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

Friday, April 18, 2008

A Futile Dream For McCain's Turn In The Barrel 

...Cliff Schecter has a great idea. Why not cordially invite St. John The Maverick McCain some questions that don't have any particular attachment to the supposed reality of presidential candidates discussing what they want to do if they manage to finally get their mitts on the keys to the Oval Office? John McCain has a far more lively personal history than either Democratic candidate and a knack for association with people the sort of which would leave assorted members of the cable TV chattering class collapsed on the floor crushing their clutched pearls in spasming hands were the same sort of friends and neighbors to be associated with Obama or Clinton. This truly is an opportunity for George Stephanopoulos to demonstrate that he is up to the task of taking the "tough questions" to ALL of the leading candidates for the presidency of these United States...

I have a kid in college, so I'd be happy to offer odds to anyone who thinks that Stephanopoulos or any of his Sunday morning Mousekateers would actually have the guts to disturb the serene peace of their corporate masters to dare do such a thing...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:29 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

A Book and Its Cover 

...so Doug Feith wrote a book. Figures. People write books for lots of reasons. Some write books because they want to entertain; others write books because they have something that just simply must be said. There are those who write books because they see a need to try to inform those of us who may not be paying attention, while another group of tortured souls can feel “The Great American Novel” trying to chew its way out through their skulls and react in the only manner that seems logical. Then there is the group of authors that has become more disturbingly common over the last number of years: ‘perps’ who are trying to use a book as some sort of cover, as if they could grab up handfuls of words to sweep away those damning tracks that lead back to the scene of their crimes. And, so, here we have a book by Doug Feith...

...since Feith was a principle architect of our invasion of Iraq and it’s disastrous aftermath, the raw perversity is that we probably wouldn’t even be subject to this embarrassment if all the things he and his masters so fervently wished would happen after American troops roared across the Kuwaiti border had actually happened, but they didn’t. The punch line to this stupid unfunny little joke is that all the reasons that they didn’t are directly attributable to the actors in the PNAC such as Feith who were way more invested in personal motivations and agendas than they were in mundane things like tactics, logistics, geopolitical and sectarian realities, and Middle Eastern history. Feith may not have been a signatory or author of the famous letter to President Clinton, but he was a fellow traveler with root-deep connections to Israel and a festering hunger to Be There at the implementation of the Grand Plan sooner rather than later...

...haven't read the book; don't intend to; don't send it to me. In the first place, it's easy enough to rely on the observations of others who have the patience and iron will to stomach that sort of punishing exercise and, in the second place, one hasn't been able to swing a fresh caught Deschutes River steelhead without smacking in the face one or another talking head or radio voice that has had a 'close-up and personal' with the author. I owe a great gratitude to Mr. Spocko of Spocko's Brain (who I believe is a true hero of progressive blogtopia, for reasons that I don't have time to go into here) for tipping me off to this particular Hannity interview that is only one of many that Feith has done in the effort to shill his wierd permutation of history. From "60 Minutes" to "the Diane Rehm show", with a few odd whistle stops in between, Feith has been desperately trying to peddle his revisionist effort at shaping his own personal place in history, insisting that he was just a simple true-blue soldier struggling to do the right thing in the face of savage incompetence by Colin Powell's State Department and the CIA, among others...

The record, tragically, doesn't really support most of the things that Feith has said in his recent interviews in defense of his cover story. Despite all of his insistence to the contrary, Feith was in the middle of the game planning long before the opening kickoff, providing backdoor 'intelligence' to the White House that smothered any sort of professional work by real live experts and which led to a whole list of declarative statements by leading administration officials that will compare favorably with the most misleading bits of governmental propaganda ever recorded. His insistence that his Office of Special Plans and its precursor were merely active critics of some hapless inability of the CIA to get its act together was so thoroughly repudiated in that review by the Office of the Inspector General of the Pentagon that Feith is left to insist - in an effort to put the most positive possible spin on the mess that he created - that he probably didn't break any laws but provided informative criticism which, in an interpretation of polite bureauspeak, was pure feedlot bullshit. Even a year ago, his efforts to stick to this particular story line were so lame that no less a pocket-lint supporter as Chris Wallace felt the need to question him on his alternative views of the report and went to the remarkable length (for FauxNews, at least) of repudiating Feith's assertions the next week...

...and then of course there is the too-little-discussed BFF relationship between Ahmed Chalabi and Doug Feith. When Feith rambles on about how Powell and Bremer won a 'battlefield victory' by engaging in an occupation rather than putting Iraqis in charge immediately, it's probably Chalabi he's talking about, even though he denies it these days. When Feith mutters about CIA failures of intelligence, it's the raw unfiltered noise that Chalabi's "informants" and others like "Curveball" were slinging around - and which Feith himself used in his own little intelligence operation when the CIA wouldn't - that he's actually referring to. When he tries out his sordid little "mistakes were made, but not by me" line, he's hoping you will ignore the piles of evidence demonstrably proving that he and the rest of the neocon gang bought Chalabi's full-blown tailor-made fantasies of a cakewake invasion and seamless transition to a peaceful, happy, democratic Iraq to a degree that would make even the better, more skillful grifters and email phishers out there break down in a flood of envious tears...

