April 2007 Archives

Imminence, as explained by Condoleeza "I have an oil tanker named after me, what has been named after you?" Rice.

"The question of imminence isn't whether someone is going to strike tomorrow. It's whether you're in a position today to deal with a threat or a stronger position to deal with that threat tomorrow."
- April 29, 2007 on This Week With George Stephanopoulos

"There's glory for you!"

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!' "

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,' " Alice objected.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

"The question is, " said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty. "which is to be master—that's all."

Lick my heel, bitch.*

___________________
* by which I mean, of course, "Great job Miss Secretary of State!"

How can we lose a war we already won? As the right wing is quick to point out, we kicked ass in the Iraq war, toppling Saddam's government in about 3 weeks or so. Bush himself set about on a victory lap, proudly displaying the banner "Mission Accomplished".

So, the question isn't whether or not we're going to "win" in Iraq. We've already won. The question is whether we're going to stay in the middle of a sectarian war that resulted from our victory.

We can't lose a war we've already won and nobody wins in a civil war.

Every once and a while there's a nice event in which the reactions sharply illustrate the differences between the left and the right. Today's example comes in the form of piercing criticism by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling. Please read Yingling's piece and the accompanying commentary in the Washington Post - it's stunning to actually see such things in print given what we've experienced in the last 6 years in which the criticism of anything millitary has been successfully repressed and exterminated from our cultural discourse.

Life just keeps getting more and more surreal, which is - of course - quite fine by the likes of me. Myself, I find nothing out of the ordinary with incidents such as Paul Wolfowitz's seemingly inexplicable stance that he can lead the charge in the fight against corruption while simultaneously providing a cushy job for his main squeeze (no visuals, please!) with a nice fat $200K salary. It's something to scratch your head over only if you think for even a moment that Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the biggest foreign policy disaster in the entire history of this planet, believes that he did anything wrong - or has the capability of considering that he may have. I mean, here's the guy who spent the entire run up of the disaster formerly known as the Iraq war playing a version of name that tune with Don Rumsfeld using troop levels for notes (I can take over that country with 50K troops. No, no, I can do it with 10K!). Seriously, this is the same guy who leveled with us all and told us that WMDs were simply a bureaucratic justification that only represented something everyone could agree upon. People, how much cockslapping in the face do you need before you just accept the nature of our lord and masters and simply stop being surprised when they act in rock solid patterns that are predictable with 100% certainty?

<sigh>

Let's see. I have some more stuff scribbled down on that toothpick wrapper while I was waiting for my non-fat, decaf, no whip VENTI mocha. Where is that thing. Ah, yes.

It's quite illuminating to see the reaction the whole Imus affair produces with different people. I was having my weekly beer with the usual Friday night crowd and of course the subject of Don Imus' firing came up. One of the regulars is a big fan of Michael Savage and regularly gets an earful from me about the level of trash he spews out on the airways on a regular basis. He's an interesting bloke, as foreign worker in this country, originally hailing from Germany before he came to this wonderful land. Not one to put words in his mouth, let's just say that he doesn't find the immigration laws in this country sufficiently enforced - especially as he has yet to get his green card. Kind of makes him ornery regarding people who come here illegally - and don't even get him started on amnesty.

So the first thing out of his mouth was a rant about suppression of free speech. After politely listening for about 2 minutes while I took a few chugs of Jeremiah Red (quite tasty and surprisingly high alcohol content), I just had to stop him and ask him a couple of questions. First, how has Imus' free speech been suppressed? He can still speak his mind in any way he wishes. He just doesn't have the megaphone he used to have, being placed in the top slot in 61 major markets. No one is telling him what he can and can't say. They just decided that he can say it on his own time, rather than paying him millions for his trouble.

Just got to love cartoonists. They have an innate ability to take a complicated issue - such as wealth distribution, and simplify it to the point where all information has been wrung out of it, leaving only the standard right wing talking points that speak directly to the spinal cord. What's great about this is that the entire argument bypasses any of the circuitry controlling your logical thinking and critical reasoning and just kind of aims right at the gut, hitting you with the inherent unfairness in the proposition under "discussion".

Take, for example, today's Zack Hill comic that I found pointed to via Reddit (you can find it here, if they've cycled it off the site). In this episode, the lovable Tanja has given a report with the conclusion that we should tax the rich and give the money to the poor. The teacher, sensing a teachable moment, informs Tanja that she's taking her advice and splitting the difference of her A+ with that loser Zack's C, giving them both a B. See? That's the cold hard reality of those policies you're advocating Tanja! You'll just end up hurting yourself.

Now, one can perhaps argue about whether it's a good idea to tax the rich and redistributed the money to the poor. Personally, I think that's a bad idea and prefer other mechanisms for achieving a level playing field so we can really deal with rewarding actual work instead of rewarding luck of the draw. As I said, there's a lot of good discussion to be had about how to make our "free market" far more free and fair.

Via Fake Steve Jobs:

Just gotta say that it's pretty funny to see the entire right wing lose what little mind they have left.