2008 archive

Coincidence?

Or tradition?

The Democratic and Republic Parties are pretty much tied in terms of administrations that are remembered for ineptitude. Indeed, many historians believe that a Democrat, James Buchanan, is the current leader in ineptitude for his failure to do anything to avert the civil war, despite his having one of the most impressive resumes of anyone to serve in the office. (Interestingly enough, his successor, who had almost no experience in public service, is generally considered to have been one of the two or three best, if not the best, President.)

But why is that all the administrations that are remembered primarily for their corruption:

• Grant
• Harding
• Nixon
• Reagan (remember, more Reagan functionaries went to jail than did Nixon functionaries), and, in years to come,
• Bush the Minor

have been Republican?

Coincidence?

Or Tradition?

Or the inherent outcome of a bankrupt ideology?

McClatchy:

Whoever wins the presidency this November, it’s all but a slam dunk they’ll be working with a Democratic Congress. And it probably will be a stronger Democratic majority with more votes than it has today.

(snip)

“A large segment of the American public doesn’t have confidence in the Republican Party,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., the party’s chief political operative for House races.

Golly gosh gee, Mr. Cole, I wonder why “A large segment of the American public doesn’t have confidence in the Republican Party.”

Could it have something to to with its being dedicated to making the rich richer and the poor poorer, with sending our young to die for a lie, with undermining the Constitution of the United States of America, with selling out the nation to the highest bidder, and with having a deficit of moral principles that would have embarrassed Little Nicky Scarfo?

Hmmmmm.

Ya think?

NRA bans guns at their convention:

A small but startling sign welcomed the gun lovers who arrived at the National Rifle Association’s annual gathering Friday.

“Firearms WILL NOT be allowed in Hall A during the Celebration of American Values Leadership Forum.”

So what if St. John McCrap was there? He’s already proclaimed himself as gun lover.

After all, guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Just ask all the dead folks. They will tell you that they are just as dead as if someone rapped them in the head with a sap.

What’s a few AK-47s between friends, anyway?

Now, personally, I got no problems with guns.

Apparently, though, the Secret Service doesn’t really buy the whole NRA gun nut “guns don’t kill people” propaganda line.

Hmmmmm. Wonder why that is? Maybe, could be, that they realize that a person with a gun is somewhat more dangerous than a person with a bow and arrow?

I just have a problem, a big problem, with

Hypocrites.

The whole damned lot of them, McCrap included.

ASZ links to Terry Gross’s interview with John Hagee (no, I am not going to link to his place). NPR’s Fresh Air replayed the interview yesterday because so many MSM outlets have been playing excerpts of it during the past couple of weeks.

Prior to the 2006 congressional elections, radical right wing mullah John Hagee sat down for an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. While there was some immediate reaction to the interview two years ago (particularly from the Jewish community and those of us who were horrified by the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina), the outrage quickly faded. And when snakeoil salesman Hagee slithered back into the spotlight earlier this year to flex his political clout, I figured that John McCain would disavow Hagee’s support and that any controversy would fade into obscurity due to the legacy media’s blackout of anything remotely anti-McCain. Of course, that’s before Barack Obama’s preacher problem reared its ugly head.

My girlfriend couldn’t believe that he said what he said, that he would attribute the destruction of New Orleans, and the wasting of the lives of so many innocent persons, to the plans of a small number of persons to have a gay pride parade.

Frankly, nothing he said surprised me.

But she had never been exposed to this type of self-righteous Pharisaical Protestant nutcase before.

She couldn’t believe the hatred, the vengefulness, the vindictiveness that he somehow managed to find in what is supposed to be a Gospel of Love, and was able to express in the dulcet, gentle tones of a nurse singing a baby to sleep.

I don’t know how he finds hatred in love either. Perhaps he’s read too much Leviticus and not enough John.

Oh, yeah, and has deep-seated psychological needs I’m not qualified to diagnose, but that’s just a guess

It’s just that I’ve met his sort before.

So I wasn’t surprised.

Just disgusted.

Free audio books.

A while ago, I posted a link to a site offering free audio-books. Opie worried that they might be computer generated and his worries were right on target. I tried one out, and it had all the life of last year’s cornstalk.

Today, I was nosing around Project Gutenberg and discovered that they have added audio-books to their choices. Some of them are computer-generated, but almost 500 were done by people.

Even better, their Advanced Search feature allows you to specify which type you are interested in (as well as a number of other criteria). The couple that I looked at were available in Ogg Vorbis, Apple iTunes, mp3, and speex (whatever that is) formats.

Much of the work for Project Gutenberg is done by volunteers, so it is probably unreasonable to expect professional-quality narration.

I downloaded several Project Gutenberg text files and ran out (cyberly speaking) to get myself a reader for my cell phone.

