Special Blog Post:
Christmas 2006
Published 12/23/2006 12:37:00 PM
Saturday, December 23, 2006
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Dear friend,
Beautifully done, perhaps the best yet.
May all the good in thought and deed you extend return to you a thousand times a thousand times a thousand, on and on.
Live well, carry on.
With much respect, Michael meEE
y'attah-heh dark wraith:
yo-sen, bihiil hishash aaii diji jooni
(may we walk today in beauty)
peace.
Merry Christmas, my dear. I wish you and your family happiness and health for the coming year.
May the saddest day of your future be no worse
Than the happiest day of your past.
(Old Irish blessing)
Heap on the wood! -the wind is chill;
But let it whistle as it will,
We'll keep our Christmas merry still. ~Sir Walter Scott
Merry Christmas to you, Wraith.
Good Christmas Morning.
Beautiful card, beautiful poetry. Merry Joyful Christmas to you and yours.
We three kings from orient far;
Tried to smoke a rubber cigar;
It was loaded and exploded;
Now we're on yonder star!
Merry Christmas, Dark Wraith.
Grinch Cheney, Occupation Governor
That is the funniest thing I've seen in quite a while.
Hope your holiday is warm and festive. (I've been using the word "festivus" a bit much lately. And I wasn't even a Seinfeld fan.)
Merry xmas, Wraith.
Good evening, friends.
I want to thank all of you for stopping by on this Christmas Day.
Given that I have been traveling, I have been on a terribly slow connection to the Internet throughout the day. Watching my blog load at less than 30 kbps has been most frustrating, so I haven't gotten around very much. Tonight, however, I shall sit and watch light speed crawl at glacial speed just so I can wish you all well. I certainly hope you have had a good day or, at the very least, a day of good eating.
Tomorrow begins the last week of this year, which means we are approaching 2007, which might be a whole lot more difficult for Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their minions. We need to help make it so.
Gallows shouldn't be built without proper planning: the hanging party, alone, will be a logistical challenge. Lord knows, if we don't do it, no one will.
The Dark Wraith will get started on ordering the party hats.
On the Feast of Steven I also offer best wishes for the new year to all!
Today's Non Sequitur is worth a looksee.
- oddjob
...light speed crawl at glacial speed...
"Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth."
Merry Christmas Dark Wraith and all your good readers. May the spirit of good will live with us for a few more days.
And leave it to Peter to bring up global warming. ;)
happy times to you dw. and to all the rest of you who stop by here. what an interesting place.
Good Morning Dark Wraith,
Merry Christmas (a little late, but what the heck ...)
Happy New Years too!
Hope you are enjoying this season, and the semester break.
Here's wishing you all the warm fuzzies that you can stand, and all the best of what you long for.
Be well my friend.
Merry Christmas Dark Wraith and best wishes to all.
12/27/06 Quoth the Dark Wraith
They are not worthy who hold their small candles to a great but quiet torch.
Rest in peace, Gerald R. Ford.
Definitely OT for this beautiful post, Wraith, and I do apologize -- but because of this quote today, this is where I will have to respond to it...
Excuse me, for just a minute:
Among other things...
"...no one should lose sight of the fact that it was Ford who helped launch the careers of the two ugliest faces in the George W. Bush administration. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. [...]"
"In addition to the "gruesome twosome" of Rumsfeld and Cheney, Ford also propelled George H. W. Bush into the world of future chicanery when he named the former Texas congressman, UN ambassador, envoy to Beijing, and Republican National Committee chair as CIA Director. [...]
"Bush approved CIA assistance in the illegal car bombing assassination of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague, Ronni Moffitt, on a Washington, DC street in the heart of Embassy Row. Under Ford, Bush also approved the bombing of a Cubana Airlines passenger plane off the coast of Barbados that killed over 70 men, women, and children.
"Much is being made of Ford's statement in the wake of Nixon's resignation that 'our long national nightmare is over.' Mr. Ford's elevation of Bush, Sr., Rumsfeld, and Cheney did not end our national nightmare, it merely postponed it until January 20, 2001."
Good evening, Moody Blue.
In fact, awhile back I saw a picture of Ford standing in the office with a young, dark-haired man I didn't recognize. The caption identified the unknown fellow as Richard Cheney. Lord, but he looked almost human back then.
To the point, though, of that story, Ford was not a saint, but he was most decidely not in any way, shape, or form the monstrosity that would later become the dominant type within the Republican Party.
Moreover, when the Left pulls out its hate guns to trash men like Ford based upon incidents, admittedly awful, in the records, I can pull out a pretty darned good box of horrific stuff of Democrats from those days. It seems like a case of selective amnesia when it comes to fire-breathing hate by both the extreme Right and the extreme Left. No one wants to remember when we did things differently in politics, even as we did many things wrong on both sides.
