House of Eratosthenes

I will be turning forty this year and I’m still an apartment rat. Let me just state for the record that when I finally have my 45,000 square foot dream house with the electric turntable that chooses for me whether I’ll be driving the Bentley or the Harley or the Miata or the Targa or the Diablo, and said house is crammed full of carpet-critters during the summertime who are my grandchildren, and I need glasses for the very first time, and people constantly ridicule me for “typing” stuff into those whatchamacallzemz “keyboards,” and the doctors have ordered me to never look at caffeine again because I’ve consumed my lifetime quota already…I believe, firmly, that Ted Kennedy will still be the senior senator from Massachusetts. Oh, he’ll get that shiny film of sweat over his bloated skin and his face will get red and blotchy every six years as he worries about his prospects. But over the long haul, he’s very secure. Probably moreso than his 99 colleagues in that august deliberative body.

And let me state for the record that what this says about the people of Massachusetts, is, to use a charitable adjective…”unflattering.”

But Senator Kennedy is up for re-election this year, and I almost have to feel sorry for the old boy for the rough start he’s getting. And the year is still young. First up there is the matter of the Alito hearings, during which he took point in flailing around for reasons to block the nomination. Yes, flailing around. Grasping. Searching for reasons when few such reasons were available, and the ones that could be found were anything but compelling. That is what it looked like, because that is what it was. Someone decided Democrats would gain more capital by telegraphing the message “we’ll find ways to stonewall a good idea” than “we mean it when we say we will work together for a better America.” Worse still, someone decided it was mutually beneficial for Ted Kennedy, and the Democrats, for Camelot’s Favorite Son to take point in that sorry charade. Worst of all, appearances being any indication, that someone was either Senator Kennedy or someone who works for him.

To put it more concisely, Ted Kennedy thinks that when he attacks someone with the integrity of Justice Sam Alito, there are more people yelling “right on, Ted!” than there are like me, wincing with disgust, silently wondering “couldn’t you guys have found someone else?” In matters of closets and skeletons, I have to do some slow, burdened, labored thinking to imagine a target more out-of-place than Justice Alito. I have to do more labored thinking to imagine an accuser more out-of-place than Senator Kennedy.

It was kind of embarrassing to watch. With the passage of time, I halfway expect more and more Democrats will be willing to agree with that. Not their finest hour.

No, I’m not referring to the misstep involving the Owl Club. That was just gravy on top. The mashed potatoes, by themselves, were salty enough. To what I suspect is a large majority among the nation’s electorate — and an I-honestly-don’t-know-what in Massachusetts — Kennedy had already made an ass out of himself before that fiasco.

What else has happened to him this year to help bolster his chances for reelection? Well the next month after the Owl fiasco, a student caused a little bit of a stir before an appearance by Kennedy at Massasoit Community College.

Paul Trost, 20, a student at Massasoit Community College in Brockton, Mass., says he was upset by an introduction of Kennedy given by Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., in which the congressman noted how the long-time senator overcame hardship in life on his way to success.

“Lynch said Kennedy had overcome such adversity to get to the place he was, and that’s a bunch of bull,” Trost said of the introduction, which occurred in the school’s student center yesterday morning.

Just as Kennedy began speaking, Trost was walking out of the room when he shouted, “Remember Chappaquiddick!”

“Most of the crowd gasped,” Trost said. “Then I walked out of the student center.”

Brevity can pack a punch that a rambling treatise never can, I am told frequently by people who take the time to read my rambling treatises. This just goes to show how right they are. Remember Chappaquiddick; how in the hell would you go about arguing with that? No thanks, I’d rather forget? It didn’t happen? It was a long time ago? Don’t say that?

What happened next really cuts to the quick in exposing Kennedy’s problems.

“One of my teachers called me ignorant and told me this was an embarrassment to the school,” Trost told WND. “She said to me, ‘Can’t you forgive him after all these years?’ And I said, ‘No, he killed somebody.’

“If it had been me or any other person, we’d be in jail,” Trost says he told his instructor.

Referring to his two-word shout, Trost said, “I did it because I know about Kennedy’s past. I know what happened at Chappaquiddick.

“I wanted to send a message to him that my generation still knows about it. We haven’t forgotten about it.”

Trost said he was satisfied to know that students on campus were talking about the Chappaquiddick incident later in the day � some of whom, in fact, were not familiar with it.

I find it interesting that, if you take Paul Trost’s word for it — and there’s really no reason not to — Massasoit Community College is packed with 20-year-olds who didn’t know about the Chappaquiddick incident until it was pointed out to them. It’s even more interesting that this unidentified teacher thinks it’s an embarrassment to the school when a student has become aware of it, but in that private deliberative space between the student’s left ear and his right ear, in which he has the God-given right to percolate thoughts subject to inspection and censorship of absolutely nobody else — has not seen fit to forgive Ted Kennedy.

Oh, maybe she thinks it’s an embarrassment the way I think it’s an embarrassment. Paul Trost did break protocol, after all. He showed a lack of discipline.