A note about Project Gutenberg:

It rocks. But remember that every book there is in the public domain, that is, the copyright has expired. Don’t look there for the latest John Grisham thriller; you’ll have to find some other place to infringe on that copyright (try newsgroups). Nevertheless, it has thousands of titles, ranging from Mark Twain to Shakespeare to Sigmund Freud to Edward Hobbes to even Victor Appleton (pen name of the author of the Tom Swift books).

Follow the link, listen to the story, then ponder the empty heads and hearts who think that pasting magnetic yellow ribbons on the back of their vehicles or wearing flag pins is what patriotism or what supporting the troops, who serve honorably, even when serving dishonorable leaders, is all about.

Fair weather patriots, who care not that good men and women are asked to die for a lie, then cast off upon their return, like the little green army men I sometimes find left over from my sons’ youth in the back yard.

It’s less than 10 minutes. Not much for you to give when they give their health, their sanity, and their lives.

Go listen to it.

Tammie LeCompte is among (military wives fighting to get justice and treatment for their husbands–ed.). When her husband, Army Spc. Ryan LeCompte, came back to Fort Carson, Colo., after two tours in Iraq, he was a different man — angry, withdrawn and isolated. In 2007, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and he eventually became so depressed and unable to function that doctors feared he might die.

So when Tammie LeCompte saw that the Army was not giving her husband intensive treatment — and, worse, his commanders were punishing him for not doing his job — she launched a campaign against the Army that eventually caught the ear of Congress. Today, doctors say that Tammie LeCompte’s battle may have saved her husband’s life.

Addendum, Later that Same Evening:

Senator Barack Obama involved himself in the VA email situation today by sending a letter to VA Secretary James Peake demanding an investigation into whether or not the Department of Veterans Affairs is under-diagnosing combat-related PTSD as a cost-cutting measure. Obama then requested hearings on the matter and, within hours, those requests were granted by the chairmen of the House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committees.

I had to run out to a local shopping center today to make a deposit for my church.

I noticed that the space vacated by the independent dollar store had been filled.

By the Brandywine Republicans.

(For those of you not from these parts, this area of Delaware is known as Brandywine Hundred. It’s named after the Brandywine Creek, notable for having given is name to yet another battle that George Washington lost during the Revolutionary War–he only won two battles, the Battle of Trenton and the Battle of Yorktown, and he wouldn’t have won the latter without the help of the French, but that’s another story).

Here’s the funky part.

When I followed the link to the Brandywine Republican website, there was nothing there but a splash page. Sort of a metaphor for the Republicanism, ain’t it.

Guess I have to start looking for a new shopping center. This one has lost its cachet.

St. John “Hundred Years War” McCain seems to have figured out that a hundred years of war may not be a good plank for his campaign.

So now he has scaled it down to five.

Like most predictions emanating from the Republican Party, this one appears also to have been snatched directly from thin air. Concomitantly (I’ve waited years to work that into a post), he has shown that he has truly turned into McBush:

“He laid out what his dream was … without offering one single solitary concrete way explaining how he’d do the things he stated,” said Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Having studied the Iraq situation probably as much as anyone who also has to, like, you know, work for a living, my personal opinion is that, if we leave tomorrow, the damn place will go up in flames; if we leave in five years, the damn place will go up in flames; if we leave in 20 years, the damn place will go up in flames.

Why? Because we never should hadda oughta been there in the first place, and, by going there, we’ve opened a can of worms that will wiggle for generations. It wasn’t our can, it’s not our worms, but it sure as heck was our can opener.

This column offers a trenchant analysis of St. John of the Hundred Years’s new way of counting the days, as well as his full conversion to Bushieness (emphasis added):

If he believes what he is saying, then McCain is again showing only a passing understanding of the conflict in the Middle East. Even by the most generous assessments, it would take at least sixteen months to withdraw our troops from Iraq. To have the bulk of our troops home by January of 2013, with his preconditions having been met, would require that McCain somehow achieve this functioning democracy and dramatic decrease in violence within two years of taking office. From where does he imagine he will find political reconciliation? In what sense can he expect a reduction in violence, given no evidence that a long-term reduction is sustainable? It is simply not feasible to assume that our exit from Iraq, if it were to coincide with the happy ending McCain portends, could possibly happen in either 100 years or on his new shortened timeline.

It is far more likely, however, that McCain does not believe what he is saying, that he has not in fact, had a genuine change of heart. The conditions on the ground in Iraq have not changed. But the political conditions for this election have. This is not an honest assessment from the self-appointed king of straight talk. It is rather yet another false promise, uttered with a straight face, as an attempt to survive an election, and with no intent to follow through.

With comments that break with himself and the GOP, McCain is showing yet again that he has a willingness to lie that truly makes him a Bush Republican.