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

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

There IS A Fly In My Soup 

...it may not be as gripping a subject as where Anna Nichole Smith gets buried or just exactly where Britney is today, but the fact is that the food you're shoveling in your mouth while you watch the travails of cable news celebrities most likely wasn't inspected to determine whether it might kill you. Lost in all the noise about paternity suits and juror dismissals is the news that the Food and Drug Administration is fighting a losing battle in maintain an adequate inspection regime to assure the security of the American food supply. This isn't solely a problem to be laid at the foot of the Bush Administration, although it shares a significant portion of the blame for failing to be forceful in promoting food inspection. We can also blame the Republican Congress that was running the show as the food safety inspection program became more and more inadequate...

It's the same old sad run-down story that we keep seeing: politicians twist themselves into knots over when and how to go forth and kill people in foreign lands to address the terrorist threat, while the actual risks faced by the American people through terror or corporate malfesance or simple brute carelessness or bad luck get lip service, short shrift, and inadequate funding. Port security; A National Calamity Just Waiting To Happen, but - sorry - no money for that. Insecure power plants or water supplies; Something Must Be Done, but - sorry - we'll get to it someday. Significantly increased food imports from countries where there are people who don't like us; The People Must Be Protected, but - sorry - got those tax cuts to fund, you know...

It's all part of the same lame, sad joke that has echoed up and down the halls of federal agencies ever since Gee Dub came to office: Doing More With Less. It stems from the unproven and usually wrong-headed Republican idea that government should be run like a business. Agencies are supposed to manufacture "efficiencies" out of thin air that will allow them to function at full capacity even as funding goes down and it is exactly the situation for which the phrase "Potemkin Village" was invented. Government services become little more than a false front, with all sorts of busy-ness for the unknowing eye to behold, even though there is nothing going on behind the scenes. In the meantime, you are left to ponder whether that peanut butter and jelly sandwich is going to put you in the intensive care ward...

It's all part of the false choices we have been offered since 9/11 made the world seem to be a more dangerous place. We will pour money down the Iraqi rathole because it is in some ill-defined way the "right" thing to do - apparently because that whole Homeland Security thing is a huge sham and waves of wild-eyed Islamic terrorists will stream across our borders if we pull our troops out - while our seaports and our chemical facilities and nuclear power plants...and our food...go unprotected...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:06 AM 0 comments

Monday, February 26, 2007

A Vietnam Irony In The White House 

...Bruce Crandall finally received the acknowledgement he should have received forty long years ago when George W. Bush draped the Congressional Medal of Honor around his neck today. Anyone who has read the story of his actions in Harold Moore and Joe Galloway's book "We Were Soldiers Once And Young" about the battle in the Ia Drang valley in November of 1965 would naturally wonder why it took so long, but there it is. His repeated trips into LZ Xray, carrying ammunition and water in and wounded out when medivac helicopters refused to land because of the intense ground fire is a remarkable story and testament to the proposition that men in combat risk their lives for each other because of a mutual bond rather than some sense of patriotism...

Ah, but the air is absolutely stiff with irony. Today we see the photo's of a president who's own actions during the Vietnam war - oh, let's be charitable here - have been surrounded by numerous questions giving the nation's highest award for valor to a man whose actions are starkly without question. In a subtle way, it is a reminder for those of us old enough to remember about the impact that Vietnam had on Americans, and it stirs images and feelings which we will not rid ourselves of until the Vietnam generation has stepped off the stage. Still, on a day when another hundred thousand and more Americans were engaged on the other side of the globe in a war we would have been better off not getting into - instigated by a man who doesn't have any feel for some of the root lessons that LZ Xray offered - it was a sort of jarring sight to behold....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:45 PM 0 comments

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