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

Friday, March 30, 2007

Nine Months vs. 20 Years 

...John Walker Lindh must be pissed right now. David Hicks, the former Aussie 'roo wrangler captured by Northern Alliance forces in December, 2001, just got sentenced to time served plus nine months for having been on the wrong side of the wire in Afghanistan during the US-supported eviction of the Taliban from that country. Lindh, captured a month earlier by the Northern Alliance, caught up and wounded in a 'prison riot' shortly thereafter, and tried in U.S. courts rather than by military tribunal like Hicks, got 20 years hard time and forget about time served...

It's passably strange that, even though the crimes to which they pled guilty and conditions of their plea agreements are remarkably similar - especially that part about not talking about their treatment at the hands of United States personnel - the sentences are so diffferent. It will turn out to be a remarkably cruel twist of fate that the first conviction in a US court of an American al Queda 'terrorist' and the first conviction of an Australian Al Queda 'terrorist' by military tribunal results in the convict of the much-maligned tribunal system walking the streets as a free man for more than a decade before the subject of the civil judicial system walks out of a US Federal prison...

If it wasn't already, it's time for a drink...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:38 PM 0 comments

The Words Of The Dead 

Never forget that your daddy loves you more than anything and that I will be home soon.
...I've just finished reading the cover story of this week's issue of Newsweek, "Voices Of The Fallen". It's hard to see right now, and my hands shake slightly, neither of which is a normal or comfortable situation for a hard-shelled 50-something grumpy forester who's seen some bad things in his life. Thirty-five pages or so, filled with pictures and the words of people destined for one last unheralded flight home to Dover Air Force Base under an American flag. The pain is palpable when I read the words of people who don't realize how their individual movies are going to end, how in the next days or weeks or months they are going to become numbers on the Grand Iraqi Nation-Building scoreboard. Just numbers, as a Pentagon official implied back when the number was approaching the then-remarkable benchmark of 2000 dead soldiers...
I love and miss everyone. Pray for me and my fellow Marines. I look forward to seeing you in October.

But they weren't and they aren't just numbers. They were real live people, right up until that last terrible moment. Some were young recruits, barely old enough to vote and sometimes too young to legally buy alcoholic beverages. Others were middle-aged Reservists and National Guardsmen with established lives outside of the "one weekend a month" tagline who got swept up in the need to feed George W. Bush's war machine to a degree that the Guard and Reserves hadn't been faced with since World War II. Some were confused, some expressed fear for the unknown of their deployment, some were patriotic, but all of them tried, through the letters, to reassure their loved ones back home that they were OK and would get through this and come back home to pick up where they left off. Only they didn't...

So while you're praying, pray that we come home soon as well. I would rather not do another four months on top of the year. But we will stay as long as we have to.

War always matters, but it feels like it matters more when you actually understand the cost of placing men and women who volunteered to defend this country in harm's way with a possibility that some of these men and women will be coming home in a casket. Understanding that the cost is the permanent loss of a husband or wife or lover or sibling or child or parent whose thoughts and hopes and dreams really mattered to another and which you can actually read makes the math more personal...

GodDAMN George Bush and his bloodthirsty, nitwit band of nation-building neocon minions, especially Donald Rumsfeld, for launching this war for reasons that didn't have a logical foundation to stand on to begin with; for trying to get by on the cheap instead of actually trying to WIN the war; for bungling into a situation FOUR YEARS LATER that is less secure for either the Iraqi people or the troops that have been sent there time after time after time than it was in the first days after "Mission Accomplished"; for their hubris in thinking they were the smartest kids in the class when they weren't in fact smart enough to pound sand in a rathole, as dear ol' daddy would have said. Even if they happen to pull this little nation-building effort off, I will never take back my words, because they have cost the lives of far too many people who had the guts to do what not one of them ever would: take up arms in combat in response to the orders of their Commander-in-Chief...

Aug. 9, Baghdad (journal for his newborn son)
It occurred to me again that I don't know how old you'll be when you read this. It wouldn't do to write things an 18-year-old might understand if you read this when you're five. I think I'll assume you're young when you read this. Anything you don't understand, we can talk about when you're older.

