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

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Feelin' That McCain 'Higher Tone' 

...John McCain (or more likely his handlers) is clearly trying to establish a perverse yet somewhat clever baseline for his upcoming effort to appease his desperate hunger for the White House. What he wants to do is prattle on like this:
I'm going to raise the level of political dialogue in America, and I'm going to treat my opponents with respect and demand that they treat me with respect...

while standing back as surrogates do his dirty work for him. It's not the first time we've seen this sort of tactic, and it won't be the last, but this time it's going to be a much tougher road for his 'brain trust'. This 'straight shooter' doesn't appear to be able to pull off the big game plan without shooting himself in the foot, especially given his uncontrollable habit of saying things like this:
I think it's very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States...

[snip]

I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare ... If Senator Obama is favored by Hamas I think people can make judgments accordingly.

You can nearly feel the strain. You can almost see Ol' Maverick quivering under the stress of just desperately trying to avoid referring to the likely Democratic nominee as 'Barack Hussein Obama' and blowing his whole game plan right straight out of the water. The Repub backstory for an Obama nomination is the whole "Secret Muslim" thing; the only real chance they have of winning another four years of what would essentially be "Bushco III" is to make sure that the vast number of Americans who are low-information voters are exposed to the fairy tale of a strangely magnetic Black Man of somewhat foreign heritage who is actually a dangerous blend of some of the darker passages from the Book of Revelations and a Qur’anic version of the Manchurian Candidate...

In coming right out and saying that Barack Obama is "the Hamas Candidate", McCain isn't engaging in something that could otherwise be considered to be some sort of innocent hyperbole; this is all part of the baseline strategy, although I suspect that his handlers and message-shapers would rather McCain himself not carry the water on this subject. In McCain's rhetoric we can understand that Obama isn't just 'soft on an Islamic terrorist group' but is instead One Of Them, a Fellow Traveler who had the message of Jihad impressed into his soft young malleable soul at an early age. In McCain's message, we can understand that he wants us to know all the way down to our mitochondria that Obama would be a weak, lame enabler of all those deadly Islamofascist terrorist groups who want to infiltrate our society, brainwash our children to the teaching of some violent pagan religion, turn our mothers, wives, and daughters into chattel (not that some so-called Christian portions of our population don't do that already), and force men who simply are incapable of doing so to grow large bushy beards that are itchy and uncomfortable in the summer...

John McCain does not have a history of giving respect when all the big-value chips get shoved out into the pot and the 'call' doesn't go his way. Even the most hopeless political rookie could understand he was just rambling on in some shameless knock-off of what has become a bitter meaningless charade of "Senate Comity" when he said what he said back in January. McCain made it pretty clear today that he is more than happy to run the weird parallel games that the Repub's have been signaling like light houses for some time now about Obama's connection to Pastor Jeremiah Wright and his 'Secret Muslimism'. This is just another salvo; the way he says it provides crystal-clear evidence that this isn't about 'being weak on national defense'. McCain wants you to know that all those emails "proving" that Obama is a Muslim are The Stone Cold Truth. McCain didn't say that Obama would be 'weak on national defense'; he said that Obama was the Hamas candidate. It's almost surprising that McCain didn't slip back into those comfortable early days of his naval career and refer to Senator Obama as ' that boy'...

If this is what John "Straight Talker" McCain considers to be some sort of higher, respectful tone for the fall campaign, times are soon going to get interesting...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:22 PM 0 comments

Friday, April 25, 2008

John McCain, Casey Jones, And The Fate Of A Nation 

...ok, so I will stipulate at the outset that the "Straight Talk Express" is a bus and not a train, but the name is still profoundly evocative of some strange atavistic connection to railroad politicking back in the day. John "Straight Talk/Maverick/Holier-Than-Y'all" McCain has decided to hang his particular dark new moon on that populist meme, suggesting a stout connection to the 'real people' that just simply cannot be detected by even the most powerful scientific tools when examined in the real world. Had the famous Casey Jones of a few generations ago been a sufficiently reckless navel aviator rather than a railroad engineer, his face and personal ethos would have been shrink-wrapped all over St. John's bus. He wasn't, though, and it wasn't, but McCain's 'Maverickness' displays an absolute stone deafness to the problems that plague us common folk that engenders the sort of recklessness that - in a more innocent time - might actually appear to be heroic...

From a variety of policy perspectives, Ol' Maverick is a flat-out disaster for anyone who doesn't breath the privileged rarified air that exists at the altitude into which he was born or ultimately married into. His lack of understanding about 'real life' has been clearly on display - but just as clearly obfuscated or ignored by a fawning MSM - in such episodes as his insistence that "real Americans" wouldn't pick lettuce even for fifty bucks an hour and his suggestion that A New American Resurgence only awaits some common realization that selling one's personal belongings on EBay would be some bizarre key to revitalizing this country's preeminence in the manufacturing and retail sectors of the global economy....