But “Can’t you forgive him?” seems out-of-place if that’s the motive. It’s far less extravagant to suppose the lack of forgiveness is what’s embarrassing. She said so, after all.

Ignorance is not embarrassing.

Awareness, followed by forgiveness, would not be embarrassing.

Being aware of what happened that summer in 1969, and reacting as a normal person would, while the authority figures instruct you that this isn’t the reaction you’re supposed to have. That’s the embarrassment.

And this is what is really damaging to Democrats like Ted Kennedy. They look good when people’s thoughts and opinions are subject to authoritarian control. Their public images would flourish in a society wherein people look to their overlords to form their private opinions…where there is a loudspeaker kiosk on every street corner telling you “today is Wednesday and your favorite color today is orange.”

I’m repeatedly told that Republicans and Democrats are exactly the same. People who tell me that aren’t advising me to leave that open as a possibility, they’re instructing me to believe that just as the kiosk in my hypothetical tells me my favorite color is orange. Democrats, similarly, aren’t advising me to keep my mind open to the possibility that Iraq is a quagmire. They aren’t recommending that kind of critical thinking; they are condemning it. They’re instructing me to believe Iraq is a quagmire. And that my favorite color is orange.

Republicans and Democrats are not the same, it turns out. They think differently. Democrats, especially the ones like Ted Kennedy, must tell people what to believe. A Republican talking-point, therefore, can embrace brevity. The Democrat talking-points have come to resemble balloons, so Republicans can respond to them with needles. “What about the Owl club?” is devastating. “Remember Chappaquiddick!” is even moreso. Just as a red-faced dad during a kids’ birthday party can huff and puff all day long getting the balloons inflated, you can drone on for months at a time about how Ted Kennedy has triumphed over adversity and been confronted by every conceivable misfortune, blah blah blah…you can pour millions of dollars into making made-for-TV movies about the Kennedy family. And then someone says “Remember Chappaquiddick!” — POP!

By the way, Trost is not a Republican. He calls himself an anti-war liberal. And it looks like the school will not be disciplining him after all. Good. Schools are supposed to be hallowed grounds for independent thinking.

Back to Ted. What happened next? Well, Dick Cheney is again in the mood to >speak candidly. Just as my favorite color is supposed to be orange, I’m aware that I am supposed to hold the Vice President at a very low level of esteem. I’m dutifully informed that his popularity is extraordinarily low, and therefore, his popularity with me should be low. I really don’t think too much about him, but when he speaks candidly in this way, his “polls” with me spike upward a little bit.

To whomever I’m supposed to apologize to about that: Sorry, I guess. My favorite color isn’t orange today.

Sen. Kennedy’s “The Last Man I’d Go To…[on] How We Should Conduct U.S. National Security Policy”

Vice President Cheney pulled no punches today on Face the Nation:

Q Let me read to you what Senator Kennedy, liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, and a long-time opponent of the war said on the third anniversary. Here’s part of his statement. He said:

“It is clearer than ever that Iraq was a war we never should have fought. The administration has been dangerously incompetent. And its Iraq policy is not worthy of the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform. Yet President Bush continues to see the war through the same rose-colored glasses he has always used. He assures the American people we are winning, while Iraq’s future and the lives of our troops hangs so perilously on the precipice of a new disaster.”

Dangerously incompetent is what he is saying. I want to give you a chance to respond.

VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I would not look to Ted Kennedy for guidance and leadership on how we ought to manage national security, Bob. I think what Senator Kennedy reflects is sort of the pre-9/11 mentality about how we ought to deal with the world and that part of the world.

We used to operate on the assumption before 9/11 that a criminal attack – – a terrorist attack was a criminal act, a law enforcement problem. We were hit repeatedly in the ’90s and never responded effectively, and the terrorists came to believe not only could they strike us with impunity, but if they hit us hard enough, they could change our policy, because they did in Beirut in 1983, or Mogadishu in 1993.

We changed all that on 9/11. After they hit us and killed 3,000 of our people here at home, we said, enough is enough. We’re going to aggressively go after them. We’ll go after the terrorists wherever we find them. We’ll go after those states that sponsor terror. We’ll go after people that can provide them with weapons of mass destruction. We’ll use our intelligence and our military services very aggressively. And we have.

We did in Afghanistan. We’ve done it in Pakistan. We’re working with the Paks. We captured or killed hundreds of al Qaeda. We’ve done it in Saudi Arabia. And obviously, we’re doing it now in Iraq. That kind of aggressive forward-leaning strategy is one of the main reasons we haven’t been struck again since 9/11 because we’ve taken the fight to them.

Senator Kennedy’s approach would be pack your bags and go home; retreat behind your oceans and assume you can be safe. But we learned on 9/11 that, in fact, what’s going on 10,000 miles away in a place like Afghanistan, or Iraq can have a direct impact here in the United States when we lost 3,000 people that morning. And we know now that the biggest threat that we face of all isn’t just another 9/11, it’s a 9/11 where the terrorists have something like nuclear weapons, or a deadly biological agent to use against us.

