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

Thursday, June 18, 2009

That's SENATOR To You, General!! 

...offered without comment, except to say that a longer clip would have afforded the opportunity to actually hear the General's anal orifice trying to crawl all the way back up into his upper GI tract for protection:

Posted by: Jack K. / 9:17 PM 0 comments

Oh, And One More Thing.... 

...I don't really have anything more to add to the sordid John Ensign story. I just thought this shot was way too awesome to pass up in light of the paradox that is his current circumstances vs. his history of moral pronouncements...

Actually, so I do have a couple of things to add:

1) While I don't have any particular feeling one way or another about whether this silver-haired Lothario engaged in some sort of "sordid" affair (because I'm not interested at all in people's personal lives when they don't intersect with mine), I feel a powerful urge to use the same language that the scrintchy-eyed faux moralists on the Pharisee right (such as...oh, say...John Ensign, for example) would use if it were a Democrat (such as...oh, say...Bill Clinton, for example) whose failure of marital fidelity was being discussed.

2) Despite anything I may have written, implied, or suggested in that previous post, I am enjoying the daylights out of this little tragedy and look forward to what appear to be many shoes that remain to be dropped as this story unfurls and expands...

Photo Credit: (AFP/File/Karen Bleier)
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:09 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

When All You Have Is A Bomber, Every Problem Is A Target 

...why John McCain is getting so much face time with his criticism of Obama's response to the Iranian strife while Senator Richard Lugar's views are not is something of a mystery.......OK, it isn't really, given the history of the MSM over the last 15 - 20 years....but, still, at long last, have these people no decency?

This report isn't the fault of Politico - even though most of that outfit's writers would probably cheerfully crawl across a parking lot full of broken glass while under constant live machine gun fire if there was the chance of finding something on the other side reflecting badly on the Obama administration. No, this one is on CNN, which - one more time, just like the day before on NBC - granted a forum to the guy who got his butt handed to him in last November's referendum on who would be the best person to lead the country (in part because of his bellicose refusal to step away from the saber-rattling that has become the failed hallmark of Republican foreign policy) so that he could once again prove that the old saying about partisanship ending at the ocean's edge is only operative in a Republican's mind if the president is, in fact, a Republican...

John McCain has a pretty sparse history of having been right on any foreign policy issue that mattered over the last quarter century (his opposition to Reagan's deployment of Marines to Lebanon being a notable exception) and is not viewed as a foreign policy expert, unlike his collegue Richard Lugar. His answer to many foreign policy issues is one or another version of parking a carrier battle group off the offending country's coast. McCain represents the bomber pilot's variant of the old "when all you have is a hammer" saw to a degree that another bomber pilot of an earlier generation - George McGovern - could never have even thought of aspiring to, much less lowering himself to emulate...

McCain is wrong once again; wrong on the basics and wrong on the policy. More to the point, he seems not to understand the nuance of the very specific history that the United States shares with Iran. Support of the desires of the opposition is in fact taking sides, regardless of how noble the motives might be for doing so, and could play into the hands of the ruling regime in the very way that Senator Lugar - who has actually thought about such matters - implied. The ol' Maverick used to be a naval aviator - an attack pilot flying a bomb-dropping ground attack aircraft - and seems to not have moved beyond the aggressive mindset that is required for that line of work. That mindset doesn't really play well in the realm of foreign policy most of the time, so it's just a little bizarre that we can't seem to be rid of this guy and his ill-considered observations on "what should the US do" in this particular case...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:38 PM 0 comments

On A Contrarian View Of "Analysis"...The Ensign Files 

...it is an article of faith in the world of conventional wisdom that Nevada Sen. John Ensign's confession to an extramarital affair is another headache that the Incredible Shrinking Republic-Fascist party could do without. In fact, this A.P. analysis illustrates that point perfectly...

I have a contrarian view which I'm going to present very quietly, just this once, never to repeat again. The fact that I have a contrarian view shouldn't be surprising; I live in Orygun, after all, and I believe there is a section in the Orygun Revised Statutes mandating serious penalties for failing to do so (that's how we explain the historical fact of Republicans like Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield, and Bob "Boxed Wine" Packwood, all of whom tended to fit uncomfortably into their party back in the day and wouldn't get out of a primary campaign these days)....