From a purely economic standpoint, the only thing left for the Ol' Maverick to do is to advocate selling one's blood for fun and profit after an exciting patriotic day of picking truck crops for some absurdly unlikely hourly wage before going home to fire up the family computer and getting on line to offer up Grandma's walker and Uncle Jake's spare pacemaker batteries to a "You Can Buy This Now" EBay auction. That is how the American economy works in John McCain's world...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:45 PM 0 comments

The Area Code Boogaloo 

...back in 1995, most of us residing outside of Oregon's densly-populated Willamette Valley were reassigned the area code 541. Despite all the logical-sounding reasons for the change, it went down hard - especially east of the Cascades where the annoying need to change letterheads, business cards, advertisements, phone books, and phone lists was coupled with a long-held suspicion that any change dictated by a bureaucracy was simply one more step toward jackboots and black helicopters. Everyone finally got used to it, though, and life went on...

Owing to the on-going increase of all those logical-sounding reasons of 13 years ago, here we may go again. Regardless of which way the regulators decide to go, there will no doubt be loud complaints again, because it is really a pain to have to make all the changes that a new area code entails - although some of the phone calls one can get during the transition are quite entertaining (say, for example, if the seven-digit number for one's work phone is assigned to a bail bondsman in the old area code). Complaints will probably be somewhat tempered with a certain sense of resigned acceptance, though, because even out here in the remote, primitive hinterlands of eastern Oregon, we are already being schooled on the fundamental realities thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones...

The cell phone provider for my Borg has required 10-digit dialing for over a year now and, as I sit at home this morning nursing the younger teen through a migraine so he can get his butt to school, I am reading a letter from my personal cell provider informing me that 10-digit dialing looms menacingly in my non-work life. Add the possibility of new area codes into that mix in the next year or two, and it ought to be - as the old Chinese curse suggests - an interesting time...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:28 AM 0 comments

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Quick Random Thoughts 

...maybe it's just me, but I don't think it's all that good an idea for an ambassador from a nation that has benefited from the Camp David Accords should be calling the man who engineered that effort and who has spent the last thirty years since then trying to do the exact same thing in other settings a "bigot" for making an effort to bring a further measure of peace to the Middle East...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:52 PM 0 comments

Beady-Eyed Weasel-dom, The John McCain Way 

...a great deal of commentary was offered today on the slick ease with which John McCain made sure everybody knew he didn't want the North Carolina Republican Party to run a particular anti-Obama ad, thereby making it seem as though he was remaining above the fray while at the same time being able to engage in run-of-the-mill sleazeball politics by assuring that every media outlet on the planet would be sure to run the ad (National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" did about five freakin' minutes on it, including running what sounded like the entire audio portion of the ad). In the meantime, on a more ominous note, the candidate hizownself was running around New Orleans trying to simultaneously scare the dailylights out of any thinking person and rewrite his own legislative history on the subject of post-Katrina recovery. The trip, whatever its stated purpose, is actually another in a series of efforts by St. John's handlers to distance him from the actions and policies of a Bush administration that he has in many cases ardently supported but clearly can't run on since Gee Dub's approval rating has gone somewhere south of 'head lice'...

...what seems strikingly disingeneous about Big John's foray through the devastated streets of N'awlins is this:
"If I had been president, I would have ordered the plane landed at the nearest base and I'd of been over here." He repeated that later, saying, "I would've landed my airplane at the nearest Air Force base and come over personally."

...ok, so two things here...maybe three...

In the first place, the last thing anybody needs in the middle of a disaster is ol' Maverick swaggering into the middle of it, sucking up precious resources for his own entourage and barking strange contradictory orders to a bunch of people who already have too much to do. Michael Brown was a failure as FEMA director, but he knew at least as much about disaster response when Hurricane Katrina roared ashore as John McCain knows today, so there wouldn't be anything of value that a President Maverick could have contributed to the process except to be underfoot...

In the second place, ol' Maverick actually was in a place where he could do some good in the aftermath, and that was in the Senate of the United States of America. In that particular setting, to the complete and utter disatisfaction of the residents of the Gulf Coast, he let his cares and concerns be known with his votes, most of which made it pretty clear that they could just remain one of those forgotten places in America that he seems so anxious to talk about these days, now that the stakes are different...

...and yes, thanks to that Huffington Post link, there is a third thing: He did have just the chance he was yammering on about today to ride manfully into the fray of the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast. He and Gee Dub posed on the tarmac in Arizona just steps from Air Force for a bizarre photo-op on McCain's 69th birthday mere hours after Katrina had made landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi. McCain should be able to claim that he had every one of those things that all those cop shows and CSI variants/knockoffs are always going on about: motive, means, and opportunity. Yet he neither acted at that moment or recommended to his new best friend Gee Dub that he act...

It's one thing - and completely common - for politicians to lie to us about the things that they are going to do once they attain the office to which they aspire. We know they are going to do it and they know we know. It's a whole other thing to lie to people who have been almost criminally abused by the government of your own party to claim that you would do things differently than the current occupant of that office, especially when your own past actions and voting record make it pretty clear that you don't have the slightest inclination to do any such thing. That's what makes John McCain a Beady-eyed Weasel...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:16 PM 0 comments

Monday, April 21, 2008

Eat Yur Heart Out, Colbert! We HAVE Yur Eagle!!! 

