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

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Rumours Of War, The Bushco Way 

...how do you know when the nation you love and live in is at war? Well, if you live in the time of Franklin Roosevelt 65 years ago, you ration beef, butter, tires, steel, eggs, silk, toilet paper, automobiles and just about anything else a body could mention in order to turn the prodigious manufacturing capacity of your country toward feeding the machinery that will win the war. If you live in the time of George W. Bush...well, not so much...

One of the enduring legacies of Bushco's so-called 'prosecution' of this War onTerra - and specifically Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure - has been the steadfast refusal to actually make it seem as though we were at war. The biggest sacrifice that we as Americans at war have been asked to make is "Do More Shopping". This doesn't exactly rise to the sort of sacrifice that my parents and their parents were asked to make by FDR when there was actually a real live war going on. There is no pasty white oleo with packets of yellow dye instead of butter; there are no coupons to be earned to buy tires for the family car; there is no Selective Service program marching the sons of the well-to-do off to defend our nation. Sadly, there also isn't the sort of urgency in the production of the tools that will fulfill the supposed George Patton insistence that it wasn't a soldier's duty to die for his country but rather to make the other guy die for his country...

As a result, here we are, trapped in a procurement system that a lot of the rest of the Federal Government not touched by the GWOT wouldn't accept under any circumstances. What has transpired in the whole process of procurring MRAP's might be acceptable to the Pentagon or the sort of thing that you could expect from Homeland Security if you just watched the splintered remnants of your home go floating by the tree you took refuge in during a hurricane, but it would get you a one-way ticket to a job filling out special-use permits in a small remote Alaskan fishing village in my outfit. Why the refusal of the Pentagon under this administration to move forward in a timely fashion two years ago to get sufficient numbers of MRAP vehicles to the field when they were so hot on fielding Stryker battalions that were already understood to be the wrong vehicle in the wrong place at the wrong time is something that will simply have to be placed the the column entitled "Enduring Mysteries". Beyond all that, though, this failure to provide needed vehicles in a timely fashion tells all the story that one needs to hear about how Bushco goes to war and demands the sacrifices that war demands of the citizens...

No manufacturing lines for refridgerators or MP3 players or SUV's have been diverted to the production of some particular vital war material. Nobody is planting a Victory Garden and nobody is going without the latest and greatest petroleum-based fashions in order to support our troops. Nobody except those Americans trapped in the middle of a civil war in the late summer hell of some Middle Eastern desert are being made to make any sacrifice at all. Those particular Americans are being made to far too often make the ultimate sacrifice, however, because the comfortable old "good buddy" ways of traditional military purchasing have been allowed to stay in place, even when all reason screamed powerful arguments against having them being uselessly blown up for no explainable good reason. The whole situation stinks in ways that can't even be explained today, much less to the hard-hearted scribes of history. The failure to provide adequate resources to the troops in the field probably won't be a significant component of Bush's official legacy, but it is a piece that should never be forgotten....
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:04 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Jeff Merkley And The Call To Action 

…I received an e-mail yesterday from Jeff Merkley, as did (I would imagine) other, more prominent lefty Oregon bloggers. In it the recently announced candidate for the Democratic nomination to the 2008 US Senatorial campaign called for support for the resolution by Congressman Jay Inslee (D, WA) to seek impeachment of Attorney General Abu Al Gonzales. It’s a perfectly marvelous idea, and I have called on my own Congressman to also support the rule of law and the civil and personal rights of all Americans by backing this resolution, even though Greg Walden’s picture is probably found next to the phrase “Bush water-carrier” in some of the more comprehensive dictionaries. At the same time, it sounds like an odd sort of stand for Merkley to take on his campaign website, but it only is if you don’t think too hard…

Merkley is making a smart move to bring more attention to Inslee’s resolution – at least in Orygun – by using his Senatorial campaign as a form for impeaching Gonzales, and he’s doing so two different ways:

1) This helps draw much-needed attention to the resolution and may stimulate further discussion about how much we have lost over the last several years. There may have been Attorney’s General who have worked harder to take away our civil rights and personal freedoms and turn the Justice Department into nothing more than a political machine, but the odds on that look pretty long. The only reason there isn’t clear and compelling evidence that we are in the midst of one long unrelenting series of impeachable offenses is the cover-up that hasn’t yet fully unraveled. An investigation could pluck at that last thread holding it all together, but Congress clearly needs to be made to understand that it is the will of a significant slice of The People that we want this to stop. We want the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States to be upheld and not twisted around into some grim unidentifiable artifact to suit one man’s personal ends…

2) Merkley’s call for impeachment also puts Gordon Smith on notice. Some are confused why a state legislator running for the U.S. Senate would be calling for the impeachment of an officer of the Executive Branch who will presumably be out of office about the time he would be rolling into town, but it serves the purpose of creating a benchmark from which to measure Oregon’s newest Democratic Senator: as he tries to move back to the center for the 2008 election, where does Smith stand on the subject of the AG’s continued service and, to a larger extent, where does he stand on abuse of law enforcement power and the whole-hearted willingness to spy on the American people at any time for any reason? Even the constituents of the self-styled “Eastern Oregon’s Senator”, conservative as they may be, are not down with being watched or listened to by the evil bloodshot orb of ‘Big Brother’ and their distrust of Federal governance is already well-developed. These folks might just happen to be interested where the incumbent Senator stands on this sort of issue….
Posted by: Jack K. / 12:13 PM 0 comments

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