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

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

¿Puede Usted Ahora Oírme? 

...as the not-quite-yet-but-pretty-darned-near general election campaign between Barack Obama and the Ol' Maverick John McCain has started to heat up, many shots have been traded across both bows. Over the last couple of days, Cuba has become the landscape on which another strange verbal battle has been waged, with Huggy Bear McCain claiming that Obama's willingness to engage in actual diplomacy is a sign of weakness if not outright incompetence while Obama pointed out - not in so many words, obviously, since he wisely doesn't want to be branded a DFH - that all that "officer and gentleman" crap that McCain was exposed to at Annapolis was clearly wasted on the lowest one percent of McCain's graduating class (which, of course, included Huggy Bear himself). All of this is understandable when viewed within the traditional framework of the idea that "as goes Florida's Cuban-American voters, so goes Florida"...

Today, the strangeness ramped up a bit as Gee Dub, in yet another ham-fisted effort to drag some twisted burnt-out shell of White House relevance into the debate, decided to call some imagined bluff by new Cuban Raúl Castro to allow personal ownership of mobile phones. Fortunately, given the diplomatic history of the Bush administration, there isn't any need to suffer through some unfortunate bout of cognitive dissonance over this latest move. This isn't an episode of United States diplomacy; it is merely an example of Bushco diplomacy offered, as usual, as a means to some local personal end rather than as a means to some end that matters to the citizens of the nation or the world at large...

The state-level relationship (or, more properly, the lack thereof) between the United States and Cuba stands as one of the truly glaring diplomatic failures of the last half century. We are a nation that made at least an uncomfortable peace with the former Soviet Union and China, and yet we as a nation have never been able to come to any sort of grip with a small island nation off the Florida coast for almost half a century for reasons that have everything to do with politics and nothing to do with statecraft. All or part of Thirteen Presidental Terms Of Office have been consumed with containing the dire prospect of the subversion of our entire way of life by exposure to an evil risk of societal destruction brought to our shores through the insidious threat of the Cuba Libre...

International relations, as practiced by Bushco, has been an abject failure that has left the citizens of the United States at more personal danger both at home and abroad than any reasonable person could have predicted on a cold January morning in 2000. The blustery "in-your-face" political calculations that informed Bushco seem to be the framework for the approach that Huggy Bear wants to bring to...or maybe the better turn of phrase is "continue"... in the White House. Now it's cell phones, and you can almost see "Big Dick" Cheney personally planning the bombing runs for air assets that have been tasked with dropping Cluster Bomb Units loaded with MOTORAZR's across that disturbingly innocent downtrodden Cuban landscape...

In poll after poll, the American people have been saying for some time now that they aren't pleased with the way things are going aren't happy about our Grand Iraq Nation-building adventure, aren't happy about the general direction the nation is traveling and aren't really down at all with 'staying the course'. If you dig deeper, you find that U.S. citizens as a rule don't like playing the role of self-assigned 'toughest guy in the bar'. Huggy Bear has decided that that's the way he wants to roll, especially on this issue that he perceives to be so critical Cuban-Americans that are his 'base' in Florida, even though 49 and a half years of experience demonstrate that his way doesn't work, and now his 'mentor' and 'best friend' has decided get into the action by engaging in the moral equivalent of flying a squadron of B-52's through the middle of a May Day Parade at the Kremlin...

The question in the title, in Spanish, is "Can you hear me now?". As far as Bush and McCain are concerned, the answer in any language is "NO"...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:52 PM 0 comments

Monday, May 19, 2008

The Mad Rush To The End Of A Mad Season 

...as the sun slips away behind the crest of the Oregon Cascade Range out the window to my right, the last day that mattered in what has been a truly wild and unprecedented primary campaign season is finally drawing to an end. All of the empty quiet that crept over Michigan and Florida, two states that usually do matter in the presidential candidate selection process, has been replaced in spades by a frenzy of Democratic campaigning in a state that hasn't mattered for 40 years. But the circus has packed up and left town, because ballots need to be in to the tiny little collection trailers that will be littering library parking lots all across the state by 8 p.m. tomorrow and - given another one of those quirky aspects of Orygun life - a large number of votes have already been cast...

It has been a crazy time and the supporters for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been treated to opportunities to turn out in support of their candidates in ways that this nondescript, usually overlooked state on the upper left-hand corner of the continental map may not see again for another couple of generations. Conventional wisdom would have normally dictated that Democratic candidates would confine themselves to Portland and the Willamette Valley, a region nestled between the Coast Range and the Cascades wherein reside the majority of reliable Democratic voters. That hasn't been the case this season. While all the recent buzz is about Obama's amazing Portland appearance this weekend at Tom McCall Waterfront Park on the west bank of the Willamette River on a spectacular Orygun day in front of 60 to 75 thousand people in what looked like a made-for-campaign-ad scene that probably made the Chamber of Commerce faint with delight but caused the rest of us to scream "Turn it Off!@!! Turn. It. Off!@!@!!" (just to protect our selfish way of life), the truly amazing aspect of this last few weeks has been what was going on over here on what is called the East Side....

