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

Thursday, February 15, 2007

You Can Take The Boy Out Of The Scandal.... 

...but you can't take the scandal....yadayadayada. It just bears reporting, not repeating, that former Member of Congress and current Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons is yet another Republican office-holder who is spending more time dealing with federal investigators than most people would really care to.

Hey, what's a person to say? "It's shocking...shocking I say...that federal agents are spending so much of their valuable tax-payer-provided dollars persecuting former Congressmen". Yup, you could say that...

You could also speculate at length about how these stories seem, for some strange reason, to be so much more common than they were back in the day when Democrats were coming down off of four decades of majority. You might also note, were you so inclined, that there seem to be a whole bunch more of these sorts of stories than you remember from the bad ol' days when Dem's were in control. Maybe it's in the DC water system; maybe its human nature struggling against the moral strictures of political office-holding. Whatever the reason, the bottom line is that you gotta take your hat off to the current crop of Republicans, because they have created a culture of corruption in such rapid fashion that their current record may well withstand any challenge...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:19 PM 0 comments

The Fix Is In, Senate Version 

...the reauthorization of the Patriot Act included, much to just about universal surprise amongst the people who are supposed to know what the hell they are voting on, a provision that allows the Attorney General to appoint "temporary" US Attorneys under circumstances that could result in said appointees serving for the better part of a dog's life without facing the normal confirmation process to which such federal servants should be subject. Naturally, Abu Al Gonzalez wasted no time in firing various US Attorneys who had been far too successful in prosecuting various friends of the current administration and replacing them with people whose bona fida's as solid FOB's (friends of Bush) were more impressive than their track record as actual prosecutors...

Democrats, playing catch-up after having been flat out snookered by this whole thing, are trying to cover their natural embarrassment by snuffing this Republican effort to stem the tide of prosecutions that their past behaviors so handily called for. The desire to avoid seeing one's own name or the names of one's associates on the front page next to the word "scandal" is powerful, however, maybe even more powerful than the urge to breathe or eat, so Republican stalwarts are flinging themselves into the breach in an effort to stop Democratic efforts to assure that US Attorney positions are still filled by confirmation. The premier breach-leaper is John Kyl of Arizona, who has thrown a monkey wrench into the gears to stop the current Democratic effort to have an open, democratic process of filling US Attorney positions. The hypocricy with regard to Democratic efforts to establish a term limit for these appointments is only breath-taking for the politically uninitiated:

Gonzales, Kyl and other Republicans say this approach could lead prosecutors to be appointed for reasons other than their qualifications.

Well, Yeah...

Yes, that last part is exactly the Democrat's point. The effort to forestall the Democratic effort to roll back this dirty little Patriot Act provision is so lame, in fact, that one almost despairs of ever again having an opposition party that is clever enough to at least try to hide it's motivations. The upcoming hearings should be a rolicking good show, especially if Abu Al decides that he doesn't want to fork over the most recent performance ratings for the half-dozen fired prosecutors. Democrats have been frustrating the recently dethroned Republicans by taking a measured approach to change that hasn't offered the opportunities for demigogery that the Repub's so desperately need to regain power. This is a little bit off the grid, however, because now the Repub's are needing to defend a little bit of dirty laundry that will look to the average American like the indefensible: subversion of the traditional role of the Congress to act on Administration nominations. It's not about the sort of arcane bits and pieces that signing statements represent; this is about fundamental and - quite frankly scary - changes to the common person's civic's class understanding about "How Things Work". Unfortunately, debates over the ownership of Anna Nichol Simpson's body will garner more attention that this coming battle, and that's too bad, because this is one of the more important games in town these days...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:33 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

The NeoCon Fix Is Still In At The Pentagon 

...you've never heard of Eric Edelman. But you had never heard of Douglas Feith in 2003, either. This really does matter because it gets to the heart of not only how and why we are squandering blood and treasure in Iraq but also why we may well be doing the same thing later this year in Iran. Edelman hasn't yet popped up on the "let's bomb Iran" radar screen yet, but he has served an important role for the
Bush administration in trying to forestall the wave of outrage that could sweep this country if the full culpability of Bushco in using manufactured "intelligence" to get us into the Mess In Messopotamia were to ever come to light. Edelman, as it turned out, played a significant role in dumbing down the Pentagon Inspector General report about Feith's Office of Special Plans and it's part in leading us to the Iraq invasion...

