Saturday, July 26, 2008

End of the Week Rant

I'm too busy with puppy training to play close attention to the point vs. counterpoint in the day-by-day news. The endless task is to get up early enough to exercise the little beauty before she becomes the big beast and an obstacle to 90 minutes of blogging. The catch-22 is that, in the process, I'm becoming too exhausted to think. All I can do is to take a few notes. But processing them? Let's just say I have come to know how the fake journalists - cum - stenographers/rumor-mongers in the MSM sleepwalk through their day jobs.

Hopefully, a difference is that I understand enough to be aware that there are sizable and numerous gaps in my comprehension of what's been happening this week.

For example, everything I hear randomly about this presidential week's campaign doesn't seem to fit together:
  • that Barack Obama is out classing and out drawing McCain by several times, like three or four to one.
  • that the press is favoring Obama to McCain two to one.
  • that in the polls (quote-polls-unquote) the race is surprisingly even.
I don't know what to make of all of this. Maybe some one can fill me in.

I don't understand what McCain is saying. Is he actually saying that because he, McCain, urged the surge, Obama was able to go to Iraq? Someone tell me, did he really say that? I can't believe that he really said that squat. For one thing, This is Obama's second trip to Iraq. The first time was well before the so-called surge. Secondly, if McCain (and others) hadn't been such a gung-ho cheerleader for the unnecessary Busheney invasion of Iraq in the first place, and their interminable occupation in the second place, then Obama and 200,000 other Americans would not have gone to Iraq. And we would be a happier, wealthier, more respected and united people than we are now in our present circumstances.

I guess I am lapsing into channeling Ellen Goodman's McCain's blind spot on Iraq & Vietnam, here. She says,
McCain's cultural references have a sell-by date of 1970… He's thought more about the sorry last chapter of that war than its foolish beginning. …. So, too, his attention on Iraq has been less on the war's origin than on some undefined victorious conclusion.
A perfect summation. McCain is obviously following the Busheney trail like their faithful son although he should be old enough to be their father. The current crumbs of wisdom which have fallen from the table in the oval office are:
... a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals ...
As I heard someone - I think Zbigniew Brzezinski - say the other day, a horizon is an imaginary line that recedes away from you as you approach it. As any sailor knows.

Having slept all day since her morning at the beach, Ballou is restless again, and tugging at my sleeves. Similarly, the American voters are restless. As Goodman says, at the end of the day, they will insist on,
... a bottom-line, rock-solid qualification for being the next president, it's a candidate who acknowledges just how badly we were misled. So far, Obama's The (Only) One.