pariah status in his State of The Union address was bound to attract attention, and it most definitely did in South Korea, which wasn't invited to the meeting where it was decided that the extremely militant enemy to its north was going to be earning this particular attention. What for Gee Dub was a cheap bit of speechifying flourish that - at the time - was primarily intended to inflame American passions against Iraq was a wake-up call for both ends of the Korean penninsula, granting in its own way the right for North Korea to explore the development of nuclear weapons as a defense against any of the obvoius intentions we might have. At the same time, it served as a reminder to South Korean citizens that any actions looking like an attack on the Communist government of North Vietnam was more likely be the start of a really bad day for them than it would for anyone in the United States, given the fact that Seoul is within tactical rocket range of the border with North Korea and the United States isn't...

It is not, therefore, surprising that the South Korean government, having had just about all they can stand of the aggressive "let's have a war" attitude that Bushco has substituted for what was at one time called 'diplomacy', has decided that they are not interested, thank you very much, in being involved in the inspection of North Korean shipping as part of UN sanctions and under the terms of the Proliferation Security Initiative. North Korea may or may not have nuclear weapons, primarily as a failure of the Bush administration to continue the initiatives put in place by Bill Clinton, but they do have a huge standing army...and South Korea has been here before. Beyond the point of facing the sort of violent conflict that wouldn't solve any more issues than did the original early '50's Korean War, leaders in South Korea understand that it would be possible for whiskeyed-up teenagers with too much access to intertubes and groves of saplings to launch nuclear weapons into the cultural center of South Korea via some sort of uber-slingshot without even breaking a sweat, and the North Koreans are far more technologically capable than that. More to the point, North and South Korea are still more or less officially still in a state of war, and waylaying North Korean shipping on the high seas would most certainly be a hostile act. Gee Dub and his gang of diplomatic amateurs may be miffed by South Korea's profound lack of disinterest, but the fact remains that - as has been the case with most of what passes for 'diplomacy' around the White House - these clowns don't really understand the core human ramifications of their hot ideas. South Korea does; the early 1950's weren't a series of M.A.S.H. episodes for them, and they can't think of a reason in the world to carry Gee Dub's tainted water and end up repeating that time for no good reason...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:52 PM 0 comments

Learning the Wrong Lesson 

…George W. Bush, in the midst of silencing critics of his military record by finally actually making it to Vietnam (albeit 31 years after the last unit-sized U.S. combat activities), has offered up his take on what lessons our involvement in that war can teach us about his war in Iraq:

“We’ll succeed unless we quit…We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take awhile…”


This is not the lesson from the Vietnam War. It isn’t even a lesson from the Vietnam War, and anybody who claims it is clearly is either too slow-witted or too politically entrenched in the current conflict to be trusted to run around loose with the keys of power. The first two names listed at the dedication of that long grim black granite wall of the Vietnam War Memorial were from 8 July 1959; at the far end are 18 names on 15 May 1975 from the rescue operation of the Mayaguez incident. Sixteen years, with almost a decade of that involving the massive commitment of U.S. troops; 58,249 dead or missing Americans. The lesson from this sacrifice wasn’t that you fail if you quit or succeed if you don’t; the lesson was that you cannot conduct a successful war and build a functioning, democratic society if the foundation upon which you are working is a decadent, corrupt central government that does not have the support of the people that it is supposed to be leading. It’s citizens will not unite to defend it, even if the alternative is almost too disturbing to contemplate. That was the lesson of Vietnam, and for all the cheap talk about lessons learned and doing it right the next time, that’s the lesson that was ignored by Bush and Cheney and Rummy and Feith and the PNAC gang, and that is the most striking parallel that they refuse to acknowledge between Vietnam and Iraq...

