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

Saturday, September 20, 2008

The Visible Miracle Of A Media Creation 

...there was a time, back in Ought-Ought, when John McCain was The It Girl of the day. He sang a seductive song that attracted all kinds of independent voters and right-leaning Democrats and that may well have resulted, had it not been for the huge pile of manure delivered by Karl Rove that suffocated his campaign in South Carolina, in a clear-cut Republican victory that could have saved the SCOTUS the profound embarrassment of being found out as being dominated by a majority of partisan hacks with no more legal erudition than than some small-town city council. Even in '04, there was some strange mavericky undercurrent powering the truly bizarre chit-chat about the prospects of McCain becoming John Kerry's running mate (although, when compared to Joe Lieberman, I'm not all that sure how really "outside the box" such a suggestion would have been when it comes to some of the big issues facing the country)...

It's been a long, almost violently weird ride following the McCain saga over the last eight years. He has been heralded as some sort of twisted savior by people who should know better and has never, ever, held a favorably view on any of the issues that most stir the hearts of the majority of Americans. The last year has been - or should have been - particularly tough on the ol' Maverick, and it is probably only the weakness of the larger Republican presidential nominee field that has led to his being the guy at the top of the heap. It should have been a tough year because of the simple raw fact that he has been, in big ways and little ways, well behind the curve in almost every meaningful policy position that his handlers have allowed him to enunciate. Some of the more famous/notable examples of Huggy Bear's failure as a leader:

John McCain has ridiculed the very idea of negotiation with adversarial foreign governments. It was a comfortable position to take against proposals by Barack Obama and was offered cover by the policy of the Bush Administration.

On the other hand, at least it was until Bushco woke up and smelled the roses.

McCain redeemed his long-held philosophy that the sovereign nation of Iraq needed to be plunged into a nightmare of constant death and pre-industrial living conditions for no particular reason by insisting that Obama's call for timelines of withdrawal of US troops was totally unacceptable, once again comfortably nestled under the cover of Gee Dub's official policy.

On the other hand, at least it was until Bushco finally realized that the whole "newly-liberated free and sovereign government of Iraq" gig wasn't going to sell if we told them to shove it over the issue of timelines for troop withdrawal.

McCain and others constantly tout "experience" as being his primary advantage over Obama. Where that 'experience' actually manifests itself in any fashion that is measurably of benefit to the American people is more than an open question, but his Experience and, of course, his POW-ness are the most profound and valuable assets he brings to the presidential election process.

On the other hand, he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate.

McCain has been a strident, but not terribly effective, opponent of earmarks of all kinds...unless they are his, of course. While he doesn't possess the frame of mind and vicious sense of humor to promulgate something as pointed as the late William Proxmire's "Golden Fleece" award, he has been found in the well of the Senate railing against all those special earmarks that we have come to know as "porkbarrel spending". He HATES porkbarrel spending.

On the other hand, he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate. Clearly St. John McCain is a forgiving man; he has obviously been able to move beyond his past objection to her personal earmark requests.

Just this week, John McCain displayed his own brand of leadership in declaring that the Bush Administration was absolutely correct in refusing to offer some sort of Federal bailout to American International Group. The money line (if you will excuse the pun):
The Arizona senator said on NBC's ``Today'' show that taxpayers should not be ``on the hook'' for AIG, which may be on the verge of collapse. He praised Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for denying requests for a bailout, saying Paulson ``has been correct'' in asserting taxpayers aren't responsible for business failures.

On the other hand, Huggy Bear's brand of leadership was rather quickly demonstrated to be just about as valuable as shares of Lehman Brothers stock by the very gang that Huggy Bear was - literally a couple of hours before - praising for its rock-ribbed conservative free market refusal to bow to demons he apparently can't see.

As an aside, it is a bit surprising that the ol' Maverick would be so harshin' about bailouts, since he is only and solely where he is right now because of his own personal bailout that is encumbered with all sorts of moral, ethical, and legal questions of its own...

John McCain hasn't just been wrong on most of the major issues of the day; he has been spectacularly wrong. Despite all of this, he continues to be neck and neck in all those obnoxious daily polls with Barack Obama. Maybe that's because of Sarah Palin; maybe that't because of the sort of latent racism that we don't talk about in polite conversations. Or maybe...juuust maybe, that's because there is such an institutionalized MSM-created impression of John McCain as 'A Different Sort Of Republican' (even though that isn't a true statement by any objective measurement) that he can weather the already impressive and still-growing list of instances where he has been so spectacularly wrong because of the lingering feelings of good will that he created in 2000 and managed to maintain through 2004. The idea of John McCain as an acceptable choice for president, given the volumes of sensing polls that ask Americans how they feel about the issues of the day - most of which repudiates the idea of a McCain presidency, can be directly attributed to the fact that he is entirely a media creation...