The Eastern 2/3rd's of the Beaver State is reliably considered to be Red State territory. There have actually been gubernatorial campaigns where the eventual Democratic winner didn't even make campaign appearances east of the Cascade Crest and one would be hard-pressed to find an elected Democrat in any local, regional or state-level office in this place where I live. All of that has been turned on its head this year, though; candidates and surrogates have been popping up in all sorts of unlikely places mining for Democratic presidential primary votes and have turned out numbers that in all likelihood make various Republican party county officials sleep less comfortably at night. Obama came to Bend and filled a high school gym with over 2000 people - and it could have been twice that many if space had allowed, given the number of people who lined up for blocks trying to get free tickets to the event; Hillary and Bill have pulled that many and more in other Central Oregon locations; Barack brought 3000 to a venue in Pendleton in northeastern Orygun, which in itself is a truly astounding number, given that there are barely more people who even live within an hour's high speed drive of that community than showed up in Portland on Sunday...

It has truly been a crazy primary season in this forgotten little corner of the world that is better known for sports apparel and 'death with dignity' laws than it is for politics. The best part, for those of us who are iconoclastic Orygonians through and through (even if we aren't native-born to this state), is that tomorrow night - as far as the battalions of cable news talking heads assembled to "analyze" the results of this primary day are concerned - we are a black hole. Election coverage and "calling the winner" are usually based on exit polls in 'normal' states where people flock to churches, school gyms, libraries, and county court houses to cast their votes. We don't do that here; we quite literally mail it in or - in the case of lazy procrastinators like me - we drop our ballots off at collection points prior to the bewitching hour. There are no exiters to poll; the results are in the count of the ballots, not in the views of voters leaving the voting site. As far as the primary vote in Orygun is concerned for the phalanxes of chitterers on cable network news, there is nothing to do but drum impatient fingers on the desk and fill the air with a degree of inane banter heretofore unseen on America's TV screens while the vote count scrolls inexorably on...

"It's not a bug; it's a feature"...

Bill Clinton has been within 50 miles of the keyboard on which I am now typing more times than he was in the entire state during his presidency; Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been to places in this state that George W. Bush couldn't find on a map with help from a host of handlers; any one of them has set foot on the east side of the Orygun Cascades in the last month more times than John McCain has been in this entire State in his entire life. This madness is about to end, however; by tomorrow's sunset, Oregon will once again slip back into the shadows to become little more than another North Dakota except for the coastline and less extreme winter weather and more outdoor recreation and more famous recreational exercise and outdoor clothing manufacturers. But, with all due respect to the angry voters in Michigan and Florida, it was nice for us out here to matter for once...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:33 PM 0 comments

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Another Hard Day On That "Winning Hearts And Minds" Front 

...the headline says about as much as needs to be said: US soldier removed from Iraq for shooting at Quran...

Apologizing in a case like this only works if:

A) you are correct in assuming that the target audience for your apology is a sufficiently simple group that it does not understand that your heartfelt mea culpa is more a desperate attempt to keep the lid on a situation that could spin wildly out of control in a heartbeat more than it is part of a plan to make sure that your occupying force treats that audience with the sort of decency and respect that you would expect your occupying force to extend toward a region dominated by - say - Methodists...

...or...

B) you don't assume that target audience is that simple and you create a highly visible zero-tolerance policy with equally highly-visible punishment for anyone who has been identified showing this sort of stark disrespect for the religion of the occupied citizens...

All in all, not a a very good week in our efforts to "win hearts and minds"...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:54 PM 0 comments

Lightening The Lobbyist Load On The Straight Talk Express 

...there certainly must be getting to be a lot of room to stretch out on the Ol' Maverick's "Straight Talk Express" these days, now that the sheer embarrassing weight of all those lobbyists running his campaign has finally been revealed. Today Former Texas Rep. Thomas G. Loeffler today added his name to the list of newly-minted "former" advisors and staffers sprawled in the ditch watching McCain's incessantly blinking rear left turn signal recede into the distance. Loeffler is a particular favorite for anyone in the country who gets a paycheck that has "Boeing" printed across the top, because his company did a lot of the heavy lifting for the European aircraft manufacturer EADS in its successful effort to defeat Boeing in the hugely lucrative air refueling tanker competition in which his good friend John McCain figured so prominently...

The point isn't so much that the heat got too bad for McCain and forced him to get rid of all of his insider lobbyist BFF's. The point is that he was either too comped-up or too comfortable with the way things are expected to work for top-rung power merchants like himself to even begin to understand early on that all his self-promoted iconoclastic Mavericky-ness was going to be a problem when people finally realized that you couldn't walk into a McCain campaign staff meeting swinging a dead muskrat without wacking some moke in the puss whose pockets are all stretched out of shape from packing those thick cash-stuffed envelopes up and down the halls of D.C. Power...

This is the appearance of 'making things right' and nothing else. It's just another cheap political dodge by a guy who has built a lengthy but largely unknow record of cheap political dodges. McCain isn't responding to some late realization that all these people around him were the poster children for what's rotten in D.C.; he's responding to the late realization that there may be some sort of problem, a certain difficulty that is just beyond his capability to grasp but one that seems to stir up negative emotions out there amongst the little people. This is another glimpse into the heart of what hopefully will never become a McCain presidency. He represents four more years of the country being for sale to the highest bidder, with little regard for the consequences for the vast majority of us who don't have the wherewithal to get into the game. We have enough experience already, one would think, with how that all works out....
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:07 PM 0 comments

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