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

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Same Story, Same Ending 

...there was no reason to be surprised that Gee Dub staged a flashy, cruel spectacle of vetoing the bill authorizing federal spending on new embryonic stem cell lines. Well, OK, I suppose a stranger from a strange land would find it surprising that a man who seems to have no particular feeling toward those who disagree with his view of American supremacy or the troops sent to enforce that view could feel so strongly about fertilized eggs that will be unceremoniously destroyed. Said stranger might even be shocked at this position in comparison to the relish he seems to derive from executing criminals. But we shouldn't be...

Dragging that family up on stage to show off the daughter suffering from spina bifida was the typical sort of insensitive touch that anybody who has watched this waterbrained gang over the last 6 1/2 years has grown accustomed to. The fact that this family is expressing a choice that those of us who have loved ones who could benefit from embryonic stem cell research don't get to make on our own is lost, totally escaping that family, Bushco, and the media...but we're used to that now...

It was a suckers bet to lay money on any other outcome. George W. Bush has nothin'; he has lost the approval and respect of over three quarters of the American people and merely hangs by a thread to his office because of the apparently frightening specter - to Congressional Democrats, at least - of that 30% gang of rabid social conservatives that represent the only bulwark between him and a date in the Senate chambers overseen by the Chief Justice for a list of high crimes and misdemeanors that will make future generations think of all of us as crazy as loons for sitting around while he and his fixers raped the Constitution and pillaged the country. That wingnut faction has done an effective job of entwining the issue of using excess embryos for the good of the suffering rather than getting chucked in a biowaste incinerator into the whole generally unrelated debate over abortion, to the point that we have to endure conversations about brave families turning their backs on the miracles science might offer (round these parts they are usually called Christian Scientists) and little gaggles of snowflake babies that represent such a small percentage of the total number of destroyed embryos that it would be a waste of decimal points and zero's to express it numerically...

The stem cell debate will go on, because it has to. Those of us who have a dog in this fight will make it go on. The strange consortium of bedfellows who have joined together from the left and the right to support federal funding in this bill understand that there is a difference, and they don't seem be suffering politically - especially on the right - for having made that leap. Clearly there isn't going to be a great deal of movement for the next eighteen months; too many Republicans (and a few Democrats) are wedded to either fear of the fundie right or wedded to it's magical powers. Someday, however, someone will finally push this thing over the finish line, and maybe my son and others like him will be able to receive a cure or a treatment that will free him of the multiple daily blood-tests and syringes that have been part of his life since he was diagnosed with Type I diabetes back in the second grade. Some day this nonsense will end and common sense will prevail; I hope we're both around to see it...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:18 PM 0 comments
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:18 PM 0 comments

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Another Casualty of Bush's War 

...Antonio Taguba is, by all reports and any measure, an honorable man and an American Patriot. He is so not by birthright but by desire, being a native of the Philippines whose mother and grandmother moved to Hawaii when he was 11. He is the son of a warrior, his father having been a survivor of the Bataan Death March, and served in an assortment of positions from Armored platoon commander after his commissioning as a second lieutenant on graduation from Idaho State University through company, batallion, and brigade commands, along with a bunch of those ticket-punching assignments that any officer moving up through the ranks will end up accepting...

...unlike all the cheap easy rumors that circulated within the hearing range of talking heads and journalists about the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Taguba - who had risen to the level of Major General - understood his oath and his obligation to honor, duty, and country, exercising his understanding of that solemn responsibility to the best of his ability when he was tapped to investigate reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. For that effort, he got defenestrated...

The story is deep, but not so very complicated. Senior leaders in the Bush administration lied about when and how much they knew about what was happening at Abu Ghraib. After all, nothing that went on there stepped outside the strange new lines that Alberto Gonzales drew to demark the boundaries of just exactly what represented "torture". A handful of enlisted personnel had their lives ruined, even though they didn't break any of the rules that Bushco set for them on this particular nation-building exercise. The bottom line, however, and the last word in how this whole sordid charade was played and just exactly who held the dirty hole cards in this game belong - as it probably always should - to Sy Hersh, who wrote the original New Yorker article that brought Gen. Taguba's personal sacrifice to light...

It's a stupid, sordid story, but the most disturbing aspect of it is that this isn't something that we haven't heard before from this worthless band of crooks and liars that the SCOTUS allowed to steal the 2000 election on the basis of a logical thread so thinly spun that they would not allow their decision to stand as a precedent. If you depart from the storyline being pumped out by the Rove Fourth Reich spin brigade, you are outta here. Failure is not just an option, it is a policy statement for this crew, and anyone who steps out of line or doesn't understand the important parts of orders that are written between the lines is just as expendable as any National Guard Spec. 4 on his upteenth Iraq deployment who gets blown up by another IED...

Antonio Taguba is just another casualty of George W. Bush's war, and he is one because he knows - because he did the work - that people in the highest levels of the Bush administration knew, long before they have admitted to it, that things were happening in at least one US-run prison (and maybe more) that could do more to harm our image in the Middle East than Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority could have done in the early days after the invasion if they had tried to set up stripper bars and x-rated video rental stores in downtown Baghdad. They seem to have - at the most charitable remove - to have been somewhat confused about what they knew and when they knew it. At the worst, either Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush knew, months before they admitted knowing about it, or they intentionally blocked any effort to receive direct information about the abuses of Abu Ghraib because they knew that Abu Al's green light to do anything just short of killing brown people under their control might not square with the average American's sense of "the right thing to do". They were right; Americans by and large were stunned and revolted by the revelations, and the man who did his duty because of his proper sense of his assignment as an American soldier to investigate Abu Ghraib was forced to retire because he did what we expect those who serve on our behalf to do - he did the right thing...

It's just another example of the carnage that Bushco has left in its wake. This time, however, they took out a man who represents things that Gee Dub and Unka Karl and Big Dumb Donny and the rest could never appreciate because he, at least, understands the concept of honorable service to country. General Taguba sought the truth, and for that he was forced to retire. If there is ever a black marble wall for the men and women who sacrificed themselves in Iraq, his name won't be on it, obviously, but he is a casualty of this useless war, just the same...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:19 PM 0 comments

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