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

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Supporting The Troops, Bush/McCain Style 

...Huggy Bear has apparently decided that he has stumbled on a 'gaffe' committed by Barack Obama during his foreign tour over the last week: as styled by McCain's spinmasters, Obama refused to visit wounded troops in Germany. This actually speaks more powerfully to the callow sense of value that McCain assigns to American women and men in uniform than it says anything at all about Obama, especially given the Ol' Maverick's record on legislative support of American service personnel...

John McCain, just like the current president whose third term he wants to serve, honors the troops only with words, seldom with action. "Honoring the troops" to Huggy Bear, just like to Gee Dub, is a commitment that can usually be fulfilled with the occasional photo op that he is currently excoriating Obama for not wallowing in like he would. When it comes to supporting legislative efforts to actually improve the lot of military personnel who have served multiple tours in the war and occupation that he so desperately supported and have in many cases emerged with psychic and physical wounds - and, even if they were fortunate enough not to - deserve some sort of tangible reward the sacrifices that they have made, McCain has been AWOL...

And the list in that last link isn't even all that current. Just a couple of months ago, he opposed improving benefits offered by a revamped GI Bill, based on the argument that the benefits would create the risk that service personnel who didn't want to be pawns in neverending war might leave military service. This week, he declared that the Veterans Administration should ration health care, excluding service personnel who suffered the misfortune of having suffered their injuries in a strictly-defined noncombat setting. That's probably an unsurprising viewpoint to be held by a guy who didn't actually earn his access to Naval Service and never really understood the role that a couple thousand sailors on the aircraft carriers on which he served played in getting him into the sky (there's a clear Gee Dub/Texas Air National Guard parallel tangled up on this point)...

Recent history speaks quiet volumes about just how McCain 'supports' the troops and it tells a story of a sense of elitism that profoundly disrespects the degree of sacrifice by all sorts of people who have voluntarily donned military uniforms in service to the United States. To Huggy Bear, cheap political moments with wounded heroes are the coin of the realm just like 'visits' to Baghdad markets protected by a company-sized security force and air cover is. In a not-quite parallel universe ruled by reason and reported upon by a media that actually dealt objectively with the facts, Huggy Bear wouldn't be getting away with his desperate, tiresome whining directed toward Obama. We don't live in a world like that, though, so we'll just have to put up with the ongoing, disgusting noise from the McCain campaign for several more months...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:13 PM 0 comments

Friday, July 25, 2008

Why Straight Talk Confuses Me 

...I do dearly hope that somebody will give me a nudge when Huggy Bear McBush finally stakes out a position of some issue - on any subject, really - and sticks with it. The "he was for it before he was against it" list of McCain's...er...policy shifts has become so long that the US Treasure would have to print boxcar loads of extra currency to allow the Obama campaign and others to have the cash on hand to list them all. Today he has added to the list with Wolf Blitzer:
BLITZER: So why do you think he (Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki) said that 16 months is basically a pretty good timetable?

MCCAIN: He said it's a pretty good timetable based on conditions on the ground. I think it's a pretty good timetable (emphasis added), as we should -- or horizons for withdrawal. But they have to be based on conditions on the ground.

...so when Barack Obama says that his timetable for withdrawal of American troops is 16 months but he will consider the conditions on the ground, the Ol' Maverick says he is simply naive and inexperienced and that four years may be a good number. Now, however, having been left behind by both Maliki and Gee Dub (maybe this will finally shore up his rep with religious conservatives) (on second thought, having been left behind probably won't be all that helpful with that demographic, so never mind), Huggy Bear thinks 16 months sounds pretty good, although - just like Obama - he says circumstances on the ground would play a roll in the decision to remove troops...

[As an aside, I sincerely hope that Obama campaign staffers are weeping with joy over the presentation of such a target rich environment.]

I used to think I knew what "straight talk" meant. Apparently this new confusion of mine is all my fault for having grown up around loggers and cowboys and small town business people; apparently they don't understand "straight talk" the way a politician of over three decades of experience does...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:46 PM 0 comments

The President Question Hour 

...so John McCain wants to institute an open-forum Q & A session with Congress along the lines of the British Prime Minister Question Hour, does he? Jonathan Turley thinks its a splendid idea, and I do, too. Of course, Professor Turley and I probably have different reasons for seeing such a spectacle in the tragic event of a McCain administration; he, judging from his quote, would likely feel that it would be an excellent way of forcing the Ol' Maverick to keep it real...

I, on the other hand, think - given McCain's legendary temper, his penchant for going all snappish when pushed a bit by questioners, and that remarkable talent McCain displays of confusing or misrepresenting even the simplest of facts - that such a weekly performance live on CSPAN (or better yet, on cable news channels, followed of course by hours of "analysis") would be a stone cold treasure trove for blogtopia, late-night monologue writers, and the Daily Show...

