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

Friday, January 26, 2007

Paying Respects 

...Gus Grissom was one of the original Mercury astronauts, one of the select seven who left the surly bonds of Earth to circle our big blue marble. Ed White was a hero of the Gemini program, being the first American to conduct a spacewalk outside of a space capsule. Roger Chaffee was the new guy, just thrilled to be there for the advent of the Apollo program that would eventually take Americans to the moon. Forty years ago Saturday their stories came together in what was supposed to be a routine training episode inside the command module of Apollo 1 just a couple of weeks prior to their launch date, when a random spark in the pure oxygen atmosphere of the module conspired to create a fire so fast and intensive that nearby technicians couldn't get the hatch open fast enough to save them...

Apollo 1 never left the pad, and the three assigned crew members became the first astronaut fatalities of the race to the moon. In their deaths, however, they provided a tremendous opportunity for the space-race community to reevaluate, reassess, redesign, and move on, making sure that there could never again be an accident that could be laid on the fatal flaws of the original Apollo command module. Still, in Grissom and White, America lost two icons and pioneers of America's trip into space, and all we are left with is their photographic images and the memories of their past endeavors. Travel into space ceased to be an exciting game forty years ago tomorrow, turning on a moment into a deadly serious business capable of breaking the nation's heart. It is a testament to the memory of Grissom, White, and Chaffee that we as a nation pressed on, making the changes necessary to fix the problems, and continued on the march to achieving the goal to which John Kennedy called the nation a decade before. Since there is no readily accessable physical memorial, their memory will have to serve, so we will remember their sacrifice tomorrow on the fortieth anniversary of their deaths in a pad fire at Kennedy Space Center...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:00 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Breaking News: Cheney Did It 

...Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is saying in his opening statement at the Scooter Libby trial that Vice President Cheney was the person who told Scooter that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative. He is also alleging that Cheney actually wrote a note containing speaking points for Libby to use when talking to reporters about Plame's CIA connections and the relationship between that and her husband's trip to Africa...

I'm not sure that this ranks right up there with learning that Spiro Agnew had taken kickbacks as Maryland Governor, but the folks at MSNBC are almost collapsing on their desks from excitement, so this could grow its own legs and cover some serious ground. This is going to be fun to watch...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:08 AM 0 comments

Paying the Price For Being A Good Soldier 

...it has been the desire of the Bush Administraton, in paricular the departed but unlamented Donald Rumsfeld, to keep troop levels relatively low in Iraq since long before tanks zoomed across the Kuwaiti border in 2003. General Eric Shinseki demonstrated this baseline fact back in 2003 when he was herded off into retirement after insisting that more than a couple of hundred thousand troops would be needed to successfully take and hold Iraq. Subsequent Army leadership, intelligent men with a talent for detecting political windspead and direction, have toed the line that Rummy drew in the sand. Since 2004, General George Casey has redeemed his responsibility to do Bushco's bidding by refusing to call for more troops, doing so with such success that he became an impediment when the decision was made to act contrary to every scrap of advice and send in 20,000 more troops in this last-ditch "surge". Now that the boys in the White House have decided to kick him upstairs to the Army Chief of Staff position, Casey finds himself in the unenviable position of facing opposition to his nomination from Senators McCain and Graham...

Gee, why does the word "scapegoat" leap so readily to mind. McCain and Graham have military backgrounds; more to the point, they are experienced political operators with tendrils reaching into the White House. They know how things work and how these particular things have been working. This smacks of being little more than dope-slapping Gee Dub through one of his surrogates and seems to serve no purpose other that gaining an advantage in insider politics. There's a bigger lesson to be learned here, though, other than what price can be exacted for doing what your boss told you. The bigger lesson is that, when they want to, as in this case, Republicans are more than willing to throw faithful servants of the highest rank under the bus but when they don't want to, as in the case of Abu Ghraib, they will turn a blind eye to the involvement of the upper ranks. This isn't about Casey; this is about the ongoing hunger eating away at John McCain's guts to grab hold of the keys to the Oval Office and his willingness to trample anyone who needs trampling to help create the image that he hopes will get him over the top. General Casey runs the risk of paying the price not for what he did but for what John McCain wants to do...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:34 AM 0 comments

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Spare Me, Oh Lord... 

...from ever thinking that I am The Answer. Spare me, Lord, from ever becoming so lost in my own hubris that I believe that I may need to fling myself into a political venue that is neither crying out for my viewpoint nor all that anxious to see my sorry butt wallowing around in public once again. Lord, spare me the personal embarassment of taking myself back onto a stage that I left in dispair and disgrace not all that long ago. Spare me, Oh Lord, from becoming so lost in my own sense of misguided self-importance that the scales on my eyes prevent me from seeing that there is nobody - not a soul; zero; zip; nada - who has any interest in seeing me back in the limelight for any reason whatsoever. Spare me from being so blind that I cannot understand that my massive personal failings would render me as appearing little more than some self-inflated cartoonish buffoon with little to offer except object lessons on how not to behave as a person, a spouse, or a caring compassionate human being...

Spare me this, Oh Lord, but not my will, but Thy will be done,

Amen
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:50 PM 0 comments

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