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

Saturday, January 05, 2008

...Wherein We Discuss Why Fox News Is A Cable Channel.... 

...there are usually good reasons some once-promising journalistic careers get shuffled off into the desert of cable TV land. Trying to make yourself the story rather than telling the story is always a good bet to get yourself set up in a gig that will garner way less viewers that "SpongeBob Squarepants" or "Monk" on a given night. Geraldo probably doesn't understand it, although he has experienced it. Bill O'Reilly may have known it once upon a time, but it appears that his long tenure in cable TV land and the pressure that "Countdown" has been placing on prized viewer demographics have made him either forget about it or just not care...

'Bill-O', as the far more engaging and entertaining Keith Olbermann insists on calling him, decided to make himself the story today in New Hampshire. Taking his show on the road, he attempted to inject himself into two separate campaign events being held by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. On the one hand, it was no doubt a logical move that Fox News bigwigs and any number of their talking head program hosts had to be considering, given that the network's long history of being little more than a Republican party mouthpiece has come back to bite it seriously in the butt as the general boycott by Democratic presidential candidates has placed it somewhat south of the Scholastic Reader as a full-spectrum provider of campaign information and analysis...

On the other hand, there is a certain matryoshka doll undercurrent to political campaigns, so it wouldn't necessarily be surprising were it to be revealed that Bill-O's self-aggrandizing was used in some black art undercover operation by both the Obama and Clinton campaigns to help energize what they see as varying elements of their base. None of this is good news for the Republican National Committee in any case, no matter how Bill-O and Fox News want to spin it. The RNC is saddled with a van load of presidential candidates who are failing to excite the 'big tent' of party faithful - and is, in fact dealing with a great deal of hand-wringing over the Huckabee victory in Iowa. It really doesn't need anything that would further motivate an already highly-motivated Democratic electorate, not to mention a sizable number of people in that precious 'independent' voter registration block who are fully fed up with the Bush administration, and - all failings of the last Democratic-majority Congress aside - the decade worth of sleaze and corruption that Republican control of government produced...

Regardless of which of the two supposed leading Democratic candidates you may choose to support, both campaigns handled themselves with class today during Bill-O's desperate effort to make himself and Fox News relevant in the '08 presidential campaign. Despite his efforts to provoke some sort of confrontation, the candidates and their staffers behaved in a manner that we haven't seen from Republicans for years. At any typical Bush event over the last seven years, even wearing a t-shirt that suggested opposition to Gee Dub's policy themes has been a one-way ticket to Confrontation City with either the security force or people trying to pass themselves off as such. Today, in a clear display of the difference between Democrats and Republicans, Bill-O was neither taken down by Obama staffers, taken out by Secret Service detailers, or taken away by Clinton supporters. People who actually have the fortitude to deal with his blather will no doubt hear all his heroic tales about bearding Democratic lions in their dens, but today was as good an example as you will get demonstrating why Fox News and SpongeBob are on cable tv...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:39 PM 0 comments

Friday, January 04, 2008

Taking The Dis To A Whole New Level 

...it isn't some sort of deep insider's secret that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency have a history of getting along like particularly maladjusted siblings. The intelligence failures surrounding 9/11 and the vicious round of recriminations in the aftermath did little to bring any sort of comity to their relationship; the interrogation opportunities presented after the Afghanistan invasion brought a gaggle of conspirators, enablers, fellow travelers, "persons of interest", hapless farmers, innocent or misguided children, and otherwise innocent bystanders to that American enclave on the eastern tip of Cuba that everybody came to know as "Gitmo" haven't brought the FBI and the CIA any closer together...

Given the institutional rivalry and the seeming ascendancy of the CIA in Gee Dub's Great War on Terra, there has to be a certain delicious sense of irony for the FBI in its assigned roll as lead investigator in the CIA's intentional destruction of interrogation video tapes. It's truly a wonderful combination of circumstances for folks in the FBI: dealing with an agency that has engaged in interrogation techniques to which they strenuously object on legal, moral, and technical reasons while at the same time investigating garden-variety, run-of-the-mill obstruction of justice and evidence destruction by those same people. The FBI took a brutal hammering in the post-9/11 investigation that wasn't helped at all by the classic 'mechanic's shrug' clean hands approach that the CIA took in trying to deflect as much blame as possible away from itself...

"Turnabout's Fair Play"; "Payback's a Bitch"; "All's Fair in Love and War". Pick one; circle your favorite. Heck, pick all three if it feels right. This may not be the moment when half a century's chickens come home to roost, but it is safe to say that history matters. The simple fact is that if interrogation video tapes made by CIA employees were destroyed after both federal investigative boards and federal courts had in effect been told they didn't exist, somebody has a lot of 'splainin' to do, Lucy, and the FBI is in all likelihood both ready and willing to help untangle this problem...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:13 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

The March of The Rogue Elephants, Ver. 2.0 

...back in the heyday of my misspent young adulthood, during a time before demographers claim half of today's Americans were even a glimmer in dear ol' dad's eye, Idaho Senator Frank Church did some digging. My Birth-state's senior Senator and his select committee investigating U.S. intelligence agency activities over the previous two decades found that some of the folks who were supposed to be preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution of the United States and the nation itself seemed less than willing to actually acknowledge all of the civil protections established under law that the Constitution instructed them to honor. While it doesn't rise to nearly the same level, Attorney General Mukasey's announcement that a criminal investigation will be opened against the CIA's destruction of Gitmo interrogation tapes - especially given the reputation of the lead investigator - at least provides some faint glimmer of hope that Gen X and Y and Z and whatever the heck else we call the children of the Boomers to watch another episode of the March of Frank Church's "Rogue Elephants"...