At any rate, as I was saying, I have a quiet little contrarian view to the conventional wisdom about Ensign's hypocritical little sexual romp. This is probably exactly what the Republic-Fascist party needs, for one simple reason: the only way that this shrinking minority can ever realistically return to the state of being an actual long-term player at anything other than a regional level is to cast off the hegemony of it's one true current base. That base is the socially ultra-conservative religious Pharisee base (insisting beyond all evidence to the contrary that it is somehow affiliated with Christianity) that has wrapped its sweaty mitts around the levers of power - and teenage boys and strangers in public restrooms and prostitutes and other sexual objects other than its spouses - for the last 20 years and it's hold isn't likely to be broken until somebody steps up to the potter's wheel to form a new Republican party out of the raw clay left over from the sort of Republican party that once held sway in places like Orygun...

I grew up around a lot of Republicans - seriously, a lot of Republicans, mostly of the old more libertarian mindset - back up in the hills and hollers above Central Idaho's Clearwater River and I don't think any of those old Idaho hillbillies would even deign to acknowledge the image that their party tends to project these days. Why they wouldn't have been pleased with Ensign's infidelity in any objective sense, his pious insistence on using the power of the Federal Government to pry into and control people's personal lives - coupled with that little "daliance" of his - would have guaranteed his return to the private world no later than the next election cycle. The old Republican party had a shot, here and there, at reaching out back in the day to all those center-whatever voters because its candidates didn't normally - as a rule, outside of Bible-belt regions - spit out the kind of tripe that True Believers (even if they frequently aren't True Practitioners) keep spouting as the foundation of their political aspirations these days. Extramarital affairs aren't ever a good idea for anyone seeking or looking to hold onto political office, but Republican hopes for a party worth messing with as a national entity simply aren't going to come close to seeing fruition of that dream ntil somebody figures out that it's time to step away from the morally vacuous Promise Keepers like Ensign, Vitter, Foley, and all the rest...

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:08 PM 0 comments

Monday, June 15, 2009

On Why The MSM Doesn't Like Bloggers 

...on Saturday last (June 13), Bryan at Why Now wrote this post about the obvious evidence of fraud represented by the reported Iranian election results...

The Associated Press finally has a story, first published less than two hours ago, mulling over just how it could be that the Iranian election could be declared after a matter of hours when 40 million hand-written ballots needed to be counted "by hand". Apparently, the MSM has finally tumbled to the very same idea that Bryan reached on Saturday: how do you count so many ballots without voting machines or tabulator equipment in such a short period of time?

As Bryan pointed out...on Saturday... you don't. Yet even today, the awesome power of the MSM - as so ably represented by the AP - hasn't quite been able to figure that out. It can only report that such a remarkable electoral "loaves and fishes" moment is "suspicious"...

That's why the MSM doesn't like bloggers. Bloggers are smarter and faster than the MSM...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:21 PM 0 comments

Doesn't Anybody Around Here Watch SciFi?! 

...the lede says it all:
After more than 120,000 years trapped beneath a block of ice in Greenland, a tiny microbe has awoken. The long-lasting bacteria may hold clues to what life forms might exist on other planets.

Seriously, what part of the underlying plot line of at least one SciFi Channel movie every other day or so are these Penn State researchers missing, for God's sake? Ancient/foreign microbes are the fourth leading cause of death for science fiction B-movie bit actors, trailing only natural disasters, little understood spiritual forces like the undead, and large, ungainly yet vicious alien life forms (many of which may well be your next door neighbor under the influence of those same ancient/foreign microbes)...

These people are playing with fire and they need to be stopped!! Otherwise, the normally placid rural farmland and wooded copses of the Nittany Valley will be swarming with legions of strange, angry, murderous beasts bearing a startling resemblance some sort of twisted variant of a Pennsylvania dairy cow...or maybe even Joe Pa. I mean, who knows where this could lead?
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:35 PM 0 comments

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