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

Thursday, November 05, 2009

A Fond Look Back At The Bush Administration 

...there are very few reasons to reminisce about the late and generally unlamented disaster that was called the administration of George W. Bush. History will probably show those eight long years to be a grim joke played on American citizens by a feral band of yes-men, fixers, and hustlers who never encountered any national issue - either great or small - that thew couldn't twist around into some pure raw financial windfall for the benefactors and patrons that essentially bought Bushco's ticket into the White House. There is, however, at least one reason to look back fondly on that era, especially the period after September 11, 2001:

At least during that era, we could live with the comfort of Dick "Big Dick" Cheney being incommunicado, hiding out in one or another "undisclosed location". Yes, there was the occasional muttering, angry emergence on some Sunday political show, looking for all the world like one of those 'world of nature' movies where one of Jacques Cousteau's divers would get too close to a moray eel fetched up in some coral hidey-hole, but for the most part we didn't have to listen to ol' "Big Dick" all that much. Now that he is free of the strictures of spending all of his time underground, all that is over and that's a darned shame, because these days you can't swing a dead possum without hitting a podium behind which cranky ol' 'Big Dick' is looming, carrying on about the failure of courage the Obama administration is showing over the conflict in Afghanistan...

It is ever so slightly possible, if you will grant me this indulgence, that we wouldn't be in the leaky boat we are in right now if Bushco principles like 'Big Dick' had decided to express as much concern over "winning" the war against Terra in Afghanistan way back in 2002 or 2005 or 2008 as they - and he - are now. These days, we seem destined to be graced with repeated calls for massive infusion of troops to Afghanistan by one of the primary architects of the abandonment of our earlier efforts in Afghanistan in order to invade a sovereign nation that posed the unspeakably terrifying threat of launching paper mache remote-controlled UAV's laden with nuclear chick pea bombs from rogue Iraqi garbage scows anchored off the Eastern Seaboard.

Or something like that...

Why we even need to be exposed to the likes of 'Big Dick' Cheney at all when it comes to the very military action in Afghanistan that he readily abandoned in lieu of the much more profitable invasion of Iraq over six years ago is a question for historians to sort out. All we can know is that we should look back fondly on the last administration if only because we didn't have to listen to 'Big Dick' Cheney's mewling half-witted nonsense like we do these days...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:36 PM |

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

As We Consider Why MSM Themes Matter More Than Reality 

...all you need to know, as far as the MSM is concerned, is that Obama has suffered a stinging defeat for his hoped-for agenda, all because a really lousy candidate for Governor of Virginia got the stuffing beat out of him and a sitting Governor of New Jersey who suffered from a certain personally profound unpopularity failed in his effort to secure a second term. On the other hand, as of this moment, the MSM is for some reason refusing to discuss the fact that the race for the seat in New York's 23rd Congressional District is going to be won by a Democrat for the first time since God made dirt...

It's an interesting view of analysis, or at least what passes for analysis in these latter days of the decline of Main Stream Media as a real live Fourth Estate. The bottom line in tonight's elections is pretty simple, however. The Democrats just lost two Governor's offices to Republicans who will immediately begin cutting taxes for the rich and eliminating programs and reducing services for everybody else, a prospect to which I say "Good; maybe even Great!" I have long been a disciple of de Tocqueville's long-ago observation that “in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve" when it comes to state and local elections. If all those de-energized '08 Obama voters in New Jersey and Virgina want to send him a message by sitting on their hands this time around, they can now check off that "mission accomplished" box and live with the consequences for the next four years...

On the other hand, in the in-focus race that really mattered up in New York's North Country, the much- discussed power of the tea baggers to bring the Republican Base back to majority dominance has resulted in a Democrat winning the seat for the first time since the end of the Civil War. The tea baggers weren't really interested in talking about those two governor's races because they are sufficiently sentient to grasp the difference in power balance between holding a Governor's office and holding a seat in either the US House or US Senate. New York's 23rd District mattered in a way that no Governor's election ever could because the 'baggers understand that it is only within the halls of Congress that they can achieve their ultimate goals of nation-wide political and social change...

