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

Friday, June 27, 2008

Pots And Kettles, General Campaign Edition 

...given the fact that he is all over the map on the subjects of 'what he believed when' and what constitutes 'respectful discourse', a significant part of the foundation of Maverick McCain's campaign strategy is becoming clear. Aside from harping constantly on what his handlers hope will be perceived as Obama's 'flip-flopper' nature - despite McCain's own weakness in this particular venue when it comes to torture, immigration, off-shore drilling, support for veterans, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a few other issues - Huggy Bear's campaign is going to feature the ploy of trying to stifle the Obama campaign's ability to criticize McBush in any way. This ploy features tired repetition of Maverick's promise to run an honest respectful campaign focusing on the issues instead of sinking to the level of his much respected but much less respectful extremely youthful and untested Democratic opponent...

It would be a clever ploy were it not for the twin facts that McCain's campaign is a hapless mess that only exists because his opponents were either stone rockin' nuts or members of the wrong religion for the fundy base and that he is only getting by now because the SO-CALLED-LIBERAL-MEDIA - primarily white, primarily male, demonstrably swimming in the shallow end of the analytical pool, and totally enthralled by Top Gun Right Stuff-ness and the opportunity of being perceived as part of the Kool Kids clique - has mostly cast it's vote for who it wants to have a beer with, especially if that beer-quaffing were to take place around the barbeque pit at what we little people laughably call McCain's "cabin" in Sedona, Arizona. Aided and abetted by the profound faux-journalistic silence of the analytic side of the SCLM, this main "respectiness" gambit is getting coverage, if not traction, that it simply doesn't deserve. Today we find that Huggy Bear is miffed....dare I say disappointed!!...at Obama's suggestion that a McCain presidency would roll back half a century of gains for women's rights. Apparently in their desperate scrambling effort to make it look like the campaign has a clue, Huggy Bear's minions and handlers have somehow misplaced that critical sheet of paper containing the commonly understood definitions of social politics buzz-words...

Aside from the root simple fact that ol' Maverick, despite all of his presidential campaign flip-flopping on the subject over the last 8 years, has been a rock-solid reliable opponent of abortion as well as any sort of family planning that even hints that it may include discussion about abortion, his profound disappointment at Obama's comments shows how Huggy Bear wants to try to play the game (with, of course, the full cooperation of any members of the SCLM that ever want to cross the city limits of Sedona again on his dime). Barack Obama, in this interesting construct, is being deceitful, disrespectful, nay...even cowardly in a way that a war hero would never be, all because he is saying bad things about that Great American Hero and Fellow Senator. In the real world, the problem is that this approach suffers at the hands of Huggy's own statements. He has slammed Obama for wanting to go back to the "failed" energy policies of Jimmy Carter (which are code words of the first order for conservatives of a certain age). He has accused Obama of being a cowardly islolationist in the area of NAFTA and free trade. He raked Obama over the coals in front of AIPAC for a callow, cowardly willingness to actually talk with Iran rather than bombing them back to the Bronze age. He called Obama little more than a draft dodger or - even more hated to the sort of front-line combat troops that McCain clearly can't identify with - a REMF for actually questioning Huggy Bear's eminently questionable and absurdly reasoned objection to an improvement of veteran's benefits that Jim Webb - a fellow Senator with a far better sense of what today's troops are going through than anything McCain could ever understand regardless of his time as a POW - passionately supports. He has constantly talked down to and denigrated Obama over the whole idea of actually talking to hostile foreign leaders, indicating that he doesn't apparently get that whole "Nixon goes to China" thing.

