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

Thursday, May 07, 2009

When They Say It's Not About The Money 

...as the oft-quoted saying goes, "when they say it's not about the money, it's about the money". In the fetid hothouse environment of national electoral politics, that very word - 'politics' - can readily replace 'the money', and Senator David Vitter (R-D.C. Madam Phone List/Adult-sized Huggies) demonstrates with a lame halfhearted effort how that whole thing works...

David Vitter was, of course, the biggest prize to be found on Deborah Jeane Palfrey's infamous phone list. He did all the things that any Pharisee conservative Member of Congress would do in the event that there wasn't an actual airport bathroom arrest and video evidence of a subsequent interrogation (h/t to Larry Craig): he apologized to God and his family and Louisiana voters and said all the accusations were politically motivated. Inquiring minds might linger on why all that other stuff is necessary if the accusations are just some sort of politically motivated attack, but Louisiana politics have always been a mystery to me, so I guess I should never mind that bit...

Vitter has a bit of an electoral problem, though, because all of this stuff is going to come up again, regardless of God's - or Vitter's wife's - abundant grace-filled forgiveness. He's got to do something - anything - that will show that he's not spending all that taxpayer-funded time in D.C. frolicking in diapers and playing "Spank Me, Mommy" in hourly-rate motels along the banks of the Potomac. He needs to show that he is On The Job, doing the work that the people of the Great State Of Louisiana sent him to Gomorrah Along The Potomac to do...

In an ongoing effort to display the sort of lip-service that he has for so long paid to his hurricane-ravaged constituents, Vitter has decided that the best course of action is to put a Senatorial hold on the confirmation of Craig Fugate to be the head of FEMA. He claims that this is a principled stand that he is taking on behalf of the hurricane-ravaged citizens of his state, even though he has forsaken his own opportunities to make a principled stand for some of those same hurricane-ravaged residents when the question was about affordable housing in New Orleans - a question that was affirmatively supported by just about every elected state and Federal official except for David Vitter....and George W. Bush...

Vitter says now that his hold on Fugate's nomination as FEMA director is all about the business of the people and not about politics. His questions and complaints are things that he could have addressed over the last several years, but his reelection is coming up soon, so now is apparently the time to raise those issues that he's been grappling with so silently for so long. In the meantime, a highly regarded emergency management expert sits on the sidelines while the start of the hurricane season creeps ever closer and an unusually early wildfire season burns down the western United States....

Even given all this, Diaper Dave wants you to understand that it's not about politics; it's about the peeps. As is usually the case, that's all you need to know about Diaper Dave's motiviation...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:10 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

The Danger Of A Divine Right 

...it is being reported this evening on the MSM on the mounting pressure for some sort of action - any responsive sort of action - that could be directed against Jay Bybee and John Yoo in response to their efforts to make the path smooth for Bushco's desire to torture 'high-value' prisoners. What I find most interesting about this article is elements of defense being offered by supporters, especially the idea that Yoo's work "taps into the founders' understanding of the executive"...

Cue the Double-Take Moment here...

I confess right up front that I am not a constitutional scholar; heck, I'm not all that much a scholar in my own field of study. I do, on the other hand, have a working understanding of the big-ticket items of U.S. History, including that part of our history revolving around the insurgency that led to our independence from our British masters. Pretty much every instinct of the majority of the Founding Fathers opposed a monarchy, and there isn't all that much evidence suggesting that they were all down with the idea of an elected constitutional monarchy. In fact, American history suggests that the majority of the framers of the Constitution were strongly interested in establishing checks and balances, negating the whole idea of the Divine right of Kings that monarchy - whether it be electoral or as a product of primogeniture would lead to. The memos cranked up by the Office of Legal Counsel to justify actions that have repeatedly been defined as torture under both Federal and international law have the ugly heft of a 'divine right of kings' moment, a simple 'in your face' rejection of constitutional checks and balances in favor of the 21st Century's answer to Richard Nixon's dangerous claim that the things that a president does are legal by some mysterious extra-constitutional power of the office...

