‘I grabbed her little sister and put her in front of me. As the bullets began to fly, the blood sprayed from between her eyes, and then I laughed maniacally … I blew those little fuckkers to eternity …They should have known they were fucking with the Marines.’

And so goes the final verse of a song that the military is investigating, that which was cheered wildly and robustly by the Marine’s comrades… a veritable campfire song… pass the s’mores.

‘Hadji Girl’ uses hyperbole and the contrast of a sweet melody with a violently twisted ending to capture the frustrations of a counterinsurgency in which the goal is not to win but to hold the line until the struggling Iraqi forces can do so.

It is a war in which 20-year-olds are counseled to have a plan to ‘kill everyone in the room’ in case they have stumbled into an ambush, but told their mission is to ‘win hearts and minds.’

At the moment we have a sudden buoyancy with the Bush Administration, and a renewed belief that the War in Iraq can once again be churned into a winning political issue. And so we have a political stunt in the halls of Congress with a stupdifying resolution calling on Congress-critters to vote yea or no on whether “We will win the Global War On Terror”.

Zarqawi, the now deceased head of a franchised version of al Qaeda, and the most nihilistic of the groups fighting in Iraq, from the estimated seven or ten percent of foreign fighters that make up the whole of Iraq’s fighters — my best guess is if we remove ourselves from Iraq, these foreign fighters would be the first to be decapitated before the sects turn against each other… but I know nothing, really.

What I do know is that you can’t be singing songs about killing Iraqi children.

Bush. Goes to Iraq. A sovereign nation, I hear tell. Why, their military even caught Zarqawi — at least in one variation of the story of Zarqawi’s capture. Bush calls in to Iraq’s prime minister — Nouri al-Maliki a google search tells me — about five minutes before meeting.

The President has shown it’s not impossible to sneak in and out of Iraq under the cover of darkness. To chat, spontaneously as it were, with a head of state. Elected in one of any number of elections that Iraq has held over the past several years. I ponder something about the meeting: could al-Maliki have closed the nation to Bush and not let him in, for political purposes (gain the support of the Iraqi people and such)? He is the head of a sovereign nation, I hear tell.

There’s a “Wheee” effect to all this. Bush jumped into Iraq by surprise before… a couple years ago at Thanksgiving. To cheering American soldiers, which is all good and dandy. I don’t think Iraq was a sovereign nation at that time (I recall Paul Bremer arbitrarily granted it in the most low key of fashions, sometime after enacting Iraq’s flat tax.) And the media ate it up, and told us all that Bush was going to a landslide victory in next years’ election.

It reminds me of Jerry Jones, president of the Dallas Cowboys, a number of years back. The Cowboys were in trouble that season. The team faced a must-win game of some sort. Jerry Jones walked out onto the field. The team went on to win the game. The Cowboys meandered along a bit more for a few games. Then came another game where the Cowboys were struggling. Jerry Jones walked back onto the field. The team lost. They went on to a 6 and 10 season. And so those Superbowl years of the first half of the 1990s were now long gone in the past.

Bush is churning out a few extra points in the approval rating front. Zarqawi is dead and Bush makes a surprise appearance in Iraq. We’re duty bound to report both incidents, and believe they mean a bit more than they do mean. If psychological alterations can be transferred to actualities, good for it all.

There’s a “pass the popcorn” moment going on in the Connecticut primary race suddenly, which is taking place as it has dawned on Lieberman that he just might lose the damned thing. I can’t quite pin-point the precise moment. I think it’s Lieberman’s new line of attack, which goes like this:

“The only public record this guy has, he voted time and again like a Republican,” Smith said. “Why would we support that?” He said Lieberman would not promise to support Lamont, because the businessman voted frequently with Republicans as a local official in Greenwich.

The irony is loud and thumping. And so Lieberman’s opening for running as an Independent is a heavy-handed misdirection trip at his opponent’s partisan credentials.

John F. Droney Jr., a former Democratic state chairman who helped Lieberman unseat Republican Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. in 1988, said Lieberman should make his case for re-election to all voters in November.
“I think to be terrorized through the summer by an extremely small group of the Democratic Party, much less the voting population, is total insanity for a person who is a three-term senator,” Droney said.

