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

Saturday, January 10, 2009

If The IDF Invaded Portland, Oregon...Or, Why Leaflets Mean Nothing 

...this is Portland, Oregon:


Out beyond the edges of this picture to the left and right lies the rest of the politically defined city of Portland - as opposed to the Greater Portland Metropolitan area. The vast majority of that unseen area is neighborhoods comprised of houses on tiny lots, apartment complexes crammed up against each other, and the occasional aggregation of condo's, with a nice diversity of small parks interspersed throughout the city. Excluding water (such as the Willamette River in the foreground), the area of inhabitable land within the city of Portland is 134 square miles. The population density within the boundaries of the city of Portland is around 4,200 people per square mile...

This is the Gaza Strip. The area of inhabitable land is 139 square miles. The population density within the boundaries of Gaza is a little less than 11,000 people per square mile. There is no indication that there is a nice diversity of small interspersed parks...

Were tanks and troops and aircraft of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to swarm across the eastern border into Portland, dropping leaflets ahead of their advance and text-messaging the residents to warn them to stay away from the targets of their invasion (angry, heavily armed home-brewers, I guess, because Grunge Rock is pretty much already dead all by itself), the desperate fearful residents would be able to flee in the opposite direction. They could flee west over the Portland Hills into Hillsboro and Beaverton and Tualatin, taking refuge in the vast comforting spread of industrial parks, scattered neighborhoods, gated communities, and malls that would provide all sorts of prime locations for refugee camps in appropriate proximity to the succor of Starbucks, Burgerville USA, and Powell's Books...

When tanks and troops and aircraft of the IDF swarm across the eastern border into Gaza, dropping leaflets and sending text messages in advance of various moments of escalation of the invasion, the citizens have nowhere to go. They are trapped to the west by the Mediterranean Sea and on all other sides by people with firearms who will not let them cross into Egypt or Israel. Their only hope is to stay away from Hamas fighters as the leaflets and text messages urge, but they are also trapped by the simple fact that the determination of just exactly who is a Hamas fighter is being made on a moment by moment basis by individual pilots, enlisted-grade forward air controllers, junior-grade field commanders, and singular tank commanders of the IDF. These trapped residents live in an environment where nobody has a uniform and there is precious little difference in appearance between a "bad guy" and all those other people who don't realize that they are suddenly featured characters in some strange infrared movie that will be played later in the day as a movie clip demonstrating the great victory...

The noncombatant residents of Gaza have nowhere to run or hide, regardless of whatever blizzard of warning leaflets that may rain down upon them. One only has to casually ponder the borders and population distribution of a place like Portland, Orygun, to understand the reality of the circumstances that these noncombatant citizens of Gaza are facing right now. For them, this is a "shooting fish in a barrel" game with no particular rules about picking out just exactly which fish can be shot at, and they don't have anywhere else that they can go...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:09 PM 0 comments

Friday, January 09, 2009

Friday Night Songs 

...some songs from my early years have kept echoing through my head over the last eight years. Here's one:



If for no other reason than January 20 will mark the end of those last eight years, here's hoping I can get my feet back on the ground...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:06 PM 0 comments

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Can This Stop Now, Please? 

...of all the things that have been bad about the long, brutal international reign of terror that has been the Bush administration, the occupancy of the office of the Vice President of the United States by Dick "Big Dick" Cheney has been one of those pinnacles of madness for which this administration should be most remembered. His views on both executive authority and the role of a person in his position have made the whole idea of "undisclosed location" look pretty good if we're talking about a remote uninhabited Pacific island or the trapped dead-end side of a tunnel cave-in, but really bad if there is any opportunity for communication with the outside world involved...

It would be a cheap, convenient throw-off to say that Dick Cheney was this generation's Spiro Agnew, but he was so much more than that. Cheney wasn't so much another growling Republican attack dog so much as he was the embodiment of a truly dangerous imperialistic view of the Executive Branch of American government, espousing interpretations of executive power that the vast majority of constitutional scholars wouldn't be able to buy off on even if you kept them up all night and plied them with neverending bottles of cheap wine. He leaves office with what is probably the lowest approval rating of any Vice President in the last century and as the Vice President that Americans are least interesting in hearing a valedictory speech from in at least that long, if not longer...