American history is absolutely stiffly packed with examples of presidents who took liberties with their Constitutional powers and has only a paltry few examples of the Constitution actually winning (or the people winning, in the total absence of concern by a simple ancient piece of parchment). Most of those examples of liberty-taking, when looked at through the long lens of time, leave us shaking our heads and wondering what the hell people were thinking at the time to allow such extra-legal behavior. We have a wonderful opportunity right now to come to an understanding of what was going on during all those past episodes as we watch the unfolding debate over whether an administration can make torture OK in contradiction to a human lifetime of national and international prohibitions against acts of torture. The big danger of failing to hold accountable those who created a legal framework for torture is that it fosters the idea that 'its not illegal if the President says it isn't'. That is the road down which "the Divine Right of Kings" lies, and that's a tremendously dangerous route to travel...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:23 PM 0 comments

Sunday, May 03, 2009

I'm Here To Help 

...enough electrons have died in a collective effort to adequately capture the ridicule that the whole idea of the new Republican sensing effort known as the National Council for a New America deserves that I won't go there. Wouldn't be right; wouldn't be the sort of thing that a church elder like myself should engage in. No, I believe in reaching out and helping my fellow Americans in their time of trouble. In that light, helpful advice is what is in order...

Since I have to travel occasionally in the line of work, I understand how hard it can be to be alone in a strange city away from my family. There is a clear path, it seems to me, to help the members of this blue ribbon panel to avoid this unpleasant experience since Heaven knows McCain and Romney deserve some time off the road and Jindal needs to take a break from dragging all those heavy bags of campaign contributions back from all those fund-raising trips he's been making all over the United States. The panel members could probably avoid a great deal of separation from their families that love them and miss them by doing two simple things:

1) Have the Council staff round up all the reputable deep-drilled political polling results dating from Jan. 1 to Nov. 4 of last year, for every state and district where Republicans lost when they were thinking they had a shot at winning. This information could be sent - along with the speeches, talking points, platforms, and commercials by each Democratic and Republican candidate in each race - to the panel member's home e-mail addresses, where they could sit in their sumptuously appointed dens and study the information at their leisure.

2) Ask Roger Ailes (the bad one) to burn some DVD's of FAUX news coverage and talk shows covering that same time period and send them next-day-air to each of the panel members to watch either on their massive flat panel TV's or on their computers (John McCain's daughter could probably help his with the technical aspects of this one and maybe even supply some pithy New Republican commentary at the same time, kind of like a live version of those "background information" segments that any movie DVD worth its salt has anymore).

It should be relatively simple - dare one say it, child's play - to be able to compare what their candidates and their official cable network mouthpiece were saying compared to what actually mattered to the American voter. There is, however, an ever-so-slim chance the members of this top-notch blue ribbon panel may not be able to tease out what these particular tea leaves are actually trying to tell them; after all, they and the rest of the party had all of this information in front of them in real time during the campaign and couldn't figure it out. Maybe in the quiet comfort of familiar settings, they will be able to move outside the box a bit, though, and reach that much-needed political epiphany that has so far escaped them and at the same time reduce their individual and collective carbon footprint a bit (OK, so maybe not so much for Jindal, who seems intend on visiting every state in the nation in his effort to not run for president, as Bryan at Why Now? would say)...

Assuming the members of the blue ribbon panel either aren't interested, capable, or willing to save themselves time away from home by employing the simple steps listed above, they will need to address a few items that will be vitally necessary in order for them to get a true sense of What Americans Want. In fact, if they hope to derive any meaningful value from this journey on which they are about to embark, there are things that they just simply must do:

A) Schedule all travel, lodging, and rental cars through an on-line 'cheap fares' site (I use Orbitz, but there many other fine sites available). Make sure to select the cheapest possible ticket prices, the lowest-cost lodging, and the least expensive rental car. If they need to get in touch with real American people, might as well start off by scheduling travel the same way real American people do, even if it means facing that second layover be an eleven-hour stint in the Salt Lake City airport and the drive from the destination airport at 4:15 am to the CheapBox one-star motel on the outskirts of town is in a Ford Focus (which is a fine American-made car owned by many real American people, by the way)...

