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

Saturday, June 02, 2007

The Unintentional Humor of Fred Dalton Thompson 

...any day now, we will be hearing about the impending anouncement of Wilford Brimley's run for the office of President of The United States. It's bound to happen, and it only makes sense. If we can have Newt Gingrich or Fred Dalton Thomas sniffing around the edges of the track on which this fast treacherous race is going to be run, Wilford's action in the underappreciated Paul Newman/Sally Fields movie "Absence of Malice" has to make him a serious candidate, being a 'law and order' guy long before Thompson co-opted that scene should put him in the running...

It's not happening, though, and we have instead Thompson, who has been a counsel to the Watergate Committee, the commissioner of NASCAR dispensing rude justice to Tom Cruise, and Admiral Painter moaning about how the next one false move in the hunt for the Russian ballistic nuclear submarine Red October will lead to a shooting war where good men will die. He's also been an actual United States Senator and did that role admirably, but it isn't necessarily one of his better efforts. He can, however, crank of a pretty good line off the cuff these days as this bit demonstrates:
He warned against a rising tide of fundamentalist radicals who he said were targeting America.

Yup.

Out in my part of this great country of ours we call it the Republican Base. It's the very crowd that Thompson is reaching out to in an order to gauge how his flavor tastes in the mouth of the religious conservatives who still hunger to make their strange misappropriation of Christianity into the law of the land. Thompson is playing the strange sort of game that Republicans have felt they needed to play for the last couple of decades, a wierd kind of transubstantiation that will earn that baseline 30% vote that will put the right man over the top. In this particularly dark world, there are evil people out there who want to satisfy their religious needs by subverting the goals, objectives, and desires of this great nation, but the joke is on all the rest of us because the actual threat is from these same religious conservatives who are themselves doing the subverting...

Fred Dalton Thompson is the perfect poster child for what is wrong at the root level with American presidential politics, and it has been - in one way or another - the problem that we have wrestled with for the last two decades. The power of personality has supplanted any actual skill at leadership; George W. Bush trumped Al Gore and John Kerry because he had the sort of winking, leering, frat-boy, "let's have a beer and hit on the 'stews'" attitude that makes the main-stream media Big Dogs melt rather than the serious stick-up-the-butt seriousness that usually plagues any progressive whose name isn't Keith or Michael or "that other Al". So now we have Fred Dalton Thompson, a man who cuts a dashing - albeit avuncular - figure on stage and screen but who has no particular street cred of his own when it comes to the major issues of the day. This most recent effort at outreach has that bit of unintended comedy associated with it, but today's performance shows, as if we didn't already know it, little more than the fact that Fred Thompson can read a script. It doesn't suggest that he has any particular leadership skills beyond those cranked out for him by screenplay writers and it doesn't demonstrate that he has the stones to actually lead the country in any better way than the disaster that we have endured with the current infestation...

By the end of next week, we will probably have Fred Dalton Thompson flinging his hat into the 2008 presidential ring. His efforts to compete for the base will probably lead to more unintentional moments of humor before he figures this game out. The good news is that his McCain-esque hewing to the right-wing "kill the brown people and let God sort them out" theme will make him an attractive opponent...from a Democratic point of view...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:10 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Why Republicans Have The White House Inside Track (as if this is a surprise) 

...Rudy G., "America's Mayor", has a personal history and connections that most soap opera script writers would hurl you bodily out of the office for even suggesting. Fred Thompson has a much younger trophy wife that you wouldn't dream of taking home to meet mother, along with a body of political and artistic work that suggests "good county commissioner candidate" or "acceptable war movie General on screen for a few minutes". John McCain has a political history that screams "sellout". Newt Gingrich and Rudy, all by themselves, have been married to more women than I dated before marrying the delightful Mrs. Jack K. Mitt Romney belongs to the only relative main-stream religion that the 29 percenters on the far right consider to be a cult. The Republican party is awash to the decks with more scandal and color of scandal - from the White House to the Justice Department to the short-bus load of Senators and Congresspersons currently under investigation - than has been seen in the District of Columbia for a century. But what are we going to talk about?