On the other hand, I just simply hate the feeling of being a sucked-in simpleton who bought off on some new iteration of Rovian politics, so the proof will be in the actual flavor and texture of whatever particular pudding that John Durham cooks up. One of the fundamental findings of the Church Committee was that various intelligence services, in particular the Central Intelligence Agency, used US taxpayers' money to treat every American citizen - with the possible exception of the guy at the next desk over and then maybe not even then if he didn't seem sufficiently Western European and right-thinking - as a potential enemy without positive contrary evidence. Didn't matter what the Constitution said; didn't matter what laws appropriately passed under the terms of that Constitution said...

We find ourselves in something approximating that same place...One. More. Time. There is an ample body of law, both international and national, that forbids torture. It has only been with the advent of the misguided and failed administration of George W. Bush that people who on the larger landscape are considered little more than legal backmarkers have been given the keys to power in order to craft largely ludicrous "legal" opinions that say - in effect - that anything short of actual death is not really torture. Jack Bauer and "24" may not be so much a by-product of Gee Dub's Great War On Terra as an effort by a supporting agency (yes, that would be The Folks At FAUX) to make the physical abuse or murder of people who don't look like you and me all okey dokey if...or even not if...that abuse prevents a horrible massive nuclear attack on some rich white Southern Baptist enclave...

The bottom line is simple and straight-forward: we imprisoned and killed people for actions that we called 'torture' in the aftermath of World War II. Employees of the government that we empower with our votes and tax dollars are accused of committing the same sorts of offenses that we imprisoned and killed people for at the end of World War II. Supervisors of those employees have destroyed physical evidence of the interrogations where techniques banned by both US and international law may have been used, even when US courts have ordered that such evidence be retained. The government of the United States, including intelligence services, is subservient to "We The People". It is "We The People" who get to make the choice, at the last remove, over how "We The People" are represented by government employees. It is, finally, "We The People" who should have the right to decide what actions we wish to have taken in our name...

Mukasey has made a perhaps half-hearted stab at trying to get to the bottom of the latest CIA scanda, being an administration lackey and all, but the man he put in charge may just rise above the obvious conflicts of interest to actually get to the truth. Frank Church showed us that rogue elephants will run wild until some sufficiently tough cowboy with a stout enough rope shows up to get them under control. Michael Mukasey - and John Durham - are about to show us whether they are tough enough cowboys for the job of wrangling these particular rogue elephants...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:26 PM 0 comments

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Firing Up The "Arizona Illegals" Experiment 

...I have a demonstrable, verifiable, academic-level distaste for economics. The transcripts provide the brutal truth. This sad paper trail exists because it was necessary for me to weather several semesters of college-level economics coursework in the pursuit of my natural resource degree, and that disturbing experience led me to a clear understanding that there was far more truth in the "dismal" part of the equation than there was in the "science" portion. Given all that, I have not found myself on particularly sound footing when it came to discussing the impact that the employment of illegal imigrants actually has on the economy of a town or region or the country. The gut has always told me that there is some effect, just because of the obvious dominance of illegals in some base-level economic endeavors like agriculture. Didn't have any proof, which may be why this science is so dismal, but that particular storyline be about to head back to the rewrite shop...

Arizona is about to offer itself up as our lab rat on the question of whether the employment of illegal aliens has an economic impact. The debate has been on-going and vicious, with advocates on both sides delivering muscular salvos about business ethics and fairness, societal costs, and root-level issues of morality. It now appears that we may have a little opportunity to test the impacts of the varying theories and value judgements; this may not answer any illegal immigration questions once and for all, because the stigma and hysteria that have been intentionally attached to the subject won't go away. Those problems have been with us since shortly after the first English subjects crawled off their rotting disheveled ships onto the New England coastline. "Real" Americans have picked up verbal, legal, and real sticks to deal with the original residents of this continent, Scandanavians, Northern Europeans, Italians, Irishmen, Carribeans, and anybody else who didn't meet the "Just Like Us" mold of a particular moment...

George W. Bush entered into an unholy alliance with Congressional Democrats and a few Republicans to try to create an immigration policy that had some sort of basis in sanity. His own party flung that effort back in his face - adding another brick to the sad legacy for which his failed presidency will be remembered - and Gee Dub's administration has responded with its own federal intensification of enforcement at the employer level to the illegal immigrant problem (probably more as a matter of spite than anything else). The Good People Of Arizona went looking for this fight, however, and they are going to be the folks who may finally give us a glimpse at what it all really can mean in economic terms...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:05 PM 0 comments

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