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

Friday, November 24, 2006

The New Iraqi Benchmarks 

...far too late, being far too behind the curve of American opinion, George W. Bush and his supposedly brilliant band of handlers led by Karl Rove decided that "staying the course" in Iraq wasn't feeding the bulldog anymore. They decided to abandon that often-spoken phrase as the definition of our plan for stabilizing the situation in that flaming, deadly, violent environment that our invasion and mishandled rebuilding had created with the concept of "Benchmarks". This created the immediate opportunity to make heretofore impossible claims of success: there was the provisional government benchmark, the election benchmark, the 'create-a-constitution' benchmark, even the 'troop/police training is going swimingly' benchmark. Unfortunately, the people of Iraq have spent the last couple of days creating benchmarks of their own that have nothing whatsoever to do with creating that bright shining beacon of democracy that was one of the core reasons for our invasion and disruption of Iraq, and they aren't the sort of benchmarks that offer hope for anything but more bitter conflict, bloodshed, and abandoned bodies in this mess Gee Dub and his neocon minions have created in our name and on our behalf...

Foremost amongst the most recent benchmarks that the ongoing civil war (that we refuse to acknowledge) has offered was the murder of 219 Shiite Baghdad residents yesterday in one of the most deadly directed series of bombing attacks ever staged on one day. Another important benchmark is today's response by Shiite militia to yesterday's presumably Sunni-led attacks: Sunni's being dragged into the streets by Shiite militia members as they left their mosques to be doused with diesel and set on fire to burn to death. All by itself, this is a profound escalation of the violence, offering the remembrance of the African "necklacing" parties of yore, minus the tire around the neck and the chopping off of the victim's hands, but those are just niceties, mere details of ommission in the catalog of "Bad Ways to Die". This particular bit of brutality earns benchmark status, however, because the US trained Iraqi military, the personnel that MUST take control of the local situation if there is to be any hope for Gee Dub's misbegotten adventure, stayed in their barracks while the Shiite militia exacted their revenge on the closest available victims...

The awesome capability that mankind has to inflict the most horrific, brutal, painful death possible on his fellow human beings for no reason that stands up to simple intellectual probing is one of the enduring mysteries with which we must struggle. Iraq has become almost a field lab for the exploration of human brutality, and this last few days has seen an almost unspeakable expansion of the sample set. Now, suddenly, it isn't sufficient to bore holes into the bodies, necks, and heads of victims with electric drills before sawing their heads off with crude knives. Now, under the noses of the very troops that WE were supposed to be training to defend the entire country - Sunni, Shiite, Kurd, and even the occasional Christian - from forces of evil both within and outside the nation's borders, it is now the practice of the day to drag innocent people out of their houses of worship into the street so they can be doused with flammable liquids and set on fire. This is Gee Dub's new benchmark, whether he understands it or not. This is the reality of Iraq, not the sugar-coated mewlings that we have be offered up by this administration over the last four years. There may have been 'benchmarks' that Gee Dub and Big Dick and the gone-but-unlamented Rummy wanted to point to, but all their 'benchmarks' have always been meaningless window-dressing. The only benchmarks that matter anymore are the vicious, ugly ways that Iraqis can concoct for killing each other and the number of Americans who have to die or be maimed in the effort to try to stop the killing. We are fast approaching - if not already arrived at - the point where there isn't anything in Iraq but senseless sectarian killing, with the only fix being the realization by more rational minds that this madness must stop. The only 'benchmark' that matters any longer is the point at which the leaders of the various Muslim sects reach this particular conclusion and pull back to a position of trying to bring peace to their destroyed country. George W. Bush and his sad little band of nation-builders are really of no matter anymore, except for the price that they have forced all those braves members of our military to pay on their behalf and in their stead; none of their benchmarks matter anymore...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:04 PM 0 comments

Joey and The REAL Paper Lions 

...it's just sports; worst than that, were one to judge my wife's assessment, it's just football, but there are those passing occasions where some small better story or a larger moment can come out of a mundane sporting event. Thursday provided just such a brief occasion in Detroit, where former Oregon Duck star Joey Harrington came into the sparkling Detroit football palace built by the Ford family and showed the Fords, the Detroit Lions, and their sad-sack, woebegone fans that maybe, just maybe, the abuse they heaped on Harrington for the Lions' losing ways over the last four years was just a bit off the mark...