And so the electoral process becomes a sense of mighty forebears believing they have a god-given right to rule over us all. What does this Lieberman-fan think of that which we call “the base”?

“Every single weirdo in the left wing will be there,” Droney said. “That’s what the Lamont strategy is all about.”

For the left-wing weirdos of Connecticut, I believe you can place Ned Lamont’s Republican dalliances next to Lieberman’s Republican dalliances and come out clean. (Although to be sure, Lieberman’s Republican dalliances are really a sort of Democratic danglings of the wrong type, but that’s another story.) What was Ned Lamont’s elected position, again? Something or other in Greenwich? School council seat or something like that? This line of attack starts looking kind of insane.

I remember reading that Ned Lamont had signed up Bill Hillsman to create his political ads — Bill Hillsman of Jesse Ventura, Paul Wellstone, and Ralph Nader fame. I don’t know whether his fingerprints were over the ads that came out a while ago, say — Ned Lamont in his living room and a bunch of supporters, including most auspiciously Markos Moulitsas, running in. I sighed when I saw those ads, believing them to be quite lame. Such that it is, Lamont did move on and is cutting Lieberman’s lead, so I suppose they did some good. I definitely approve of Lamont’s latest ad, which pushes the correct buttons and one can easily cut and splice the pieces of jujitsu Lamont is pulling with it.

The latest news of the race are: (1) According to Hotline On Call, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee “fully supports” Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) in his primary bid against Ned Lamont (D), “and he refused to rule out continuing that support if Lieberman were to run as an independent.” And so we enter into Hell. The chips that the Congress-critters collect and trade amongst each other cannot, shall not, and will not be disrupted by this unruly rabble that make up your goddamned political party, the peons who should be genuflecting before almighty “three-term” Lieberman. I was theorizing that an Independent Senator Liebrman would be burning everything and everyone and would be 10 times worse than what we have now with Lieberman, but maybe that the Democratic Machinery is blessing it means it will be just as bad. (2) The latest Rasmussen poll, with a ridiculously high margin or error, shows Lamont… trailing behind Lieberman… such that it was recently twenty points and before than something astronomical: 46 to 40.

So there you go. The answer to the question of who the Democratic Party will be supporting if they are in the awkward situation of an Independent Lieberman against a Democratic Lamont.

A couple years ago I took note of a story of a school district that banned Recess – games that did not have written rules to them. This is sort of in league with schools dumping the fabled “Monkey Bars”, but a bit more insiduous. Getting rid of “Monkey Bars” is, theoretically designed to rid us of various kiddie injuries. Regulating recess games is what I called a “School Bans Calvin-Ball” — the school district was moralizing the children’s play time and preparing them for the business-world — and god help me if I knew the intricacies of “Freeze Tag” or “Cartoon Tag” or if my daily games of soccer really and truly had rather malleable rules to them. (Or, for that matter, another fond recess memory from grade school: setting ants with the aid of a magnifying glass.)

Here is a story from Wired proposing the hypothesis that the “War on Meth” is destroying a type of childhood Scientific Inquiry. I don’t know what you can do with pounds of chemicals, but we say goodbye to Dexter as a childhood role-model. I remember hearing a fellow high school student murmur a bit angrily at a Science teacher who apparently said to her that “she was unlike her” either father or brother, I don’t remember which, because “she did not tinker around with things”. This teacher had a somewhat moreass sense of things, seeming to think that the quality of students in his midst was generally in a downward trend, and that this student’s elder father member “tinkered” with things in his spare time and she was content to do or not do other things was in keeping with his character. I generally liked him, and his thinly veiled (at least to me) commentaries on, for example, Creationists that he apparently had to deal with. For his part he apparently was bumping up against some of the “dissappearance of the Chem Lab” that the Wired Magazine is discussing, in that he apparently had some fights with members of the community on the safety concerns of this or that lab experiment.

On the other hand, it was in poor sport for this teacher to compare the student to her family member. I suggest that today’s problem is that if we have a kid in a make-shift labortory, it’ll be easy to suspect he (or she) is busy creating explosive devices for use later on for rather sinister Columbine-like reasons. At any rate, Calvin Ball is out. Childhood labortories are out. And the nation is experiencing a vaguely defined state of perpetual brain-deadness. Our educational system is in perpetual crisis, or so I’ve heard.

