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

Friday, December 28, 2007

Selling The Wrong Product 

...the fundamental problem with tying yourself to a particular issue in a political campaign is that when the plates shift you can find yourself ill prepared when some other issue thrusts itself up. This is the plight of the gaggle of old white guys trying to earn the Republican presidential nomination. Each one of them, with the exception of notable quasi-libertarian wierd guy Ron Paul, has spent most of his time trying to out-Rambo the next guy on the symbiotic subjects of national security and Iraq. On the economic front, nobody's got much going on except 'more tax cuts' and 'smaller government'. A new poll suggests that this may be a bit of a problem...

None of this is good news for Republicans, expecially on the same day that it is announced that new home sales have dropped to the lowest levels in more than 12½ years. Iraq and the Greater War On Terra have been great spooky campfire stories for Republicans, but they haven't had a personal visceral connection because most people don't have any personal connection to the occupation of Iraq (or the ongoing efforts in Afghanistan, for that matter) or any actual personal measure of risk from terrorist attack, but most people have personal concerns about the increasingly fragile plight of their own economic circumstances...

At least for now, as the upcoming month's tsunami of primaries and caucus events looms, the majority of the Republican candidates find themselves facing the prospect of staring at the same unsettling truth that the village smithy faced as Model T's started rolling off of Henry Ford's assembly line. The sordid little joke is that the "Surge" that so many of them supported has quieted the background noise of Iraq sufficiently to take it off of the lead headlines, but it has done so without leading to the sort of political solution that could actually bring something resembling stability to Iraq. They have lost their singular chest-beating issue and are now faced with an electorate concerned about subjects for which they have no suitable soundbites and no acceptable solutions...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:22 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

The Ineffable Tyranny of Karma 

...Barron Hilton announced today that he is donating 97% of his entire net worth - approximately 2.3 BILLION dollars - to the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.

Among those who will be sharing far, far less of his inheritence than they once had hoped will be his granddaughter Paris, whose behavior over the last several years may well have not pleased Grandpa. It being the Christmas season and I being a Christian man, I will refrain from indulging in an orgy of gloating...

It is probably a mark of the twisted nature of what passes anymore for our public discourse that any of this is even noted, much less a top-5 Yahoo story (heck, here I am writing about it). With all the pain and suffering and hate and war and death - and yes, all the political action - going on in the world today, the plight one newly not-so-rich white chick shouldn't be notable, but celebrity or notoriety - regardless the source - still matters to far more people than might be comfortable to contemplate...
Posted by: Jack K. / 1:42 PM 0 comments

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