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

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

On Consideration Of Another Of The Things John McCain Doesn't 'Get' 

...the good news about having John McCain running loose across the landscape babbling every first sort of nonsense that pops into his shattered, fractious mind is that so many opportunities are so generously offered to see that neither he nor his handlers are, as is said in polite society, deep thinkers. The bad news is that the lazy, bloated, sugar-daddied-up remnants of what was once an aggressive, independent media has neither the inclination or motive to actually call him on some of the fruitcake nonsense that dribbles off of his shriveled old lips. Today, for example, McCain confidently announced that the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis was caused by congressional budgetary earmarks...

Sorry, old boy, but, no, it wasn't...

There's only a couple of ways to go here. Either ol' Maverick's handlers aren't well-read, or think we aren't well-read, or they're stupid, or they think we are stupid. The correct answer is most likely (E) All of the Above. It is true that, for professional reasons, I know a bit about various types of bridges while Huggy Bear McCain is constantly cursed with grappling over that whole hole-in-the-ground/anal orifice dilemma, but none of this is very hard. The I-35W bridge most likely collapsed from a design flaw that combined underdesigned gusset plates (the connector points that ties the steel girders together) with a lack of failure-protection redundancy in the structure. All the money in the world and time would not have fixed this problem, even if the Senate and House chambers were knee-deep in unspent $100 dollar bills because of the lack of a devious, underhanded, corrupt (at least according to Huggy Maverick) budgetary device like earmarks...

While the airwaves are stuffed with commentary about Hillary's sensitivity to sniper fire and Barack's choice of pastors, John McCain is getting away with verbal homicide and receiving a free pass from the MSM on a host of issues that range from being just as stupidly meaningless to immeasurably more important to the fate of our country. What worries me the most is whether the eventual nominee will have the stones to go after Ol' Maverick on these strange pronouncements of his. Lord knows the MSM won't...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:19 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Like Shooting Fish In An Oil Barrel 

...Gee Dub decided, for reasons that can only be clear to White House insiders, to dash out onto the South Lawn today to spread that special kind of mystifying fairie dust that only his handlers have really been able to collect in usable quantities. Today's subject: how he feels your pain over energy prices and how it's all the Democrats' fault. It was a remarkable performance, making one harken back to the months before the launching of his Great Iraq Nation-Building Adventure when every appearance was packed with enough lies, prevarications, misstatements and raw untruths to destroy any meaningful understanding of "the bully pulpit". One of the most fascinating aspects of his...er...performance, mostly because the American Public Media radop program "Marketplace" decided to roll him up in a stale Zig Zag paper and smoke him down to the nub, was his fantasy-tinged evaluation of the current crisis of gasoline costs...

No reason to trust me on this; nobody who slithers around the intertubes calling himself 'the Grumpy Forester' probably should be independently trusted on issues of economics. On the other hand, this is the main gig of the "Marketplace" gang, so Let's Go To The Replay, Bob:

First, Preznit Chimpylips...
One of the main reasons for high gas prices is that global oil production is not keeping up with growing demand.

Now, leading industry analyst Barbara Shook...
The U.S. market is well supplied. Do you see anybody waiting in line at the filling station?

OK, so maybe Gee Dub, given his rather pedestrian grades at that expensive Ivy League university, partied through all those econ classes. It's understandable; I hated econ courses myself. We should give him another chance:
Another reason for the high gas prices is the lack of refining capacity. It's been more than 30 years since America built it's last new refinery.

...replies aforementioned expert Shook:
We're expanding refining capacity in this country. We have probably more than half a million barrels of new refining capacity per day under construction right now and I wouldn't be surprised to see another 100,000 barrels per day of new capacity announced in the next six months to a year.

OK, so that would leave a mark...if the person lying were a Democrat and the MSM were actually playing fair, but that particular tramp steamer sailed a long time ago...

The rest is there in the transcript to read, and there is more. Senior business correspondent Bob Moon fills in some of the other blanks sitting behind Gee Dub's misrepresentations of supply, demand, and causal relationships and even a casual listern would feel compelled to ask the question "so what the hell else did that adlepated carbon sink lie about today?". It was another in a far-too-long and far-too-disgusting series of remarkable performances by a person who clearly wasn't suitable for the job of leader of "the World's only Superpower" seven and a half long years ago and who clearly never had the capacity to grow into the job...

Tracking down and refuting the lies is becoming so simple and easy a game that putative journalists who actually want to spend a few quality minutes actually engaging in the art rather than trying to claw their way onto cable TV opinion programs can finish up that little bit of work, file the story, and have the rest of the day off. The only issue that really remains for the historians to sort out is whether there ever became a point where Bushco figured out that it didn't really matter how much or how often it lied to the American people...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:12 PM 0 comments

Monday, April 28, 2008

Alice In Gitmo-Land 

...there will no doubt be those who will profess to be shocked, shocked that the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo would actually take the stand to testify that tribunal prosecutions of the supposed terrorists held there were "tainted" by the interference of high-ranking military personnel and political appointees and evidence collected through torture, but - like Captain Renault, you can bet with pretty good odds that they are lying. As was also demonstrated by the remarkable display of situational ethics displayed in a letter from Deputy Assitant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski to my own Senator Ron Wyden - we have one more morsel of evidence that demonstrates that the Bush administration has willfully chosen to operate in some sort of morally vacant space that is so far removed from any common understanding of international law that nobody who stood by and tolerated this total meat-axed departure from anything we thought actually made us Americans will play hell trying to justify to either his or her grandchildren or to historians the cold, stony silence that facilitated the crimes committed in our names...

"Alice in Wonderland" long ago began to look like an apt metaphor for Bushco's whole War On Terra, but now we seem to have slipped all the way over the ledge from 'literary nonsense' to literal nonsense, both in terms of the story and in terms of its coverage. The headline is that the man who was once in charge of the prosecution reveals that the Trial of the Knave of Hearts was a model of jurisprudence compared to what is coming down the track for the prisoners of a Bush administration that apparently feels that kangaroo court convictions serve some higher political purpose than achieving actual justice. Just as important, and as has been the case for the last couple of weeks, this continual drumbeat of stories is being swallowed up and obliterated like the understory in a forest fire by the continual obsession with what seems to be the Barack/Hillary/Bill/Reverend Wright/elitism continuum...

We are being plunged down into the king hell of rabbit holes and we won't be finding our way out anytime soon, for reasons that probably can't ever be adequately explained to whatever unborn generations that may follow to take our place and wouldn't be excused by them in any case, if any glimmer of decency or the sense of who we used to be can be transmitted down history's wires. All we can do is eat Alice's strange mushrooms and hope that it will let us get beyond this twisted nightmare that Gee Dub and his handlers, fixers, and wet-work men have visited upon us...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:50 PM 0 comments

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