Memnison Journal

From Dick Meyer at NPR on Blago and Made-off:
As audacious as Blagojevich’s political gluttony is, it is easy to find far worse political corruption, much of it perfectly legal: Distorting intelligence to invade Iraq, torturing prisoners, failure to regulate Wall Street, and systematic pork-barrel boondoggling come quickly to mind. If you’re feeling expansive, how about [...]

Details after the cut.

The real root of Don’t Ask Dont Tell and other anti-gay stuff seems to be an insistent idea, that, similarly to the idea my father tried to pass on to me, that all gay men and women are desperate and determined to infect us all with their orientation – that somehow, they will all be [...]

The ugly truth about what happens when you send people to a war zone who aren’t up for the situation; they get turned into the contents of a coffin. A waste, an utter stinking waste. But the recruiters can fill their quotas, and the President can play with men’s lives.
And once again, the [...]

I know that there are people out there who have a bunch of questions about Obama’s stance on the military and the war.  I decided to look up his initial statement in 2002 as an Illinois State Senator - a speech where he said what his feelings about war and the military were.
I work about [...]

Various retailers are offering shoppers a 10% rebate or break on money spent at their stores with money from the new US Treasury tax rebate ’stimulus’ check. (For us, it’s probably going into a side of beef and some needed home repairs.)
Domino’s Pizza is also offering a “recession-busting” special of three pizzas for $12. [...]

Bush grasps at the straws of his own disinformation as he casts himself deeper into the abyss. The more profound and compounded his blunders, and the more he redoubles his certainty in ultimate victory, the greater his indifference to failure. He has entered a phase of decadent perversity, where he accelerates his errors to vindicate [...]

Reading the latest run of things out in the news, it strikes me that there seems to be a competition between Bush and Larry Craig as to which one can twist reality around in their heads and ignore what’s going on and what the heck they did and what consequences that has.  I’m betting on [...]

COMMENT: Saddam and his majority sect was systematically exterminating the minority sect in his county. He used chemical weapons to do so at least on one documented occasion.
JIM’S RESPONSE: His sect (Sunnis) are only about 20% of the Iraqi population. No argument from me that he deserved what he got. See also what he [...]

COMMENT: Bushes problem was he failed to recognize the instant gratification syndrome of the American public. If a news story doesn’t end by the end of the week the public is bored with it.
JIM’S RESPONSE: No argument from me that between the media and the public, it’s Short Attention Span Theater out there. However, [...]

More on the answers to a commenter:
COMMENT: Saddam was destabilizing the region and his success was encouraging the other countries to do the same.
JIM’S RESPONSE: Iraq was an invention of the West from the ruins of the Ottoman Sultanate; jamming in three not-sympatico ethnic and religious groups together and calling it a country. [...]

A commenter on a previous Livejournal post was putting forward some posits and asking some questions, and I’m going to respond to them in a few chunks of material.
COMMENT: This president went into war with the hope that the region would stop being a hotbed for terrorism.
 
JIM’S RESPONSE: It’s difficult to tell all of [...]

Stuff below on the complex of scandals washing over Washington. You are warned. More after the cut.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/02/26/rumsfeld/print.html

The best training: No, you can’t go to counterinsurgency training, you have to fight the insurgents.
Military readiness: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reports that we can’t handle any other fighting, and it will take years to rebuild what we have.
And the White House says: what readiness problem?
This readiness and resource problem in, [...]