This is not a story about some high-minded search for truth in the charred wreckage of Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure. This is a rear-guard action, firing rounds into the mass of the advancing legions of truth moving against the position that George W. Bush and his blood-lusting minions established in order to engage in their grand plan to bring democracy to the Middle East at gunpoint. This is the last stand of the True Believers, a final desperate attempt to use their still-considerable power to burn the evidence and blunt the revelation of the truth that would let us understand why the hell we are where we are...

The bone-simple fact is that "Big Dick" Cheney and his defenders will throw up any roadblock necessary or shoot anybody in the face that needs it to protect his fat quivering flanks from repudiation...or impeachment. These people have the morals of naked mole-rats and the integrity of coyotes, and the fact that they haven't all been frog-marched down a gangplank onto some rotting relic of a square-masted prison ship to spend the rest of their lives in chains on the lower vermin-infested decks in payment for their crimes against the country and the Constitution is a failure of spirit and of respect of the law for which our children will hold us responsible for the rest of our lives...and for years to come after that. The country was led by the nether regions down a soft path into involvement in nation-building that the leaders were neither intellectually or emotionally prepared for and which did not have a base of legitimacy in any case. Now we have those rear-guard actions, where minions, fixers, and dead-enders fight some twisted "good fight" to keep us from understanding just how evil and useless their ambitions actually were...

Fine people, people who in many cases could have become the best and brightest of our time have given their lives and their health and their hopes for a future to this misbegotton adventure in Iraq. The least that they deserved was a little bit of honesty by members of the Bush adminstration; clearly, the least is all they are going to get...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:38 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Derailing The Obama Freight Train? 

...one of the constant, and well-deserved, complaints from the hinterlands about Democratic presidential candidates has been that they were far too willing to appear weak or failing because they could be so easily be pushed into a position where their sense of triangulation would force them to apologize for every damned little thing. That perception of weakness chipped away at the Gore campaign; it was a small dose of poison in the Kerry campaign. How it happened that Democrats ended up in the position where anybody thought they needed to apologize for something is more a subject for the "role of the media", in particular the obvious disparity in the degree of attention, air time, and column inches devoted to their missteps vs. those of Republicans, but that's a debate for another time. The bottom line for today is that Barack Obama was right in terms of both strategy and tactics, but used a term that is painful to the families of those soldiers who have died in Gee Dub's failed Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure...

What is most frustrating about the situation in which this nation finds itself with regard to Iraq is that common truths run hard up against human and humane sensitivities. Obama once again apologized today for using the word "waste" with regard to the loss of military lives in Iraq, a humane gesture toward those who have suffered the unbearable loss of a loved one in that conflict and have to deal with the meaning of that loss. Unfortunately for everybody involved, he was right as far as the current status of that conflict is concerned. Only time will reveal whether those three thousand or so lives (and counting) were wasted, but - by any normal tactical or strategic yardstick - waste is the case as things now stand. Our troops fight over the same ground again and again at a cost of lives and limbs - the Vietnam parallels are chillingly obvious - without ever actually gaining the high ground or securing the objective. Day after grim horrifying day brave Americans are blown up by IED's without a foot of ground being captured and held, and it is all a part of the initial failure to provide enough troops to properly secure the country to begin with...

American blood has been wasted by the abject failure of the Bush Administration to properly administer the war for which they so desperately hungered. This in no way demeans the bravery of our troops, nor does it diminish the honor we should pay to their sacrifice, but it does stand as a galling, blinding indictment of the useless hacks who put them in the position of having to make their sacrifice. We will not reach the point where we can honestly talk about where the path out of this morass lays until we can honestly talk about where we have been and what it has meant...

