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

Thursday, December 21, 2006

My Mother-in-Law Calls For the Draft 

...ok, so maybe she didn't, but the fact that the Veterans Affairs Secretary did suggest that it might be a good idea is not all that farther up the food chain than if she actually had come out in favor of conscription. Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson - Airborne and Ranger qualified; West Point graduate; combat infantry company commander in Vietnam - suggested to a reporter's question at a press event with New York mayor Bloomberg that America would be well-served by reinstituting the draft, but so what? Nicholson would never be invited to sit anywhere close to the head table in any administration decision meeting about the draft because he isn't in any way involved in managing that end of the military machine, but the sensor arrays of the press are so finely tuned to any hint of such a consideration by this administration, especially in this era of rumored 'surges' of larger numbers of troops to Iraq, that any sort of sentence uttered by any member of Bushco that contains the word "draft" is going to make big news...

OK, look, I'm as interested as the next guy in whatever Gee Dub and the gang are thinking about a military draft...ok, that's not quite true, because I just turned 52 and my kids are in one way or another permanently ineligible, so there are probably some folks out there with a more - shall we say - gripping personal interest in the subject. It must be said, however, that musings by the Veterans Affairs Secretary about the utility of a draft sit right up there with observations about the draft by the Secretary of Agriculture or the Postmaster General. The media is showing its true nature, which turns out to be neither liberal (as the wingers insist) or conservative (as we lefties have so long claimed) but rather is the simple product of a hoard of greasy losers with slicked-back hair and no agenda more profound than using their awesome access to the American dinner table to stir up nonexistant controversies in order to grab more eyeballs and make more money for their own Big Dogs. So here we have a reporter inquiring as to some aspect of the draft, not so much to open a discussion of whether a conscripted military is more egalitarian that an all-voluntary force comprised to a degree of the lower economic strata but to get the word "draft" out on the table in an overheated political climate where the mystery of just how Gee Dub is going to find the troops for this Iraqi 'surge' he is likely to propose runs up against the idea that all this surging may require a larger military that - given the struggle the services have had meeting current recruiting goals - is likely to be built without a draft...

Although Secretary Nicholson's comments, coupled with his hasty but way too late denial, seem to suggest some sort of looming internal conflict inside the beltway, there is no story here, despite the MSM's efforts to concock one. Gee Dub and his minions understand one thing above all else: there is no support for a draft and any effort to actually discuss the subject at all heads a person down a dangerous unmarked trail. Secretary Nicholson is as likely to be a mover and shaker at a discussion about the draft as he is a discussion about the North Korean nuclear weapons progran. It makes nice big, bold headlines and forces the honorable Secretary to do some later wild back-tracking on his previous quotes, but any official discussions about a draft will happen pretty much without Secretary Nicholson's input. This little headline grabbing moment is bogus nonsense, and should be treated as such...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:56 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Idiot Wingers Loose on The Countryside 

...those of you who spend the time dabbling around over in the seamy, cesspool-scented side of life, otherwise known as RightWing Land, have heard of radio talk show yapper Dennis Prager, who is barely clinging to his grip on sanity over the spectacle of Congressman-elect Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who either has or hasn't threatened to hack out the very underpinning of our sacred democracy by swearing his oath of office on a Koran (seems to be some confusion on the purely mechanical truth of Prager's prattling). Well, now things are getting better, because Virginia Republican Rep. Virgil Goode has stepped into the ersatz fray with a letter to his constituency raising the fearful vision of "many more Muslims" finding their way into the seats of Congress...

What do you say to this? I mean, this one is a toughie to work through. Normally, people elected to Congress are either smart enought themselves or have adept enough handlers that they don't normally let the raw fetid stench of their own innermost xenophobia, racism, and pure idiot-leanings come bursting out into the daylight. Not to put to fine a point on things, but apparently the voters of at least one particular VA. district isn't making it a habit these days to elect such smooth operators. Nosiree, these folks elect a guy who is so out there, so comfortable in his own ugly personal beliefs that he feels OK writing a letter to his constituents warning of the perils resident in the possible election of American citizens of a particular belief system.

