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

Saturday, May 31, 2008

Ginning Up A Plan B 

...now that the grasping maw of the media spew machine has been so amply fed with the embarrassing spectacle of the Democratic Party Rules Committee holding court in public and recordable sessions to address the disposition of the Florida and Michigan primary elections, it's time for Plan B. With the made-for-commercial "McCain, McCain" chants of Clinton supporters still echoing down those mean D.C. streets, we liberals are now faced with the difficult prospect of trying to figure out how to maintain the sort of heated fervor that will sustain the defeat of as many Republican incumbents or "chosen ones" tapped to try to hold Republican congressional seats as possible to blunt the hopes and dreams of a McCain White House...

Today's Rules Committee meeting suggested in a pretty strong, "in your face" way that the people involved in various campaigns seeking the Democratic presidental nomination are far too focused on winning the wrong contest, probably for all the wrong reasons. From what I saw of the live coverage of the meeting, the old Will Rogers observation of not belonging to an organized political party is as relevant today as it was way back then in the days between the two world wars. Democrats seem, one more time, to be ready to go to the mat in ways that will piss off sufficient numbers of one constituency or another to guarantee that any obvious sure-bet chance of winning the presidency of just six months ago will be squandered....

The Democratic presidential nomination contest has become some strange sort of "Waiting for Godot" moment that doesn't seem to suggest that it will end any better than the original. Veto-proof congressional majorities may be the only refuge in the coming storm. The challenge will be trying to come up with some reason to energize all those Democrats who turned out all over the nation in such record-breaking numbers to come out in November despite the fact that their preferred presidential candidate isn't leading the ticket. The importance of the upcoming election is being drowned out by all the Clinton/Obama noise, and it's time for the Democratic leadership to come up with a Plan B to make sure that dissatisfaction with Republican leadership is addressed, regardless of the outcome of the presidential nomination campaign....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:40 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

By Their Caterwauling Yea Shall Know Them 

...one of the most clearly understood tendancies of the failed Bush administration has been the vicious vehemence with which it attacks those critics who have been carving too close to the bone. Hasn't mattered whether it was a long-time foe or former friend, any commentary that has painted this useless band of hacks as anything but the very best and most true-blue group to ever run the Executive Branch of the Federal Government has been attacked with a ruthless zeal that would put a pack of timber wolves to shame. The most clearly understood truth about these attacks has been that the amount of heated vitriol directed toward the critic is usually directly proportional to the amount of truth in the criticism. And so, today we have Scott McClellan...

If a national-level pundit or an A-List blogger had written a book saying the things that Scottie is revealed to have written in his new memoir, the sound of crickets emanating from the White House would have been maddening. But Scottie has clearly touched a nerve, and the echoing blare of the klaxton alarms in the West Wing hallways must have even startled the street people and pushers across the street. Given all we have learned about the particular psychopathy of the Bush administration and its enablers and hangers-on, today's response to the released excerpts from McClellan's book suggest that he's probably hit pretty close to the bullseye...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:50 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Why Elections Matter More Than Personal Grievances 

...there has been WAY more talk than necessary over the last few months on the Democratic side of the primary campaign about who was going to do what if one candidate or another didn't get his or her just reward by being tagged to be the Democratic candidate for President Of The United States. Some of that conversation, early on, was important and necessary; some of it wasn't, but that doesn't matter so much as the depths to which that conversation has sunk. We liberals have fetched up on a strange, ugly piece of shoal water from which the most ardent supporters of the two leading Democratic candidates have struggled ashore to declare that they will either sit on their hands in the disquieting comfort of their homes on Election Day or vote for an odd aging golem who has yet to find - even in the turbulent endgame phase of a life of cheap compromise, confused morality, and self-serving "independence" on issues of little import out at some meaningless margin - any sort of moral anchor that would suggest to any thinking person that he was some sort of legitimate choice to be what we used to call The Leader Of The Free World back in the day before George W. Bush made a mockery of that concept...

The Supreme Court of The United States did us the courtesy today of giving us a couple of little wake-up calls. While McCain has made it well-known in recent months that he considers Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Alito to be the perfect models for a member of the Supreme Court, he probably felt a rare moment of being stabbed in the back by their traitorous support in this particular instance of the concept of stare decisis, leaving him with only his two previous rave-fave buddies Antonin Scalia and Clarance Thomas to uphold the rock-ribbed social conservative principle of judicial activism for a meaningful right-wing cause. For all of his talk about Roberts and Alito being what he considers the "perfect" SCOTUS candidates, McCain's heart resides in the frigid comfort of jusists like Scalia and Thomas who will happily overturn all those long depressing years of wacky left-wing Supreme Court decisions that dared to favor the little guy. Today's rulings, being something of an outlier in the pursuit of Republican causes, must be a bit jarring for the old boy...

Today's rulings are a fortuituous anomoly for most of the rest of us. The odd facts of Justice Alito siding with the traditionally liberal viewpoint in both cases and Chief Justice Roberts going off in an entirely different direction about federal protections in one of the cases repudiate - in their entirety - the sort of long-term right-wing construction of personal rights that John McCain has insisted he believes and represents. He is unlikely to make the same mistake twice and, if he makes it to the White House, will make sure that the mold from which his SCOTUS nominees will be the reliable sort of Scalia/Thomas clones who will carry his peculiar view of American life far into the future....

There is a strong, profound teaching moment here for anyone who wants to go to the mat over the Democratic presidential nomination. Roberts and Alito may be John McCain's flavors of the month, but what he is really looking for is a Scalia/Thomas model who is willing to overthrow long-established case law. Staying home on Election Day or willingly voting for McCain because your candidate didn't get the Democratic nomination directly facilitates that outcome. The potential outcome of either of those calculations will matter more for a much longer period of years than either of your candidates would have spent in the White House. It's time to grow up and think about how elections can matter...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:19 PM 0 comments

Sunday, May 25, 2008

On The Passing Of A Northwestern Legend 

...there are plenty enough names that came out of the Pacific Northwest that are readily known by people throughout the United States - if not the world. Everybody knows about Bill Gates and Microsoft; most people may not know the human names, but everybody knows about Starbucks; some people may know Phil Knight's name, but - again - everybody knows about Nike; and then there are the Safeway and Albertsons grocery stores that started in southern Idaho. On the other hand, one of the most influential companies in the Pac NW you've probably never heard of, even though the odds are pretty good that you have consumed some of the products it produced, is the J. R. Simplot company...

John Richard Simplot, who died today, is probably the main reason that Idaho's license plates have had the phrase "Famous Potatoes" so famously or infamously stamped into their lower margin for longer than the half century that I have been alive. Coming from humble beginnings, he rose to a position of economic and political influence in Idaho and in the world beyond the Intermountain West that may not even be clearly understood for years to come. Simplot never mattered that much in the relatively sparsly-populated northern part of Idaho where I grew up, but he was a giant in the southern portion of the state and his company eventually acquired an outsized influence in a tri-state region so vast that it would easily overlay a map of several East Coast states...

J.R. Simplot was a precursor to Gates, Knight, and Starbucks' Howard Schultz . He was a significant actor on America's stage back in a day when America didn't even know it had a stage to be on...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:48 PM 0 comments

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