Yeah....I'm ranting again

see it here

whoa.....from Today's Huffington Post

This is an essay by Jon Robin Baitz on why he "liked" the much-maligned Move-on.org ad about General Petraeus....but it's much, much more than that.........here's what I mean.

Snip

I rather liked the MoveOn ad from the Times. It was crass, but these are crass times. It was simplistic, but these are simplistic problems, basic ones -- after all -- the American people have been treated as foolish consumers of a product -- in this case a war -- by an administration that hovers in a bipolar helix between hapless fervor and rank cynicism.

Snip

Now let's face it. We're in Iraq for the next decade. We are in Iraq for the next decade. At least. No way out. This is how America crumbles; at the hands of the most misguided ideologues since the Crusades. Men who led America to catastrophe, who betrayed all the promise we had left -- and for what? The naive and arrogant expectation that a grateful culture would be democratized magically, instantly, and with no ambivalence.

Snip

In the Atlantic Monthly, one of the ex-speech writers for the administration turns on one of his own with the ferocity of a cartoon pirate turning on another pirate after the treasure is all gone. This is how it goes down, folks. They're not conservatives. They're not even Republicans. They are de-regulating cynics who pray that capitalism works like the glorious God-Powered Rube Goldberg machine it is. Just add self-reliance and a few days in Aspen. This crowd? They make one long for the intellectual rigor of a Nixon, and they don't deserve to even speak the name Goldwater. I liked the MoveOn ad, because it was probably true, in the Freudian sense, even if it is a little shrill.

I don'know much about Baitz, except from his biography which you can find here. Initially, at least, I had some trouble with his sentence and paragraph structure and even his punctuation, but now, seeing his credentials, I understand the style is avant-garde and I am the one who is out of touch. All that is beside-the-point anyway. The writing is dead-on and captures, I think, a lot of the absurdities of "the new normal" as my favorite (and now "ex") anchorman Aaron Brown termed the phrase after September 11,2001.

One final phrase caught my eye...and resonated....loudly with me as I am sure it will with many of you.

I want to paraphrase Auden and silence the clocks and the noise and pray in the silence to a a god I don't trust or even know how to believe in -- for a way to help my country -- and everyone in it -- find a way through the dark toxic cloud that was conjured up six years ago at the tip of Manhattan.

Don't we all?

Don't

We

All?

The "Onion" reports on General Petraeus

This was just too good to pass up....Our own, Wisconsin-home-grown Onion did their own analysis of General Petraeus' report to Congress. Here's the linky-thing....and the article:

Gen. David Petraeus gave his report on the effectiveness of the troop surge in Iraq to Congress Monday. Here are some of the most significant points:

• 
  Title Page, Acknowledgments, Introduction, Results, Conclusion, Appendix
• 
  Iraqi government officials still being assassinated, but just barely
• 
  Most U.S. soldiers can be relied upon to wake up on time
• 
  The six guys that Cameroon sent have been awesome
• 
  Due to overly negative review, footnote on every page stressing Patraeus' support of U.S. troops
  
  Two of the 18 political and security benchmarks have been met: Birthday parties for all Iraqi parliamentarians are in place, and nobody died at 3:19 a.m. on July 22
• 
  By weight, Americans are now the country's majority
  What a wild ride it's been
  

Sept 11, 2007

I'm back from being deprived of internet access for 4 days.....the withdrawal symptons were awful.....

anyway...I was trying to think of an "appropriate" 9/11 post but Ezra Klein beat me to it....actually....it's because he's SMARTER than me....

I'm reprinting all of it here for your enjoyment:

I felt a bit conflicted about writing this post. What you want to do is remember an awful crime. What you end up doing is invoking a Republican talking point. That is all that remains of the term "9/11." As Gary Kamiya correctly points out, 9/11 need hardly be remembered: The President won't stop bringing it up. "President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq," writes Kamiya. "And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his 'war on terror.' He has incessantly linked the words 'al-Qaida' and 'Iraq,' a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated. It's no surprise that Gen. David Petraeus' 'anxiously awaited' evaluation of the war is to be given on the 10th and 11th of September."