"I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America."

He's serious with this stuff. Never mind that the traditional 'values and beliefs' of this country are so broadly cast that they generally escape coverage by just exactly you-know-what religion. There is a broad gulf between Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists and they have only the very broadest similarities in their values and beliefs when you look at the religious side of the issue, which is what we're talking about here. You would be hard pressed to get some redneck cracker with more children than teeth down at the fillin' station to come right out and say things that Rep. Goode has willingly committed to print. Mormons must be dancing in the wintry streets of Salt Lake City tonight, giddy with the hope that they might finally be off the hook for once with all those redneck southern fundy's always trashing their beliefs and calling them cultists and all. Jews, Buddists, Confusians, American Indians, Hindu's...heck, maybe even a few of my Lutheran brothers and sisters...just might possibily be feeling a tad uncomfortable at the thougth of stone-cold bigots like Virgil Goode even running around loose out there, much less having a shot at voting on the issues that come before Congress...

There's apparently a lot of raw hatred bottled up in some reaches of Virginia. I hope we can keep it bottled up there, because none of us is going to be safe with people like ol' Virgil tryin' to reach for the controls...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:10 PM 0 comments

Monday, December 18, 2006

The Problem With "Vicious Killers" 

...some days it's hard to decide what is the best target for outrage in Gee Dub's overall mismanagement of the Gripping And Totally Awesome Global Conflict Against Terrorism Sponsored By Swarthy Men Who's Last Names Always Start With Vowels And Have Hyphens (known by its more familiar acronym GATAGCATSBMWLNASWVAHH). This particular tidbit, however, probably has to rank fairly high on the list...

Packs of 'vicious killers', we were told. 'Worst of the worst', we were told. Instead, as other sources either reported or speculated, many of the 'worst of the worst' being held at Guantanamo were (and probably are) farmers and shop-keepers and laborers who just happened to be the most convenient body around when the US sugar daddy came 'round waving fists full of dollars as bounty for the capture of bad guys. We saw the tip of this particular iceberg early on, as old men and children were tagged and caged in our own Caribbean gulag. Now, however, as more detainees are returned to their nations of origin, a more complete understanding of the appalling personal abuse that was inflicted on innocent men in our name is coming into focus. The breath-taking degree of cheapness that this administration is willing to assign to human life - whether ours or theirs - is no more clearly displayed than in the degree of dispatch with which all those "nations of origin" are clearing those supposedly worst, most dangerous, terrorists in the whole world. In far too many cases, there isn't a shred of evidence to support detaining the supposed terrorists for even a night, much less for the years that we had them locked up at Gitmo. Bushco is very, very lucky that the dominant American media is so fully afflicted with whatever form of Attention Deficit disorder that grips it, because the fact that so many detainees have been released on the realization of a complete lack of evidence by their home countries would be a huge story if it weren't for....Hey! LOOK! A Chicken!!

You do not win hearts and minds by abusing, imprisoning, and torturing the innocents, but that is a lesson that - from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib - this filthy little band of chickenhawks, flat-out cowards, and twisted shallow-thinking Neocons can never hope to learn. Our entire "War on Terra" faces the stark prospect of being a hopeless failure, creating a far more dangerous world that the one we faced in late January, 2000, because of the failures of our detention systems, because of that whole 'extraordinary rendition' fiasco, and because of the intellectual, moral, and human failings of the quasi-human losers who somehow stumbled into power after 9/11. We're not winning in Afghanistan, we are losing in Iraq, and we are turning one of the earth's major religions against us as a nation just as surely as if we were to lock up and waterboard random Roman Catholics while declaring them to be a murderous sect-riven religion seeking nothing less than the bloody overthrow of our very way of life. The fundamental problem with locking up "vicious killers" is that, when the people you lock up generally aren't, you will probably ending pissing off their loved ones enough that somebody out there will decide to become one, revenge being one of the most natural of human emotions....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:09 PM 0 comments

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