Gonna need something to keep on keepin' on if, God forefend, Huggy Bear actually gets the opportunity to try this out...
Posted by: Jack K. / 4:18 PM 0 comments

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Breaking News: Republican Candidate Is A Pouting Putz 

...given that the only opportunity that John McCain would ever have to actually give a speech to 200,000 people would require that he be sneaked into the Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the running of the Indy 500 (which would probably result in the sort of wild fleeing-to-the-exit panic that could only otherwise be generated by turning starving packs of timber wolves loose in the grandstands), it's probably a little bit understandable that he's just a bit of a pouting putz over the reception that Barack Obama received in Berlin today. His is probably an understandable reaction, since there isn't a sufficient supply of CS gas and Tasers on the North American continent to herd this sort of crowd to a Huggy Bear event on a good day and probably not even enough to get less than half that number to a casual speech on the banks of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, even if the Decemberists could be sufficiently induced with the vices of their choice to be his front band...

The McCain flip-flop that isn't getting much attention is the one regarding his promise to run a "respectful", issues-based campaign. He hasn't been doing so, isn't likely to, and won't, mostly because that was a lie of the first order to begin with. The Ol' Maverick wants most of all to rely on his carefully nurtured relationship with the media to provide him cover to trash his opponent while he adopts that famous pained expression while disparaging and objecting to the same treatment offered by Democrats toward him...

The weapon that McCain wants most to use is his seniority and not-quite-earned insider respect as a shield that will allow him to say any damned thing he wants about Obama while insisting that his status as a "war hero" and tribal elder has earned him the sort of respect that forecloses any honest examination of his views, behaviors, "kept man" status, or past pronouncements. That's what makes him a putz. His dismissive comments about Obama's Berlin speech to a larger crowd than he could scare up in a couple dozen events added together is just pouting...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:11 PM 0 comments

"Mistakes Happen", Bushco Stiffing The Vet's Edition Ver. 953.01 

...this is (circle the answers that apply) a) an outrage; b) an absolutely abject embarrassment; c) pretty much run-of-the-mill behavior by the Bush administration:
The Department of Veterans Affairs failed to send benefit packages to nearly 37,000 National and Guard and Reserve members who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan because it mistakenly thought they were ineligible, government watchdogs have found.

Given the tacit and up-front in-your-face support that Gee Dub and his gang of half-witted gibbons have given to every possible effort to abuse, demean, and mistreat The Troops once they came back from his overseas adventures, it's not surprising that the VA has somehow "mistakenly" dealt improperly with the troops that every Republican within earshot has been so passionately "supporting" as long as those troops were directly in harm's way attempting to fulfill that well-documented host of neocon wet dreams about the conquest of Iraq. From the criminal treatment of Guard and Reserve troops wounded in-country by the VA to the systematic refusal to deal honestly with PTSD of soldiers who weren't physically wounded during their lengthy and multiple deployments, the treatment by the Bush administration of those brave, honorable Americans that did what virtually everybody in that administration has struggled so mightily to avoid - serve in a combat environment - stands as mute testament to how they really feel about that whole "support the troops" thing...

The grim part of this sad story is that it represents 37,000 individual people who were forced to fight the bureaucracy on their own in single-handed combat. These are 37,000 Americans - as I've said somewhere before, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers - who never dreamed that they would end up being full-time front line troops for longer that American troops were in combat in Europe during World War II. To Gee Dub and his people, they were simply expendable husks undeserving of sufficient scrutiny to establish whether they were eligible for their rightful benefits. This probably wasn't really the sort of mistake that Bushco would have you believe, but it's becoming commonly understood that this is the way George W. Bush and his people 'support the troops...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:33 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

When Lying Becomes "Straight Talk" 

...clearly John McCain misspoke the other day in Rochester, New Hampshire. It's another of the many gaffs, boners, and flat-out laughable mistakes he's committed over the last year or so on the campaign trail that have been - and will probably continued to be - papered over by the fawning MSM that he is trying to convince us is ignoring him in favor of Barack Obama. I would assume, him being the Straight Talker and all, that what he meant to say was “I had the courage and the judgment to say that I would rather lose any sense of ethical mooring and lie through my teeth at the drop of a hat than lose a political campaign...you little jerks"...

