Political Commentary

Incoherent Ranting From Richard Reeves

The always-dependable (when it comes to spouting imbecilities) Richard Reeves sends in a missive from whatever planet he inhabits–it’s clearly not this one. The basic theme is that Mr. Bush is not up to the job, and that he will therefore be a one-termer.

It’s so full of chocolaty stupidity, I hate to excerpt it, but I will anyway. Fortunately, it’s short. His talent (as it were) is such that he manages to pack a whole universe of idiocy in a very brief bit of mental flatulence.

This was a day in the life of the president of the United States, Thursday, April 18, 2002:

  • The circumstances of endless savagery in the Middle East forced him to look into a television camera and tell the world that Ariel Sharon (news – web sites) is “a man of peace.”

    Well, it seems to me that things have been a lot more peaceful over there in the past couple weeks. At least no more Israeli bat mitzvahs have been interrupted by murderers disassembling themselves.

  • Halfway around the world, on the West Bank, the U.N. peace envoy to the Middle East, a Norwegian hardly given to flamboyant language, one of the first outsiders to inspect Mr. Sharon’s recent work, looked into other cameras and said: “Horrifying, horrifying … Israel has lost all moral ground in this conflict.”

    No, he’s only given to flamboyent language when the subject is Israel. When it comes to Arafat, and his bomb factories, and his exhortations to murder, and his booby-trapped refugee camps, and his unending lies, and his general violation of every single tenet of the Oslo agreement for which he won his Norwegian peace prize, our Norwegian friend seems to have lost his tongue.

  • In Kabul and Washington, members of the forces commanded by President Bush (news – web sites) had to face the cameras and apologize for the killing of Canadian soldiers, our best friends, by American bombs in yet another friendly-fire incident of the kind that punctuates long-distance, high- tech warfare.

    Yes, Richard. This is war. And even if weren’t, people are often killed in training (typically a couple dozen per year in each service, I believe). It is tragic, but these are real weapons, with real explosives, and sometimes things happen. It’s not a good day for a President when they do, but it’s certainly not a challenge to his presidency.

  • Back on television, the president gave a lecture to the elected president of Venezuela, an incompetent, if charismatic, lefty named Hugo Chavez, who had been overthrown two days before with some help and cheers from the right-wingers running the middle levels of the Bush State Department. Bush warned Chavez that he better do more of what we consider the right things, or we’ll get his army after him again.

    Incompetent? He seems to be pretty competent at retaining power, like most thugs. And I didn’t hear Mr. Bush say any such thing, but then, as I say, Mr. Reeves lives on a different plane of existence.

From there he drifts off into total incoherence and irrelevance. And when I get to the end, I still don’t know why Bush will only serve one term.

Political Commentary

Smoking Gun?

What an interesting day to break this story–the seventh anniversary of the OKC bombing.

If it’s to be believed, the Clinton Administration and FBI covered up evidence that Terry Nichols met with Iraqi agents prior to the bombing.

Why? We may never know for sure, but I would presume that it was more politically useful for Mr. Clinton, in the midst of his post-1994-loss-of-Congress irrelevancy, to demonize the American “right wing,” in the form of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and to not distract people from that with Middle East connections that would then have to be actually dealt with…

Uncategorized

Infamy

Nine years ago today, men, women and children in Waco were incinerated as a result of actions by overzealous publicity-hungry federal troops.

Seven years ago today, the Murrah Building was bombed by Timothy McVeigh (possibly with the aid of some of the same terrorists we are presently fighting in the Middle East, who were never held to account because the “right wing” was too attractive as an undiluted target by the Clinton Administration).

Political Commentary

A Blast From The Past

Remember the vandalism to the White House by outgoing Clinton Administration staffers, that was later denied (and basically ignored by the Bush Administration, which wanted to “set a new tone”)?

Well, the GAO has confirmed that it was true.

Those who have seen the GAO report, a preliminary document, say as many as 75 computer keyboards had to be replaced — at a cost of more than $5,000 — because Clinton staffers had broken off the W keys, a jab at George W. Bush, the winner of the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election, who was often referred to during the campaign as W.

I wonder if those are special keyboards of some kind? Seventy bucks for a keyboard seems kind of pricy, but I tend to go for the five-dollar specials at Fry’s.

