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

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Where Failure Leads 

...be AFRAID. Be VERY AFRAID. That is the message that Bushco has decided to send you today. They have decided to leak the most recent National Intelligence Estimate, wherein it is revealed that filthy brown Islamist are at this moment driving down your very own street in rental vans packed with deadly nuclear evil. Or maybe it's chemical, or possibly biological. But never mind those pesky details; Al Qaeda is coming to kill you in your bed this very night...

Now, maybe I'm wrong...been known to happen...but it seems to me that this isn't exactly the message that you would want to send if you were in the position of trying to defend having starting a war that almost three quarters of Americans wish you hadn't for the supposed purpose of making us safe in our homes and places of work. We are told that the upper-level managment of the evil-doers are supposedly safely cuddled in along the Afghan-Pakistan border, growing in strength and plotting more evil against us peace-loving American citizens, and for that reason we must maintain 160 thousand troops a couple of countries away in Iraq. My college classwork included a number of math courses that I never really enjoyed, but even the highest-level calculus work doesn't really solve this equation...

Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan prior to 9/11, thriving under the protection of the Taliban. They were never, despite all the desperate wet dreams that Big Dick Cheney might have, present in any number in Iraq. We now have over 160 thousand American troops in Iraq, supposedly - at least according to Gee Dub today - battling a previously nonexistant Al Qaeda presence that even US officials estimate only represents about 15 percent of the violence that is occuring there. On our best day during our entirely righteous take-down of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, we seldom had more than 20% of that number on the ground, even though there would have been scant disagreement that taking down both the Taliban and Al Qaeda was Job One. We didn't, however, get that job done, and pulled troops out of Afghanistan to deal with the manufactured "threat" in Iraq. NOW we are being told that the original bad guys are back, tanned and rested and looking to spill infidel blood on our own streets AND we are being told that we may not be able to stop them because of the inadequacy of our our homeland security operation...

Anyone who has been paying attention has two obvious reasons to be angry: 1) Why, after nearly six years, are we incabable of stopping bad guys from getting to our shores while women with babies are being arrested over tippi-cups and our government has an unrestricted capability to fork through every facet of our personal lives without consequence? 2) Why, after nealy six years, and after all the sacrifices and destruction and dead and maimed Americans, Iraqis, and Afghans, are we now hearing that the people who engineered the 9/11 attacks are tanned, rested, and ready to go, even when eliminating them and anybody like them was the original point of the Chimp's War on Terra?

The odds are pretty good, given the craven bunch of waterheads that we are dealing with in this administration, that this soon-to-arrive assessment has all the rigor and scholarship of Mikey Chertoff's gut feeling. This leak looks remarkably like another attempt to go back to the same well for a gang that has always drawn that "the terrorists are going to kill you" every time it looked like public sentiment was starting to turn sour. This time, however, too many flag-drapped coffins have rumbled down too many conveyor belts at Dover Air Force Base for anyone to stand by and simply accept an intelligence estimate that says nothing more or less than the fact that George W. Bush and his misguided War on Terra are both, categorically and definitavely, a failure. We may well be entering a time of greater risk of attack in our own towns, but if we are, it is no more than a demonstration of where failure leads...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:51 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

What Failure Looks Like 

...it is becoming harder and harder to even accurately list all the ways that George W. Bush's strange hunger to invade Iraq under the false flag of "The War On Terra" have conspired to lead this nation down a path that no sane person would have chosen if given the choice. We are at best disrespected and at worst hated across the globe; any gains that we might have made for good as 'the world's only superpower' (whatever all that means) are perhaps irrevocably squandered because of the jingoistic behavior of one of the least popular presidents in US history; our supposed efforts to bring a stabilizing influence to the Middle East have instead created the single most destabilizing influence in the region, regardless of all the cheap war talk from the White House and it's minions about Iran. And now this...

This is what abject, absolute failure looks like. The forces of what White House officials and desperate Republican hangers-on like to call 'Islamic terror' are strengthening and growing. Al Qaeda is operating freely in a portion of our ersatz ally Pakistan where the ruling dictatorship fears to tread. The Taliban that we drove out of Afghanistan are coming back because of our failure to keep our eye on that particular ball, actually stick around and rebuild the country like we promised, and our unfortunate habit of killing innocent citizens without much in the way of actual remorse...

Our efforts in Iraq have resulted in a virtual terrorist factory in that land, literally right under our noses. European security experts are being driven to distraction trying to track all the Iraqi's who has left Gee Dub's little experiment in nation-building with the sorts of job skills that nobody really wants the new neighbors down the street to posess. It's all less measurable that the dead and permanently disabled Americans and Iraqi's who show up directly on the Iraq war ledger, but it may be - over the long term - just as important, if not more so. The one rather amorphous entity that Gee Dub and various water-carriers have told us for six years must be defeated is actually growing and strengthening everywhere...

