Monthly Archives: May 2009

Sunday Ruminations

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My parents’ gravesite.

The house, for sale then and now sold where, for 60+ years, my family existed. It runs in our veins, it seems larger than life. And it will soon be forbidden to visit. I freely admit: I am having a very, very difficult time handling that aspect. This house will no longer be mine to visit or claim. At best, in the future, I could drive by. But what once was so familiar, what was once so comforting, was once so assumed — will soon be occupied by Strangers. Strangers. Do you understand? Can they understand? Every memory I have of growing up — I have it THERE.

I gave my parents a kitten from a cat I owned when I was first married, in 1982. They named their cat Scooter. Though I customarily got along famously with any and all cats, that cat hated my ass and I hated it back as well. It would never relinquish any opportunity to scratch me, and I never relinquished a chance to kick it or slap it. This mat still exists on the front of my parents’ house, but only for a few more days.
They loved their cats. They had Pixie, a Lynx Point mix — and my mother won the 1964 award for Best Household Pet at the Sacramento Cat Fanciers Association — and a trophy — behind Pixie. Who was then killed a short time later by a local Labrador Retriever named Pat whom I vowed to kill by meat tainted with rat poison. It barked and barked and barked. It later died.
When Scooter died, my father vowed he would never have another cat. He said it was because the cat was a pain-in-the-ass. In truth, it was because he loved the cat too much and didn’t want to experience more death. He’d had enough. He’d invested too much of himself in an animal and he found that issue too painful. I could never convince him otherwise. He rumbled around in his house, after my mother’s passing on May 14th of 2002, entirely alone. By his own choosing. I could never convince him otherwise.

Last week, the Estate Sellers entered my life. I don’t blame them; they have a job to do and they do it wonderfully, precisely, considerably, professionally, tactfully, sensitively. They are and have been eminently wonderful. Here is the dispassionate photo of a sellers table displayed in MY living room in MY house. My first gut response: GET THE FUCK OUT. YOU DON’T BELONG HERE. Your PRESENCE is an abomination! But then I had to remember: not my house. Not for much longer. Calm the hell down.
It is my job to get over the transition of my family’s house to another’s house. But I will be the first to admit that this transition, amongst other familial issues, is keeping me up nights. I’ve not been sleeping much for the past few months, since February 11th.

Most days I purposely try to avoid specific thinking. I try to embrace uninvolved problems, issues, pursuits, tasks.

But at night, when the sun recedes, I am not so quite effective. I may wake at 2 or 3 am, then try not to disturb my wife. But my mind refuses to shut down, and still refuses. At night. In the dark. When it may wander where it does and is not so otherwise occupied.

I am old. I am rather old. And this should not, theoretically, shatter nor disturb my advanced world. But it still manages to do so, to my very own personal and sighing chagrin.

Here is my father’s car in front of my cabin, last night. I will have to sell this car. It’s a great car with few miles but that’s not the point. It’s another issue and aspect with which I must deal and put aside. I just want to drive it and remember.

I have boxes and boxes and boxes of my parents’ items in my house. I don’t have a garage so these boxes are littered all over my first floor. I will be eliminating some of my very own possessions so that I can accommodate theirs.

But I keep asking and postulating: shouldn’t I just give it all up? After all, they’re just things?

And more importantly, this question: what is the true cost of memories?

BZ

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House Speaker Liar Pelosi vs CIA:

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The Demorats are starting to cringe when Speaker Pelosi speaks.

They’re worrying about smoke damage.

Even Leon Panetta, Democrat, current CIA Director, wrote to his personnel on Friday, 5-15:

Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing “the enhanced techniques that had been employed.” Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.”

First, Speaker Pelosi disavowed any knowledge of enhanced “torture” methods.

Then she parsed her words.

The Washington Post counters her lies here.

This is just not looking good for Madame Speaker Democrat Nancy Pelosi.

Rush Limbaugh thinks that Madame Speaker should resign. Good damned luck, Rush.

Newt Gingrich thinks that Pelosi is vicious and dishonest, here.

The charge that the C.I.A. lied to her is an extremely serious one. She is now at war with the C.I.A., and it has the means by leaking selectively of destroying her, and I suspect it will do that.”

She is now debating, like Willie J, what the definition of “is” is.
Then there is this; did she mis-speak?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, her eyes wide, her hands gesticulating wildly, on Thursday laid out a third version of what she knew and when she knew it about the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, edging ever closer to debating what the meaning of the word “is” is.