Once again we are caught between warring factions – althought the divide is religious this time instead of political – and are trying to prop up a government that is not supported by the people it is trying to govern. The parallel isn’t exact, mostly due to Rumsfeld’s arrogance in trying to do this nation-building thing on the cheap to validate his views on what the “new” military should look like and in intentionally impeding any effort to develop an occupation strategy that would further Gee Dub’s nation-building goal. We have far less troops in the theater and the weekly U.S. death toll is in the tens rather than the hundreds, so from a purely factual standpoint this isn’t Vietnam all over again, but in most other respects it’s the same damned thing. The people who strongly supported the Vietnam War through draft deferrments and childbirth and from singles’ bars and livingroom sofa’s didn’t get the message about Vietnam; to them, we lost in Vietnam because we lost our will and bugged out, so the simple solution in their uncomplicated minds is to ‘stay the course’. This is, I suppose, what you should expect when you let ‘C’ students run the show...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:45 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

He's BA-aack! 

...Trent Lott has never been the sort of person who could ever stir any traces of sympathy in me. During his tour as Senate Majority Leader he displayed the sort of preppy bully-boy snottiness - especially toward the Democratic minority - that would get your butt hurled from many of the cowboy/logger bars in which my youth was wasted, but somehow is tolerated in the genteel clubby world of official Washington. Even though I have always felt that his fall from grace and leadership was more a bit of political theater borne by manufactured outrage rather than a heartfelt response to some bit of clearly outrageous behavior (for reference, see Kerry, John: How Not To Tell A Joke), gone was gone and it was a good thing. Gone didn't stay gone, however, and ol' Trent seems to be marching smartly down the comeback trail...

The prospect of his smarmy whining falling once again on our ears isn't a pleasant one, and I might consider driving to Missippippi to pitch in on that porch rebuild that Gee Dub was going on about last year if I thought it would somehow lure Lott away from the media and keep him off my Hi-Def screen. But yet, the path to redemption can be a black diamond trail, getting steep and loosly rocky as one nears the mountaintop, not to mention the fact that we aren't often treated to the musings of minority whips in any case, so maybe things will turn out OK. Clearly, though, it is apparent that reports of his political demise were premature. I wonder if any other aging Dixie-crats are having birthdays anytime soon...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:07 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Bush's Katrina Gift That Keeps On Giving 

...there are stories upon stories about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that serve no other purpose than to highlight the raw incompetence, venality, and corruption of the Bush administration. You've heard some - but not all - of them, ranging from the absurd Air Force One fly-by (with the requisite shots of a duly concerned President casting a furrowed brow out that little window at a bizarre bird's-eye view of the stark human tragedy that was playing itself out several thousand feet below Gee Dub's plus leather-accented cabin) to the days-too-late visits that tied up essential rescue Coast Guard resources for the purpose of some cheap photo op's. There are other stories that received greater or lesser coverage about the sweetheart deals and no-bid contracts that fell to Republican faithful, and yet other similar stories never told to the nation but well known to federal employees from other agencies who came in as part of incident command teams to coordinate the relief effort. Despite all of the earnest pronouncements by Gee Dub and his minions, the stories have continued through what can only be laughingly be called "the recovery" of the most heavily damaged portions of New Orleans, and it' beginning to become clear that there may not be a near-term endpoint for these tragic, sordid little stories...

Now we face the saga of the ruined modular homes. In one respect, this is just another chapter in the building legacy of George W. Bush that he most surely wouldn't have wanted history to write. It speaks to a degree of incompetence to which even the often reviled federal government would never allow itself to sink if the trained professionals who should have been allowed to run their programs could have done so without interference from the various politically-appointed Assistant Associate Deputy Secretaries of This or That. On the other hand, it represents another story repudiating the false premise of the value of a CEO president. Gee Dub was supposed to be the leader of the 'adults', the people who were going to come in and apply known market principles to the management of the Federal government. What we the people discovered was that a business model of governance was nothing more than the same sort of fetid cesspool that corporate America offers up every day in every way. The most important lesson of Hurricane Katrina that needs to be learned is that government run as a business - a long-heralded talisman of fiscally conservative Republicans - is inherently incapable of responding to either the immediate or long-term needs of the people who need help. What we have seen is government run the way giants of industry have run the major American car companies, where things work a certain way because the bean-counters say so and there is no contingency plan for that day when it is revealed that the bean-counters were mostly strung out on crack all the time and couldn't much see the beans, much less count them. Thus has it been from that first morning after the winds died down along the Gulf Coast. Supplies and the means to transport them were ordered too late or in insufficient quantities; needed supplies sat for days in Receiving and Distribution Centers because only certain trucking contractors were allowed to haul into the center of the disaster area; refugees without even a roof over their heads were told to use computers they didn't have to access web sites to seek assistance; camp trailers and modular homes piled up like cordwood in parking lots, storage facilities, and fields because it was more important to gin up a twisted series of impossibly convoluted rules about who and where than it was to actually get people out of shelters and into single-family dwellings.