That's the only explanation for Huggy Bear's performance today, which would otherwise be - for any Democratic presidential nominee, at least - a piece of back-tracking and foot-shuffling so glaringly, embarrassingly obvious that cable news channel pundits would be fighting each other out in the parking lot with tire irons and bike chains to settle who got to be the first to pour boiling cauldrons of sarcastic repudiation on every single word of his reply to charges that he may not have it all goin' on upstairs. This is starting to look like one of those old B-movie "Old champ boxer enters the ring one last time" things where the corner workers are shouting at the old champ that he's down on points and he's dropping his left but he's still in match and he needs to keep his gloves up and counterpunch but the will and the skill and the stamina aren't there anymore and the next scene is gonna be a quiet empty locker room with just the bloody beat-up old champ, his manager, and his brassy blond girl talking about what sort of life he might have after boxing...

I'm not even sure what "a number of components" even means in this context. There were admittedly a couple of goals for "The Surge", but you will be unsuccessfully googling all night long and look like crap in the morning if you're looking to find quotes by anybody actually talking about 'counterinsurgency' as a 'component' of "The Surge" back when "The Surge" was being talked about. Lying when the truth would fit better is never a becoming trait, at least according to my late and much-missed mom, and it is certainly at the very least a disturbing tendency for some guy who thinks that he is the perfect person to be picking the carpeting in the Oval Office next January. The Ol' Maverick is devolving - rapidly and before our very eyes - from the lovable old war-hero iconoclast that so oddly captured the imagination of independents and centrist Democrats back in 2000 to a grim cheap cartoonish facsimile so filled with a weird combination of bilious anger and raw political hunger that it's almost a joke to fret about him merely being a continuation of Bushco...

Lying artfully is a skill that we have long come to expect from the most crass class of politicians and John McCain has been trying to tell us that he wasn't that sort, that he in fact was skying high above and beyond 'the usual thing' and was a cut above as only a War Hero/Maverick could be. Turns out, he was lying about that, too, and not very artfully...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:09 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Terrorism And Nomenclature - A Likely Forgettable Personal Rant 

...for the second time in a couple of weeks, an act of violence directed against civilians trying to go about their daily lives has been committed in Jerusalem. All by itself, it is a major news story simply because it is another strange attack employing a fairly common piece of construction equipment, yet it may even have some increased heft of importance because this particular attack happened on the cusp of Barack Obama's arrival in Israel on his "Cheerful Wave To McCain" tour of the rest of the world. While I find this sort of attack to be horrific, I do have a certain professional objection to the use of words in the coverage of these two recent attacks that will probably brand me as a dilettante, but I suppose that's the price to be paid for 34 years of hanging around bright yellow pieces of power equipment...

Neither of these attacks involved "bulldozers". The attack on 4 July was not committed with a "bulldozer". This was the piece of power equipment that was used as a weapon. It is a rubber-tired front-end loader - a very large front end loader, mind you, and one that (and I can speak from three decades of professional experience here) you would feel extremely uncomfortable being around even if you were driving the largest, manliest 3/4-ton 4x4 pickup in its normal operating environment - but a front-end loader nonetheless. It is not a "bulldozer"...

This was the piece of construction equipment used in today's attack. It is a "front-end loader/backhoe", known generically as a "backhoe". Judging from the picture (and not being able to find a photo that identifies the manufacturer and model number), this appears to be in the largest size class of backhoe that you are likely to see. It is not nearly as powerful or as physically massive or as brutally heavy as the loader shown above, but it is still a potent weapon if you want to start running into things and creating mayhem in that space before people with guns show up to call you to account for your actions. It also is not a "bulldozer"...

This is a "bulldozer". It's a very large example, admittedly, and is usually only seen on major highway projects and in surface mining operations, but it is a real live civilian example of a bulldozer, although they come in all sorts of sizes. This particular model comes in a G.I. Joe "militarized" variant that is sold to, amongst others, the U.S. Department of Defense and the Israeli Defense Force...

I'll not ever hold myself up as an example of a great writer, but I have for a few decades felt that words have meaning and that the proper use of words is an important part of communication. The hate-filled - or just plain unhinged - assaults on the citizens of Jerusalem by crazy people in the cabs of construction equipment has a certain special personal resonance for me because I've spent my entire adult professional life successfully avoiding being run over by large yellow hunks of iron just like those used in these attacks. They are large and dangerous examples of mechanized equipment that can kill or maim you if things go off the rails...