But he just won't go away quietly, even though he needs to. Big Dick is - and has for a long time been - about as popular in the mind of the average American as the idea of a huge flaming asteroid smacking the Earth dead-center and recreating that whole "Where did the dinosaurs go" scenario. And yet, he's still out there, offering unsolicited and unappreciated advice that didn't even work the first time around...

It's time for him to go fishing so this nonsense can stop...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:58 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Even John Doe is P.O.'ed 

...there just simply isn't any excuse for this. While it is only unintentionally cruel, the fact that the letters sent to relatives of Army personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan being addressed to "John Doe" was a product of a contractor's actions in no way excuses the Army. Contractors, despite the mountains of apparent evidence provided by all those huge no-bid contracts in Iraq, do not - or at least aren't supposed to work - in a vacuum. Throughout the Federal government, including the Pentagon, there is a vast bureaucracy that exists for the sole purpose of overseeing contracts (let's just say I know about these things and leave it at that). There was a Contracting Officer and a Contracting Officer's Representative (and perhaps even Contract Inspectors working for the COR) who's job it was to oversee the contract and make sure things went smoothly...

An Army spokesman says "It's our fault". Well, yes, it is their fault. It was the job of Defense Department acquisition personnel to make sure this went smoothly to the benefit of still-grieving families, and, despite the presumed focus that you would think would be directed to this letter, they managed to screw it up by the numbers for reasons that would guarantee a one-way ticket to another line of work (probably in a picturesque but disturbingly remote Alaskan village) for most non-Defense acquisition personnel. Apparently this episode answers the question of where all those Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority procurement specialists ended up working...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:13 PM 0 comments

Monday, January 05, 2009

Wanting It Too Much 

...I'm starting to get a disturbing vibe from Roland Burris. Up until last week neither I or the vast majority of Americans had ever heard of him, and then Blagojevich named him as the replacement to fill Barack Obama's vacant seat. What I have learned since then is that he was the first African-American to be elected to state-wide office in Illinois and is - in a certain sense - most notable for insisting in that office of State Attorney General that the state fight for the conviction and execution of a man accused of a vicious rape and murder long after it became apparent that the target of this prosecution was innocent of the crime...

Roland Burris appears to be a politically ambitious man. Aside from his tours of duty as State Attorney General and State Comptroller, he has run for mayor of Chicago once, for US Senate once, and for governor three times. All by itself, this track record would suggest that his insistence on December 14 that he would only be interested in being a "caretaker" Senator with no interest in running for reelection might not be all that sincere an observation, given his history of not taking "No" for an answer. Fortunately for the observant - or unfortunately, as the case may be - the discrepancy between his history and his 12/14 suggestion don't have to stand on the confused edge of that history; just a couple of days ago, according to a columnist/blogger/whatever from the Chicago Sun Times, he's walked all the way back from the December 14 'offer' and ruled out a role as "caretaker"...

All of this is just the sort of thing that one might expect from a person who feels that he is destined for better things. I don't have all that much a problem with that; it takes a certain mindset that I don't have to be willing to lay yourself out on the line time and time again in order to try to reach a place that you think you should occupy, and all the recent to-ing and fro-ing is the normal sort of thing one might expect from an ambitious politician. The problem I have with Roland Burris regards his judgement as displayed by his aggressive behavior as Attorney General in the case of Rolando Cruz...

Rolando Cruz was a young man convicted multiple times for the brutal rape/murder of a 10-year-old girl. He deserved the death penalty the crime, were it not for the fact that there wasn't actually any real evidence that he did it. Roland Burris aggressively sought to convict and sponsor the state-sanctioned murder of this young man (if you go all squougy at my use of a Politico link, I have others), even when a police investigator and Burris' own Deputy Attorney General resigned in protest over the continued effort to convict Cruz in the face of mounting evidence, including DNA tests, that demonstrated that he was nothing more than a victim of anxious overreach and misconduct by both prosecutors and police involved in the case. Roland Burris really, really wanted to win the appeal in this case, even when his own people were telling him that his desire to convict and murder this young man could not withstand the simple weight of the evidence...

This is a measure of the judgement of Roland Burris. Either that or it is a plumbing of the depths of the political ambition of Roland Burris at the expense of other human beings. In either case, it demonstrates that he isn't all that acceptable a nominee to the role of junior Senator of the State of Illinois. That, combined with the increasing stridency of his personal insistence that he MUST be sworn in right now as the next Senator from Illinois - which is a fight one would think would be fought by the governor's office rather than by the nominee - raises interesting questions as to why he should be considered a worthy candidate to a Democratic seat in the United States Senate...

