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

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Tanking With The Voters From Boeing 

...the thought did flit briefly across my mind the other day when the news came out that the Pentagon had accepted the proposal by EADS for the new Air Force airtanker fleet that this may not be all that good a bit of news for John McCain. Just so happens that may be the case. While we don't know yet just exactly how voters feel in locales where Boeing has a presence, you can slide all your chips out on the table to cover the notion that those voters are going to hear all about McCain's efforts to kill the KC-767 lease program back in 2003...

How much of a claim Johnny Maverick can rightfully make to the eventual cancellation of any procurement of Boeing tankers doesn't even matter. He wants to own that puppy and any Democratic operative worth his or her salt will make sure that he does, night after night on TV's in Seattle and Wichita and a few dozen other places. He may want the campaign story to be all about national security, but even a casual reading of the sheep guts right now suggests that the economy, including matters such as who may earn a salary bolting together large airplanes, will rank higher on many voters' interest list than does the war in Iraq. Thirty seconds at a whack, right in the middle of American Idol, John McCain will be presented to voters as the man who gave American jobs to Europeans...
Posted by: Jack K. / 2:14 PM 0 comments

Friday, March 07, 2008

The Bush Legacy? Torture. 

...it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has any sort of long view about the strange, abusive tastes of George Walker Bush that he would be the president who would shove a lit firecracker up the butt of a well-understood legacy of American moral standing by vetoing the anti-waterboarding bill. Only Gee Dub, who has established new boundaries within which future presidents can find comfortable elbow room to operate without fear of impeachment, would be the guy to insist that interrogation techniques that his own Pentagon rejected in the Army Field Manual are a vital tool to Keep America Safe...

We are an embarrassment in the eyes of most of the world now and the only places on this planet where our stated stand on torture doesn't embarrass us aren't going to be showing up in the Conde Nast Traveler in the foreseeable future anyway. It's only one more example of why "More and Better Democrats" is the only marching order that people need in the upcoming election. John McCain, who you would think would have the most clarified thoughts about the casual use of torture for little more than political ends, would as president offer the same unnatural objections as Gee Dub if only for the reason that he has to build a bridge back to the 18th century where that natural Repub base still lives. Were I an insider Democratic operative, I would hire some actors and film an exceedingly realistic commercial of a waterboarding session, complete with the screams and struggling and painful gasps and wild babbled confessions, and make it clear - in every district and state - that John McCain and the Republican in the Congressional contest were absolutely fine with doing this to poor Abdul, even though Abdul is an innocent farmer with a wife and children and no connection whatsoever to any terrorist organization. As Lyndon Baines Johnson is once alleged to have so famously said, "make 'em deny it"...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:45 PM 0 comments

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Forests And Trees, March Democratic Campaign Edition 

...stipulating at the outset that I don't have any immediate preference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I must say that they are about to traipse on down a treacherous path, totally oblivious to the sign at the trailhead that says "This Way Danger Lies". The damning question of "Who Started This" can be left to historians or A-listers with time enough on their hands to ferret out the first shot across the bow, but what matters is that there is beginning to loom before us the very real possibility that the raw animal hunger on the part of both candidates to be the Democratic Nominee For President Of The United States will lead to a degree of internecene Democratic warfare that could guarantee the need to begin growning accustomed to being able to hear the phrase "President McCain" without throwing up blood...

The most recent upheaval began to build a few days ago and continued into today with Clinton's comments regarding her - and John McCain's - supposedly superior national security credentials as opposed to Obama's. Barack Obama, apparently finally gaining some reliable footing after his lame response to Clinton's challenges during the days leading up to the last set of primaries, has now responded in kind - sort of - by loosing his campaign workers on the Clinton blood trail with stark, pointed observations of the similarities between Clinton's and McCain's foreign policy views. All of this too-ing and fro-ing has fired up the left side of the intertubes, and you almost can't hear yourself think for the sound of sabres being unsheathed by Obama and Clinton supporters all over blogtopia (I used to acknowledge skippy for this word, but he doesn't blogroll me anymore, so the hell with it)...

Mom used to tell you that it was all fun and games until somebody got their eye poked out; same thing still applies today. Lots of silly arguments have been thrown about by otherwise relatively sane progressives who on any other day look just like the sort of people who would naturally gravitate toward each other at the local bar, but there looks to be a sudden unexpected dustup looming where somebody's eye is going to get poked. People who should know better are shouting at each other about "giving campaign themes to the Rethugs", as if the Republican party didn't actually already have people smart enough to figure out these same themes all on their own...

I don't have a car in this race (I was going to say 'dog in this fight', but that really isn't a place to go these days). After some study of their positions on a host of issues, I see the differences between Obama and Clinton to be more nibbling around the margins rather than the sorts of out-front policy disparities that have plagued the Repubs. I also see partisans on the verge of tearing up any chance Democrats may have of recapturing the White House because the uniquely human need to win the contest immediately in front of them at all cost. The need to capture the best view of the trees threatens to block out the need to view the whole forest. If there are any adults left in the leadership of the Democratic party, they need to start making some discrete and emphatic phone calls soon, or things are going to go poorly...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:27 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Odd Thoughts On A Primary Night 

...sometimes it almost seems like the MSM, or at least some renegade hellbound subset thereof, is loosed on the world to run wild on those days where we no longer have all those decent, God-fearing communities of old that made all the taverns shut down on election day, forcing reluctantly sober Americans to get on with their lives. We don't much any longer have that sort of grounding to focus our minds, and today is no disappointment in this regard, as we are provided the opportunity to glean new, hitherto unknown bits of knowledege that will no doubt help us live better lives, or at least thank God that a stiff drink is an option...