They are not, however, "bulldozers"....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:51 PM 0 comments

Monday, July 21, 2008

Why Playing Catch-Up Sucks When You Don't Know How 

...given that John "Maverick" "Iconoclast" "Straight Talker" "War Winner" McCain seems to be afflicted with a traditional conservative confusion - the one that presumes that people who don't speak 'American' aren't as smart as heroes like him - it's probably not surprising that he is now sinking into the "timetable" debate while trying to convince us that he isn't really talking about timetables. After the brutal times that he suffered last week, it would be only understandable that a typically cheap but experienced politician like McCain would sign on to the idea of timelines. After all, he has been totally abandoned by both Bushco and the Iraqi government on the subject at hand, so the idea of adopting a ham-handedly nuanced position of his own in a desperate effort to catch the backside of the wave of American opinion shouldn't be a surprise. John McCain, after all, is a master of having been before (or against) things before he was against (or for) them. He only gets away with it, unlike John Kerry, because Huggy Bear is a War Hero and Real Guy, not to mention the fact that Democrats have the basic common decency to not create an "A-4 Skyhawk Veterans For Truth" committee to trash his service to his country...

The failure of John McCain to rise to the level of competency necessary to live in the White House can quite simply be found in his current viewpoint about American troop strength in Iraq. It was the wrong deal and poorly done from the outset and Huggy Bear has never successfully explained just why we needed to be there in the first place. That's not to say that he didn't offer lots of reasons, but nothing that he has said, in the fullness of time and given the facts that were available to a senior Republican Senator who claims all sorts of experience in military matters, has ever justified invading Iraq at the expense of finishing the job in Afghanistan. Now McCain is suggesting that "maybe" we can leave Iraq in a couple of years, apparently either unaware of or politically blind to the idea that any objection to timelines suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature, if not the well-established flow of history...

McCain recently said that we can't have timelines for leaving, because the Evil Ones will just wait us out. Now he says that evidence of social quiet and political progress in Iraq will be measures of success that will allow us to leave, in a couple of years. Apparently in Huggy Bear's world, IslamoNazifascist al Qaeda terrorists and their supposedly Iranian-trained Sunni fellow travelers can't read translations from English and aren't smart enough to figure out that they only have to lay low, working at the grass roots level to build their cause, and wait out the presence of American troops only when Republicans are in the White House but will have all of this perceptive cognizance working if a Democrat is elected...

McCain's most recent flip flop to catch up to the new reality that the Iraqi government, Bushco, and Obama have created represents the ultimate sort of desperate catch-up game that a fellow who has been left behind by circumstances has left to play. Having been a robust supporter of the invasion of a country that was already boxed in by "friend" and foe at the expense of the real War On Terrorism that the stabilization of Afghanistan represented is a tough place to be when the whole rest of the world decides that it's time to have a new hand dealt. Huggy Bear is trying to play catch-up now, and it's not going to be a pretty thing to watch because he's just not good at this sort of thing....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:40 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Shallow Thoughts™ On A Slow Sunday Night 

...ok, so I love movies and music and enjoy watching their award shows, but tonight's showing of the ESPN Espy's awards, with Justin Timberlake as host, has been tremendously entertaining. Far more snarky and less self-important that the Golden Globes, Peoples' Choice, Oscar, and Emmy shows...and yet, with some touching human moments...

Hey! So sue me! The only reason I'm not driving my ol' pickup truck right now is because it's late, there aren't any Sprint Cup NASCAR races on, and I'm drinking beer...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:08 PM 0 comments

Justice Calls At Long Last For One Of The Evil Ones 

...so it's reported that tomorrow the first of the military tribunals...er...excuse me...trials for the worst of the worst in the annals of evil bloodthirsty terrorism will begin. That's right; the first step down the road toward that final war goal of defeating "Terror" will begin with the trial of...well, actually...um...of Osama bin Laden's driver...

But he's an important driver, make no mistake about that. He drove bin Laden around, and delivered weapons and crap like that, and the fact that your average Evil One is treacherously trained at packing a good couple dozen AK=47's into an Evil Terrorist SUV is just the sort of foundation on which International Terrorist Cabals are constructed...

At least, that is apparently the case in this instance, I suppose. There's no point anymore in asking why so much time and money is being spent trying to lock Salim Hamdan away for life while his former primary passenger continues to run free along the Afghan-Pakistani border and the situation in Afghanistan is slipping farther out of our grasp by the day while the end of the Iraq "Surge" intended to fix our unnecessary destabilization of the Middle East will see more troops in-country than there were prior to the "Surge" even though we are winning although neither the current White House occupant or his putative Republican successor think that we can safely withdraw the bulk of troops by 2010. Doesn't matter anymore; bringing the hammer down on bit players like John Walker Lindh, David Hicks, and Hamdan is the smell of victory for Bushco and its enablers like Huggy Bear McCain, even though anything looking like (or even smelling like) real victory against the people who actually engineered the attack on this country in 2001 is still mostly notable by its absence...

...but at least we're about to lay the Righteous Hand Of Justice on the getaway driver...so we must be winning...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:45 PM 0 comments

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