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

Thursday, January 24, 2008

What Part Of 'No'..... 

...apparently in order to let Senate Democrats know that he still is the boss of them, Gee Dub has renominated Steven G. Bradbury to be Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department's Office of Legislative Counsel. Bradbury's original nomination last year ran up against a brick wall over his memoranda giving cover to the Administration's burning desire to go all Jack Bauer on hostage....er, I mean...detainees during interrogations. Democratic resistance was so strong that Bradbury's hanging nomination was a primary reason for the series of pro forma sessions during the Christmas break...

You can read the whole sordid Bradbury saga at the Muckraker.

This renomination is an interesting political play on the part of Gee Dub's handlers. He's an obvious choice from the standpoint of being just the sort of Answer Man that they have always been on the lookout for. It stands to reason that, when you want to turn any common understanding of our own moral values and international law on their heads, stout-hearted men having a facile touch with the art of the memorandum are needed to justify things that aren't going to get you a seat near God in Heaven but may well earn one in the front of the Senate chamber at your own impeachment hearing if you don't muddy the water by claiming those things are legal. Bushco has had a solid run on this production line, from Gonzalez, Yoo, and Delahunty through Bybee and Haynes, leading up to Bradbury as Enabler ver. 6.0, all of them cranking out memo's containing legal reasoning for this administration's actions that is so twisted and unrecognizable that most legitimate legal scholars just shrug hopelessly while trying to dig down to the roots...

It almost appears that the minions are trying to go back to that same old 'national security' well one more time, efforting to create a story line wherein the stalwart defender of our right to sleep in our beds free of the fear of being murdered in the night by Islamofascist suicider brown people is being denied the ability to Do His Job by a bunch of lefty terrorist-loving Defeatocrats. Makes sense; that's always been a sure-fire way to rev up the base and Lord knows the Republican base is anything but revved up at this point in the 2008 election season. Otherwise this nomination appears to be nothing more than a fight looking for a place to happen and that doesn't make much sense; even though Karl Rove isn't right down the hall anymore there are still a few people in the West Wing capable of making actions match themes and storylines. Senate Democrats drew a pretty stark line in the dirt over the Bradbury nomination last fall, actually standing up to Gee Dub for once, and it doesn't look like anything in the surrounding political topography has changed so much that they would now say "oh, never mind"...

The worst news in all of this, at least for Democratic Senators of lesser seniority, is that somebody is probably going to have to hang around town again during the next recess to run a pro forma session or two...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:30 AM 0 comments

Monday, January 21, 2008

Harold Stassen For A New Generation 

...it says here that Ralph Nader is pondering whether to throw his hat in the ring again to make a run at the presidency in 2008. Far be it from me to offer any advice to Ralph - ok, so that's not actually true, but anyway it strikes me that the fact that the phrase "jump the shark" has jumped the shark means that it will be necessary to gin up some new sort of short buzz phrase to capture Nader's quixotic consideration of another grab at the Big Golden Ring...

Maybe "going Stassen" would be a good choice. This would capture the increasing futility of Nader's efforts while honoring the efforts of Harold Stassen, whose nine campaigns between 1948 and 1992 had the same sort of success as Pat Paulson, who ran six of his own campaigns for far more entertaining yet oddly meaningful reasons than anything that Ralph Nader has yet to capture...or at least effectively articulate on the stump...

Nader had a point to make in 2000, one that had more to do with influencing the Democratic side of the ledger than actually - you know - winning the whole thing. His whole point was to create an opportunity for a protest vote that could (and in some minds may well have) sink Al Gore if Gore refused to move so far to the left that he would no longer even need a red running light for the port side of his campaign ship. Far too many people have a bitter taste in their mouths about that whole protest vote idea; the last seven years of George W. Bush have made the idea of accepting less than a full loaf look a lot more attractive than it did at the end of the Clinton administration when you could actually sell the concept of putting a little better, more liberal Democrat in the White House...

Nader can 'consider' all he wants; he may even find a few fragged out hangers-on who can whisper the right sorts of supplications in his ear to convince him that a nation's desperate progressives call out to him. Maybe he can even convince the Republican party to scrape up some of its dwindling cash to support his efforts to get on the ballot again, like he did in Oregon last time. Nader's "gone Stassen", so he can make whatever decision his spirits move him to. Democrats and progressive independents have learned a great deal since 2000, and Ralph Nader isn't going to be factoring into their voting decisions anymore...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:25 PM 0 comments

Thank God For The Super Bowl 

...or more to the point, thank God for the long-held perception of the value of the Super Bowl as a marketing point. Because those 59 straight hours of coverage leading up to and including the game itself are considered to be such prime advertising real estate, a single 30-second spot can go for as much as 3 million dollars, it is unlikely that any of the presidential contestants will be spending any money on ads during that event...

Good. Folks here in Oregon won't get to even cast a vote, whether or not it might matter by that time, on any of the candidates for another four months. The last thing I want to see on February 3rd during the Big Game is Mitt or Rudy or John (pick one) or Hillary or Obama looking out at me with soulful eyes and and a heart full of hope promising Change. The commercials are more often than not the best part of the Super Bowl, and I would hate to miss an opportunity to view any of them because a bunch of political ads. They can come to Oregon in April and spread some money around locally if they would like to compete for my vote...

OK, so maybe I don't mean that so much if Anheuser-Busch wants to run more "Bud Bowl" ads. They can each have 20 seconds in place of those "Bud Bowl" spots. I'd be flipping channels at that point anyway...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:03 PM 0 comments

Dissing The Middleman 

...a prominent theme for us dirty frickin' hippie lefty types coming out of both the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns was the outsized role the talking head portion of mainstream media played in framing the discussion through the primary and general election seasons. Al Gore's earth tones, Howard Dean's scream, the down-home "have a beer with" folksiness of George W. Bush, John Kerry's war record and a host of other observations were pounded into us day after day, coupled with assuredly trenchant analysis of who was surely going to win or lose and why. Especially during the primary seasons, this framing by all those wise men and women set tones, established expectations, and triggered waves of momentum that got us to the place we are today...

Things may be just a bit different this year. Since so many states have become infected with the hunger to be "relevent" this time around, the primary season has become a wild, tightly packed affair that will see nearly half of the available delegates will have been fought over by the end of the day on 'Super Duper Tuesday' on February 5, when 24 states hold caucuses and primaries. In contrast to past election seasons, where there were a steady progression of events leading up to the "traditional" Super Tuesday (which was on March 1 in 2004 and included 10 states) that allowed the punditocracy to shape the race into winners and losers, everything is going to come crashing together on Feb. 5, creating the very possible outcome that - with over half of the states having held nominating events - there is no clear frontrunner...

There is no clear frontrunner in either party and only one more event that matters to each party before February 5. That long comfortable glide slope that has allowed the MSM ample time to beat into our heads just exactly who was the right candidate, the true winner deserving of the nomination, looks to be broken this year, or at least seriously disrupted. That's not to say that the punditocracy won't fight like rabid weasels to assert its prominence coming out of 'Super Duper Tuesday', especially if there is still no clear front-runner in one or both parties. For the moment, though, it's self-assumed role as the middleman selling us the product it thinks we should buy is on hold with this too much, too soon, to fast political season. As the Democratic primary outcome in New Hampshire may have suggested, this year the voters may do the deciding without having to deal with the middleman...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:13 AM 0 comments

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