The Iraq situation has to be viewed within the broader context of the global war on terror. It is a global conflict. You can’t look just at Iraq and make decisions there with respect to how that’s going to come out without having major consequences for everything that’s going on. And I think we are going to succeed in Iraq. I think the evidence is overwhelming. I think Ted Kennedy has been wrong from the very beginning. He’s the last man I’d go to for guidance in terms of how we should conduct U.S. national security policy.

Now I ask you. Is there something wrong with what Dick Cheney said? Oh, I can hear it now: “Lies blah blah blah fracturing decorum blah blah blah civility candor diplomacy blah blah, not fit for the high office of blah blah blah.” Yeah right, dipshits. Civility like what we saw from the Massachusetts senator during the Alito hearings. Tell me another.

Well, the Boston Herald has come out swinging in the Senator’s favor. They “reported” on the Vice President’s remarks in an editorial. It’s okay to put opinion in an editorial, so that is the way they chose to do it. I always find it entertaining when an editorial carries the news, written in such a way that the author expects the reader is learning about the event for the first time. It’s good journalism to tell your readers what you’re talking about before you talk about it, of course. Here at the blog that nobody reads, that’s what we try to do.

But another benefit is that this way, the editorial can be a substitute for the news. You don’t need to run a half-dozen paragraphs from Dick Cheney, verbatim, as I did (by way of the Worldwide Standard) above. You can pull out snippets to substantiate the point you want to make. And if your editorial is the vehicle by which people learn of the event, well hey, that just saves time — and it’s certainly not your fault, right?

So you get to tell people their favorite color is orange. Take a look. Now that you’re up to speed on the transcript of Cheney’s remarks, go over this editorial from the Globe, see how little meat and real information there is on it and how much of the piece is hot air, telling you what to think. It does start to resemble a balloon, come to think of it. This is what you need to prop up the likes of Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Cheney vs. Kennedy

March 21, 2006

THE BUSH administration’s post-Sept. 11 strategy led the United States straight into Iraq. Vice President Richard Cheney, one of its architects, had the gall to question Senator Edward Kennedy’s criticism of the war there. But American political leaders have to call a halt to the reckless unilateralism born on 9/11 before it enmeshes the United States in more conflicts around the world.

Cheney, on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” was responding to Kennedy’s statement that the United States should not have gone into Iraq. Cheney said: “After they [the Al Qaeda terrorists] hit us and killed 3,000 of our people we said ‘enough is enough.’ We’re going to aggressively go after them . . . We’ll go after those states that sponsor terrorists.”

“Enough is enough,” an emotionally satisfying response, can lead to overreaction. The United States waged war in Afghanistan, justified by international law and supported by allies, but instead of figuring out a secure but humane method of dealing with prisoners captured there, the administration set up the camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the mistreatment of prisoners has caused an international scandal. Cheney’s remark about ”states that sponsor terrorism” recalls the administration’s campaign to drum up support for the war in Iraq more than three years ago by linking Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda. Saddam was a vicious tyrant, but he had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks. US troops used coercive techniques imported from Guantanamo Bay to mistreat Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. Cheney and President Bush ought to have the intellectual courage to acknowledge that the American presence in Iraq may be spawning more terrorists than US and Iraqi forces are killing.

According to Cheney, the administration’s ”aggressive, forward-leaning strategy is one of the main reasons we haven’t been struck since 9/11.” That is his bedrock argument, for who can say what has kept the United States safe from attack over the last 4 1/2 years. But terrorists have attacked in Britain, Spain, and other countries, and the United States has lost the support of many of its friends around the world in the process because of Guantanamo Bay and Iraq.

Kennedy supported the war in Afghanistan, opposed the Iraq conflict, and has raised questions about conditions at Guantanamo Bay. The administration, in its latest strategy paper, likens the struggle against terrorism to the Cold War. The United States made many mistakes during that 40-year conflict, many of which could have been prevented if policy makers had heeded their critics.

“He’s the last man I’d go to for guidance,” said Cheney of the senator. Given Cheney’s record on the war, a bit of humility is warranted, if not expected.

Given Cheney’s record on the war, a bit of humility is warranted, if not expected. Huh, that’s a laugh. Expected by whom?

Let me speak for probably millions more people than those who find favor with your comments, Boston Globe. I am fed up-to-here with humility from this White House regarding the war. Humility is not this administration’s problem. If there is one single thing they have really screwed up on this war, it’s not logistics, tactics, training, command structure, Abu Ghraib, consulting with the U.N., or any of the other. It’s public relations.

Humility? Are you out of your gourd?

Come to think of it, to paraphrase Vice President Cheney…Senator Kennedy is the last man I’d go to for examples of your much-vaunted-humility. Kennedy tied up everybody’s time and energy in some misguided snipe hunt about “CAP memos” during Justice Alito’s confirmation hearings. Thirty-seven years after he got a girl killed.

Yes, Massachusetts, you got a real winner there.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Ouch IIIWednesday, March 22nd, 2006

Ouch III
Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006