Harrington's story is well known to Oregon Duck fans. Record-setting career as the Ducks quarterback; Heisman Trophy finalist; third pick in the NFL draft by the Lions; four dismal years of failure that devolved into booing, public repudiation by teammates, benching, and - in the final stamp of failure - being traded to the Miami Dolphins for a fifth-round draft choice; sudden reentry into the sporting public's eye when the starting Dolphin quarterback's lingering injuries led to Harrington's being tapped as starter in an effort to save a season that was going south fast and early. Thursday's encounter was supposed to be just another game, one more week out of 16, but the undercurrents and backstories threatened to bury that simple fact. By the time Harrington was chased out of Detroit, he had acquired a persona not too far removed from Public Enemy No. 1. The run-up to the game wasn't "The Dolphins are coming to town", it was "Harrington's coming to town" and Lions fans spent the week warming up their vocal cords in the shower in order to maintain the stamina to boo him for the entire game. The problems of the Lions over the last several years have not, however, been because of Harrington; he was rightfully one of the best players to come out of Oregon in recent memory and a Heisman finalist and a high draft pick. He was saddled with the blame for Detroit's woes, but on Thursday the only thing that looked any different on the Lions side of the ball from the last four seasons was that the quarterback being sacked and harrassed and chased around the field and forced into committing turnovers was John Kitna, another Pacific Northwest product who doesn't deserve the punishment of being the Lions' quarterback, either. Joey Harrington, the former Lion who probably was the only man in town who could get booed in the grocery store, came into the stadium with a team that can - unlike the Lions - actually run and block and tackle and catch the football, and he passed over, under, around, and through the Lions defense in one of those gleaming moments of personal redemption that most people will never have a shot at in their entire lives. The boos stopped early and the seats started emptying not much later. It was pretty difficult to find a Detroit Lion fan in Oregon yesterday, and it wasn't much easier to find one in the stadium by the end of the third quarter...which is too bad, in a way, because those who stayed had the chance to observe that their team still sucks while the primary culprit they blamed for their team sucking over the last four seasons didn't...suck, that is.

Joey Harrington isn't now launched on his way to superstardom, but he has at least stepped out from under a personal cloud. He came into the place where he suffered the most public humiliation that a person could imagine and - with an almost unimaginable public grace both before and after the game - took back some the pride and self respect that the city of Detroit beat out of him. It's one of those little stories about second chances and personal redemption that can get lost in the stats and fantasy league results that so overwhelm sports, but it was a nice little story nonetheless, the kind they're always making sports movies about. This time, though, it was real...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:50 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

How Bad A Month Can Be 

...it wouldn't, just couldn't be bad enough that the family that currently occupies the White House had to sit in stoic silence while all those good friends who gather down the street in the Capitol Building who could blunt any effort to plumb the fetid, septic depths of the occupant's administration got their butts handed to them on Nov. 7, opening up the possibility of the sorts of congressional investigations that could at best create a legacy that Millard Filmore wouldn't accept. No, no...no...no...it's worse than that. As it turns out, the Secret Service detail tailing the more attractive, Not-Jenna segment of the future generation of the White House branch of the Bush 'dynasty' isn't doing anybody in the Bush administration any favors either. Despite the normal assumtion that nothing much larger than a mosquito sould be able to penetrate the perimeter that the SS boys would presumable lay down around Barb the younger, somebody made off with her purse...from under their nose...and now some Argentinian street thug has her cell phone - with all those secret numbers - and her credit card and whatever else she carried in that bag...

...this could get interesting, in ways that Mom and Dad and the spinmeisters really must wish they didn't have to deal with just now. The Fun May Be About To Begin...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:25 PM 0 comments

Monday, November 20, 2006

Getting Schooled by Iran 

...well, what the heck, eh? Gee Dub and his boys have been telling us all along that what they wanted most of all for Christmas was for the Iraqi people and government and police and military to stand up on their own hind legs and try to make some sort of silk purse out of the mishandled occupational sow's ear that we've laid on in that part of the world. Well, it turns out that they just may be about to do that...

I'd be willing to lay a wager, even though I am not a betting man, that this isn't exactly what Bushco had in mind. Having Iraqi leadership meeting with the third leg of the "Axis of Evil" stool that Iran represents, not to mention including the very same Syrian government that Gee Dub would have probably happily included in his "Axis" list had it not been for the lack of historic translational symmetry with the original Axis, suggests the likelihood that the worst of all possible worlds looms for the "liberators" of Iraq. Not only will we be stuck in the middle of a swirling maelstrom of violence that claims several American lives every week, but now we face the prospect of doing so as little more than a marginalized occupying force. The prospect of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani sitting down with the Sunni leaders of Syria and the Shiite leaders of Iran to try to come to some sort of concord that would bring, if not peace, at least some sense of truce between those two warring sects offers a prime opportunity for our troops to be put into a dark and dangerous position. Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure is more than ever before teetering on the brink of total collapse, if for no other reason than the fact that our failure to engage Iraq's neighbors in the rebuilding effort - choosing instead to threaten them vaguely with nuclear destruction for one reason or another - than because any sort of success coming from this summit that quells the violence and seems to bring the Sunni's and Shiite's closer together will demonstrate to the Middle East just exactly who can get the rubber to the road. Could be a good thing, as far as getting our troops out of an unwinnable situation; could be a bad thing - and for Bush and the neocons this is probably the more important point - because of the degree to which it marginalizes the US position in a story line that we created. We came; we saw; we sort-of conquered; we got our asses chased out of Dodge at the end of the day. This is not a bedtime story that will buttress American influence in the Middle East. It's all a part of the neocon legacy, where you declare friends and enemies and make sure that you beat your enemy's chops at every available opportunity. This is not a mindset that would ever have Nixon going to China. It is, on the other hand, why we have failed in controlling North Korea's nuclear ambitions, it's why we will fail to control Iran's nuclear ambitions, and it's why we will totally lose control of the development of a new post-Saddam government in Iraq. In the world of pick-up basketball, it's what they call getting schooled...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:38 PM 0 comments