We are going to talk about Hillary Clinton's use of private jets, that's what. Is it unseemly? Yeah; anybody who wants to move into the Big House at the far end of the Washington Mall should have sense enough to avoid the issue. Is it illegal? Compared to the 6 years of total Republican control of the gears and levers of the federal government, it's a silly flash in the pan. One no-bid Bush crony contract for transportation of relief supplies into the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone packed enough fat to buy a corporate jet, but that's a story that many know at the local level but the media will never tell. Does it rise to a level where the average person on the street should even care? Only apparently because it involves the Clintons; sex, drugs, rock & roll, and money have been the benchmarks of coverage of Bill and Hillary even while Jack Abramoff was cutting a loud and open swath the size of Rhode Island through the middle of the US government, leaving big muddy tracks, a foul corrupt stench, and tattered dollar bills in his path...

The Republicans...any Republican...who are lining up for their shot at the presidency will clearly get a free pass for abandoning past wives under circumstances that would get their smelly carcasses shot back home in Idaho, changing their positions to be tailored to the office in question, having personal and business connections that would get the average person indicted by your average grand jury, and having no personal set of values beyond "time to get mine now". Democrats will be raked across the public coals of MSM punditry for things that sound really bad only if if they get chatted up a whole bunch in the absence of comparison of how Republicans behave. Obama is having a disagreement with the leader of his congregation, and has real estate issues? Lawd God Amighty, the man is UNFIT! Hillary Clinton rides on corporate jets? The hypocracy is almost too much for our fragile damaged national mindset to bear!

Never mind the rest. Never mind that some of the leading Republican contenders have had more marriages than the average American family has children. Never mind that some of them have been caught in one way or another playing fast and loose with the rights of office. Never mind that none of them can find his shiny, perogative-laden white butt on the right side of virtually every poll about virtually every issue that matters to the American people. Presidential elections aren't won or lost on the basis of anything that matters; they are decided on the basis of themes that the MSM either supports or ignores. You end up with a George W. Bush as president because media giants decide he would be a great guy to have a beer with, nonwithstanding the fact that he would have been chased out of just about every bar I've ever been in my whole adult life (although my history in this respect is one of working man/cowboy/logger establishments where Gee Dub's action would have been underappreciated). You end up there because the MSM spends an entire week making Kerry's wind-surfing look like some sort of elitist indulgement, which is the stupidest thing anyone who has ever spent a summer weekend along the lower Columbia River could ever hear...

Republicans will have the inside track to the White House despite themselves. Neither the print media, nor the broadcast network media, nor the cable "news" media, will apply what are normally considered proper journalist techniques to the coverage. All we have now is some twisted perversion of the Watergate era and actual investigative reporting. It is all sound and no fury, and the sound will be favorable to the Republican wannabe's and negative to the Democratic candidates, and that's just the way the world is going to work for the foreseeable future...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:24 PM 0 comments

Monday, May 28, 2007

The Scum Also Rises 

...THIS is wrong. This is sick. This speaks to a truly bone-deep ugliness of spirit that would make the perps better off being chopped up as bait to serve the cages on the next episode of "The Most Dangerous Catch" than having to explain themselves to civil society. These aren't just the graves of soldiers who gave their last full measure in Bush's war of choice in Iraq; these are the graves of people who served in Vietnam, Korea, and the two World Wars...

It is almost impossible to put into words the degree of disgust that this sort of desecration represents. The dog vomit that did this may have thought that they were making some clever political statement or they may have simply been engaging in the sort of simple cheap ruthless vandalism that makes the most self-affirmed pacifist want to reach for a Ruger .357 Magnum Blackhawk...just this once...just for the betterment of society. The "why", however, does not matter. The action stands as its own statement, no matter the motiviation. My late father was a WWII combat veteran, and - despite all that Bible-based, Jesus-forgiving stuff in which I believe - the person who did this to his final resting place would be wanting to run as fast as his stringy meth-sore encrusted little legs could carry him to the warm welcoming arms of the county sheriff, because the prison sentence that his confession would yield would be his gift of life as compared to the prospects of my finding him first...

It would be cheap and easy to say that there are people who simply don't deserve the freedoms that a few million Americans have died to secure for them. That sentiment, however, slips dangerously over to the right-hand side of the political fulcrum to take its place with the sentiment that anyone opposing Gee Dub's war of choice in Iraq is a traitor. But there is a point beyond which the boundaries of common human decency are exceeded. This Orcas Island gig resides well beyond the fringe, way out there in Fred Phelps territory, and the people who did it have more reason than they understand to take up arms and shoot it out to the death when the long arm of the law starts to close in around them. If they make it all the way to prison, even the child-rapers will shun them...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:41 PM 0 comments

Reading Bad News Between The Lines 

...the news report itself was fairly innocent: two US F-16's, perhaps inadvertently, spent about four minutes flying around in Turkish airspace the other day. No big deal all by itself; we are supposed to be on the same side, after all, so by itself such a thing wouldn't normally spark the same sort of international incident that - say - a low-level pass across the rooftops of Tehran might stir up. That next sentence does make you sit up and say "EH?", however:
"The incident comes amid mounting speculation over a possible Turkish troop incursion into Kurdish northern Iraq to crush Turkish Kurd rebels hiding there."