...and they failed. They lost every which way and managed to construct a narrative for the New York 23rd special election that will provide future generations of political operative with a manual on either how to - or how not to - throw away a clear poltical advantage, depending on which way those future generations want to swing. What they didn't do was demonstration how to win when competing outside their weight class...

We may well not here much about that tomorrow, though, because the MSM is clearly so anxious to construct a theme addressing the decline of the influence of the current president. That theme construction will be manifested by the loss of two formerly Democratic Governorships, while the loss of one more Republican seat in the House of Representatives - which just yesterday was going to be its own manifestation of the rising power of the tea bagger right with Hoffman's inevitable victory - will be lost in all that other noise about how the loss of the Governorships in...wait for it now...New Jersey and Virginia...spin out the threat of eventual DOOM for the current administration...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:17 PM |

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Tonight We Are All Ducks 

...I'm not even an Oregon native, but I chose to endure the slings and arrows hurled at me by both Mrs. Jack K and others because of my decision to stay home - rather than attending a long-scheduled church function - to watch one of my adopted Orygun teams play the hated University of Southern California Trojans in the raucous confines of Autzen Stadium tonight...

The root circumstances of my boosterism are somewhat ironic, given that I lived and worked for several years within the direct local Duck sphere of influence and, during that tour, I terrorized my Duck-loving coworkers by spending every football season week wearing a baseball cap of the team that Oregon would be playing that Saturday. It worked as a bit of workplace harassment back then because the Ducks weren't a very good team; sometimes the Civil War game against Orygun State (which I also root for these days) was a contest to see who could finish the season with at least one Pac-10 win...

Things are a lot different than they were twenty years ago in the bad old days. Regardless of the native differences of current residents, we are all Ducks tonight...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:29 PM |

Partial Scores: Teabagger Wingnuts 1, Republican Sanity O 

...this afternoon saw a huge victory for those rock-ribbed forces of ideological purity in the Republican party, as the Republican nominee in the special election for the Congressional seat in New York's 23rd district abruptly withdrew from the contest after virtually every big name from the party's right wing swarmed into the state in support of her right-wing opponent running as a third party candidate. Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday's election, this is a huge victory for the Beckian teabagger wing of the Republican party, and probably not all that bad an omen fo.r the rest of us...

Dede Scozzafava's self-defenestration isn't all that surprising, given the fact that every failed loser and overly pumped-up unelected who-said of the teabagger wing of what was once an actual national party seemed uncommonly anxious to trample over any little old ladies or children standing in the way of their wild stampede down various jetways to catch flights to Oswego or Watertown. She actually did something that has become an uncommon grace for Republicans: she did the honorable thing for the sake of a party that clearly has no interest whatsoever in welcoming anyone into its tent who doesn't cleave to a particularly twisted sort of political philosophy. This moment is, all by itself, a Big Win for Beck and Limbaugh and Palin and all those other folks who have captured the hearts and minds of a particular constituency but haven't actually won anything for a lot longer than most people realize...

The incumbent that Scozzafava hoped to replace was a relatively moderate Republican serving in a district that Obama won in 2008 and was selected by Obama to serve as Secretary of the Army. How her withdrawal affects the upcoming election will only be answered on Tuesday, although it should be noted that the local Republican party felt that she, a hated RINO in the eyes of the massed forces of outsiders who stormed into the contest, was the best candidate in the context the political reality of the district. The special election will be an interesting event to observe in its own right, but this strange moment of political theater is, all by itself, instructive of the direction the Republican party is headed...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:52 PM |

Friday, October 30, 2009

Reform And My Half A Loaf 

...it's all too easy to be disappointed and angry -even bitterly so - at what appears to be just another massive el foldo job by Congressional progressives in the sausage-making exercise that is the effort to craft health care reform. It is becoming clear that there won't be any such thing as a robust public option included in whatever bill finally is voted on; in fact, the possibility exists that there won't ever be a vote on the Senate floor for any bill that has even the slightest whiff of a public option, if the public musings of Joe Lieberman (for whom there is no longer any reason for Senate Democratic Caucus members to resist the urge to physically hurl out the door) are any judge...