Big-Time Politics is a different stage with an entirely different and artificial set of rules, however. Obama is learning that lesson, and he can either show the same backbone that he displayed toward that silly Aussi loser or he can revert to the traditional model of abject Democrat apologizer that has delivered the White House to the Republicans for most of the last 30 years. The debate is on as to whether he is a heartless cretin or spot on with regard to the use of the term "wasted", but that debate, aided by various covert and overt Republican spin-meisters, threatens to spin out of reach of the basic issue. More to the point, it threatens to fling one of those "Defining Moment" MSM monkey wrenches into the working gears of Obama's quest for the White House. How he moves beyond this point in the face of a media radar that is constantly in search mode for flaws in Democratic candidates to a degree that seems never to be applied to Republicans (how else to explain the very idea of a 'President Bush') will be interesting to watch. MSM is chock-full of "Osama Stumbles" stories and almost fawning attention to his repeated apologies; this, more than anything he might say or not say or imply or suggest, is what runs the risk of throwing the Obama train off the tracks for keeps...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:02 PM 0 comments

Mitt's Elephant In the Room 

...nothing is definitive in politics, but having spent a good part of my life surrounded by conservatives, many of whom are socially conservative and members of various evangelical Christian congregations, there is one thing I do know: Conservative evangelical Christians may share certain social values with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of The Latter Day Saints, but they are most certainly not friends. They are barely fellow travelers. Conservative Christians may find common cause with Senator Hatch of Utah, but when you break them out of the herd into smaller groups - and I have been in some of these groups - they are more than happy to take up hours with stories about the cultist tendancies of Mormons, the pitched battles they fought to intervene when Aunt Mable fell under the sway of earnest young bicycling men in white shirts and ties, or the good friends who had to be dragged back from the soul-sacrificing, vacant-eyed edged of a plunge into Mormonism...

This is the so-called Republican "base", the 'fundies' who don't just want a man (yes, most certainly a man) who reflects their values, but one who is willing to impress their values into law and regulation. They are the ugly shirttail relatives of the Reformation, viewing even Roman Catholics as being at best a fringe religion, if not a manifestation of the AntiChrist. They have no concordance whatsoever with the peculiar stylings of Joseph Smith or any sense of connection to the "denomination" he concocted. Mitt Romney, who announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president today, has been working hard to construct a new identity, one that stands in stark contrast to the identity that he had to hammer together for his runs for office in Massachusetts, but there's one piece that he simply can't get rid of...

As a practicing Mormon, Mitt is going to have to try to climb a much taller hill that John F. Kennedy scaled in the often-cited but not quite parallel issue of his religious affiliation. The early betting money is that he and John McCain are going to be the front-runners for the hearts and minds of that 'base' that is so important in Republican primaries, and that is going to be an interesting battleground for Romney. McCain has given every indication from his behavior that he is willing to grab the wheel of the "Straight Talk Express - ver. 2.0" and crash right through any roadblock to the nomination; the lessons of 2000 are probably still fresh welts and the memories of South Carolina are probably ripe for a bit of reverse engineering to employ against the opposition. Mitt Romney would probably really rather that his religion not be a campaign issue, but he either now understands or will eventually that phone lines across the early primary landscape are going to grow fat with push-polling that starts with questions like "Given that Mitt Romney has never disavowed the Mormon practice of polygamist marriages involving girls as young as 14..."

Romney has a whole inning full of strikes against him already, given his shifting stance on embryonic stem cell research, legal recongition of gay and lesbian couples, abortion, and gun control (does "he was for it before he was against it" ring a bell?). Religion, even though most of MSM is going to shy away from the subject to demonstrate its supposed enlightenment, is going to be at least as effective a weapon against Mitt in the pitfights of the primaries as any of his other recent changes of heart about social issues. The fight for Romney isn't going to be about innovation and transformation of government; it's going to be about the sort of connection he can make with social conservatives with regard to or in spite of his religious beliefs. That's his elephant in the room...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:34 PM 0 comments

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