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

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Shooting 'Em In The Streets 

...I'm not sure what I am supposed to do with today's reflexive spasm of terror-fear offered up by the White House over the Supreme Court decision regarding Guantanamo detainees' legal rights. We have been assured that Gee Dub "strongly disagrees" with the USOC decision, but so what? The scenario offered up by Dana Perino today, presumably at the behest of her masters, of scraggly-bearded Islamofascists wandering the streets of America laden down with assault rifles, suicide bomb vests, and large duffle bags stuffed full of nuclear bombs or vials of chemical or biological agents may certainly be gripping for that segment of the US population that has been suspiciously eying every non-native gardener, food server, and motel maid since 9/11, anxiously waiting for that one deadly false move, but it doesn't provide any sort of meaningful guidance for us sane people...

Anybody who has been paying attention for the last few years understands that the legacy of the Bush presidency won't be all about some sort of heroic effort to battle the evil forces of terrorism but instead will be a case study in the use of fear-based propaganda to attempt to control the behavior of an entire nation. Yet, and still, Gee Dub's thoroughly discredited and totally failed administration feels no particular compunction about going back to the well one (hopefully) last time, trying to convince us that a Constitutionally-authorized, independent, separate branch of the Federal Government has failed in its responsibility to the country. In other places across the globe, such a strident and continuous objection to a decision by the supreme judicial authority in the nation would be a precursor to some sort of coup d’état (for reference, see: Pakistan)...

Gee Dub can object to the SCOTUS decision as strongly as he wishes. It doesn't really matter at the intellectual level, given that fact that he has no personal legal training and has tended to surround himself with legal beagles who clearly haven't absorbed any meaningful mainstream legal training themselves, even though they may be called 'legal counsel' or 'lawyer' or some other officious-sounding legal-sounding title. What matters is that a core foundational block of the system that makes us who we are said he and his are full of crap; he has responded by sending Perino out to the press room podium to speculate wildly about dangerous Islamofascist agents of Terra strolling the streets of God-fearing Middle America, killing our friends and neighbors at will because of a misguided, naive reliance of the US Constitution...

One can only assume from Perino's statements today that the rule of law doesn't set well with this administration. Apparently, according to the White House, we need to come to grips with the fact that the inability of the Bush administration to actually demonstrated a legal verifiable danger presented by some of the Gitmo detainees still suggests that there is a dire threat to the public because of some ephemeral risk that we are too stupid to understand. According to the White House Spokesperson, we are at risk of fighting for seats on the Metro bus with people who are looking for ways to kill us all in our beds if only the transit schedule would allow stops in all of our front yards. Clearly, in the eyes of Bushco as expressed by Perino, our only hope in the face of this strange abdication by the SCOTUS of its responsibility to protect us from waves of suddenly-released Gitmo detainees is to celebrate our Second Amendment rights and buy up as many firearms and boxes of ammo as federal law allows and start shooting them in the streets before they can do something bad to us...

Fearmongering. It's what's for dinner at the White House...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:05 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Thad Cochran Didn't Want To Be VP Anyway 

...it is said - oh, Lord, how often it is said - that Barack Obama suffers from the fact that the American people don't know him. That may be true and, if it is, it says some scary things about the state of the American electorate more than anything else, given the wall-to-wall primary coverage over the last eighteen months. What isn't said much, but would be equally true were it to be said more often, is that the American people don't know John McCain. The American people really don't know all that much about John McCain aside from the thumbnail offered up by the SCLM (he's a Maverick and an Heroic POW), and one of the things they don't know about is his monumentally volcanic temper. Ironically, today along comes fellow Republican US Senator Thad Cochran to "help" his presumptive party nominee and colleague by relating a story about McCain almost provoking an international incident by manhandling a Sandinista official during a diplomatic mission to Nicaragua in 1987...

The good news for Huggy Bear is that Cochran simply has the best interests of the party and his quest for the presidency at heart, despite their past conflicts over the subject of budgetary earmarks and Cochran's ruminations about a McCain presidency earlier this year:
'The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.'

Bygones can be bygones, eh? Bury the hatchet and all that. Cochran insists that he merely recounting this story from two decades ago to demonstrate how the Ol' Maverick has grown, mellowed, and matured over the years. I know I'm certainly glad, if the Senator is correct, that McCain has outgrown a predilection for hurling foreign government officials around the room. Such behavior would make a hash of any future G-8 summits and would no doubt make Angela Merkel reflect on unsolicited neckrubs with something akin to fondness...

The less good news for Huggy Bear is that his penchant for wild petulance is once again creeping into the news stream, where he and his minions have to deny a) that the episode ever happened, 2) that he has a vicious temper, and III) that he plans on kicking the Honorable Senator from Mississippi's wrinkled lying white butt up and down the marbled halls of Congress at the first available opportunity. Senator Cochran should be saluted, though, for reassuring the voting public that John McCain has mastered his once-uncontrollable temper. He should take advantage of every possible opportunity at as big a microphone as he can find to continue to reassure the American people that John McCain hasn't totally blown out at anyone in quite some time...well, at least not recently...as far as Cochran knows. We deserve to be frequently reassured about the level-headedness of the candidates as we try to decide who should next lead our country...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:13 PM 0 comments

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Odd Thought Of The Day 

...now that I have finally joined the 21st Century and acquired hi-speed internet from my local cable company, I find that my location is shown as some place called Alpharetta, Georgia. Although this adds a layer of "international man of mystery" to this lash-up, it does make me wonder why my internet provider, a small outfit in Central Orygun, is routing me through someplace I've never heard of...

Makes me suddenly suspicious of the locations that Sitemeter is telling me people come from....
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:47 PM 0 comments

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