These soldiers and those whose correspondence we do not see died with honor. The fact that we will be fighting over the better part of the next two years over whether Bush's decision to invade Iraq was honorable is - as they say - above the pay grade of the people who have been sent there. These people spotlighted in the Newsweek article honored their commitment and gave that 'last full measure' that Abraham Lincoln talked about back in the day before anyone realized that there would someday be a massive warship on whose deck a swaggering costumed war president-wannabe would defile both that ship's namesake and the principles and sacrifices about which he spoke. But I cannot, despite the depth of my opposition to Bush's war of convenience and reputation, do anything but honor the sacrifice of these letter writers and their lost mates. They were - and are - far better people than those who put them in harm's way...

Posted by: Jack K. / 7:16 PM 0 comments

Thursday, March 29, 2007

The Chinese Midgets Are Coming! 

...I've owned a lot of cars in my life. General Motors products, Ford Motor Co. products (lots of FoMoCo products, for no particular reason), a Honda, Mopar products, a Subaru, and a few other little-heard-of odds and ends. Out of all of those 22 vehicles, the one car that I have had in my garage that made the strongest personal impression on my life was my 1978 MG Midget (that's neither me or my car; mine was brown and I have - barely, according to my evil teenaged contribution to our future - more hair). It was a car for the ages, the sort of automotive entity that could, on the one hand, expose a person to the absolute joy of motoring through that first truly comfortable late spring afternoon with the top down and the powerful fecund plant-scents of spring filling the cockpit, and, on the other hand, sentence a fella to entire long weekend afternoons glaring angrily at a shop manual while trying to diagnose why the damned thing won't start or won't run or won't start after having run for a while or quit while running perfectly well...

Buried way deep down below all the news about Kyle Sampson's meltdown and Iraqi violence and all those National Security Letters that the FBI used to demonstrate that Republicans were just foolin' when they insisted that sufficient safeguards were in place to protect civil liberties in the face of Patriot Act legislation, the fact that a Chinese automotive manufacturer has bought up the manufacturing capability of MG lock, stock, and barrel has slipped completed between the cracks. More to the point, what little news reporting about this purchase has neglected to mention that Nanjing Automobile is planning to come to America and build a plant in Ardmore, Oklahoma, to bring the MG brand back to the United States. Sadly, for those of us who have a history with the old Midget (or it's near twin, the Austin Healy Sprite), the only vehicle that they originally plan on building is the much more modern and sexy MG TF. Rumors that the people responsible for the design and manufacture of the Lucas electronics and various versions of carburation endemic to MG products have been invited to the People's Republic of China in order to isolate them on collective rice farms far away from the automotive design and manufacturing process may be profoundly satisfying for current and former owners of MG products but have so far remain unfounded...

This is interesting news, and anyone who has ever willingly invited the peculiar pain of MG ownership into his or her life will no doubt feel some sort of reaction. It doesn't have the sort of cachet that one might find in the various Kyle Sampson "Butterfield" moments from today's hearing, but MG's were a truly liberal vehicle and the fact that anybody, even if it is a U.S. manufacturing facility owned by the Communist Chinese government, is bringing the marque back to life in some semblance of a late-20th-century vehicle should be exciting news. Just hope that they don't bring the SU carburators with them. We may have to launch the bombers if they do...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:15 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

So Do We Need The "300"? 

...just took my teenagers to the movie "300". My 18-year-old thought the movie was boffo because of all the semi-nude male bodies and the rear shot of the naked Spartan king; she and her mother, who couldn't have been dragged to this thing handcuffed at gunpoint because of the violence, discussed at length whether the King's naked butt was better than mine (we need not discuss how that turned out). My 14-year-old declared this the "best movie I have ever seen", no doubt because of the spectacular cinematography that rendered the flying blood trails and anatomical correctness of each slowly, lovingly depicted beheading, delimbing, and through-body impaling in such exquisite detail, not to mention the fact that his older sister and I were more or less unsuccessful in our attempts to shield his eyes from the occasional complete frontal upper-body nudity of various breathtakingly attractive female persons. Next time, dad is going to order a supersized bucket of popcorn, and hold the popcorn...

