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

Friday, February 01, 2008

Climate Change? Naw, Couldn't Be... 

...it's snowing again today. Just like it was yesterday and the day before and even more days before that. Admittedly it's not snowing as intensely as it was yesterday, but this is not another "sparkling day in Central Oregon". Since Saturday, over 24 inches of snowfall has been recorded in my little slice of Oregon heaven (leaving me now with roughly three feet of snow on the ground), although I am exceedingly grateful that we haven't seen the nearly 8 feet of snow that has fallen on Santiam Pass in the Oregon Cascades over the same period. Although I've live most of my life in various interior Pacific Northwest locations that get snow and have engaged in various forms of winter outdoor recreation, I can safely say that today, February 1st, I am ready for winter to end...

It has been a wild winter, with many more than normal coastal storms packing hurricane-force winds, astounding amounts of rain- and snow-fall throughout the Pac. NW, flooding in western Oregon and Washington, and more highway and freeway closures than I ever before recall seeing due to snow, blizzard conditions, flooding, mudslides, downed trees, plague, pestilence, famine and God knows what else. Communities throughout the region have exhausted their entire winter's snow removal budgets three months before the end of the normal season. Maybe all this exciting edgy meteorological action is just a statistical outlier in the normal range of weather; maybe it's an manifestation of climate change. I have my personal suspicions...

I blame Al Gore...

UPDATE: OK, never mind. It will never stop snowing. I have decided that I am going to retire to the Washington Coast, where I will joyously run naked through the cold winter rain and never shovel snow again...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:13 AM 0 comments

Winger Punditry's Tenuous Grasp 

...one thing John McCain doesn't have to worry much about these days is feeling the love from the big names in the Right Wing Chattering Classes League. All through the lineup, from Limbaugh and Hannity to Savage and Coulter, the on-going theme is that John McCain is a RINO, little more than a dirty stinking liberal in sheep's clothing. It's an interesting meme, given the fact that anyone who would usually be likely to be called a "liberal" by this odd coalition can only look with bemusement on the twisted idea that McCain in any way approaches any approximation of that term, even when it's used as a repudiation rather than any sort of accurate appraisal...

As the pace of events on the Republican side of the presidential nomination race begins to accelerate to eyeball-flattening speed, the rejection of leading (and not so leading) winger bloviaters raises one or two interesting questions:

If McCain, who is trying hard to look like the inevitable choice and who could well emerge as the prohibitive favorite after next Tuesday, eventually becomes the nominee, how will these particular nattering nabobs evaluate their actual value and influence in Republican - in particular, conservative Republican - politics? Of what value are they if they can't sway the legions of Dittoheads to see things their way and reject the simple idea of a McCain nomination?

Furthermore, if McCain is the nominee, where do these hatemeisters go from there? One would surmise that they would be facing a very slim array of options, none of which is going to engage their once-heralded power to victoriously motivate their listeners, viewers, and readers in the same way they are said to have in playing a leading role in bringing a decade of Republican Congressional dominance and a two-term Republican presidency to an eventually somewhat less than grateful nation. Their aura of influential power would be diminished were they to suddenly embrace the very candidate that they have spent the better part of a year suggesting would best serve the party's interests by being a participant in the next manned deep-space mission. Attacks on the Democratic candidate need not be considered as an 'option'; those would be happening in any case, but the usual tired old list of sins, crimes, and treachery by the Democratic candidate loses some of its punch when they have so recently been leveling many of the same charges against the Republican nominee...

Even beyond all this, the Hate Brigade has a more near-term problem that may inform the fragile nature of their position on a McCain nomination: people, the very people who would normally be expected to be tuning into their programs and buying their written words, don't seem to be listening to them. At the very least they aren't at the moment marching in lockstep. McCain just won primaries in South Carolina and Florida; he has a comfortable lead in California polling results; he seems poised to be competitive in most of the 20-some events on Super Duper Tuesday...

It has always been problematic to be getting out in front and leading, only to look over your shoulder to discover that you're not being followed. Doesn't matter if the situation is armed combat or blazing a trail through untracked wilderness or getting down to the grimy mean streets of insider politics. In this case, it threatens both the unity of the Republican party, regardless of whether or not The Hated Clinton is the opponent in the fall, as well as the heralded sense of 'leadership' and 'power' with which some of these chitter-chatterers have been invested. All a guy can do is hoist a frosty mug of good Oregon micro brewery product in salute and say "Keep up the good work, folks"....
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:05 AM 0 comments

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Meanwhile, Back At The "Good" War.... 

...well, this certainly isn't good news at all. If this were the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, every alarm in the room would be going off right now whilst Kirk and the crew were flinging themselves around like rag dolls. Words like "disaster", "crisis", and "catastrophy" are not the sorts of things likely to soothe troubled minds...