Sunday, November 19, 2006

Thanks for Nothin', Henry 

...what is it with Henry Kissinger? Why is it that, comes the time to conduct a postmortem on a failed large-scale American military nation-building venture that has consumed sacred blood and treasure with no particular outcome except a smoldering hulk where this country's stout positive reputation once stood, we can always find Henry Kissinger lurking in the background, growling Prussian-accented recriminations about how none of this was his fault and how all hope should be abandoned. Don't these people ever retire? Can't they finally, at some point, use the caller id function on their phones and choose not to pick up the phone and drag us down another rough rocky trail with their recommendations to some sitting president? Is there ever such a thing as "enough, already" for these people? All by itself, the capitulation that Kissinger offers to British interviewers is big news in all the ugly things it says about just what the hell George W. Bush and his phalanx of fixers, handlers, and yes-men managed to get us into with the Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure. It is only the power that his perverted aura holds over Republicans that he hasn't been dragged out to some ditch and shot as a traitor, unlike most Iraq war opponents would be if Gee Dub's gang had their way...

That's not the big story, however, and it is most certainly not the outrage. Henry Kissinger has been, if one can believe the straight reportage of Bob Woodward, an important advisor to Gee Dub's cabal advocating a robust "stay the course" military victory approach. The "only meaningful exist strategy is victory" is what he has been telling them, reinforcing their particular tunnel-vision view of how things have to work. Of course, he is also the guy who messed with the '72 election by declaring that "peace is at hand". It was only 2 1/2 years later that helicopters were snatching the last Americans to leave South Vietnam off of the roofs of Saigon buildings. In a way, it is the closing of some dark circle, with Kissinger being just the most recent "stay the course" advocate throwing this administration under the bus at the very same moment that Gee Dub is tooling around Vietnam, visiting the very same now-renamed Ho Chi Mihn City where Kissinger's strange mix of nation-building militarism and ineffectual statesmanship was once and for all drowned out by the unique and distinct sound of Huey blades slapping against the thick Saigon air as they ferried load after load of evacuees to waiting ships through all those desperate hours of April 29, 1975...

One of the more discouraging and despicable aspect of Gee Dub's misguided war of choice is the way in which all of his enablers, supporters, and advisors are abandoning the effort now that the American voters have said "enough". There's nothing new here, no sudden downturn in fortunes that would lead to some sudden epiphany. Things have been going generally downhill since the original looting began, and the sight of some useless, out-of-touch relic like Kissinger trying to distance himself from his past involvement in this most recent nation-building failure doesn't ease the pain of the losses this nation has suffered. It's finally time, once and for all, for Henry Kissinger to find a hobby, maybe take up fishing, just do something that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything resembling addressing America's foreign relations. He has demonstrated to everyone's satisfaction that he has never had anything positive to offer to the benifit of the nation; it's time to move on...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:48 PM 0 comments

Romney Plays for the Fundy Base 

...it was probably a given that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision in 2003 to legalize same-sex marriage wasn't going to be tolerated by at least some of that state's residences. It was also probably a given that Mitt Romney, who has looked around to discover several of his nominal competitors for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination spiraling downward in flames toward that bleak political landscape, might decide that now is a good a time as any to try to make a play for the Republican base that might carried him to the promised land. So it's no surprise that he has decided to try to force this issue onto the ballot in order to establish his political cred on the far right side of the street...

This will be an interesting gambit to watch as the 2008 presidential campaign spools up. I grew up around conservative Christians in northern Idaho at the tidal edge of the powerful influence of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latterday Saints. It will be a sign of the hunger of the religious right to exert their right-wing social influence on the rest of us if they embrace Mitt Romney just because he occupies some of the same social positions that they do, adopting a sectarian sort of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" attitude to reassert their perceived sense of dominance. Christian conservatives traditionally view Mormons as little better than cultists in need of prayerful intervention and conversion, and the idea that they would join in league with a member of the Mormon Church to advance their agenda would speak volumns about the degree to which they have sacrificed their understanding of God's Word to their desire to shape and dominate secular society...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:12 PM 0 comments

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