The visible miracle of that creation can be seen in the simple fact that, despite having the sort of year to date that would have destroyed any other candidate, the ol' Maverick is still in this race. He's not in it because of his own skill or experience...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:43 PM 0 comments

Friday, September 19, 2008

Heckofa Job, Paulie 

Posted by: Jack K. / 9:49 PM 0 comments

Thursday, September 18, 2008

A Brief Vicious Thought On A Smoky Night 

...although I've been able to steal the odd moment on the intertubes now and again the last couple of days (hurry up and wait is not just a military concept, and sometimes one needs to wind down when the day finally ends), I have been able to listen to the radio some, and I've had something of a personal epiphany:

I suspect that an undiscovered campaign tool exists for the DNC and the Obama campaign in the sound clips of Sarah Palin speaking. It's may just be me (and my impression is undoubtedly freighted with all sorts of unrelated emotions), but the cadence of her delivery, tone of voice, and occasional but abruptly jarring and profoundly affected homey down-home 'g'-dropping drawl at moments when she wants to "connect" with the Little People is becoming amazingly grating to my ear. Mrs. Jack K. for several years now has either turned off the radio or left the room when Gee Dub is heard speaking on NPR (we won't even talk about television here; it's a painful and expensive subject). I fear that, contrary to every egalitarian instinct in my being, I'm growing close to that same level of reaction with respect to the Governor of Alaska. If my candidate sounded on the radio like this V.P. candidate does, I suspect that I would stay home on election day out of simple despair...

Play her clips every day, DNC and Obama campaign, especially the silly, particularly grating, and easily disproved comments. Just please don't mention that she finally, after tours at several institutions of higher education, graduated from my alma mater. We Idaho Vandals usually like to sound like we garnered some semblance of our money's worth out of our degrees when speaking in public...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:15 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Missed It By Thaaat Much - Wildfire Edition 

...usually around these parts, you can generally assume the likelihood of an aggressive wildfire displaying extreme fire behavior is behind you for the year. One doesn't normally see really hot fires that burn actively late into the night and force crews to pull back off the line for safety reasons; the humidity is usually relatively high and the daytime temperatures are usually in the 70's and any fires that start can usually be managed one way or another without any real excitement...

The exception to that 'rule' cropped to the west of me this afternoon at around 1400 hours, rather quickly forcing the evacuation of a teensy little community on the east side of the Oregon Cascade Crest - along with, by early evening, anyone staying at about 100 recreational "cabins" around two mountain lakes (many of them are way nicer than the house I live in), the visitors at three resorts on those two lakes, and other folks who live out in the woods in the area. Oregon State Highway 58 is closed from the Cascade crest at Willamette Pass for 13 miles to the east, which means that two of the six routes that provide passage across the Cascades from Western to Eastern Orygun are now closed by wildfire activity (which in itself is an exceedingly rare situation regardless of the season)...

Numerous 20-person fire crews have been ordered and are on the way, as are dozers, engines, trucks full of supplies, and contractors who specialize in running fire camps. The sky at in the late afternoon was busy with air tankers - including this one (image from a different fire) - and dip-bucket helicopters. Since being old and fat makes me ineligible for fireline duty, I will be crawling back in the car in a few hours to bore halogen holes through the Central Oregon night to assume my fire assignment doing one of the myriad behind the scene jobs that support the actual effort to get people and equipment on the ground. I suspect I won't be thinking much about presidential politics, the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, or the path down which blame lies for our current fragile financial state for the next day or two - or more, depending on how the weather trends actually pan out. And here I thought we had dodged the bullet this year...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:02 PM 0 comments

Monday, September 15, 2008

The Turning Of The Tide - 45 Years Out 

...on September 15, 1963, American citizens planted a bomb in a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. The explosion killed four young American citizens, none older than 14, and marked the beginning of the end of any previous understanding about the relationship between Black Americans and the racist white culture that had been a point of dispute and conflict for decades...

Many things accrued from this moment. "Bull" Conner might never well have gained national prominence as the face of any sort of fat, greasy slick, white racist objection to the incorporation of blacks into the full enfranchisement of citizenship if it had not been for this moment. The rest of the country north of the Mason-Dixon Line may not have thrown all in with the the whole idea of integration if this moment hadn't occurred. It is, still, a sad anniversary in the history of race relations in this country...

Children should never have to die in anybody's war. They most certainly should never have to die in an undeclared war between the wasted, useless past and what is Going To Be The Future. The death of children in any conflict is an automatic repudiation of any sort of meaning or value to the sense of the conflict, but it is even more an argument against the sort of racial dispute that gripped this country for so many years. Forty five years ago today, white Americans blew up a Christian Church because they didn't cotton to the idea of black Americans having any sort of rights. Today, a black American held a rally as the nominee of the Democratic party for the presidency of the United States...