What we have to show for all Bushco's efforts is a world of strengthening hate, tens of thousands of cases of undertreated PTSD, thousands of underserved disabled veterans, and - at last count - over three thousand six hundred flag-draped coffins. It bears repeating: this is what failure looks like...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:53 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 08, 2007

You Can't Have It Both Ways 

...I have opposed the invasion of Iraq since the subject first came up. I have railed, along with anyone else within reach of a keyboard, about the self-evident lies that were being told to stir up a still-quaking nation against Saddam's regime and the ham-handed effort that has taken place once the decision to invade was acted upon. I personally know people who were there and are there now, wearing our nation's uniform under orders of a President who history will probably judge as being in the lower fifth percentile of all who have occupied the highest office in the land. While I witnessed the effect that the loss of his brother in the early weeks of the invasion had on an acquaintance, I have not suffered the sense of loss that Cindy Sheehan suffered. On the other hand, I don't really agree with Sheenan's ruminations about running as an independent against Nancy Pelosi in the 2008 election as being the hot ticket for fixing things...

In the first place, as a resident of a different congressional district, she lives in a place where there is a Member of the House of Representatives who is equally as culpable as Speaker Pelosi for the failure to hold Gee Dub's feet to the fire about getting out of Iraq. While it would no doubt be gratifying to go after the big dog in the kennel, there is - operating under the construct of 'caving in to the President' or even 'supporting the President' - a target-rich environment and there are even more worthy candidates than Pelosi right nearby, if one is already willing to sell the house in order to move to another district in order to unseat a sitting member of Congress. The area around Sacramento is stiff with potential Congressional targets, for example...

In the second place, we are now six years into possibly the most secretive and closed-rank administration in history. Coupled with that, we are beginning to see the true damage and danger of having Republican administrations over all but eight of the last 27 years (and don't forget the struggles Bill Clinton had in his last year trying to gain the confirmation of something other than conservative judges by a Republican-controlled Senate): the courts are becoming more and more unfriendly to the idea that the People from whom all ruling authority supposedly springs should be able to seek a gander behind the curtains of the Temple. The secrecy of this band of fascist cutthroats combined with a narrowing definition of just exactly who has standing in a court has been dramatically defined this week when a US Court of Appeals rejected an ACLU suit about wiretapping because they couldn't PROVE that members had been harmed by deep dark secret spying on their voice and electronic communications...for the appropriate references, please read "Catch 22". Under these conditions, impeachment on any terms will rely on a multi-pronged attack that can shake loose some John Dean or Deep Throat; the firing of US Attorney's is probably the most likely avenue for that to happen. Due to their investment in the PNAC dream for a shining beacon of democracy in the Middle East, there is probably little fertile ground to plow in that Iraq War field...and let's not forget that the most likely threat that would tip some folks over the edge is controlled by Abu Al Gonzalez's Justice Dept....speaking of impeachments...

Third of all, and perhaps most important of all, progressives all whipped up on delivering electoral devastation on those weak-kneed caving cowards in D.C. need to pick their message. It has been a constant theme for longer than blogs have been around that the Main Stream Media is controlled primarily by dark forces that, at the best, delight in lampooning Democratic efforts on the national stage and, at the worst, are at the very least fellow travelers and more likely willing handmaidens to a narrative that supports the continued existence of a conservative Republican majority that dates back at least the early 1980's. Democrats in Congress understand the actual mechanics of this theme perfectly, having been hammered by it more than once; the election ad campaigns stemming from Democratic opposition to Bush-engendered federal union-busting rules ammended into the Democrat-conceived Homeland Security bill - along with the total failure of MSM to throw the penalty flag - stand as the perfect example. At the bottom line, progressives can't complain about the Mighty Wurlitzer feeding Republican themes to the unwashed masses and at the same time complain about Democrats not trying to draw a winning card out of a deck that we have been saying has been stacked against us for a number of years...

If there is no hope that the MSM will treat an honest impeachment effort as anything more than a simple brutal political exercise by vindictive Democrats, impeachment is a wasted effort. MSM feasted on the Clinton impeachment because it didn't really like his outsider attitude and it was a great story about sex and semen-stained dresses and strange talk about the uses of cigars. On the other hand, a decade earlier MSM sat on its collective thumb when more evidence than would normally be needed for conviction in a court of law was laid out suggesting that both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush should be hurled bodily from their respective offices over the Iran-Contra scandal. MSM controls the narative; the narrative controls elections. A person may be angry at the Democratic Congress because they didn't "stand up" to George W. Bush and force him to start moving troops out of Iraq, but the simple fact is that the narrative controls the game and the White House still has the benefit of the narrative. One can complain about the 'cave-in' attitude of Congressional Democrats, given this narrative control, or one can complain about the Republican-supporting source of that control...but you can't have it both ways. You can't complain about 'do-nothing', 'cave-in' Democrats while at the same time complaining about a media machine that does not honestly deal with Democratic concerns about the lack of progress or success in Iraq...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:18 PM 0 comments

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