9/11 has been robbed of its significance. It no longer lights up the neurons recalling an American tragedy, but instead activates that understand political strategy. I hate them for that. So this isn't a 9/11 remembrance. We've never been allowed to forget 9/11. Not for an instant. What we have been allowed to forget is 2,974 individuals who perished in that attack, who didn't die because they wanted to invade Iraq or because they thought Republicans were insufficiently competitive in elections, but because they were murdered. Remember them.

September 11, 2007

The Kabuki Dance continues....

For those of you not familiar with the term (or, more accurately Art Form) here's a short lesson:

Kabuki, like other traditional forms of drama in Japan as well as in other cultures around the world, was (and sometimes still is) performed in full-day programs. Rather than attending a single play for 2–5 hours, as one might do in a modern Western-style theater, one would "escape" from the day-to-day world, devoting a full day to entertainment in the theater district. Though some plays, particularly the historical jidaimono, might go on for an entire day, most plays were shorter and would be arranged, in full or in part, alongside other plays in order to produce a full-day program

and what makes it relevant is:

Nearly every full-length play would be performed in five acts, the first one corresponding to jo, an auspicious and slow opening which introduces the audience to the characters and the plot. The next three acts would correspond to ha, speeding events up, culminating almost always in a great moment of drama or tragedy in the third act and possibly a battle in the second and/or fourth acts. The final act, corresponding to kyu, is almost always very short, providing a quick and satisfying conclusion.[13]

more detailed info can be found here

How much like traditional Kabuki theatre the Bush Administration has become.....every issue is a folk-tale in five acts; each act as predictable and conspicuously staged as the first.

And, unfortunately, all the issues end just like traditional Kabuki..."is almost always very short, providing a quick and safisfying conclusion..." satisfying for Bush anyway...and almost always because Democrats collapse spinelessly in front of his faux macho-posturing and even worse pseudo-patriotism...(jingoism? probably)

So here we go again...

Act I: the great buildup of expectations for the Patraeus Report

Act II: Dog-and-Poney Shows for sympathetic and uncritical journalist to Iraq to show progress which is really just another Potemkin Village (like we talked about yesterday)

Act III: A staged extravaganza worthy of the late, great Cecil B. Demille of Bush in the Combat Zone praising the progress and slyly hinting that "some" troops can come home...staged, as always, with a background of smiling, happy US troops standing behind their "beloved" commander in Chief....(we know from the White House "advance" guide that those troops are chosen from only the most "highly enthusiastic" Bush supporters)

Act IV:......ahhhhhhhhh..... that's the Battle with Congress.... and we all know that it will end with

Act V....a swift and satisfying conclusion ....for Bush.

I'm getting tired of this.....

Once, just once, I'd like to see our Democratic Congress stand up to Bush...face him down and

fercryinoutloud....

win one for a change.

Propaganda 101

Here's a pretty good (I think) post on propaganda...pretty entertaining too I think

http://mwprogressive.blogspot.com/

See ya soon...

on edit:

I meant to use the post as an instructional device for us. I think many of us have seen the terminology "Potemkin Village" in other blog and newspaper posts but may not have known the reference. To be sure, it's an obscure reference probably best known to "Film Majors" in college and perhaps to some World History Majors (although there is precious little information about the fomentation of the 1917 Russian Revolution)...at any rate, enjoy the information

scribe

Happy Labor Day!

Labor Day used to be a big deal four our party.....

Why?

Because blue-collar union workers used to be the backbone of our party....it was a big part of "who were are".

Thanks to Reagan...Bush I and Bush II (with no help from Clinton)...labor unions have been diminished in power and prestige....

Worse yet...the manufacturing base that gave us a solid Middle-Class in America and spawned workers who could send their kids to college, buy houses and cars, and generally keep the economy humming is

GONE

The Neocon wet-dream of "pure capitalism" is slowly strangling what is left of the middle class and nobody seems to give a damn.

I still do...

And that's why on this labor day, I'll thank the working men and women of America for making us great....