Me, I thought of Iraq. Well, maybe not so much Iraq itself, because we aren't yet in the situation of having placed our troops in the position of being sacrificial, but because of the fact that we are once again faced with the need to call up members of the Individual Ready Reserves (IRR), this time 1800 Marines, in order to redeem the responsibility that George W. Bush has created for us with his misguided, mishandled, and misbegotten Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure in Iraq. One thousand eight hundred people, half the number of people who lived in the Idaho town I grew up in, will shortly be informed that their desire to no longer play soldier and get on with their lives is going to be interrupted, at least for a year if not for longer if things go horribly wrong...

I know, I know; once a Marine, always a Marine, but the bottom line is the same one that far too many people in a position that matters has had the guts to talk about for a couple of years now. Militarily, we are broken. We do not have a draft because the Republicans who sang happy cheery neocon go-along songs like something from some old Crosby movie knew more than anything else that the one thing that would perk up the national objection to this bloody misguided adventure in Iraq would be a compulsory draft. Rather than starting the process of drawing a host of rosy-cheeked high-school seniors from all segments of society to feed the monster they created, the Bushies have come up with - for them - a far more acceptable and selective undercover quasi-draft. They call up National Guard and Reserve troops, some more than once and, when that isn't sufficient, they invoke "stop/loss" to keep National Guardspersons from quitting when their tour is through and call people from the IRR lists of the various services to involuntary service, even when they sometimes were so far away from their active service that they had no idea that they were still eligible for that involuntary recall...

It's magic, in its own way. We don't need a draft, because there are all these people who served in the military several years ago who are legally encumbered with the responsibility of responding when we call. The dirty underbelly of the Rumsfeld Doctrine still lives courtesy of this administration: use least possible force to muddle by and make sure that full value is exacted from anybody who is still legally obliged to respond to keep the full price of this misadventure out of the minds of the larger part of American society. We are now at the point where - just maybe - we are in need of a band of warriors like the Spartan 300, because we are broken, busted, tapped out, totally incapable of responding to any other threat in the world that may require ground troops. This probably includes Afghanistan, where we keep hearing about threats of some sort of Taliban offensive in the spring. What we are learning, some of us the hard way, is that we were lied to from pillar to post by Gee Dub and his slick-talking hacks through the megaphone of the media camp-followers who were more interested in maintaining comfortable cocktail relationships than actually redeeming their journalistic responsibilities...

As James Fallows is saying right now over my shoulder on the Colbert Report, only one percent of this country is actually involved in the war. 1800 Marines (I've learned over the years that there generally isn't any such thing as a "former" Marine) who elected to no longer be involved in military service are being dragged into the conflict involuntarily, but the geographic distribution of this defacto draft will be such that there is little or no discernable overall impact to our society. The fundamental problem, aside from the fact that a society-wide discussion about the value and impact of George W. Bush's war will be solely high-minded and philosophical, is that the cupboards are bare. Our military, particularly the ground-based component, is pretty much busted up, and we will have nothing other that a sacrificial force like the Spartan 300 to offer up as a protection for our nation if some other immediate crisis, like...oh, say...hundreds of thousands of North Korean soldiers spilling across the border north of Seoul, were to face us. We have been failed by the administration that, on average, barely half of the citizens of this country were convincingly lied into to supporting over the last two presidential election cycles. While all number of scandals wash up against the weatherstrips of the outer doors of the White House - and how is it that we don't even have the time to talk about the abuse of the Patriot Act by the FBI - the impending imploding of our military infrastructure looms as the big story that has yet to be told and is highlighted by this new involuntary call-up of out-of-service Marines. Gee Dub may be so far into the depths of denial that he can't understand it, but his father's words are starting to have a disturbing resonance...

We are in Deep Doo_Doo...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:02 PM 0 comments

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Crazy Chuck Hagel and the "I" Word 

...under normal circumstances - normal being some sort of theoretical average that is not found in nature - a Republican Senator suggesting that impeachment of his own president exists in at least a theoretical sense would be a shocking sort of revelation. In the current political climate, it would seem crazy that a Republican Senator would risk the backlash from George W. Bush's solid 30 % supporters to even suggest such a thing. Republican Congresspersons living through the nightmare of Nixon only in the last, most desperate days started reluctantly coming to the public conclusion that "Our Long National Nightmare" could only come about by impeachment. And yet, here we have Crazy Chuck Hagel doing just that...

