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

Saturday, December 13, 2008

When The Marshall Plan Is Run By Squirrel Monkeys 

...after the devastation of Europe during World War II, General George C. Marshall, who had been named Secretary of State by Harry Truman, gave a speech outlining a plan developed by some of his staffers at the State Department that would create stout democracies capable of fending off the despotic influences of the Soviet Union. That plan was branded with his name, and the Marshall Plan was credited with being an important component of the recovery of the non-Soviet block European economy, although it has had its critics. It lasted roughly three years...

After the devastation of civil society and infrastructure in Iraq following the 2003 invasion by the United States, a plan was devised to create a stout democracy capable of fending off the despotic influences of surrounding regimes. This time, there was a problem:

Breakfast Meeting Of George W. Bush's Iraq Reconstruction Group


(photo courtesy of www.thewe.cc)

As it turns out, the administration of George W. Bush didn't have - and apparently didn't have the capacity to recruit - anyone who had the slightest idea on how to actually rebuild Iraq's society and infrastructure. All the Bushies had were image creators, grifters, squirrel monkeys, and yes men, the sort of crew that we usually group into the larger general group labeled "Liars" or "Lower Primates". Five and a half years after "Mission Accomplished", all we have is this:
An unpublished federal draft report depicts the U.S.-led reconstruction of Iraq as a $100 billion failure doomed by bureaucratic infighting, ignorance of basic elements of Iraqi society and waves of violence there...

This is the ugly little truth that is following Gee Dub around the country like some sort of weirdly misdirected golem as he conducts his "Legacy Reconstruction Tour", threatening to sneak in, overpower the interviewer, and send the moment spinning off in some unpredictable, uncomfortable direction. As with every other damned thing about Gee Dub's "War of Choice" that had nothing to do with September 11, 2001, we are once again having to come to grips with the fact that we have been lied to. "Reconstruction" was the cornerstone of that whole supposed game of creating a "shining city on a hill" and that 'effort' has been a corrupt, incompetent failure brought to us with a rather alarming exuberance by the very same political party that wouldn't give a much smaller short-term boost to General Motors and Chrysler a couple of days ago over disagreements about things that they thought should happen in a couple of months, not years...

There's a price to be paid for letting lesser primates be anywhere near the levers of governmental power; we've been paying that price in both big and small ways for a number of years. What we now know, though, is that all the screeching and fecal matter-flinging that has gone on any time critical observations about the progress of Iraq "reconstruction" were offered was only the simple and understandable response of creatures who weren't capable of responding in any other way. There is a price to pay when you let squirrel monkeys run a government that should be controlled by adult humans. We are finally, at the end of the squirrel monkey reign, being reliably informed about what that cost has been...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:32 PM 0 comments

Friday, December 12, 2008

Ending Einstein's Definition Of Insanity Over Cuba 

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”
Albert Einstein


...fifty years. That's how long the United States has refused to acknowledge the existence of Cuba, primarily as a result of the legacy of fighting the Evils Of Communism - at least in those places where it was a relatively low-risk and painless endeavor. Over the recent decades, while the United States repeated granted Most Favored Nations trading status to the People's Republic Of China and stood by while Honk Kong and Macau were turned over to the PRC, we kept up and even increased the proscriptions and bans on Cuba. While the Congress of The United States passed and various presidential administrations built upon the requirements of the Helms-Burton Act, both of them sat on their hands while Taiwan, which lost its United Nations membership at the behest of the PRC in 1971, fought unsuccessfully to regain full status as a recognized nation...

Today you can't swing a dead cat in any aisle of any department story in the United States without hitting shelf stock manufactured in the most economically prominent and politically repressive Communist regime on the planet. At the same time, you could go up the river to do hard Federal time for lighting up a real live Cuban cigar at any location that falls within the jurisdiction of the United States. This is the path down which madness lies...

Yes, there are insurgencies and destabilization efforts for which Castro's Cuba must answer, but the same thing can easily be said about the People's Republic of China. It is arguable that the sort of rapprochement that has characterized US-China relations could have just as easily been applied to our nearest Commie neighbor. Cuba has, over the last five decades, been an easy painless target for the floundering Anti-Communist warriors who found the rug being pulled out from under them when the realities of a global economy overtook their fiery hatred of the Red Chinese. The apparent interest of Barack Obama to take a new path regarding the relationship between Cuba and the United States is a remarkable breath of fresh air. The 'stick' hasn't worked over the last 50 years; maybe it's finally time for a few carrots...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:16 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Big Three Bankruptcies: Union-Killing Is A Feature, Not A Bug 

...we will probably know by this time Friday whether there is going to be anything resembling a loan package to rescue General Motors and Chrysler or whether Senate Republicans will be successful in forcing one or both into what they presume is going to be Chapter 11 bankruptcy. As this NPR interview with Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) (audio) amply demonstrates, "restructuring" in this particular debate - as far as Republicans are concerned - means "union-busting"...