John McCain starts every day by announcing that he will run a "respectful" campaign focusing on the issues, then launches into a series of assaults stating in understandable but mumbled tones - speckled with enough "my friends" verbal ticks to drive even the most casual absolutely loco-weed crazy - that his "likely" general campaign opponent is probably not to be trusted to independently to cart the cans out to the curb on garbage pick-up day. After completing this little bit of slander, he snatches up a sheet of paper containing the prepared denouncement of the disrespectful nature of Obama's truthful pronouncement of the day, today's denouncement being the 'totally outrageous' claim that Huggy bear's long-standing objection to a woman's right to have some say over her body and ol' Maverick's own clear statements that the most conservative opponents to women's rights on the US Supreme Court are the precise mold from which he would cast his future nominees as
president somehow represent rolling back women's rights by half a century...

What Obama said about the potential result of a third Bush term on women's rights was the truth. Many of the things that ol' Maverick has said about Obama are at best drivel and at worst typical Republican slander. One of McCain's root campaign tactics is becoming clear, however, as he tries to enlist the SCLM in his effort to make any honest comparison of positions by Obama look like heartless attacks on A True American Hero undeserving of such scurrilous attack while his own obscene, debased trash-talk passes without comment. This tactic can't be called ironic, because irony usually presumes a lack this degree of calculation. It is nothing more that the pot flinging deprecations at the kettle, aided by a cooperative media...

Sedona is a lovely place to visit, after all....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:13 PM 0 comments

Thursday, June 26, 2008

When We Were Good Guys 

...I'm suffering a bit from outrage overload tonight and I just don't want to think about all the bad crap for a little while. What I have decided to think about is those times back before the Republican party managed to get its hands on all the levers and make it necessary to travel abroad with a handsome supply of "I'm From Canada"-themed apparel. One of those times officially commenced - with not very much anniversary fanfare, I notice - 60 years and two days ago with the commencement of the effort to break the Soviet blockade of Berlin with an airlift of critically-needed humanitarian supplies...

What I really want to think about tonight is "Uncle Wigglywings" and "Operation Little Vittles", which began with a bit of insubordination by Air Force C-54 pilot Gail Halvorson. His commanding officer, displaying the sort of hide-bound conservatism that is readily recognizable to anyone who has worked in either civilian or military organizations, was tremendously displeased by the publicity of Halvorson's little operation, but airlift commander Lt. General William H. Tunner found it to be a wonderful stroke of business and encouraged an expansion of Halvorson's 'candy bombing'...

The historical importance of Halvorson's actions have slipped out of the American memory bank, to the point that a gently nudging reminder needed to be administered this morning on NPR. In Germany, however, he is something of a national hero. Operation "Little Vittles" may have been, at root, a big-time propaganda campaign, but Col. Halvorson didn't start doing what he was doing because of that, nor did the thousands of Americans who contributed to the operation do so for propaganda reasons. They did it because that's what citizens of the United States did, just because, without consideration of motives. That spirit is still common at a lot of places on the ground in the United States today, but it isn't who we are perceived to be as a nation anymore....so, just for tonight, I want to reflect back with fond wistfulness back on the days when it was...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:51 PM 0 comments

Crop Rotation In Space 

...I've always thought space exploration was a cool thing, even if it was spidery robotic minions doing the work rather than the sort of space men that I always wanted to be when I was growing up. So I'm just a stone cold sucker for headlines like this: "Martian soil good enough for asparagus: NASA"...

Maybe they can grow corn, too, or possibly switchgrass! The key to American energy independence may lay only a few months of space travel away!!

Yes, I know that there are many other splendid uses that the money spent getting the 'Phoenix' lander to Mars could have been applied to. Today, though, given the fact that the Senate just sent a $162 Billion funding measure for Iraq and Afghanistan to Gee Dub for signature - once again without any sort of "carrot and stick" incentives for the hopeless Iraqi leadership to get off the dime and get beyond traditional gripes and personal quest for power, I'm not really in all that cooperative mood for discussions about the use of taxpayers' money...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:29 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Sometimes There Are No Words 

...it is almost impossible to measure the degree to which the United States has slipped over the edge into the dark, strange 'banana republic/Soviet client/evil dictatorship' world that my grandfathers and father fought to defend their children and grandchildren from being subject to. They would be disappointed beyond the capability of words to explain their surprise at the direct expression of the current administration of its right to eavesdrop on American lawyers just because it says it can, without recourse and without explanation of just what exactly it was looking for...