Burris wants this Senate seat too much. That's not a good thing all by itself and it's compounded by his single-minded pursuit of the upholding on appeal of the conviction of a man who was clearly innocent of the crime for which he has been charged. His behavior during that episode clearly indicates that he wanted "it" too much even then, although what the "it" was at the time was a rather amorphous desire for higher office. As a nation, we deserve better...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:36 PM 0 comments

Sunday, January 04, 2009

The Stars Are Realigned And All Is Well In The Media World 

...if its reaction tonight to Bill Richardson's withdrawal of his name as Commerce Secretary nominee is any judge, the MSM is tan, rested, and finally ready to get back into the game. Having sat all the way down at the end of the bench over the last eight years, steadfastly refusing to in any way exercise the once clearly-understood responsibilities that generations of journalists honored as their responsibility as the Fourth Estate, the media now has lept upon the Blagojevich Senate nomination, a NYT story attempting to connect donations to Bill Clinton's foundation to some of Hilary's Senate votes, and today's somewhat surprising announcement to once again assume its role as an adversarial force....on those occasions when Democrats are in control...

George W. Bush came to power in 2000 with a bushel basket full of issues that nobody in the media seemed to want to talk about, and the question about his redemption of his cushy, unusual appointment to the Texas Air National Guard is only the most prominent (mostly because of the trumped-up problems an investigation about it caused for Dan Rather and some of his CBS News associates). There was never any talk about the sweetheart deal he engineered for the new stadium for the Texas Rangers that made him a nice sum of money; there was never the sort of media swarm that the Clinton administration experienced on the bubbling up of any silly rumor directed toward the amazing apparent conflict of interest by members of the Securities and Exchange Commission involved in shoveling all those questions about Gee Dub's Harken Energy stock sales under the rug back in the day...

Then, of course, there's also the possible failure of his administration to keep its eye on the ball regarding terrorism from the outset, the misuse of intelligence to launch the invasion of Iraq, illegal wiretapping, torture, extraordinary rendition, no-bid contracts for Halliburton despite the Cheney connection, politically-expedited treason in the Valerie Plame outing, firing U.S. Attorneys for insufficient exuberance in filing politically punishing indictments against Democrats, and all the rest. We have ample evidence from the previous experience of the 42nd presidency to suggest that this sort of track record could be expected to stir up a storm of coverage...but it didn't. Now, though - tonight - I see that all the talking heads that are normally around on a Sunday night, along with any of the real media studs who can be pried out of their personal hideaways on the last weekend of the Christmas/New Years holiday, are almost drooling at the prospect of delving deeply into the guts of the newly failed Obama administration. They seem tonight to be almost celebrating a sort of ceremonial wringing of their hands over not only the difficulties the new administration will face because of the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip (which is a truly mystifying talking point, given that it is directly the result of eight long years of failed Middle East policy by George W. Bush) but also a newly-manufactured taint of scandal that they seem to be almost gleefully flinging over the not-yet-installed administration like some sort of dank rotting tarp...

This isn't your father's Main Stream Media (can't say "Oldsmobile" anymore, since General Motors killed that reference - and division - a few years ago). What the hell; it isn't even the Main Stream Media I once thought I wanted to be a part of back in those heady days surrounding Richard Nixon's final chopper flight off the White House lawn on August 9, 1974, which stood as a stark symbol that for once The People - and The Media - had won one for the good guys. In a couple of weeks, George W. Bush will climb on some gleaming taxpayer-funded airplane to leave our nation's capitol for the last time, ushered off in the strange fog of a false patina of good will (engendered mostly by a profound sense of relief) of the sort that Richard Nixon could never know or even understand when he fled those fetid tidelands for the last time. The true, glaring irony of all this is that, thirty five years ago, the kind of President who did the sorts of things that Gee Dub and his minions have gotten away with over the last eight years would have been lucky to successfully get out of town by disguising himself as some old hopeless wino and sneaking onto a Greyhound bus, had today's MSM honored its committment to "The
Fourth Estate". But none of that matters now, because a Democrat is about to move into the White House, and a different - but previously seen - set of rules are at play, and the corrupt, failed Barack Obama administration will clearly suffer at the hands of the MSM because of the reinstitution of those rules...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:43 PM 0 comments

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