I say: there are consequences to one’s actions.

BZ
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Air Force One Over New York

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Quite any number of bloggers and pundits have weighed-in regarding the recent $390k AF1 photos taken above the Statue of Liberty.

None of them, that I’ve seen, have commented on the released photo itself — which is largely an abortion on toast.
As you can see (click on each image for a much larger result), this photograph appears to obviously have been taken inside another aircraft and through an aircraft window. The shot is therefore cheapened markedly.

Do you not see the reflection in the upper-right portion of the photo which clearly delineates a darker aspect on the right, a lighter aspect on the left?
And do you not see a darker aspect on the lower right portion of the photo? As though — for example — the photo were taken through another aircraft window?

Above is the original photo. Beneath that is a photo that I lightly PhotoShopped in order to make it slightly more palatable.
And the White House couldn’t do this?

Incompetents in coordination, incompetents in photography. Any of you Obama bastards ever hear of the Rule Of Thirds?
BZ
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Dick Morris: A Lone Voice

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. . . in the Republican wilderness:

Gen. Colin Powell is wrong to say that the Republican Party must move to the center: Now is not the time to try for triangulation.

This is a time for the party to stand firm on its principles until this nation again comes around to the GOP’s way of thinking. This process will be driven by the consequences of President Obama’s program.

The challenge brought by Obama is no longer just theoretical: He means to pass the ultimate leftist agenda and has the votes to do so.

As a result, our nation will be unrecognizable well before the 2010 elections. Business will march to a beat drummed in Washington. The top producers will be hounded by confiscatory taxation. A majority will pay nothing or receive government welfare. Our health-care system will be destroyed. Illegal immigrants will be well on their way to citizenship.

Obama’s brave new world will be the subject of the 2010 elections. We believe that his Congress will be swept from power as a result.

We think that inflation will join a lingering recession — giving us recess-flation — and that high unemployment will continue. Voters will recognize the damage to their health care as bureaucrats weigh in to prevent them from getting the care they need. Our security and defense failures may well have cost us Pakistan, and the nightmare of a nuclear-armed terrorist state may have already come true (even before Iran).

All America will be watching the Obama fallout, and Republicans must be seen as a clear alternative — a strong voice for reversal of the harm the president will have inflicted — if they are to benefit from this catastrophe.

If the GOP is seen as a moderate force, a party just looking to split the difference, voters will cynically conclude that there is no distinction between the parties.

There is a season for triangulation and a season for confrontation. When America faces a new challenge — such as what the financial crisis now poses — we look to the left and right for new answers. We want the debate to rage. Those who seek to paper over are ignored. Such was the fate of the first President Bush in 1992 and of Sen. John McCain in 2008.

But once the debate has raged and the alternatives have been fleshed out, voters want a consensus, a Hegelian synthesis, on how to move in a new direction. They want to extract the best from each alternative and combine them. This is triangulation (a term coined by Dick Morris).

To ignore the demand for synthesis and insist on continuing the debate is to suffer the fate of Sen. Bob Dole in 1996 and Sen. John Kerry in 2004.

This process — polarization, debate, synthesis and action — is how America has always moved ahead. We are not Japan; we use the debate to see the options. And we are not Italy or France; we come to conclusions and act upon them, eventually leaving the debate far behind.

Now another great debate has been born. The thesis is democratic socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism.

The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It’s up to the Republicans to fight along these lines. Compromise is not an option, yet.

At some point, the synthesis will set in. But now is the time for clear alternatives and sharp disagreement. Only later can we hope to extract America from the leftist clutches into which it has fallen.

So what do we have? What voices in the proverbial wilderness? It seems that two voices have predominantly been heard and read recently: Dick Morris and Dick Cheney.

When the Left skewers Dick Cheney and he’s far out of power, I know he must be doing something correctly. And Dick Morris states what many of us believe in our core: don’t give up.

In fact, react in a polar opposite fashion to “tenting.”

Make clear definitions. Stick to our Conservative guns. If exclusion occurs then so be it. Damn. I’m almost pulling on the flap of the Texas Fred tent. But I’m not yet quite ready to completely concede the GOP. I’m still inclined to continue the fight.

Because, I posit: morals and ethics and common sense doesn’t change year-to-year and doesn’t bend to the prevailing prairie winds. Right is right — now, in the past, and in the future.

Some things really are Constants.

BZ
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