...last year, in one of those cheap right-wing Faux News-like publicity stunts that have so characterized the career of his hero Bill O'Really, Stephen Colbert made a lot of noise about "adopting" a bald eagle chick. He even went so far as to name it Stephen Jr. in an effort to demonstrate that one particular wingnut's patriotic concerns about America's great symbols of freedom, democracy, and decent take-out pizza could extend to some large bird that would otherwise be little more than a cheap, easy target on any casual weekend "let's go shoot up the woods" meetup with his rave-fave gun-nut buds...


As is usually the case with true, true-blew, and Faux wingnuts, Colbert totally abandoned any interest whatsoever in Stephen Jr. at the first available opportunity (hereafter to be defined as the advent of a 'new season' somewhere after the end of the writers' strike). Fortunately for the children of the tragic and unholy union that had to result from the Colbert Abandonment, there are people who care and keep track...

High up in the mountains on the crest of the Oregon Cascade range, dedicated scientists - or overly technological voyeurs; it's sometimes difficult to tell the two apart - have been working their buns off to both make a better life for another sad, abandoned reject of the mean, meaningless "Colbert Nation" and to provide live-streaming nest-level video to a currently unappreciative nation of the product of the heroic struggles of those avian friends who - though so thoroughly abused - have cast their votes for the future of their species. These brave LIBERALS have risked their lives to provide you with an absolutely natural view of FAMILY VALUES AT WORK, in a way that SOME conservatiods that we need not mention have never found their way clear to acknowledge on their richly popular TV shows...

So there you have it: truly liberal eagles engaging in raising a family in a truly liberal setting, without a capital gains tax cut in sight. Colbert should be so lucky to be able to make such a claim...


[serious snark alert, somewhat after the fact]
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:34 PM 0 comments

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Pop Quiz: What Part Of A Race Horse Would Mitch McConnell Be? 

...lost in all the breathless discussions surrounding the cage-match between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are a whole bunch of current events that - given the discernable tides and currents of inevitablity - probably matter quite a bit more to millions of Americans than who has been complaining the most on the Democratic presidential campaign trail. Like what, you may ask?

...ok, so maybe you didn't, but for the sake of argument let's pretend...

The Farm Bill, for one, I answer. There is a group of legislative efforts that set national policy for various aspects of life in the US and multi-year legislation that in general directs the actions of the Dept. of Agriculture is one of them (another is the Transportation Bill). The House and Senate are currently gripped by the much-delayed effort to pass the 2007 Farm Bill and things aren't going well. One of the main points of dispute between the House and Senate is the nature of tax cuts that the Senate would like to see in final legislation. Perhaps the most bizarre of those tax cuts is a piece of legislation first introduced as The Equine Equity Act, which has been added as an amendment to the Senate version of the Farm Bill...

It may well be that one of the reasons that the MSM isn't doing a lot of reporting on this battle between the House, Senate, and Bush Administration is the strange complexity of the story and weird array of forces on either side of the line of battle. House Democrats are standing up for fiscal responsibility while Senate Democrats are supporting insufficiently offset tax breaks for...racehorses? Max Baucus is in a tight spot; he finds himself having to try to get the votes necessary to defeat a filibuster attempt in order to get a new Farm Bill having many truly important provisions - such as nutrition programs for low-income Americans - out the door by tolerating things like the inclusion of tax breaks for what is rightfully called "The Sport of Kings".

While it's totally understandable to see McConnell and Jim Bunning looking for tax breaks for the Kentucky race horse breeding industry (complete with its own set of wealthy investors/potential contributors), Blanche Lincoln' co-signing would seem odd unless one understood the growing thoroughbred horse industry in her state (complete with its own set of wealthy investors/potential contributors). The straight story, though, is that McConnell wants you to know that this is his baby; Lincoln is just another one of those unfortunate challenges that progressives hungering for a Democratic majority are going to have to tolerate until such time as the political climate changes sufficiently to allow voters' fairly liberal views about issues and their willingness to vote for liberal candidates to have some point of intersection...

Mitch McConnell is the Main Man for the Senate Republican minority, and is A Big Man On Campus in Washington circles. As the Minority Leader and a Senator of over three decades of service, as well as being the husband of the current Secretary of Labor, and as the Senator who has been pushing this humble little bit of tax relief for the downtrodden horse-rearing masses of the Bluegrass State for some time now, he has control over the sixty-vote margin that Republicans have understood far better than Democrats to be the key to managing legislative action in the Senate. Mitch McConnell is more than willing to put, amongst other things, the ongoing food security of millions of low-income Americans at risk over tax breaks for a group that will never in the rest of the history of our species intentionally come into close physical proximity to those particular people. He is part of that team that will give you a good game if you want to play some hard ball; the current crop of Democrats are probably better suited to a spirited 3-inning T-ball contest...

It's time to finish that pop quiz now...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:03 PM 0 comments

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