Now there's some good news. Nothing like a Turkish incursion into Kurdish-dominated Iraq to make everything that has happened during our little "preventative war" up to this point look like good times. It seems that, despite our strong suggestions to the contrary, the Turkish military is spoiling for the chance to take a little stroll across the border, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan thinks the government would be more than happy to support such an invasion. This is all perfectly understandable from a more or less objective perspective, given the fact that Turkey has been beset with attacks from ethnic Kurds seeking to carve out a chunk of Turkish landscape as part of their desired independent country of Kurdistan. It's certainly like the government in Ankara doesn't have the perfect excuse represented by the foreign occupying force running its neighbor to the south...

This situation puts the Bush administration in a tight little bind in two important ways: Having invaded Iraq primarily on the basis of a stated concern to protect the American people from the dangers of exported Iraqi terrorism, Bushco is hard-pressed to play 'goose and gander' with a Turkish government that really is having to deal with attacks by Kurdish terrorists/freedom fighters (circle one) coming out of and being supported by the northern portion of an adjacent country...

Even more to the point, it's pretty far-fetched to imagine that Iraqi Kurds are going to sit on their hands while Turkish armored columns come clanking across the border to kill their friends and neighbors, which puts American troops into the middle of an even more dangerous situation than they face with the Sunni/Shia civil war to the south. The need to try to police or stop such a conflict would create the very real threat of forcing our forces beyond the breaking point in more ways that are plesant to contemplate and the failure to do so could very likely make Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Nation-building Adventure blow up into tiny pieces...

Cooler heads may prevail, especially since there are political forces in Turkey that would prefer that this not become the dominant subject of upcoming July elections. But, on the other hand, why would those cooler heads take the day? The United States wouldn't tolerate for long any failure of the Canadian government to quash a violent separatist movement based out of Moosejaw blowing up people and places in North Dakota...and if the problem were south of the border down Mexico way, we would probably invade without warning or invitation...

...been known to happen...

One of the problems of the "inside baseball" debate we've been having about our presence in Iraq is that it casts such a big shadow that some of the other risks and problems that we are facing there are hard to see. A potential Turkish invasion is one of those risks and one that would call off all the bets that have been made over the last four years. But it's one that you're not going to hear much about if you don't read between the lines...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:47 AM 0 comments

The Wrong Day For A Cruel Joke 

...all over the country today, Americans will be visiting the grave sites of departed loved ones, and particular attention is being given to those lost in service to the US. That's what the day is all about, after all; long before it became a three-day weekend and an excuse for vast forests of trees to die so your newspaper could thud onto the porch with the noticable extra weight of sale fliers, Memorial Day was about saluting our departed veterans. Well over three thousand of those who who will be honored and remembered for having given their lives in military service did so in Iraq, a war launched on the basis of the stated need to fight the Great War on Terrorism...

Things aren't going well there. The weapons of mass destruction that were the fear excusing the invasion have not been found, the country has been subsumed by a vicious quagmire of brutal sectarian violence and third-party terrorism, and a guy can't even stroll the street markets of Baghdad without Kevlar underware, a rifle company, and close air support. On top of all that, now we learn that the evil but contained dictatorship that we took down has been replaced by a wild lawless landscape that is actually producing trained terrorists as its most significant export four years after we invaded to prevent that very possibility...

Four years ago Iraq was generally unconnected to the terrorism that we were told was coming to get us. Saddam's regime, having been bottled up since the end of Operation Desert Storm, wasn't much of a threat to his neighbors, much less the United States. Four years on, it is now the spawning ground for the very sort of individuals that have been pounded into the American brain as Bogeyman Number One. We are the Great Occupier, easily portrayed by any opponent who wants to do so as haters of Islam, the New Crusaders of the 21st Century bringing our infidel ways and religion to the heart of the Muslim world. All by itself, that rep is a powerful recruitment tool, but now that combined with the handling of the invasion and occupation has created exactly the sort of circumstances that 3455 Americans have given their lives in an effort to forestall...

Memorial Day just isn't the day you want to learn this sort of thing...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:02 AM 0 comments

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