So, apparently Ned Lamont has narrowed the margins against Joseph Lieberman to 55 – 40 percent among likely Democratic primary voters, including undecided voters who are leaning towards a candidate in a poll from the state — wherefor Lamont stood at something like 18 percent a month or two ago.

And that there is the most threatening primary opponent in the 2006 election cycle. The Republicans’ best primary opponent for a hated one of theirs is Stephen Laffey, backed by Grover Norquist against Whig Party adherant Lincoln Chaffee — the only Republican senator to vote no for authorizing a war in Iraq, and a Republican who said that he did not vote for George W Bush, instead choosing to write in… George H W Bush. The Club for Growth recently released a highly unreliable poll with a huge margin of error that showed Laffey barking right up against Chaffee. If only this were so, for a Laffey victory would guarantee that the Democratic party wins Rhode Island… a pretty good sign that the Republicans are probably misfiring in trying to axe Chaffee — although, to be fair, that party is in a better position to shrug off their middlesome candidate, politics being the “art of the possible” and all. For example, Ben Nelson, like it or not, is Nebraska’s “kind of a halfway, Democrat/Republican senator” (as Chuck Hagel put it), and to deal away with him would be to toss off the “halfway”. Incidentally, the Democratic nominee-to-be in Rhose Island is “pro-life” — to whatever degree that means these days, Chaffee is “pro-choice”. I see rumblings that the two parties have strong factions of both factions in them, and come to think of it that sort of makes sense. Catholic Democrats. Prescott Bush Republicans. Rhode Island: drive through it in an hour.

I have this theory that a party’s rank and file basically has one quiver in the arrow in knocking out an incumbant member of their party per cycle, and they should choose this quiver carefully. Maybe I’m off. There’s a chance that Hawaii Democrats will knock off their incumbant Democrat Senator Akaka– though it’s not much of a chance and the malaice seems to be more of a token shrug at Akaka. Beyond that, Maria Cantwell in Washington faces meager opposition. Hillary Clinton faces symbolic opposition. The key is to shuffle away one candidate in favour of one who is prone to be elected.

Joseph Lieberman is all we’ve got, and the only one worth trying to choke. Concentrate accordingly.

In, 2004 Republicans looked to knock out Arlen Specter, a frustrating Republican to them and an even more frustrating Republican for “the side of good” for laughable attempts at historical credibility in the face of a Republican Party that is knocking him around but good. In 2002, the Republican Party apparatus stood aside and let one of their own knock out Bob Smith in New Hampshire. I’ll look into this one.

For the 2006, I suggest we take out Max Baucus, rumoured to be cutting a deal on the Estate Tax — a toxic mid-way to enacting horrible policy on par with Lieberman’s follies … and a worthwhile tact in the prairie populist state of Montana. Jon Tester just knocked off the would-be Max Baucus-esque candidate of John Morrison in the Democratic primary and is well on his way to knocking off the Republican incumbant Conrad Burns, perpetuating the “Brian Schweitzer transformation”, making Max Baucus’s corporatist “a little from section A, a little from Section B” passe, and a detriment to the Montana Democratic Party brand. Or so we would hope.

This was at the end of the radio promotion. At that point, most of the 300+ folks were at Dantes already. Who knew the Anti-Christ would actually be summoned?

“JAWS was never my thing and I don’t like Star Wars.”

At a certain point, my indifference to the whole ouvre of Star Wars becomes something that I proudly tuck into as part of my identity. I fear that if I take a good look at the three movies that are now determined to be the good set from the series — “A New Hope”, the other movie from the original trilogy that didn’t employ Ewoks, and “Revenge of the Sith”, I will probably enjoy these films on some level and lose this identifier. I know I’ve seen the first movie a few times through the process of Osmosis as much as antything else somewhere in my childhood, but for the life of me I do not know if I ever saw the Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi. I own two pieces of Star Wars memorabilia– two Chewbacca figures — a small one from somewhere in the 80s and a large one that I may just well have left at my sister’s place — absent-mindedly, I swear! — when my nephews/niece gave it to me as a Christmas gift alongside a Sonic the Hedgehog figure of the same variety — two toys which, by the clamour of the kids, looked suspiciously like gifts for themselves.