The bureaucracy of private industry is at least as immovable and powerful as anything your average government bureaucrat could crank up; the imposition of actions normally associated with profit motive onto a non-profit action like the recovery of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast leads to nonsense like the above-linked story and all those other stories we'd already heard. George W. Bush thinks a lot about legacy and he will have one, in part springing from the Katrina/Rita response; it won't, perhaps, be the sort of thing that a person mindful of such things would care to see sitting on the local library shelf with his picture on the dust jacket, but it will be most richly deserved...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:23 PM 0 comments

Sunday, November 12, 2006

The Strange World Of Central Oregon's Ben Westlund 

...when we all awoke groggily at the beginning of this year, Ben Westlund was a Republican Oregon State senator immersed in a certain degree of hot water with the local Republican faithful because of his support for legislative efforts to create civil union rights for same sex couples. Westlund, you see, is a mann born too late, a Republican from another era that produced the men and women who used to make Oregon a Red State, such as Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield, Don Packwood, Vic Atiyeh, and Norma Paulus. Time and some strange hunger for the powerful persuasions of the right-wing element of the party were the constituents of the comet that killed off these dinosaurs, but Westlund hung on like some sort of "Lost Worlds" remnant, preaching the sort of bipartisanship and accomodation that would sent the leadership of the Republican party into ugly twitching spasms, and that civil union thing was the last straw for a lot of the Pharisee right. It was also Westlund's last straw, and the approach of the 2006 governor's race - given the apparent weakness of the incumbent Democrat, Ted Kulongoski - led Westlund to renounce his Republican party affiliation and run for governor as an Independent. The rest, of course, is history; Westlund withdraws because, he said, he couldn't win and didn't want to be a spoiler (of course, nobody believed him) and just before the election took a meat axe to any hope of reconcilliation with state Republicans by endorsing Democratic candidate Kulongoski. The wave that swept over the national legislature had it's impact at the state level, too, with the Democrats taking over control of both houses of the state legislature as well as the governorship, marking another strange turn in Westlund's odd journey to whereever it is that he will finally end up...

With Governor-reelect Kulongoski making special note of Westlund's endorsement during his victory speech on Tuesday night, a truly bizarre situation has been created. Democrats own the show, which is the sort of circumstance that usually sends political leaders from east of the Oregon Cascades to go off in search of a barbed wire fence to chew on to get the whole thing out of there mind. Oddly, perversely, as if it were some construct of some cocaine fantasy, a state senate district in Central Oregon is going to be in the middle of the game, having a senator who isn't fighting for legislative scraps as an outsider (which I would otherwise dearly hope Republican state legislators were faced with, just to let them get a taste of the same medicine they have been dishing out at the state and federal level for the last several years; Republicans whining about Democrats needing to rule from a bipartisan basis is the new wind beneath my wings, babee...). From the picture of one year ago today, Central Oregon would have no better hope that to be just another population subject to the will of somebody else's majority, but it is a mark of Ben Westlund's strange year that he will be a much more effective State Senator for his district than anything the wierd out-of-touch gang of fixers and losers who are still lost in the sick, long-gone fantasy that they have some say in calling the shots could ever have hoped for. With the exception of the predictable victory of Measure 39, the Kelo vs. New London anti-eminent domain initiative, Oregonians stated rather dramatically in their votes on both ballot measures and state legislators that they don't hold much anymore with the deals that the right wing wants to do. In this strange world that Ben Westlund now inhabits, he has far more influence in the new Democratic-controlled world of state government than anything anybody in Central Oregon could ever have hoped for...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:49 PM 0 comments

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