First of all, we are informed that there is the chance that Moses - THE Moses, the guy who carried both the Book of Exodus and the movie ripped from those pages - was the Original Dirty Frickin' Hippie (DFH). Blame the acacia's all you want, but the bottom line here is that what may be most tested is the intellectual freedom allowed to professors like Benny Shanon by the Hebrew Uiversity of Jerusalem. You might also want to consider added security for any acacias you might have growing in your yard...

Secondly, we have the opportunity today to learn that problem-solving can be more an art than a science and that not all science-grounded people have the artist's touch, nor do all problems have an engineering solition. Robert Kadera, an electrical engineer and former Navy pilot with 40 years of flying experience, chose to address all those ugly commuting issues that come up when one's teenager is running late for a tennis get-together by stuffing the kid and his gear into the family's ski-equipped 1949 Piper Clipper and landing on a snow-covered golf course across the street from the tennis-date location. As it turns out, neither the local authorities nor the FAA are big fans of "thinking outside of the box" and, while all the world may appear to be a bathroom to free-range cattle, all the world is not a landing strip in the minds of these particular authorities...

Finally, as it so happens, you may die from eating snow, even the kind that isn't yellow...but you probably won't...unless you do in which case you did, especially if you are a kid and most especially if you are an infant who couldn't eat snow anyway unless somebody else shoved it in your mouth. If you are a beet or tomato plant, however, you have been warned. Did I mention that our borders are wide open and undefended against the agents of Terra who are swarming toward us with hate-filled hearts teeming with evil and twisted minds obsessed with brutal intent to do us harm? Cut-rate chunky peanut butter is involved, but we can discuss that later...

Is the primary season over yet?
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:37 PM 0 comments

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Puttin' Em In The Wall 

...I'm a big-time NASCAR fan and have been ever since I was a kid back in the '60's; actually I'm a motor racing fan in general (so shoot me, then, because I drink beer, own a big ol' pickup truck, and occasionally listen to country music, too). There are a couple of interesting personal parallels that I've stumbled on in the last few weeks between this disturbing avocation of mine and the Democratic presidential nominee contest...

In the first instance, my interest in a particular race tends to slip just a bit if my favorite drivers suffer some sort of misfortune that puts them many laps behind or out of the race entirely. In the 2008 Democratic presidential race, my team retired from the race several laps ago, so it has been with only a rather detached interest that I have watched the increasingly feverish competition between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to snag that precious shiny gold ring. My candidate has had his scorecard pulled, the team has packed up their pit road tools, and the car's been loaded onto the hauler and so I find that I don't have any particular interest in who wins, because the eventual Democratic nominee is the candidate for whom I will cast my vote. The on-going contest is mildly interesting, as are the occasionally wild histrionics displayed by the supporters of the two remaining candidates, but I have a lot more free time these days since I don't feel any pressing need to hang on every word either candidate might utter during the seemingly unending series of debates...

In the second instance, I'm noticing an interesting theme sneaking into the Democratic discourse over the last several days. The building theme amongst leading Obama supporters is that, if Clinton doesn't score overwhelming victories in the upcoming primary contests in Texas and Ohio, she should drop out of the race. On the face of it, this is remarkable idea to suggest to any candidate who has invested such a tremendous hunk of his or her sense of self - not to mention tens of millions of dollars - into the raw emotional idea of winning, especially in a case like this where Clinton only trails Obama by approximately 10% in pledged delegates. What some Obama supporters are doing by speaking out so openly about the need for Clinton to withdraw is the same thing as getting to the inside of a competitor who's holding you up as you go into Turn One, putting your right front fender up against his (or, in this case, her) left rear quarter panel, and spinning 'em out into the wall...

The sentiment is understandable, and I have to confess that it is easy to have some symapthy for it. Obama seems, at the moment, to be some unstoppable natural force destined to sweep to victory by the time the Democratic party rolls into Denver in August. The sooner the internal bickering can end, the better, because there are a host of Repub oppo researchers out there furiously taking notes at all time of the day and night. On the other hand, it seems a bit shaky to say that a 110 delegate lead out of a total of over 2600 currently committed delegates is an overpowering mandate, especially given that this supposed mandate is riding on the back of eleven straight Obama primary victories. Eleven straight victories, it might be humbly suggested, should have yielded a larger disparity in committed delegates than this for a candidate who is truly the 'choice of the people'...

The motives behind the comments of people like Durbin and Kerry are, as I said, perfectly understandable. The opportunity is just hanging out there, like a ripe peach ready for picking, to have total Democratic control of those cool levers and buttons of Federal power for the first time since 1994. An increasingly bitter and incendiary campaign stretching all the way out to a brokered convention in late summer is almost the perfect recipe for making everyone face the grim prospect of getting used to saying the words "President McCain". At the same time, there are a sizable number of Democratic primary voters who feel just as strongly about the prospects of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee as do those who have pledged their troth to Barack Obama. It is just as dangerous to the hopes of the party to appear to quite openly apply an unseemly amount of pressure on their candidate to withdraw as it is to let this electoral drama play itself to whatever conclusion fate may hold. It is possible, even with the stakes as high as they are, to piss some of these people off enough that they may just choose to view the first Tuesday in November as just another day with nothing special to do and nowhere special to be...

Putting another competitor who's in your way in the wall is always an option, but it's a task you have to be careful and cool about, because appearing too obvious in the act is going to cause trouble with the spectators wearing the fan gear of that worthy who just watched the object of their support slide to a flaming smoky stop at the far end of an oil-smeared debris field. The party would be well-served if some Democrats could understand this...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:32 PM 0 comments

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