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

Friday, February 29, 2008

Just A Thought 

...as his hero Paul Harvey would say, "closed circuit for Matt Drudge"...

Beware of handsome, fit young men with military-style haircuts and and upper-crust British accents. One of them is probably interested in kicking your clammy rotund white ass...

...and thanks for supporting the troops, you stalwart Terraist fighter, you...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:44 PM 0 comments

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Gunboat Diplomacy, Circa 2008 

...this just sounds a bit off at the first reading:
Deeply concerned about Lebanon's political strife, the United States on Thursday sped its USS Cole warship there in what officials described as a signal aimed at bolstering regional stability.


Two things come immediately to mind. The first is the potential symbolism of sending the USS Cole, of all ships, into the region to "send a signal" supporting regional stability. The Cole, of course, is the United States Navy vessel infamously attacked by a boat full of explosives manned, we are told, by Al Qaeda 'suiciders' in the harbor of Aden, Yemen, on 12 October 2000. Seventeen sailors died, thirty nine were wounded, and the career of the commanding officer was effectively ended. There may nor may not be the powerful scent of symbolism being blown in our direction by Bushco, but the suggestion of a play at symbolism can't ever be discounted with the current crop of hustlers, fixers, and con-men currently infesting the White House. Maybe the USS John S. McCain wasn't available...

The second thing that comes immediately to mind - ok, so maybe it wasn't the second - is that most thinking persons who don't have ready access to a personal supply of Arleigh Burke-class Aegis-equipped destroyers might look to find alternatives to address that whole question of "bolstering regional stability" that don't include sending weapons systems into the situation. Middle Eastern stability is most certainly not fostered by sending warships into the region; it only allows the principles in the conflict to pick sides...

This is the tragic outcome of the last seven years of foreign policy as practiced by a gang that has acted as though the entire concept of foreign policy was some uncomfortable interference with its preference to be otherwised engaged in killing strangers and cooking up new batches of crystal meth down in the deep bowels below the South Lawn ground level where Dick Nixon used to practice his killer bowling moves. Instead of offering diplomatic solutions to the situation in Lebanon, the United States Government as managed by George W. Bush seems to be, at least in the background, some sort of 21st-century reprise of the Panay incident, sending a single destroyer as some sort of projection of Superpower capability. Weapons systems, be they ship-borne or land-borne, do not offer a sense of stability except through the pure brutal hammer of threat. A single destroyer serves the dual purpose of sending the wrong signal and not offer a sufficient force effectiveness to get done what Gee Dub's gang claim they want to acheive. It's sabre-rattling with a minimum employment of sabres...

That's what gunboat diplomacy looks like in the 21st century. It's not how you get at regional stability; never has been, never will be....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:01 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Final Score: Biddies and "BigWigs" - 1, "Lingerie" Mayor - 0 

...just to prove that pressing political issues aren't just held in personal ownership by all those baboons inside the beltway, the really, really small town of Arlington, Oregon, held a recall election on Monday addressing the continued service of Mayor Carmen Kontur-Gronquist. Faithful readers may recall that she was under some pressure from the biddie faction of Arlington because of her pre-mayoral MySpace photo's wearing black undies while draped across a fire engine and how the revelation of those photo's plunged the 500 or so citizens into a frenzy of angst-ridden self-examination...

In a close vote, Mayor Kontur-Gronquist was recalled, proving once and for all that biddies desperately in search of a life and good ol' boys strongly connected to the by-now-world-famous golfing experience to be had in Arlington - if only golfers would take the time to catch that one off-ramp to get into town and actually find the golf course - have more power than the more traditional residents who might actually have a Western point of view. That would be a point of view that pretty much leaves people alone with regard to their personal lives and pays more attention to their public actions...

How Kansas came to Oregon will be more a matter for some historian who sufficiently cares to explore that question, but at least for now we can have the comfort of knowing that - at least in Arlington, Oregon - there isn't any tolerance for behavior engaged in outside of and prior to one's public service. Malfeseance in office is no longer the primary reason to attempt to remove a sitting official. There isn't any tolerance, especially, if it involves a woman who made the twin mistakes of having some racy pictures on a personal web page and making decisions that affected some of the local "good ol' boys"...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:45 PM 0 comments

Monday, February 25, 2008

Limbaugh Is Gonna PLOTZ!! 

...last spring, in a disturbing episode that may well have undermined the very fabric of The Homeland, 50 neo-terrorists staged a dangerous and dramatic sit-down strike in the Ashland, Oregon, public library to protest that facility's looming closure due to a budget crisis engendered by the ending of the federal program that made payments to counties with historically timber-harvest-based economies. The resulting standoff was finally ended - thankfully, without bloodshed - when an Ashland Police Sgt. met with the Evil Ones, read to them the book "Leonardo the Terrible Monster", and escorted the dangerous band of elementary school students out the door to their waiting parents...

All by itself it was an amazing display of audacity and gumption by a remarkable group of pre-teens, but what will actually fill the air with a fine pink mist and the muffled, pulpy popping noise of wingnut heads exploding all across this great land of ours is that the Teachers' Curriculum Institute has commissioned a New York writer to craft a story about this episode to provide as social studies cirriculum for forth graders from coast to coast...

Sit back, close your eyes, mindshift to rightwing-think, and imagine: "teachers"......."protest"....."New York writer"...."sit-in strikes as 'positive community action' "...

When, on the other side of the looking glass, you start out at the basepoint that teachers are one of the twisted evils that are helping to lead us down some petal-strewn path to a grim secular Hell, this just simply can't be good news. To the Republican base, which doesn't include a lot of cheerful happy dispositions to begin with, the idea that devil-spawned disciples of the hated NEA are linking with a New Yawk writer to teach our impressionable young children the tools and techniques necessary to become some new generation of dirty protesting friggin' hippies based on the actions of the children of well-KNOWN free spirits in Ashland, Oregon, has to be the fruition of every horrible suspicion they have ever nurtured about the public school system. It is just one small step short of covering parking lot sex and abortions as health subjects and discussing Cannabis cultivation techniques during the science segment. To the winger pundrity class, which is primary populated by children of the Vietnam War, this is like introducing the free speech, free love, and freely available drugs of late-sixties Berkeley to a group that has barely moved beyond Dr. Seuss...

This whole thing may fly under the right-wing radar, given that they have bigger Democratic and Republican presidential nominee red and blue fish to fry these days, but if they get a sniff of this story....Oh, The Places You'll Go....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:31 PM 0 comments

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