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

Thursday, December 04, 2008

Quote Of The Day - December 4 

...Barney Frank is sometimes an underappreciated National Treasure. Today was one of those times, because he absolutely nailed the "Quote of the Day":
"At a time of great crisis with mortgage foreclosures and autos, (Obama) says we only have one president at a time," Frank told consumer advocates Thursday, according to the Associated Press. "I'm afraid that overstates the number of presidents we have (emphasis added). He's got to remedy that situation."


Now I don't care what you say; that's some first-class snark...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:11 PM 0 comments

Home, Home On The....Cul-de-sac? 

...it would probably be easiest to say that any sort of brain-messed waterbrain willing to lay a wager that George W. Bush would choose to keep his hobby ranch in Crawford, Texas, would be a good person to hang with if you needed to pick up the occasional walking-around money for Starbucks or a quick local deli lunch on somebody else's dime. As we have learned today, Gee Dub isn't really the brush-clearin' type when you get down next to the bone, and the whole reimagining of that "rugged western cowboy" theme that the Crawford Ranch was supposed to provide for the Forty-Third President Of These United States turned out to be just another example of the sort of slimy message management that will be the only 'success story' in the whole sorry legacy of the nightmare of the last eight long years...

The whole "ranch" thing, complete with stylish and expensive Stetson hats and top of the line Ford F-250 pickups, was always an obvious charade and now - as his time in office swirls down into this last ugly unraveling of the Main Story - we are now present at the revelation of that Real George W. Bush. He isn't a 21st century reincarnation Ronald Reagan; he's a pampered city boy finally freed from the artificial constraints of having to look like a rough-and-tumble Western Man. The fact that Gee Dub will soon be gone from the national stage should be good enough, but it is worth a moment to note that he is finally by his actions acknowledging that - as the old saying goes - he was all hat and no cattle...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:17 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Honeymooning In Philly 

...the whole "hail fellow well met" aura surrounding President-elect Barack Obama isn't probably all that unusual in its own self. There is always a certain amount of reluctant comity offered up by the losers in a presidential election year, especially when a change of party in the the White House is involved, so there isn't any particular reason to expect in the abstract that we would see this sort of thing again. There seems to be a bit of a difference this time, though, and that difference seems to be drawn from the stark difference between the guy who is arranging for the movers to pack everything out of his living quarters and the guy working with movers to pack everything into those same quarters...

The meeting of the National Governors' Conference in Philadelphia turned into a near love-fest with the appearance of Obama and Joe Biden. In itself, that is a bit of a change from the soon-to-be-a-distant-but-unlamented-memory of the Bush administration. This probably won't last, given that there probably isn't a Governor in the country who doesn't - in the privacy of his or her own bathroom - practice getting just the right pose for all those State of The Union addresses that are waiting just down the road. After all, four of the last five presidents were governors as were the last three two-term presidents, and ambition at this elite elevation on the political mountain is a powerful force...

Given that we are still the better part of two months out from the day where Barack Obama even takes the oath of office, there are still plenty of traps and pitfalls lurking in the shadows that could start snatching at the ankles of the Obama team and destroy all of this warm fuzzy post-partisanship. Today, however, was a bit of a honeymoon for Obama in Philly, and his ability to interact in ways that governors haven't seen for eight long years helps reinforce the idea that opportunities exist to address the problems currently besetting us that haven't existed since the turn of the century. Details and the Devils therein, of course, will be upcoming...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:25 PM 0 comments

Monday, December 01, 2008

Regrets, I've Had A Few..... 

...there probably isn't anything sadder than the specter of a President of the United States, careening into the last days of an administration that threatens - in fact, aggressively beckons - unfavorable comparisons with the worst presidencies of all time, who insists on sitting down for a network television interview so he can carry on like a morose drunk bellied up to the bar in some seedy dive bemoaning how his family just simply doesn't understand how really hard he worked over all those thankless years to make their lives better right up until the day the Missus threw his clothes out on the lawn for the last time. The only thing sadder than that spectacle is the raw fact that Americans, if they are not sufficiently swift at punching the buttons on their remotes, have to experience this strange expression of regrets that are neither quite realistic or fully self-aware...

Frank Sinatra could get away with this sort of song, mostly because he was Ol' Blue Eyes and had decades worth of enormous street cred. George W. Bush can't, and won't, be able to pull it off. Gee Dub did it "His Waaaaay" even when there were plenty of clear-headed people around him who tried to tell him that "his way" wasn't all that hot an idea. The fault is all his, and his end-of-term mea culpa is riddled with the same sort of shadings, dissembling, and qualifiers that have been at the brittle, rotten core of his entire seemingly endless nightmare of an administration. Gee Dub says this:
"Obviously I don't like the idea of people losing jobs, or being worried about their 401(k)s. On the other hand, the American people got to know that we will safeguard the system. I mean, we're in. And if we need to be in more, we will."

He chooses to pile intellectual insult upon injury by adding this:
As he leaves office, Bush said he felt responsible for the economic downturn because it's occurring on his watch, but he added: "I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so" before he became president.

There you have it. It's Bill Clinton's fault, One Last Time. Only, this time, it wasn't Bill Clinton's fault. George W. Bush's administration had the opportunity to create a regulatory framework that might have avoided the financial meltdown we are now experiencing, but that Bush administration decided to follow its natural tendencies and folded to the free marketeers of the banking industry over the whole issue of subprime mortgages. The closest that Gee Dub can even come to blaming all of this on Bill Clinton is the by-now-world-famous stealth amendment deregulating credit default swaps engineered by stalwart Republican free marketeer Phil Gramm in the last years of the Clinton Administration when Republicans controlled both house of Congress...