As it turns out, Tim Eyman — Washington State’s version of that strangest of creatures, the Right-wing Initiative Whore, is, as it turns out, a Star Wars fan.

Though I suspect Darth Vader’s entourage are not as fat as Tim Eyman’s. These are not terribly imposing figures, though I wonder if a typical comic book / science fiction / geek whatnot convention you’ll probably get the same effect. Beyond which, quite frankly, I would be unimpressed if I saw someone like Eyman waving that orange contraption in the air — a poor excuse for a light saber.

This was part of Eyman’s last ditch effort for a “final push” to get the needed signatures for a ballot measure for a referendum on the state’s gay anti-discrimination law. While it’s nice to know that a man associated with anti-tax crusades branched out to the other part of the conservative sphere to the religious-right cause of homophobia and reached out to Star Wars fans to get the deed done, it’s better to know that he failed in his efforts.

FREAK!

We either have or have not reached the point of the lowest results in the scheme of diminishing Returns in the scheme of bringing up the whole spectre of … Homosexual Marriage.

The thing is, as Congress gets ready to debate the subject for two days, flag burning right in the distance… Nobody believes him.

Nobody believes that President George W. Bush cares one whiff about Gay Marriage. NOBODY! Somewhere you bop from this being the huge concern of the 2004 election. Somewhere after the Terri Schiavo fiasco showed the mutability of our current domestic political scene, you quietly bury all topics religious tinged and move on to a full frontal Social Security Reform front. As you jump around from state to state with theoretically endangered Democrats facing 2006 elections, you find that by talking up a storm on your desires to reform social security, you’re actually buttressing your Democratic candidate’s electoral chances.

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and WITH AN APPROVAL RATING UNDER 30 PERCENT!!!!

And so, as John Zogby puts it in terms of “right track — wrong track” poll results, “I have never seen a number like that since I’ve been polling.”

Your base wants you to tackle illegal immigration. You are corporately at odds with your base. Maybe you have a few gestures at ready, but you will not and can not appease your base with this issue.

The one thing about gay marriage is that it loses its luster with each brandishing. I know how this issue is going to wrap itself up. Any number of elections across the nation will be lost to the “progressive” side due to this little wedge issue — candidates who, incidentally, will not take a stand for or against the topic –, and yet… in the end… Adam and Steve will be wed into holy matrimony and will take a nice little rendezvous into Alabama for their honeymoon. And George W Bush won’t care.

But not many elections are going to be lost in 2006 with this issue at the ready. It reeks too much of desparation. The only problem with it is it still just might well be a wise political move on Karl Rove’s part. Throw up this dart, it’ll stick somewhat, and hopefully long enough and just well enough to tide the Republicans over to the next election cycle.

The most important election since the last election in the California 50th district, a few months ago, and the most important election until the next election in the California 50th district — this November, with at least two of the same candidates that took part in the last election a couple months ago and will be involved in the election this November.

I hate this procedure. It started when Democratic candidate Francine Busby failed to win 50 percent plus one in a special election to take over Duke Cunningham’s vacated seat, Duke Cunningham having been — um — summarily dismissed because… um… Duke Cunningham holds the title, quite literally, as the Most Corrupt Congressman in American History.

Her vote total was a perilous 44 percent, enough to suggest the very real possibility that her Republican opponents could easily swarm around and win the seat in June… and then, of course, win the seat again in November. Frankly, for the sake of the sanity of the good folks of the San Diego area, that election should have been it until November — nobody should have to endure three goddamned election contests pitting the same candidates in a seven month period. But it isnn’t it, and Busby’s 44 percent runs us all into the the Democratic Party’s 2006 electoral problem:

“The 2006 midterm elections are a political analyst’s nightmare. The national climate seems to portend big changes, yet race-by-race analyses reveal formidable odds against a Democratic takeover of either the House or the Senate,” veteran elections tracker Charlie Cook says in his latest National Journal election preview.

