Fear Huckabee

Apparently, we haven’t learned to be wary of an affable face grafted onto fundamentalist lunacy. Will Huckabee understand that evolution is real when the cockroaches survive the eschaton?


So, the argument goes: global warming is not anthropogenic.

Here’s what I haven’t computed yet. How does that make things better? If there are serious non-anthropogenic factors to global warming doesn’t that mean we need more regulation and less carbon?

If it’s just our stuff, then we just cut back on our stuff. If our stuff is only a fraction–well, then it pretty much needs to be eliminated even to make a difference.

Am I missing something–other than trying to argue with logic against bullshit?

The Not So Great Lull

The Democratic majority in Congress failed to make any meaningful change in Iraq War II. Sans the spine to cut off funding they lost a chicken game with the loathed and despicable Generalissimo Bush. We’re stuck with his war until a real President steps in.

The Dems also failed to make any paradigm alteration in federal budgeting and domestic policy. An increase in the minimum wage surely is plenty helpful to many, but most of the Dems’ changes were “side dishes”. We’re still eating the Conservatron turkey, even though almost no one wants to anymore. Any earnest attempt to address global warming, the foreclosure crisis and any number of small and medium sized disasters will also have to wait for a real President.

Because I live far from Iowa and New Hampshire the process of processing this real President seems to be taking place on another planet. The major Democrats have few fundamental policy differences. Their platitudes are nifty, but meaningless without any explanation of how they would try to realize their vision. I believe they have done this for scores of Iowans and New Hampshirites, but I honestly do not care what Iowans or Hampshironians think. There are nationally important problems nestled in my corner of the country too. Until I hear the candidates address these in some way, or at least see them try to tailor their platitudes to people like me and other folks not at all like me who also happen to not live in Iowa and New Hampshire, I am undecided. No one has tried to win my vote.

Having an inert political process incapable of addressing slow disasters like Iraq, global warming, and housing foreclosures for 18 months is a luxury this country can no longer afford. Having a stubborn adherent to a discredited pseudo-intellectual foreign policy maintain the rudder of power for the same period could be cataclysmic. Watching today’s scenes of unrest in Pakistan following Bhutto’s assassination conjured up the phrase on a bumper sticker I recently saw around town: I Never Thought I’d Miss Nixon.

Our best hopes for waiting out the Not So Great Lull is that no one “wins” Iowa or New Hampshire. If the major candidates are more or less tied following divisional play perhaps their attempts to appeal to the remaining 99.99% of the population will reveal what sort of President they are likely to be.

Bhutto's Blood Cries From The Ground

I remember hearing some smarter-than-thou NPR analyst–you know the kind, a coward-liberal trying to convince us that the right-wing isn’t really insane–telling us that the house arrest of Benezir Bhutto was part of a “kabuki dance” between her and Musharraf, it was just for show, and Musharraf needed her to avoid an ouster by the Islamists.

I’m sure that analyst still has his job, just like all the analysts who told us Iraq would be a cake walk. And I’m sure the bloggers who doubt are still shrill, still not “serious,” and still dismissed by base, common, and popular America.

For Americans still trying to hold on to middle class life in the new petro-theocracy that daily redefines “Orwellian,” there isn’t enough time in the day to comprehend the chess board and what this move means, or may mean.

It may mean the total destabilization of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Southern Asia has been a region marked by pre-WWI interlocking and secret alliances that is only a spark away from a giant war. It may just mean that Musharraf hangs on to military rule a bit longer, and nothing of significance happens.

It also doesn’t matter whether it was al-Qaeda, the Taleban, Musharraf, the ISI, or whoever that did it. The perception will matter more than the facts in the heat of the moment.

It means that democracy’s resurrecting corpse is dead again in another country with an economy and middle class capable of supporting it, and our American hands are filthy with the stains, just as they are with countries all over the world.

Forgotten names and places like Aquino in the Philippines, Allende in Chile, Rabin in Israel, Colosio in Mexico, Guernica, Haiti, Sierra Leone, and memories more etched in our memory, like JFK. They are all the holy martyrs of the pax Americana and its false flag of democracy.

But their blood still cries from the ground, and those who hear it can’t be counted on to act with a pure and rational response. They are radicalized, they feel the drug of vendetta in their veins, and they act out.

The world’s on fire.

Obama: I Was Against Triangulation Before I Was For It

What in the name of all that is holy is Barack Obama doing attacking Paul Krugman — and not just disagreeing–but doing thug style ad hominem oppo research on him?

Could it be because he now thinks he might win the nomination and wants to say, hey, look, I hate the dirty hippies, too? How Clintonian of him.