I find myself perfectly bifurcated on this subject. On the one hand, I care about what happens to people and I want to see every American - regardless of means - have access to health care. For my whole adult life, I have seen (and railed against the necessity for) coin jars sitting at checkout counters in virtually every little small town I've lived in with the picture of somebody who couldn't otherwise pay for an available disease treatment. I once stood in the parking lot behind the Elks Lodge in John Day, Orygun for an hour after work (no, I'm not a member; it also served during the day as the parking lot for the office where I worked) arguing with a strongly libertarian coworker about the pure failure of morality that was represented by a circumstance where the health care system in the richest, most powerful country on this planet forced families to essentially grovel in the public square for money on behalf of loved ones (all too frequently children) to pay for potentially life-saving medical treatments that were readily available - as long as they could be paid for. There was, I argued that night and have argued to this day, no possible way for this country to lay claim to the title of "Greatest Nation in the World" as long as coin jars next to cash registers hold the last desperate, singular hope for survival for any American citizen. That is the obscene reality of health care coverage as we now know it, and that is the reason we need a robust public option...

On the other hand, I am the parent of a teenager who is a Type I diabetic. Talk about the absolute king hell master of preexisting conditions. Because I can shelter my two children for only so long with my FedBorg "gold-plated" insurance, I have reason to be concerned about my second-born child's access to health care insurance that will mitigate the otherwise outrageous cost of insulin and test strips and all the other little bits and pieces required to make for a sustainable life. Even without the public option, the various proposed reform bills promise a far better future for my second-born child than what now passes for the current world of health care insurance, one where my younger child might never be able to find insurance under any circumstances. Some sort of strong public option would be better for him than what the various bills in play will offer, but that clearly isn't going to happen, so he - and I - are faced with that proverbial Half A Loaf. I will be forced to be grateful to get to that insufficient point, because it is so much better than the current grim reality of the unavailability of health insurance at any price that my son will otherwise face. The way this whole debate is playing out still sucks, though...and it really sucks because the Beaten Dog Democrats on the progressive side of the caucus are the legislators who have decided to ensure that my son and I need to be happy with that half a loaf...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:19 PM |

Friday, October 23, 2009

Fly Me WHERE?!? 

...there has been a certain amount of talk over the last day or so about the circumstances of Northwest flight 188, which on Wednesday night went on an unscheduled tour of northern Wisconsin at 37,000 feet before finally finally wandering back to the southwest to land at its intended destination in Minneapolis. What fascinates me most about this story is the reaction of the passengers...

I am not a frequent flier by any means. The last time someone had the muscle and force of will to stuff me into a narrow fragile aluminum tube so I could hurtle through a hostile, brutally cold and unsustainable environment 6 long miles above Mother Earth's warm loving embrace (that someone being Mrs. Jack K.), there was no such thing as the TSA and it would be 15 years before idea that people would willingly fly airliners into buildings became a grim reality. I have, on the other hand, become something of a personal travel agent and concierge for Mrs. Jack K. and our eldest child, scheduling flights between the eldest's East Coast college and our Orygun Cascades east-slope redoubt, and as a result I understand lots of things about arrival/departure times and the availability of flight-tracking websites like FlightView. I also have certain understanding of what I should see out the window near the end of a flight, even if that flight is in a holding pattern and even if all that is going on at night. What amazes me the most about this story is that nobody (at least none of the interviewed passengers) seemed to even understand that they had flown an extra 300 miles before finally getting on the ground; passengers even seemed to accept the premise that they were circling in a holding pattern when a simple gander out the window would have suggested that such a thing wasn't actually happening...