We are being forced to throw away what were once commonly understood to be well-established civil liberties for no particularly good reason. The Bad Guys wanted us to draw back within ourselves, be fearful and feel less free, and have a tremendously reduced influence in the world. The score on Gee Dub's Great War On Terra is just in: the terrorists have taken the match on a score of 1 - nil. They are winning...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:04 PM 0 comments

Monday, June 23, 2008

Obama vs. Dobson: The Battle Of The Lay Titans 

...there is no disputing that James Dobson is a powerful voice in the fundamentalist religious community. There is also no disputing that he is anything but a singular voice for Christianity as a whole. Dobson has started a fight that he may somewhere down the line wish he hadn't, challenging another member of the laity who has as much right as does Mr. Dobson to express his own views of Christianity and its place in society...

What Mr. Dobson doesn't understand is that there are a lot of people that have the right to consider themselves to be just as Christian as he fancies himself who have grown tired of the sad, embarrassing act that Dobson and his own strange gang of latter-day Pharisees been strutting across the national political stage over the last two decades. These supposed 'leaders' have managed to drive the discussion of social politics down to the lowest possible level so that the only things that apparently matter to Christians are abortion and gay marriage. It's not true; it's never been true, but the simple message - and the lack of the SCLM to be able to understand nuance in a story - has poisoned political discourse so completely that Christians who want to talk about other things like social justice and stewardship of the earth and taking care of the poor and not launching wars of choice that kill people for no better reason than that they were in the way - you know, the sorts of things that Jesus might have talked about or Paul may have written about - are drowned out in the tidal wave of a strange conflation of raw far-right bootstrap Republican conservatism and the specific application of Levitical "rule of law" to Christianity as a belief...

Obama has responded and it looks that he got the tone right, even though the FAUX "news" network will probably run up big bills maintaining a full-time medical staff over the next few days to treat commentators overcome by apoplexy. Such a response to Obama's "in your face" reply to Dobson's criticism would be understandable; FAUX news doesn't seem to be a haven for deep thinkers in any case, and the fact that there are dozens of Christian denominations that disagree on certain fundamental theological principles would probably slip by them as easily as it has slipped by Dobson. The existence of this particular website, in itself, demonstrates that people who want to step out front to be religious commentators without the benefit of any evidence in the biographical record that suggests actual formal theological training are living on a steeply inclined and slippery slope...

This is a battle that Dr. Dobson would have been well advised to avoid. While it might energize the fundy Pharisee base to grit its teeth and vote for McCain, those of us who have grown increasingly sick and tired of being smeared with the taint of being associated with the twisted and theologically vacuous world view of the fundy "religious" right may well just offset any presumed political advantage that the once supposedly powerful "religious" right thought it had. That sort of social change can't come soon enough...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:18 PM 0 comments

Sunday, June 22, 2008

BREAKING NEWS: McCain Goes To Church 

...why this is even a story totally escapes me. The fact that John McCain actually simply went to church, sat and stood as necessary, and left afterward seems to be a strikingly unremarkable event, given that millions of us do it every Sunday. All I can guess is that either it is an uncommon thing for McCain to do or that it is an effort on someone's part to try to play to that famous evangelical base...

Given the weekend's other news that young evangelicals are walking away from identification with the Republican party in multitudes like those the Gospels describe turning out to see Jesus and that one mainstream poll is showing a surprising separation between Obama and McCain, regular - and devout, attentive, and prayerful - church attendance may be The Maverick's only hope. Adhering to the recent exploitative traditions of the Republican party may not do the trick, especially if the mere act of entering God's house is a newsworthy event...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:53 PM 0 comments

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