Two historic doorknobs were stolen from the Old Executive Office Building along with a presidential seal, valued at $350, said the sources, who could not detail how the rest of the damages were inflicted.

Chairs and telephone tables were broken, desks were overturned, garbage was strewn in offices and telephone lines were cut, the GAO report says, but does not, in each case, attribute the acts to vandalism.

OK, now let’s pull the string on the top, and let the spinning begin…

Democrats dismissed the findings of the investigation ? which they say cost about $200,000 to conduct just to find $14,000 in damages.

So, generously assuming that those numbers aren’t lies, let me make sure I have this right. No one should have to be held accountable for their actions if the cost of identifying misbehavior exceeds the cost of the actual damages. Is that the argument here?

So, if someone is burgling, and they only steal a couple hundred bucks worth of stuff, but holding a trial might cost many hundreds, or thousands, of dollars, we should just ignore it?

In what moral swamp do these people reside?

And now that the truth is out, it also demonstrates just what kind of juveniles were running the country for eight years.

Weird

Going To The Birds

There are some places where seeing dinosaur descendants would be an everyday occurrence–your back yard, Sesame Street (which has one of the Big variety), the aviary at the San Diego Zoo–but my living room is not one of them. Thus it was notable this evening that I suffered an invasion by not zero, not one, but two animals of the feathered variety in Casa Transterrestrial.

The disconsertion was amplified by the fact that it occurred during dinner, which was occurring in the living room, during a Simpsons rerun, Patricia being up in Reno and thus unable to protect me from the beaky predators as I innocently munched my chicken nachos (were they, Hitchcock-like, lying in wait for me, as I ate their distant cousin?).

I was first alerted to the avian intruders by Jessica. Jessica is the younger cat, who has misleadingly gangly legs, and black fur with a white undercoat, and who seems much too uncoordinated to deal with flying prey.

The elder cat, Stella, is a premiere ratter, having dispatched all the rodents who temporarily took up abode in the garage after discovering my stash of malt and corn sugar, set aside as brewery inputs after I discovered that beer was unacceptably carbohydratic for my newly-discovered relatively paleolithic protein-rich diet. But I’ve never seen her catch a bird, and I suspect that, at age thirteen, her hunting days may be behind her.

Anyway, Jessica was making that peculiar moaning sound, familiar to cat owners, of a cat in pure, unadulterated hunting mode. She was looking up toward the cathedral, wood-beam ceiling at a fluttering apparition in the beams. I saw the motion myself, and went to turn on the track lights to view it better.

It was a hummingbird, frantically beating itself against the ceiling between the beams, attempting to find a way to freedom. Its wings were beating at approximately thirty-four thousand flutters per second. It was clear that it was going to run out of energy in a matter of short minutes at its current rate.

Don’t ask me how it got in–I don’t know now, and I never will.

The ceiling is high on that end of the room. The front door was just below, however, so I opened it. It was late, but the sun wasn’t down, so I hoped that the light coming in would draw it to the Great Outdoors.

Fortunately, after a few minutes, it did indeed come down toward the door. But it didn’t go out. It beat itself against the narrow wall between the open front door and the entrance to the kitchen, in which it perhaps had fantasies of endless supplies of sugar water with which to power its frantic wings.

I gently brushed it toward the open door with my hand and, panicked, it found the opening, exited, and quickly increased altitude. Unlike the living room, it was ceiling unlimited.

Relieved, I sat down to finish my chicken nacho consumption.

Then Jessica started crying and pawing at the fireplace. Now what?

I heard another fluttering of wings in the hearth.

Great. Another bird had flown down the chimney, and was beating itself up in the flue, or in the logs on the grate. The cat was going nuts trying to get to it, and I couldn’t see any way to persuade it to go back up the chimney, or to head outside.

As I sat there, trying to figure out what to do, Jessica finally managed to frighten it into flying out of the fireplace, and toward the glass patio doors in the living room. It was hiding and fluttering in the vertical blinds.

I opened up the door all the way, and got the cat away from it.

Like the hummingbird, I gently brushed it toward the door opening. It found the exit, and fluttered up and away.

Jessica looked up at me, disappointed. She whined a little, and then went outside.

I finished dinner.

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