What we seem to be facing with this story is the perfect manifestation of the Bovination Of The Air Travel Public. That once-glamorous ideal of the jet-setter being whisked across the face of the planet in the capable - and sometimes vaguely erotic - care of an airline that had no greater desire than to make several confining hours in a fragile aluminum tube nothing less than a cultural and gustatory delight is all gone now. Air travelers are now lucky to think of themselves as the favored cows in a Chisholm Trail cattle drive, hoping for nothing better than to finally, someday, arrive at their intended destination with a minimum of human insults or assorted poking, prodding, and strip-searching. There really isn't any other way to explain how the 144 passengers of Northwest flight 188 could unwittingly endure an extra 300 miles of flight before finally arriving at their scheduled destination, only to be surprised by a swarm of law enforcement officers swarming onto the plane when they finally arrived...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:36 PM |

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Tell Me Again Why Chicago Violence Argued Against Getting The Olympics? 

...one of the almost celebratory notes that a whole host of wingnuts - and, to be honest, a few lefties, too - touted in regard to Chicago's ( and, by direct inference, President Obama's) unsuccessful bid to win the 2016 Summer Olympics was the idea that Chicago is a Failed City where innocent people die at an alarming rate as a result of brutal gang violence totally out of keeping with the spirit of the Olympic Movement...

It turns out, ironically enough, that Chicago's problem may well be that it just isn't sufficiently interesting to be an Olympic venue. Rio de Janeiro, the winner of the contest to be the first venue to host a summer Olympiad during its own winter season, is a much more lively place as far as criminal behavior is concerned. Chicago's punks are clearly going to have to step up their game if they want to be part of some successful effort to secure a future Olympic bid...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:53 PM |

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Breaking: Obama Doesn't Travel to Crawford 

...swear to God, I read this AP story and I have no idea where to start. Apparently I am supposed to feel some sort of concern or perhaps outrage or - I don't know - that sort of burbling uncomfortable bloated feeling that eating too many cucumbers can lead to. But I'm conflicted, y'know? I find myself asking one of those fundamental base-line questions that would usually be the sort of query to crop up in the science-based community in which I live:

"So What?"

"Obama travels." "Members of his Cabinet and administration travel." "He and they travel to states that were important to Obama's electoral victory." "That travel costs money." And that's it; that's the context of the story. The Associated Press apparently had neither the interest or the motivation to actually engage in the art of journalism to explore how travel by members of the Obama administration compares to travel by members of other presidential administrations - either recently or dating back to the days of the Wright brothers or in any other context. All we can gather from this bit of "journalism" - and, at that, only by inference based on paying attention during the eight long, grim years of the previous administration - is that Obama hasn't been spending nearly as much down time at Camp David and some Potemkin "Ranch" in Texas as the previous occupant of the White House (trips that cost some unknown amount of money that the AP apparently doesn't have the resources to research)...

It is a disturbing sign of these strange times that the idea of "activist government" earns all sorts of negative press; the mere idea of the current administration being out there on the street (which costs money) pushing a new agenda as opposed to the last administration's practice firing out edicts from behind the impassive, cold, imposing walls of the federal executive bureaucracy is apparently too foreign a concept of the practice of democracy for today's weak facsimile of "journalists" to be able to come to terms with. We've seen this before, of course, when there was actual serious reporting about the outrage generated by the Obama's taking an evening trip to New York to catch a Broadway play, even though there was never any sort of meaningful exploration of the cost of flying the previous president to Crawford to cut brush...

"So what" isn't part of the traditional journalistic "five w's"
, but it works pretty well as a measurement of whether a story actually matters. All we actually know as a result of this AP piece is that Barack Obama doesn't spend most weekends offline at Camp David or some other remote hideout and that his people travel to places, rather than writing letters to places. "Blue state vs. Red state" doesn't matter, mostly because the AP 'reporters' didn't flesh out the travel habits of previous administrations. The only "Breaking News" here is that Obama isn't in Crawford this weekend...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:20 PM |

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