B) Travel alone. No staff to make smooth the path; no detours to VIP lounges or special TSA treatment. Find your own gates, boys; get your own luggage, secure your own car and drive to your own motel. The rest of us do it all the time; heck, my college sophomore daughter has done it several times even though she never previously had never flown or been further east than the Orygun/Idaho border. You can do it, too...

C) Only hold forum/town hall meetings in places where Republicans lost. Any meeting held in any Congressional district currently served by a Republican or in any state where the majority of State and Federal office-holders are part of the current crop of Republicans are a waste of time and precious non-renewable energy resources (back to that carbon footprint thing). Anyone who schedules or countenances such a useless venue should be forced to read and write a book report on "An Inconvenient Truth" and watch everything Michael Moore has ever done...

D) Establish strict admittance requirements for those forum/town hall meetings. Allow no one who voted for a Republican candidate within fifty yards of the entrance. Use tear gas, rubber bullets, or Tasers as necessary to drive away anyone who claims to be a Republican voter. These particular control measures obviously won't need to be employed all that much, since registered Republicans are only slightly less rare than leprechauns these days, but - still - take no chances. These people have little FAUX News icons for eye pupils and will only want to talk about birth certificates, abortion, and gay marriage. The panel can throw them a bone by setting up Free Speech zones somewhere on the far side of the next county (something that Republicans can do in their sleep anymore after eight years of Gee Dub) , surrounded by cyclone fencing and heavily armed local law enforcement personnel (again, staff "in their sleep" work), and hirelings toting dummy FAUX News minicams so these folks think they actually matter, a myth that the most recent election effectively dispelled...

E) Don't ask those assembled groups of Americans "what do you want"; ask them "why do we suck?" "What do you want" isn't a serious question; the American people have expressed pretty clearly in the last two election cycles what they want and Republicans haven't fit very comfortably into that picture. The whole "National Council for a New America" thing may turn out to be more than a dog and pony show if they actually ask the latter question of real Americans who would rather personally pump their own septic tanks than vote for a Republican candidate. Pay attention; take notes; don't make sourpuss faces when they criticize all those useless tax-cut plans, taxation and fund raising policies (ahem...Haley) or ridicule lame observations about "volcano monitoring" (especially if you are anywhere in the Pacific Time Zone, Piyush - fair warning and all that). The blue ribbon panel has a couple of strikes against it before the boys even steps into the batter's box (and that's strike number one, "boys"). That other strike is a blue ribbon panel comprised of a failed Republican presidential primary nominee who only struck sparks with the voting public as a result of a story about a dog with stomach problems strapped to the top of the family car, a failed Republican general election presidental nominee who has a great war hero backstory but sometimes appears to be something of an unaimed loose cannon, a likely future Republican presidental primary nominee who scared children during his response to Obama's SOTU address and doesn't come across as a deep thinker in any case, a guy who has a checkered history as Republican National Committee chairman and Mississippi Governor, and the son who Mom and Dad probably wish would have gone on to be President of the United States instead of his brother. There's also the complicating factor that not a single one of these panel members could even most charitably be considered the sort of "moderate" Republican that would have any hope of successfully reaching out to the vast majority of American voters who have rendered that classic Epic Fail verdict on their party over the last couple of elections...

I believe that these natural disadvantages can be overcome if the members of the National Council for a New America blue ribbon panel will simple follow my humbly offered suggestions. I furthermore believe that democracy is best served by competing parties offering compelling and realistic alternative solutions to the problems facing the United States (which, of course, automatically disqualifies most of the Republican party, including pretty much all of the panel members as well as intriguing and highly visible outliers like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul, right off the bat). In that spirit, I think that a great deal of public value could come from this blue ribbon panel if only it will institute my suggestions, and that's why I'm here to help. That's the kind of guy I am...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:31 PM 1 comments

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