DeMint and the other Senate Republicans trying to kill the Big Three "bailout" don't really care about "restructuring" in the sense that most everybody else is talking about. They don't care about plans to modify or eliminate product lines in order to produce the sorts of vehicles that will compete favorably in today's wild, vicious automotive market. They've never had any qualms about the heavy tilt toward large, gas-guzzling SUV's and pickups that have been such prominent features of the Big Three's product mix; if they had cared, they wouldn't have been such staunch opponents to more stringent Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards over the years. If they had cared, they wouldn't have been standing shoulder to shoulder with all the other convention delegates in the Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota back in September shrieking "Drill, Baby Drill" at the top of their lungs in solidarity with the starkly simple idea that more oil is needed to fill the tanks of all those SUV's out there, especially the foreign-nameplate sports utility models manufactured in states represented by both DeMint and Richard Shelby...

This is all about killing unions for these Republican Senators, despite any cheap talk about their newly-discovered interest in fiscal responsibility. Unions are the two-headed dragon that must be slayed, in the minds of Republicans, because they represent the interests of workers (which are directly contrary to the interests of the Big Business interests that provide the fiscal fuel for Republicans' dreams of empire) and they are a still-powerful influence in the voter pool (to the detriment of Republicans in states where Big Business hasn't successfully killed labor unions - like, say, the foreign nameplate auto industry in South Carolina and Alabama). DeMint makes this whole strategy abundantly clear in the NPR interview, dwelling almost obsessively on his clear obsession to engage in the sort of union-busting action for which pro-business politicians have longed since the days of the National Labor Union in 1866...

With all this open Republican Senatorial salivating over the opportunity to drive a stake into the body of the United Autoworkers Union, it's amazing they are even able to talk in an interview...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:00 PM 0 comments

How To Know When You're Doing Moral Outrage Wrong 

...if you really want to step up to the plate in defense of proper Christian moral standards, it's probably best not to do it in a setting that is intended to honor one of the more brutal dictators to grace the Western Hemisphere in the last half century. You would think that this would be a pretty simple concept to understand, but you would be wrong to think so. For your consideration, Roman Catholic Cardinal Jorge Medina:
Madonna is causing "crazy enthusiasm" and "impure thoughts" on her first concert visit to Chile, a prominent retired cardinal complained on Wednesday...

...

"This woman comes here and in an incredibly shameless manner, she provokes a crazy enthusiasm, an enthusiasm of lust, lustful thoughts, impure thoughts," said Medina, the cardinal who was chosen to announce the election of Pope Benedict XV.

Cardinal Medina was speaking at a Mass honoring Augusto Pinochet, during whose reign over 3000 political opponents were murdered, tens of thousands more were tortured, and many tens of thousands more were imprisoned, although, I suppose in his defense, very few lustful thoughts were generated...

Talk about "incredibly shameless manner"...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:32 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

WOO HOO!!! NOW We're Number ONE!!!! 

...it's not often that we denizens of this hard, bitter volcanically-sculpted landscape pressed hard up against the eastern flanks of the Oregon Cascades can claim to be number one on a national scale at anything. OK, so in-home cottage industry production of methamphetamine probably shouldn't count, regardless of the actual economic contribution that it makes to the local economy, given the negative stereotypes that seem to naturally cling to this particular sort of expression of that entrepreneurial spirit that has made America the Greatest (albeit crazed and dentally challenged) Nation On Earth. But we of Central Orygun have hit the big time, at long last, because we have the most highly overvalued housing prices in the entire United States...

To be completely honest, this isn't the first time we of the Greater Bend, Orygun, Metropolitan Area have been Number One on this particular list, but in these trying economic times, it's good to know that we have become a sustainable champion. It would be best to ignore the objections of the "real estate expert" quoted in the article, because one can reasonably suspect that the poor guy 1) was probably cold-called and didn't have an opportunity to understand that the rating is not influenced by the "resort" aspect of life in Central Orygun, but is instead based in large part on local real estate prices as compared to median local income (which is largely service-economy based because of the "resort" nature of life in Central Orygun) and 2) is a seller of real estate who really doesn't need to see all this grim talk about being the most Highly Overvalued Real Estate Market when there are a whole sinking boatload of properties needing to be moved in an economic environment where eating rat poison may be a more attractive option than trying to sell properties that may be upside down by the end of the day...