While the legacy of George W. Bush may be something left for historians to decide, the legacy of Donald Rumsfeld can pretty much be carved into solid rock right now. His incompetent mismanagement of the invasion and occupation of Iraq is going to be what everyone wants to talk about, but it is his equally incompetent mismanagement of the War That George W. Bush Forgot may well be the bigger threat to the security of the U.S. and the world. It probably seemed all too clever and radical and cutting edge at the time to employ a remarkably small US force in Afghanistan and rely on a loose, uncomfortable alliance of warlords to overthrow the Taliban government, but the same failures of foresight and planning that has plagued post-invasion Iraq threaten to make a mockery of all the pretty words uttered about some Bright New Future...

This was supposed to be "The Good War", direct retribution against the engineers of the September 11 attacks on the United States. Instead, in the minds of the minions of the Bush Administration, it became an afterthought and a nusiance that only occasionaly distracted from their grand Nation-Building exercise in the Middle East. Too few troops asked to do too much, too little money, and too much haste in trying to pawn the whole mess off on NATO have led us to the point where the Taliban is resurgent, internal security is nearly a myth, and the Canadian Prime Minister is openly talking about taking his football and going home if other players don't step up their game. Afghanistan, in the eyes of too many knowledgable observers, threatens to collapse under its own rotten weight right next door to one of the most unstable nations on the planet to be in posession of nuclear weapons...

There was a right way to do this, and all those bright early promises would have been a good start, but they ended up being as empty as the words being offered up by the State Department in response to the two new US reports. The dissonance is dramatic and suggests that Bushco does not really have any answers and may not be looking for them in any case. Gee Dub clearly sees his legacy all wrapped up in something that looks like success in Iraq; Rumsfeld's legacy put a big hurt on that goal, and Rummy's legacy could end up making the forgotten effort in Afghanistan go even farther off the tracks...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:24 AM 0 comments

Monday, January 28, 2008

One More Step In The Journey 

...check off another box. One more ugly moment has been endured in the course of a presidency that will stand as a pillar of ugliness; ol' 43 has given his last State of the Union Address. It was a mean, strutting little performance by a failed president promising nothing that will matter and sounding like little more that a rehash of all the Rovian sound bite/talking points that we've all heard before. His chiding of the the Democratic-controlled Congress sounded just plain silly coming from a president who has been rendered largely irrelevant by the primary battles amongst those who would be his successors and the fact that roughly 70% of the American people would just as soon he spend the next three hundred and fifty-some days sitting quietly in his chair and not touching anything important...

[and, for the record, I typed "check off another box" before Joe Biden said it just now on MSNBC]

We are done with all that, now. We don't have to listen to Gee Dub live on all the channels anymore telling us that we are traitors for not agreeing with his bellicose sabre-rattling view of foreign policy or weak-willed and wasteful for objecting to tax cuts that in the main don't help anyone except the wealthy few. We will have some more boxes to check and some more steps to take on this grim journey, but it's starting to feel like we can almost, if we squint just right, see the end out there in the distance...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:03 PM 0 comments

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Big Numbers And Murky Answers 

...coming out of Saturday's South Carolina Democratic primary, the one thing we know for sure is that Barack Obama won big. Stomped 'em; kicked butt and took names later; wrapped it all up with a blow-out foot-stompin' stemwinder of a speech that was an absolute masterpiece of emotion, showmanship, and oratory. On the surface, it appeared to be a night of complete domination that paved the way for a triumphant victory parade through Super Duper Tuesday and the remaining primaries and caucus events that lay beyond to the grand prize awaiting in Denver later this year. Who knows; could happen. The air will grow stiff from the sheer density of sinusoidal waves zinging about and printing presses will literally smoke from the effort as the nation's punditocracy pummels us with observations of the failing fortunes of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards over the next week and a half. That will matter; political fate, just like the stock market, is as much a function of emotion and momentum as it is of rational thought and real analysis...

On the other hand, we may not be looking at an answer to the question "who's winning" than we were on Friday, if the exit poll results from South Carolina are any indication. All those questions that were supposedly answered in Iowa about Obama's viability amongst white voters seem, at least to some degree, to have been unanswered by the more racially diverse South Carolina Democratic voters. Only 24% of white voters (22% of white women and 27% of white men) went for Obama on Saturday. That may mean nothing more than the majority of white voters found either Clinton's or Edwards' policy positions and campaign rhetoric to be more attractive, but the disparity by race in voters' preferences certainly catches the eye...

One thing we know is that Obama won Saturday in a primary that saw a monstrous record-breaking turnout; as with previous events, almost unprecedented numbers of highly motivated folks are turning up at polling places and causus locations to play their part in selecting the Democratic nominee. What we really don't know yet is whether the voters have actually arrived at some new and better place with regard to consideration of race and gender in that selection process. What we really don't know is what it all means...
Posted by: Jack K. / 2:00 PM 0 comments

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