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

Friday, April 03, 2009

The Games They Play - Richard Burr Edition 

...the strategy Republicans have adopted for getting back to majority status in DC has become clear and well-remarked upon over the last several weeks: monkey-wrench, scheme, oppose, and fulminate on any media outlet that will have them. As today's example we need look no farther than Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), who - though there is no evidence that he has come any closer to military service than the distance between his chair and the witness table in the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room - has decided to effectively (though not officially, according to his staff) place a hold on the confirmation of Tammy Duckworth to the position of Assistant Secretary of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs...

Even though the former sales executive had, as the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services committee, ample opportunity to ask questions of the serving Army National Guard major who demonstrated far more allegiance to the concept of "duty, honor, country" than anything his bio suggests, he still has unanswered questions that, for reasons that mysteriously can't be explained, he isn't able to reveal to a curious public. Inquiring minds can only imagine what sort of questions a person having only a layman's view of Veterans Administration issues might still have for an Iraq War veteran who not only has had full exposure to VA processes with regard to wounded military personnel but also has served with notable distinction as the Director of the Illinois Department of Veteran Affairs for over two years. Maybe those unanswered questions are along the lines of "what's it like to fly a helicopter?". Perhaps he's wanting to know, since his experience as a sales executive doesn't provide a suitable knowledge baseline, whether she thinks it's appropriate that a double-amputee war-veteran field-grade officer who is still in service in the National Guard should be running for political office and expressing criticism toward his heroic former president who sent her and several hundred thousand others to Iraq and then failed to redeem the responsibility of taking care of those who came back wounded in mind and body...

On the other hand, maybe he's just messing around, engaging in the sort of intransigent nay-saying that the half-witted "strategists" that are all the Republican party has left have assured is the way back to the land of milk and honey. Smart money would probably snap up this option, especially if there is an over/under on efforts to poison Tammy Duckworth's future political opportunities. She is actually a dangerous opponent for Republicans: a person of color who responded to her nation's call despite personal misgivings and who, having coming damned close to giving that last full measure in service to her nation, came out the other side with beliefs that are antithetical to everything the current iteration of the Republican party believes in. This is a "twofer" moment for Burr, providing opportunities to both dig through the 'oppo' research for something to tag Duckworth with for purely political reasons and, at the same time, impede the efforts of the Obama administration to put its own people in place while complaining about the failure of the Obama administration to get people in place. It's fairly uncommon to see official or unofficial holds placed on the confirmation of otherwise highly qualified nominees to sub-Cabinet positions for reasons that can't - or won't - be explained in the face of simple questions, which leads naturally to the conclusion that holds like this one are a strategy rather than a meritorious objection. Burr's objection to Tammy Duckworth's confirmation is all part of the obstructionist 'Just Say No' game that the Republicans have decided to play...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:37 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

How To Know You Live In The Middle Of Friggin' Nowhere 

...the facts as presented are well-known locally and easy to understand. Even if I wanted to, which I don't, I could not hop in the car and drive a short distance to my local iPhone distributor and pick up one of those icons of the New World In Which We Live. In fact, the state of technology out here in the hinterlands of Central Oregon is so bad that the local birdcage liner actually put the looming advent of our own ability to finally lay our greasy mitts on a real live legal unhacked AT&T iPhone on today's front page...

I'm not sure which is the most embarrassing: that faux "tree" in the photo, or the fact that the local newspaper felt the need to make a front-page story of the opportunity that those of us out here in Nowheresville may finally be about to realize where we can turn up our elitist noses at the opportunity to have an iPhone. My 2.5G phone works just fine, thanks, and I don't really think that this is - or needs to be - front page news.....but that's what happens when you live in the middle of friggin' nowhere...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:32 PM 0 comments

Getting On With Getting On With It 

...in the annals of American foreign policy history, there are few initiatives that represent clear failure to the degree that our policy with regard to Cuba has displayed. While you don't have to read very far to find examples of Fidel Castro's efforts to be a bad actor in both the Western Hemisphere and Africa, you don't even have to read that far to find far more dramatic examples of 'bad actor' action by the former Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, both of which are countries with whom we have been connected by a whole host of personal, commercial, and political threads despite their own advocacy of forms of socialism very similar (if not at some times identical) to the political system in place in Cuba...

Despite all the the really bad places that there are out there in the world, Cuba is the only country on this little blue marble that I know of that I - as a supposedly free-will crusader for democracy - am forbidden by federal law to visit. I can't travel there, I can't do business there, and I can't even sent more than a few bucks to anybody I might know there (which I don't) without running afoul of the stern, long, muscular arm of my own Federal government, and I haven't been able to do that for most of my fifty-some-odd years of life. Neither have you, if you are a citizen of the United States, mostly because a small cabal of conservatives who were either in the thrall of those bygone days of Commie-fighting or who held their office at the behest of a small but politically active anti-Castro Cuban expatriates said you couldn't do those things. Fifty years on, none of that worked and by its failure indicated pretty clearly that it never was going to work. American foreign policy regarding Cuba offers the new definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again for two generations with the unfulfilled expectation of a different outcome...