Curious note, on the other hand: The Top Five list has a couple of other entries that would seem to make sense (and provide an argument for the idea that Central Orygun belongs on that list), but Number 5 is something of a mystery. Longview, Washington? I would never in a lifetime suggest that Longview, Washington, is a bad place to live (having spent several years living in that general vicinity), but its inclusion suggests the straight-up confusion under which the quoted Central Orygun real estate specialist labors. Atlantic City, St. George, and Honolulu have a certain 'gotta have it' cachet; Longview, which sits on the northern side of the lower Columbia River in the broad valley between the Cascade Range and the Coast Range, is traditionally a working-class town that has far more history with logging and fishing than with the various sorts of outdoor and indoor recreation that attract people to the other members of the Top Five...

None of that really matters, though, in the face of the fact that the county in which I live has a mysterious and pernicious staying power as one of the most overvalued real estate markets in the entire United States of America. I guess one can't be choosy when it comes to just exactly why "We're Number One"...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:16 PM 0 comments

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Why The Losers Don't Get To Write History 

...we are clearly destined to be inundated with a verbal tsunami by the principals responsible for the mess we are in because of the invasion of Iraq. It wouldn't be a pretty time in any case if we had some sort of responsible, adult Main Stream Media that would challenge the lame regretful yet self-justifying rationalizations that are starting to pile impressively up on that shoreline that separates the national reality from the bunkered perceptions of the failed but nearly over Bush Administration. We don't have any such thing as a self-aware MSM, though, so apparently teeth-gritting and earplugs is our only recourse between now and 1/20/09...

Today's ham-handed offering of another insincere non-mea culpa comes to us courtesy of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who once again (just like her boss Gee Dub) makes the intellectually indefensible argument that, even though the intelligence about WMD was hopelessly wrong, it was still A Good Thing that we removed Saddam Hussein from power. Given that the primary argument for invading Iraq was the purported existence of an active and aggressive WMD program, this premise - which Gee Dub hisownself also was pushing last week - doesn't pass the simplest sniff test. This argument actually ratifies the widely-held suspicion that the only motivation for invading Iraq and overthrowing Hussein was, in fact, to invade Iraq and overthrow Hussein, having everything to do with neo-con wet dreams about nation-building and nothing to do with any intrinsic threat to the safety of our nation...

The truth we were told we were living - beginning in the late summer of 2002 - was something completely different, complete with smoking guns morphing into mushroom clouds and skies blackened by swarms of weaponized remote control aircraft launched from offshore tramp steamers. That fable cost this nation the lives of over 4000 soldiers, sailors, and Marines, along with as-yet untabulated tens of thousands more Americans who came back from Iraq with physical and psychic wounds from which they may never fully recover. And then there are the citizens of Iraq, who have been plunged into a mind-bending third-world hell of deprivation, divisiveness, and death...

Condi Rice, just like her boss, can talk all she wants about how this whole mess will someday on balance turn out to have been a good thing. There is a chance - a slim one, admittedly, but a chance - that everything will work out for the best in this best of all possible worlds (as Dr. Pangloss might say). That outcome will be achieved in spite of, rather than because of, the decision of Gee Dub and his minions to invade Iraq, despite either his fondest hopes or the insistence of courtiers like Rice. He and they created a circumstance that needs to be dealt with; he and they failed at nearly every level (including, arguably, the premise behind "The Surge") and it will be the job of The Adults to come in and clean up. George W. Bush, with the concurrence and enabling of people like Condi Rice and Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, created a mess that others will have to fix. The claims by Gee Dub and his various minions that history will vindicate them on the Iraq issue is just like that small a..hole in the bar that starts a huge chair-flinging brawl and then flees to the exit, only to be found later out in the parking lot cheering about "how we showed 'em" as his battered, bloody buddies stagger out of the joint later...

Any "success" that comes from the invasion of Iraq will happen because of decisions made by the Obama Administration as it tries to clean up the mess left by Bushco. And that's why losers don't get to do that final draft of history; they were left behind when somebody finally figured out what winning looked like...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:24 PM 0 comments

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