We have come a long way and we have a long way yet to go, but the fact of a Barack Obama forty five years after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church is a fitting memorial and honor...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:44 PM 0 comments

Huggy Bear's Dwindling List Of Sec/State Candidates 

...if John Sidney McCain the Third had any notion of reaching deep into the grab-bag of old-timer, experienced former Secretaries of State to help fill out either the official Cabinet or "kitchen cabinet" - positions that he would cheerfully run over little old ladies and the Boy Scouts escorting them across busy streets if only that would give him that Last Big Chance To Be
The President in order to fill - his list got shorter today. That list didn't shrink because any of the likely candidates refused to support him; it shrank because none of those likely candidates in the least little bit buy his idea that sabre rattling is a better approach to dealing with those against whom we have issues than actually talking to them...you know...like Barack Obama advocates...

Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher would never have been on Huggy Bear's short list in any case, but in today's forum Colin Powell (a far more accomplished Warrior and Statesman than McCain could ever hope to be - not to mention a more qualified presidential candidate, but never mind that), Henry Kissinger, and James A. Baker hizown III demonstrated in their own words that they felt that the very idea that Huggy Bear has continually disparaged as being proof positive of inexperience and naivety in the ways of the world was, in fact, the proper way to address nations like Iran and Syria that pose a threat to our own legitimate interests in the Middle East and beyond. Regardless of what we may think about any or all of them individually or collectively, the group gathered together today at GWU represents the occupants of the office of Secretary of State straight through from January 20, 1989 (the start of the G.H.W. Bush administration), to January 20, 2005 (the start of G.W. Bush's second term), absent a couple of months at the end of Bush Sr's term, and - in Kissinger - a man who could arguably be considered the most enduring figure in Republican foreign policy circles since the 1950's...

All of these people from either side of the political DMZ - hell, any one of them - has more experience out on the pointy end of the arrow when it comes to foreign policy than John McCain could hope to have even if he stumbled onto the Fountain of Youth and decided, just for the hell of it, to chug a few pounders of that magical water and do the whole thing all over again. ALL of them disagree with McCain's core proposition that we should not negotiate with regimes with whom we are at odds. Huggy Bear probably has some candidates in mind for the position of Secretary of State if he is able to make it to the Oval Office - although, given the credentials of his VP choice, the short list might only have the name Carly Fiorina on it - but it's pretty clear as of now that any Republicans with actual experience prior to the brutally failed appointment of Condi Rice probably aren't going to be able to provide the sort of influence and advice that informs Huggy's own militaristic world view...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:26 PM 0 comments

Sunday, September 14, 2008

The Poor And Republican Economists: We Will Always Have Them With Us 

...it almost doesn't matter how bad things are, especially in an election year with a February 29 in it where the Republicans are trying to hold on to the White House. No matter how bad it is, no matter how difficult the struggle is for real people, there will be those who will come crawling out of the swamp to insist that things aren't as bad as you think they are. Today's example in the WaPo is this column by McCain economic advisor Donald Luskin...

He would like you to know that the mortgage delinquency rate is only just slightly higher than 1985 and was setting records "for the day" in 1999. What he fails to mention is that "only just slightly higher" makes it the highest since 1979 and that all that "what about Clinton" stuff is spin.

He would like you to know that the housing crisis is over. He probably wouldn't like you to know that, while the rate of foreclosure is slowing, it is still substantially higher than the same time last year. He also doesn't want you to know that retail sales fell - unexpectedly - for the second month in a row as the effect of all those Gee Dub stimulus checks dries up.

He would like you to know that non-defense capital goods orders are running "at levels associated with brisk expansion" even though nothing offered by the much-watched and highly valued Institute for Supply Management suggests any such thing. The ISM indicated slightly contracting economic activity and its report "underscored the sluggishness of manufacturing amid the soft economy".

He wouldn't like you to know about the increases in the Consumer Price Index, because that is a measure of what is happening to real people who aren't corporate Republican clients and supporters. He also wouldn't really care that you read the Employment Situation Summary from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. None of these things fit into his theme, which is both a slightly disguised variation of Phil Gramm's "nation of whiners" riff and the usual Republican focus on "what's good for General Motors" rather than what's good for us little people...

Luskin lashes his piece to the meme that the circumstances we find ourselves in right now aren't as bad as the Great Depression - in fact, don't really represent a real recession - while at the same time trying to prove that Gramm is correct in his observation that we are a nation of whiners without exactly saying the same thing. To Luskin, instead, we are a "nation of exaggerators". Out here in the real world, none of that really works very well because we can see how things are going down. Quibbling about terminology isn't the issue out here. It's not about bogus "bank failure" comparisons or 'the end of the mortgage crisis'; it's about people losing jobs and not finding new opportunities and about being upside down on that all too Republican version of the American Dream and watching hope dribble through your hands like dry sand while corporate enablers are rescued from an abyss of their own creation...

Things are looking up in the exceedingly well-paid world of Donald Luskin. In yours, not so much...

UPDATE: and about that comparison of bank failure rates between 1999-2000 and now? You can do the math yourself, but it's apples and oranges. Indymac all by itself dwarfs all those other 1999-2000 failures...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:32 PM 0 comments

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