We opened trade and cultural links over the years to China and the USSR with an eye toward bringing the total wonderfulness of our different system to their citizens in hopes of swaying the populace and thereby influencing their choice of governance. Not so with Cuba, largely because of that politically active expatriate population...until now. It may well be that a part of that "Change" that Obama has been prattling on about for the last couple of years will be a change in our relationship with Cuba, if pending Congressional action is any indication. These are short little baby steps toward a new relationship with Cuba, to be sure, but the strange blend of supporters pushing the idea of a new and more open legally-defined relationship between the United States and Cuba suggests that we may finally be taking that first tentative move toward getting on with it...

The reigning US policy toward Cuba over the last half-century has been allowed to stand because Cuba didn't matter, rather than because Cuba mattered all that much. China mattered, both politically and economically, so Nixon went to China (yes, I am oversimplifying it just a bit). The former Soviet mattered both politically and economically on a few more levels than did China, so Nixon's successors dealt with the USSR and the several states that resulted from its dissolution. Cuba, on the other hand, has not mattered all that much to the United States either politically or economically since the Spanish-American War. Because Cuba didn't matter all that much, the activism of those who fled the Castro regime, coupled with the finely-honed vestigial anti-Communism of folks like Jesse Helms that was looking for a home after we brought China and Russia in from the cold, has been the sole fuel powering the strange little bit of foreign policy discontinuity that our approach to Cuba has represented. Maybe, despite the ongoing efforts of the honorable Senators Robert Menendez and Mel Martinez, we can finally get beyond the last vestiges of the old Cold War...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:35 PM 0 comments

Sunday, March 29, 2009

The 'Victory' That Never Was 

...the reason that Barack Obama will end up being blamed for losing the war in Iraq that George W. Bush's minions were so anxious to start and managed so abysmally can be found in this story. As is usually the case anymore, this McClatchy report runs rings around the typically lame Associated Press effort, laying out in grim detail for anyone who has bothered to pay attention over the last couple decades just exactly how the house of cards that Gee Dub and the neocons slapped together will fall apart. That it is going to happen on somebody else's watch is the good news for the engineers of this looming disaster, because they can safely rely on the general lack of critical analytical skills by the SCLM and its own fawning attention to the dimwitted pronouncements of those same engineers and their enablers regarding all the ways they think the Obama administration is getting it all wrong...

The reality that the neocon's dream of Iraq becoming a shining beacon of democracy in the heart of the Middle East was an all-in bet in a losing game has been explained in far more articulate ways for several years at many other sites. It is sufficient to say, however, that Iraq was - and is - simply a careless cartographic artifice that fell to the British to manage as a Mandate (like the British Mandate of Palestine) after the Ottoman Empire got laid on the chopping block at the end of The Great War. What was happening in both cases was little more that the last gasping dying breaths of good old fashion European colonialism, and the whole rest of the world has been pointedly engaged in trying come to terms with the mess left by that last stab at "empire" for the last two generations...

There isn't a "Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock" moment for Iraq, no Squanto or Samoset or First Thanksgiving to create a common cultural or religious benchmark for the people of Iraq around which they could build something that looks like a cohesive national society. There is, instead, a long-subjugated Shiite majority that is otherwise a minority in the Islamic world (with only the nation of Iran as a friend), a Sunni minority that finds itself a target of Shiite anger, and a Kurdish population that is far more interested in carving out a recognized nation of its very own from the edges of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey than it is in getting tangled up in the current iteration of 14 centuries of Sunni-Shiite religious politics...

Those newly documented problems that appear to be cropping up between our installed Iraqi government and our own recruited "Sons of Iraq" suggest just exactly the sort of disturbing inability of Shiite's and Sunni's to come together for the good of the country that most thinking people predicted seven years ago when the Bushco henchmen decided to roll out the public relations initiative supporting the invasion of Iraq. They got their way in that debate and stampeded us into an invasion and occupation that uselessly wasted lives and destroyed any semblance of moral authority that the United States ever held in the Middle East. What's worse, they made it across the county line ahead of the posse that would have brought them to the sort of righteous judgement that they so richly deserve for the looming failure that their dream of a democratic Iraq will become. Iraq will become Obama's problem and a part of his own presidential legacy, even though almost every nut and bolt of our current involvement was manufactured by George W. Bush...

We haven't "won" in Iraq; we may never actually "win" there. All the talk by various Bushco minions is simply nonsensical jibber-jabber. The president who insisted in his first run for that office that we should never be involved in nation-building decided to fling himself fully into that very activity for reasons that will never find comfortable resolution with his campaign rhetoric or with the realities of this post-9/11 world we were constantly being told we were inhabiting. The Bad News for the current president is that the ongoing failure of reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite leaders in Iraq is going to be tallied on his score card rather than on that of his predecessor's. We hadn't really 'won' in Iraq by November 4, 2008, and we probably never will, but the loss - if (when) it comes - will probably be charged to Obama. The So-Called Liberal Media and Republican wingnuts who wanted to start the war to begin with will make sure to make that happen...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:38 PM 0 comments

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