Motivations are everything here. Chuck Hagel has been the most ardent Republican opponent to Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure, perhaps because he is offended by the ham-handed mishandling of the whole mess by Gee Dub and his hapless little band of losers, or perhaps because he is personally offended that a gang of fat-cat deferment-sucking girly-men led by a punk who couldn't even see his way clear to honorably redeem his safe, cushy National Guard obligation were so cavalier in their offering America's blood and treasure for little good reason. Or maybe, just maybe, he's actually thinking about that gold ring that dangles so tantalizingly out there: a chance at the White House in an election where the current front-runners seem to be so heavily laden with negatives. There is always the danger, when trying to understand the motivations of people who are capable of looking at themselves in the bathroom mirror and actually seeing a future president, that the onion may have more layers than you can possibly peel back before the blindness sets in...

The last time there was an opening at the top on both tickets, John McCain sparked a completely improbable wave of excitement amongst centrists and some liberals who should have known better. That whole "Straight-Talk Express" thing was a powerful aphrodisiac to people who, solely on the strength of McCain's well-known views, would have considered the Straight Talker to be just barely this side of evil incarnate, and yet an almost obsessive wave swept otherwise sensible Democrats to draft McCain to be John Kerry's running mate. The only cooler head that seemed to prevail was John McCain himself, who wisely saw this as probably the stupidest idea since tamagotchi's. McCain has given up that 'straight talk' mantra for 2008 so that he can pretty much paint any silly damned name he wants on the side of his bus, but everybody knows that he has thrown his lot in with Gee Dub's 30 percenters and is especially sucking up the those same religious leaders who he was so eager to disdain back in those heady 'Maverick' days in 2000. Chuck Hagel seems, at times, to be acting as though he knows where the keys to McCain's bus are hidden and has some jackin' in mind...

There isn't - or at least shouldn't be - any question about Chuck Hagel's sincerity in his objection to the manner in which George W. Bush, legalized deserter, has prosecuted the war in Iraq. He has been growling about this for far longer than other legislators like my own Gordon Smith, who has looked at the electoral calendar and realized that it's time to move back toward the middle before Oregon voters get wise. On the other hand, it was Chuck Hagel who caused the media to crawl all over itself, snarling and snapping like rabid Pekinese as they fought over the best camera angles and mike placement for his "Major Career Announcement" that consisted of the statement "I'm still thinkin' 'bout things". Hagel is dangling a toe in the waters, trying to decide whether there is room for a 2008 version of the "Conservative That Centrists Can Love"...

The fact that he is the first conservative Republican Senator to throw out the "I" word with regard to a president of his party fits well with that particular exploratory scenario. It is entirely possible to believe that he is sincere in his objection to Bush's War and not just a political hack who licked his finger, stuck it in the political wind, and deduced that most common folks aren't all that happy with Bush's War either. His suggestion that impeachment may be a likely outcome for a president who has been convinced that he is not accountable to the Congress or the people of the United States can also be seen as an expression of the righteous indignation of old-school conservatives who see Gee Dub driving their whole movement into the ditch at breath-taking speed...

On the other hand, there may just be room out there on the highways and biways of America for a tourbus carrying an otherwise conservative person who holds a couple of the "correct" center-to-left views. McCain broke this trail in 2000, although he came to ultimate ruin at the hands of a gang that was willing to play the game dirtier than he understood it. At the same time, he captured the imagination of a lot of people not under the sway of the Pharisee masters and the inside fixers that Gee Dub brought to the game, and there may well be enough disarray within the Republican Party for a real-live war hero to make some meaningful gains outside of that insular structure that McCain has decided to sell his soul to this time around. The fact that the far-too-early polling of this far-too-early presidential run shows Rudy G. leading the pack despite having a personal life and political views that would make that 30 % group throw up all over themselves suggests that there may be things going on out there that nobody has a good grip on. Because of all that, especially given the way that Chuck Hagel has been willing to step out in public in opposition to Bush's War, this sudden introduction of the "I" word into his conversation may be more calculated than the average person understands...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:30 PM 0 comments

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