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

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Another Bush Advisor Leaves 

...in a personnel action that could only seem to merit little tiny bits of column inches in many newspapers, the White House - chatty anthropomorphized structure that it is - confirmed Monday that Meghan L. O'Sullivan, Gee Dub's "day-to-day advisor on Iraq", was leaving her position, apparently because she thought that it was a good time for a change. Apparently the rat-lines securing the flaming hulk of the Good Ship Bush are still fairly intact...

The part that captured my attention was this line:
"Her departure, which follows that of her deputy, could leave the White House with a vacuum of long-term experience on Iraq policy..."

OK, so the jokes and snark-lines clearly write themselves here, but the bottom line still comes back to "huh??!!?". Obviously there must be some smarter person out there in the world who can explain A) how this expertise has manifested itself in the past and 2) how we can tell the difference between the presence and absence of such valuable expertise. We will clearly need to wait for the advent of this smarter person who can lead us to our enlightenment...

There is no question that Ms. O'Sullivan is a dedicated, hard worker, nor does there appear to be any question that she wasn't necessarily part of the Rumsfeld inner-circle true believer Mafia. But Joseph McCarthy, who claimed to possess a powerful third eye about such things, would have labeled her a 'fellow traveler', and Joe didn't think that was a good thing (not that Joe's views about much of anything carry a lot of throw-weight). One can only hope only the best for a dedicated public servant as she walks off to a new uncertain future of job searching, but you just have to know that she'll be OK; she's good enough and smart enough and people like her, by golly, and will be able to land on her feet somewhere (after all, there's a couple of days of Congressional recess left and there may still be some recess appointment left unfilled). It will be interesting to see how the Bush administration moves foreward without that "long-term experience" in matters of the Iraq war that they are now facing...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:12 PM 0 comments

The Other Shoe Drops 

...in light of my previous post, I suppose that - had I been more of a futurist - it should have been expected that it would only be a matter of time before this happened. When you look into the stories of David Hicks and John Walker Lindh, you have to wonder what sort of grit has been flung into the bearings on the scales of justice that results in Hicks, an Australian, being given a sentence of time served plus nine months from a military tribunal while Lindh, the "American Taliban", getting twenty years of federal hard time on his own plea deal from a U.S. federal court with - as all federal sentences are - no hope of parole...

The likelihood that Lindh will see any sort of commutation of sentence from this administration, given its intense investment in the GWOT as its God-given mission, seems to be a fairly hopeless proposition. His connections aren't that of a desperately-needed ally, but rather are on the surface the sort of Volvo-driving dirty farking hippie liberal parents who need to be crushed at every turn in any event (whether they are or aren't isn't and won't be an issue to Gee Dub, Master Lurker Big Dick, and their minions). Fairness of a strictly defined nature would dictate, in Dr. Pangloss's otherwise perfect world, that John Lindh would have a sentence comparable to that of David Hicks. Nationalism, or more precisely jingoism, drove Lindh's original sentence, and the People In Charge have shown convincingly that they are nothing if not hide-bound in their reluctance to do anything that suggests that any aspect of Gee Dub's Global War on Terra needs rethinking...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:35 PM 0 comments

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