And then there is the faux introspective answer to the Big Question about Iraq. When asked about whether he would have invaded Iraq if he were in possession of actual real live intelligence revealing that the whole "weapons of mass destruction" thing was a steaming bowl of bull manure, Gee Dub had a rather revealing observation:
"You know, that's an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can't do. It's hard for me to speculate."

Think about that for a moment.

No, really.

Let your mind go back to that desperate time after 9/11 when we were assured that Saddam was at the very least a fellow traveler with Osama bin Laden and was spending every free moment training al Qaeda operatives on the finer points of loading all sorts of evil toxic swill onto radio-controlled aircraft and innocent-looking carry-on luggage and the pockets of brown Middle-eastern looking people so they could spread it all around our bedrooms while we were sleeping the blissful sleep of the home of the brave. Despite all of the recent insistence to the contrary, the issue of WMD was THE reason for invading Iraq (or at least that is what we were being told at the time). Forget the "speculation" aspect; focus for a moment on the reality...

Over four thousand immediate families, and maybe twice or three times that many extended families, don't get to have a do-over either. Tens of thousands of families who used to think that mom or dad or brother or sister or lover were just playing soldier in the National Guard or Reserve have learned how sadly and tragically wrong they were. Other tens of thousands of families directly involved because of a loved one in the active military have seen that loved one spend more time away from home in harms way than most families experienced through the entirety of World War II. This is all a result of an affirmative decision that Gee Dub made, and do-overs and 'speculation' aren't really part of the equation that resulted in the reality that he - or his minions - created...

The next line in that old song at the top is "...but then, again, too few to mention". That certainly won't be part of the G.W. Bush legacy. He can crawl up onto the top of the Capital Dome and sing every verse of the song, and there is no doubt that he did it "His Way". There are, however, lots of regrets, perhaps too many to mention, and they will last long after Gee Dub's last official acts have faded into dim memory...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:29 PM 0 comments

Sunday, November 30, 2008

When Catholic Priests Become Baptist Preachers 

...it's been a long, long week, driving just over a thousand miles from Central Orygun to various remote redoubts throughout the wet western interior of Washington state to indulge in the sorts of strange tribal rituals that the family into which I married tends to celebrate. These rituals feature too much food of a sort that would cause any right-thinking nutritionist to fling his or her own self off a high rocky cliff into the roiling Pacific surf, much talk and reminiscing about people I have either never met or don't recall, and an almost aggressive rejection of things like the evening news and internet connections. But I've grown used to this action over the last 27 years, and I can cope (although the lack of internet access is a bit of a struggle sometimes)...

Having come back to my own comfortable little universe, I find this strange story in my stack of held-over newspapers that so perfectly captures the struggle that people of faith have to deal with at the interface between their belief and life in a secular society. As is usually the case, the struggle isn't between belief and the voter ballot; it is between the act of being a fully empowered voter and the views and edicts of The Church...

I don't personally have to worry about the pronouncements of various wingnut mid-level managers of the Roman Catholic Church, because somewhere back there a few centuries ago certain German ancestors of mine decided to throw their lot in with Martin Luther. There is, still, enough to be worried about by this sort of pronouncement. The first and most obvious problem is that it represents an effort to create a direct linkage between one's own path to salvation and how one votes in an otherwise secular election. These 'denial of Communion' pronouncements that we are once again seeing - just as we did when John Kerry ran in '04 - represent nothing more than an effort to exert some degree of influence over how people vote in a way intended to force everyone, regardless of faith or creed, to live to a certain standard mandated by a certain belief system...

The hypocrisy wrapped around the emphasis of this particular issue is the sort of thing that threatens to rather ironically turn some elements of the Roman Catholic Church into a much older and more widely established version of the Southern Baptist Convention. You can unsuccessfully search far and wide for a parish priest or bishop or archbishop who has been caught in the act of demanding confession before acceptance of the Sacrament of the Eucharist for having voted for a candidate who supports the death penalty, which the Roman Catholic Church opposes except under the sort of very narrow circumstances that cannot be found in the United States. You will not be able to scrounge up a member anywhere up or down the line of the Roman Catholic priesthood who will insist on confession before Communion for any John McCain voters in order to make themselves right with God over McCain's support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which The Church viewed as failing to meet its own justification for "just war"...

What we have here (to shamelessly rip off Strother Martin) is a failure to understand what the whole idea of "separation of church and state" really means. Attempting to force others to live in some sort of tight concordance with your own personal moral standards is directly in contradiction to the teachings of either Jesus or his Apostles and a repudiation of the whole fundamental concept of this country. That sort of action is, in fact, the mark of the Pharisees and is why I've called the religious Republican base 'The Pharisees' for far longer than there has been any such thing as Blogtopia. There has been a certain amount of push-back at the diocese level against that whole "confess your sin of voting for Obama" thing in South Carolina, but it doesn't seem to be translating across the country, just as it didn't four years ago...

I have to confess, though, that it is quaintly amusing to see Southern Baptists and certain Roman Catholics so tightly bound together on this one social issue. Talk about a strange sort of ecumenism...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:55 PM 0 comments

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