It almost isn't even necessary to dwell on Feith's failures or his revisionism that we encounter in his many recent interviews to figure out how the blame booty gets split amongst the PNAC pirates. The other seldom discussed fact is that ol' Doug was charged with developing plans for the post-invasion period and all of his self-righteous insistence that 'they' really did think about all the bad things that could go wrong (offered as some sort of strange example of how they really were serious patriots considering the big issues), as exemplified by the self-serving Rumsfeld CYA memo referred to as the "Parade of Horribles", demonstrates once and for all that they really weren't up to the task at hand. As Steve Kroft points out in the "60 Minutes" piece, they were actually quite good at predicting what was going to happen if we invaded Iraq, which leads to the simplest of questions that even my 15 Y.O. could figure out: "Why the hell didn't you plan for these things". Comparison to Michael Brown and FEMA have been made:

"Douglas Feith was the Michael Brown of the Iraq war," Packer says. "The planning was such a fiasco. It was such a failure of imagination, of coordination, that within two weeks of the fall of Baghdad, I think we were already in a very deep hole from which we still haven't dug our way out five years later. And that can be directly attributed to the failures of planning that took place in Feith's office before the war."
George Packer, actual real live respected author who understands the issues

This, of course, isn't a perfect analogy, given that MIchael Brown's body count is a few orders of magnitude less than Feith's, Brownie's incompetence only screwed up a portion of the Gulf Coast rather than plunging an entire soverign nation headlong into some violent facsimile of the pre-industrial age, and we have very little evidence that innocent civilians were actually shot, strafed, or bombed as a result of FEMA's failures...

(An 'Aside'): Athenae of First Draft, also known to her husband, ferrets, friends, and readers of this book as Allison Hantschel, has been simply on fire since the publication of Feith's "cover" book. Her book, aside from one strange rant from some remote outpost on the east slope of the Orygun Cascades, is a detailed examination of the role that Doug Feith played in bringing new meaning to the term "sunk costs" when it comes to blood and treasure. Her book is a remarkable resource of bone deep journalism (aside from said rant) of the sort that the MSM appears to have long since abandoned, spelling out in detail far beyond what one might get from 'reading the New York Times' just exactly how Doug Feith fits into the bloody carnival maze we find ourselves in these days. Aside from being a talented, entertaining, and passionate writer, she is probably the subject matter expert when it comes to the former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. If you want the inside scoop on What Doug Feith Did and How Is Doug Feith Trying To Beat The Posse Across The Border, read what she writes and listen any time you can hear her...

There is a brutally simple reality at work here and the blood-red bottom line is far easier to read than it was a million years ago when I wrote that post about Self-Defenestrating Doug: over 4000 American troops dead, along with unknowable tens and tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of Iraqis; over 20,000 American troops with physical wounds, many of those life-altering; a couple hundred thousand Americans dealing with emotional and mental issues and maybe that same number - maybe more - suffering from brain injuries; a fractured country that is - if anything - a more destabilizing influence in the Middle East than Saddam's Iraq presented; the reputation of "the world's only superpower" laying in shards on the floor of the international stage in a way that would actually make all the king's horses and all the king's men actually feel kind of optimistic about Humpty Dumpty's chances. Doug Feith, as I said way back then, may not be the principle architect of the disastrous plan that led us to where we are now, but it doesn't take careful forensic examination to discern his bloody palm prints on the levers of the machine that brought us here. This "cover" book looks oddly like his own version of some twisted 'Lady MacBeth' scenario. As with Lady MacBeth, he isn't going to be able to wash away his complicity...

At least the color of the jacket cover works...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:38 PM 0 comments

Monday, April 14, 2008

Gee Dub's Climate Disconnect 

...even if you didn't know anything else about the Bush administration, you would be well-advised to know that Gee Dub has not had, does not now have, and won't ever over the next several blessedly dwindling months any particular inclination to hack out a legacy for himself as the "environmental president". One need only look at Bushco's blunt refusal to address the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions to get the proper feel for his attitudes...

From its refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol (placing the Unites States right up there beside Kazakhstan as the only two nations not to do so) through its refusal to grant California - and, by extension, 17 other states - permission to regulate auto tailpipe emissions (over the favorable recommendation of its legal and technical experts) to most recent discussions with GOP congresscritters about some half-hearted half measures to make it look like it really was thinking about regulating industrial carbon dioxide emissions...sort of...in very limited circumstances...and only if it could be done on the cheap, Bushco has demonstrated that all it really wants to do is protect the direct financial interests of those sorts of industrialists who tend to scratch out big checks to the RNC and pay hefty fees for "speaking engagements" and "consultation" somewhere down the road. Gasoline at four bucks a gallon doesn't seem to phase ol' Gee Dub and the clan all that much, just so long as it's the little people carrying the burden, but costs to the big dogs to save our older selves and our children from the threat of climate change Will Not Stand as long as George W. Bush is standing boldly at the helm...

I guess that's one way to fix the problem of all those ocean-front properties with sub-prime mortgages. Maybe ol' George is just thinking ahead of the curve...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:45 PM 0 comments

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