Several structural problems confront the Democrats in the House elections. Just three- to four-dozen House races out of 435 at stake are truly competitive. And among the 18 Republican seats that are open, only half are in districts where “Democrats have a remote chance of winning,” Mr. Cook says. Making matters worse, the Democrats were able to recruit only second- or third-tier challengers in many key districts where the Republicans looked vulnerable.

I have this gut feeling that the Democratic Party really needs to win Randall “Duke” Cunningham’s old seat tomorrow in order to have a credible claim on winning the House in November. The last “Most Important Election” before April’s primary election that brought us Bilbray versus Busby was the Ohio contest that brought Paul Hackett perilously close to winning a heavily Republican Ohio district. But again, he did not win the race. The Democrats are, at the moment basically brushing up against the wall, and if Busby doesn’t break through that wall tomorrow… well, the “Culture of Corruption” was crafted in the backyard of Republican Blood Red districts.

On the other hand, and here’s where this thread dangles out: should Busby win, watch out! Or so goes my theory of Electoral politics circa 2006.

I have not gotten around to reading the article in the Rolling Stones stating what I’ve brushed back and forth on: Was the 2004 election stolen? I tend to blur past a lot of things blog-wise, and I do note a couple “unimpressed” bloggers admist a sea of comments that skew toward, simply enough, “read this” — link, perhaps a couple of paragraphs snipped, followed by another comment of “Read This”. I meant to read it yesterday, but… for whatever reason… I hit some kind of wall, and fell asleep for hours and hours and hours. I did bumpkis yesterday.

Yes, I was there in 2004. (Whatever “there” means.) I remember early drippings that Kerry had won. None of which came to pass as the news covered the election returns — John Zogby’s reports of a Kerry victory — and a pretty sizeable one at that — gone to waste. And I still ponder the sudden disappearance of that reliable measurement: the Exit Poll. (Reliable since 1952, at least and in races without a candidate people aren’t embarrassed to say they voted for: Trafficant was famous for being underrepresented in Exit Polling). I heard the reports that Karen Hughes took Bush aside and told him that he had lost. I heard the reports that Greg Palast tried to give Kerry his dossier, and Kerry bellowed “I know the election was stolen”, and I know that Kerry headquarters immediately disowned this story once Palast put it out there.

But the voting made sense. This is a national election, however much you want to localize and “bring out the vote” in individual states, and trends that flow through Ohio are going to show themselves in how other states voted. And that is where I’ve always been stuck with Ohio.

My mind wanders back to 2002.

A senior official in US President George W Bush’s re-election campaign was sentenced to 10 months in prison on Wednesday for his role in suppressing votes in a key US Senate race, a scandal that Democrats charge may involve the White House.

James Tobin, 45, one of three Republican campaign operatives convicted in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in a 2002 election, was convicted in December of two telephone harassment charges.

The New Hampshire Senate race was replete with this particular dirty trick — a coordinated Republican attack to keep Democrats from voting. I do not remember if the margin of victory meant that this mattered, but this is the most affirmed effort of alleged “stealings” of 2002 Senate races — which goes on to Georgia where Diebold supposedly swung the election. For what it’s worth, if Max Cleland had gone on to win the election, he would not be that strange breed of Democratic Rock Star he is today.

The darkest and most conspiratorial offing is Minnesota. I guess I’d have to google “assasinate Wellstone” to bring this one up. The proprietors here are after larger things: this is not Cleland, Kerry, and Gore being deprived an office, where they’d sway a few dollars from one powerful interest to another. This is Wellstone, Allende, JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr being assassinated because they were going to “ACT”…

For what it’s worth, The National Review — and Robert Novak — believe that Tim Johnson’s defeat of John Thune in the 2002 South Dakota race was stolen. This is because the votes from the Indian reservations were the last counted, and the classic model of stealing an election — the Mayor Daley model — is to keep your strongholds uncounted until the end, at which point you spring forward with however many votes you need to win the thing. But I smirk here, because the very next issue’s cover was “How Tribal Socialism is Destroying the American Indian”, and Robert Novak’s public comments on the matter have never been articulated beyond “But… but… Tim Johnson’s victory came from the Indian vote!”