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

Friday, December 29, 2006

And A Watching World Said "Who Cares" 

...if the cable news networks and their frequently shaky sources are to be believed, Saddam Hussein was within the previous 90 minutes of this writing hanged by the neck until dead. While in some historical sense this is an important historical moment, in a larger reality-based sense the whole thing seems to have a sort of meaningless heft to it. From the day Saddam was rousted out of his strange little spider hole, the fact of this moment was a given. More to the point, from the moment that Saddam went to ground, the whole sad, brutal, ugly story of what has been going down in Iraq has been about everything but him. It has been about the Bush administration's mishandling of the rebuilding process and it's utter failure to understand predictions about the insurgency or devise a plan to effectively deal with that insurgency. A thousand and more American troops have been killed, and many more thousands maimed, since we were treated to those shots of Hussein apparently being examined by the dentist from "The Little Shop of Horrors" and being hacked away at with electric razors like just any other ewe in an Australian sheep-shearing station. Over the last couple of years, there has been fight going on for the ownership of Iraqi turf, but not one single little bit of that turf-fight has had anything to do with the sad little former despot held in tight security in some mysterious facility out near the Baghdad airport...

From the day he was captured, today's reported outcome was Saddam's destiny. The worst mistake that Gee Dub and Bushco could make right now would be to try to manufacture some sort of 'bump' in the polls using Hussein's execution as some measure of success. Our connection to Saddam goes back too far and the bloody fingerprints of far too many Republican operatives are all over the place to make that work. He was Our Man in the Iran-Iraq war, and we only offered the most simpering of objections to the very crimes that he is said to have been hanged for this evening. It was only after the Kuwait invasion that it occurred to the neocon nation-builders that peace in the Middle East - and to be specific peace for Israel - could be achieved by targeting our old buddy in Iraq, with the specific target being picked in large part because his was the only secular government in the region, even though there was the Sunni vs. Shiite undercurrent to everything that was going on. Having allowed ourselves to be lied into his usurpation, it is increasingly clear, day by day, that there is little relationship between the fact of Saddam Hussein and the fact of the bloody conflict in which we are currently mired in Iraq. This can be traced directly back to the fact that the supposed sectarian conflict between the Sunni minority and the Shiite majority has more to do with secular control issues than with any sort of religious dispute...

We'll take a moment here to give Gee Dub his due. He so badly wanted this war and wanted to 'get' Saddam that polite people had to continually turn the conversation away from the subject to control his drooling. Now he has finally had his moment of revenge; now maybe the rest of us who actually are seasoned adults can turn our attention to trying to fix all the disastrous circumstances that he and Rummy and Big Dick Cheney and all those Neocons who are now fleeing down the ratlines helped to create. We as a nation would have been better served if Babs Bush would have taken some time back in the day to read a bedtime story about B'rer Rabbit and the Tar Baby to the boys instead of sending them outside to beat the hell out of each other in touch football. Maybe Gee Dub could have learned from that warm family moment that there are just some things you don't do. Didn't happen, though, and nearly three thousand American lives stand as the payment for that basic parental failing. More importantly, tonight we are looking at an Iraq that no longer has a Saddam Hussein to be either savior or demon, but we have been looking at that very same thing for a couple of years now. Gee Dub is probably going to get little if any political benefit from this particular hanging, and he is still going to have to figure out how to fix the problem he created in Iraq without getting very many more US troops killed. From the top to the bottom on the U.S. side of today's news, the fact that Saddam Hussein may have finally received the punishment that he so richly deserves leaves all of us giving a mechanic's shrug and saying "who cares"....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:31 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Seeking the Long View on Gerald Ford 

...since the first breaking news of last evening, the cable news networks have been wall-to-wall with tributes to Gerald R. Ford; journalist after writer after political commentator has been dragged before the camera to talk about how Ford helped turn the country around and end "our long national nightmare" of Watergate and save the economy and...well...all the rest. One can expect all these nice things to be said, but I suspect that history won't report as glowingly about the 38th President and is being said today...

Make no mistake, Gerald Ford was a good person and an accomplished politician in his natural habitat of the House of Representatives. He was a skilled athelete - as only...ahem...a person who has actually played the position of offensive football center can understand - and in no way deserved the image that Chevy Chase so brutally captured on Saturday Night Live. America's final failure in Vietnam came during his watch, but it was not so much any failed policy on his part as the actions of the US Congress that led to choppers snatching American personnel off of Saigon rooftops on that grim April morning in 1975. He was a decent man who believed in doing what he thought was right, even if there were to be painful personal costs. Put quite simply, his entire life was a tribute to principles, standards, and beliefs that the current White House occupant couldn't possibly understand even if you wrote them down in simple words with crayons...

But there was no feeling at the time that he was "saving" the country. The Nixon pardon was an outrage to many people; his idea for the W.I.N. (Whip Inflation Now) lapel buttons was the most wildly ridiculed presidential in my lifetime; the economy was poor, job prospects sucked, and interest rates were high; a foul mood generally seems to cover the land (on the other hand, maybe it could be blamed on Disco). Even though we have the distance of three decades as a lens to study his presidency, it will really take a much longer view to finally properly assay his value as president. At the time, in the moment, our long national nightmare didn't seem to actually draw finally to a close until 1976, when Jimmy Carter brought a change of party to the White House and cleaned out any remaining vestiges of Watergate. Gerald Ford was by all accounts a fine, generous, decent man who brought an open, human face back to a presidency that was almost burned to the ground by his predecessor. Gerald Ford was, in a way, The Reluctant President who stepped into a job he never really wanted because he believed it was what the nation was asking of him. It will be left to history, rather than the eulogizers, to establish just what his presidency really meant...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:16 AM 0 comments

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