The men of that era were far more complex. An asshole like LBJ was also the man who brought the Civil Rights Act to realization. A sexual predator like Jack Kennedy was also a man of hope, vision, and brilliance.
I could even recount some spectacular accomplishments of Richard Milhouse Nixon that liberals act like belong to their blood, sweat, and tears.
I do not dismiss bad, but neither do I live under any delusion whatsoever that the social, religious, and neo-conservatives, starting with Ronald Wilson Reagan, are not the same and don't deserve to breathe the same air as some Republicans of the past that too many on the Left gleefully trash like they're somehow versions of what we've got now.
And while I'm on the subject of political parties in metamorphosis, where are the Jack Kennedy types in the emerging line-up for 2008? The closest I see is John Edwards, and he ain't no Jack Kennedy, but he might be what I have to settle for, given that Wes Clark has all the charismatic pull of a Polident commercial, and I most decidedly do not like Al Gore's PowerPoint Apocalypto gig.
Forgive me, Moody Blue. I am not a fire-breathing dragon who dances on graves just because they carry the emblem of a political party of which I deeply disapprove in its modern form. I'll let the Rush Limbaughs of the world do that, and I shall consider it one of the greater achievements of my otherwise small and failed existence if I can go to my own grave without having become some faint form of those I really do despise.
The Dark Wraith would rather burn in Hell (which he might anyway, but at least he'll be in the smoking section).
Wraith, the only grave I plan to "dance on" is my own. I pointed out that article because it referenced the start of the long slow rise of those neo-connies. My apologies, Wraith. I meant no intent otherwise. I think that had Ford seen into the future way back then he might have chosen differently. I would hope so, anyway.
Those neo-connies from back then later decided that Clinton was fair payback for Nixon. They epitomize darned near everything that has gone wrong in politics since Reagan, IMO. And before Reagan, they gave Carter a rough row to hoe, too.
The Left sucks as far as the good choices go these days as far as I'm concerned. I will just have to hold my nose (if needed) and pick Democratic, also.
The radical wacky fundies say they're all going Heaven and we're all going to Hell, anyway. I can't envision any kind of place called Heaven with them in it. We'll share the smoking section, 'kay?
There is nothing to forgive you for, Wraith... unless it's you not forgiving me. :-)
And before Reagan, they gave Carter a rough row to hoe, too.
Actually, properly speaking "neoconservatives" are called that because they are converted liberals (usually liberals of the pre-Vietnam War era who were in favor of the war). Many of them signed on to the Republican Party only after Carter was in office and they found Carter's policies abhorrent or ridiculous (or both).
- oddjob (who is old enough to remember Senator Jackson, the liberal Dem. hawk who hired many of these folks to work as his aides in the first place)
Good morning, OddJob.
You are right on the mark: the so-called "neo-conservatives" were primarily East Coast, liberal Democrats, many of them from a traditionally Democratic Jewish base. They came to power under the auspices of the Old Guard Democrats in Congress during the '60s.
I have done some reading to understand how they intellectually transformed; and by "how," I mean the time frame—was it rapid or slower?—and the sequence of policy thinking changes—was there a narrow, pivotal issue that led to all of the other changes, or was it more of all the parts of the thinking going into transit at more or less the same time?
It is interesting to me that, as you note, external evidence suggests quite a bit of their make-over happened during the latter part of the Carter Administration. This is exactly the time frame in which the evangelical base—which Carter, himself, awoke to become a political force—became utterly disenchanted with Carter and laid its groundwork to bring Right-leaning evangelicals to office with their newly energized political power.
The neo-cons arising from the whole cloth of the Eastern liberal Democrats and in the very same time frame the evangelicals rising then turning nearly on a dime to the Right seems too coincidental to me. I am reading about what was going on at that time to see what the connection was. It's important to understand, and I'm just not sure yet, although I have a working hypothesis, one with which I'm terribly uncomfortable. Although it isn't "conspiracy theory," per se, it could come out sounding that way.
The Dark Wraith certainly doesn't want people to think he's into conspiracy theories, y'know.
Having been a fundy at the time and having become disgusted with Carter's fecklessness (I don't know how else to put it), I don't think it's difficult to see Carter's presidency as the proverbial "last straw".
Certainly most of his Southern Baptist brethren become very seriously disenchanted very quickly once they realized he was a political liberal (mostly), at least on the social agenda they (we) were most concerned about. Seeing him so comfortable with Rosalynn who was such a committed feminist and liberal did nothing at all to endear him to those he has since separated himself from.
Hillary & Ted Kennedy may be their favorite straw men, but Carter is still given the place of preeminence when it comes to ineffective presidents who never should have held the office (as far as they're concerned). Bill Clinton makes them foam at the mouth, but Carter is the one they view as truly contemtible because he was ineffective (unlike Clinton).
- oddjob (who realizes Carter has been a magnificent ex-president, but still remembers his inability to resolve the feud between his hawkish National Security Adviser and his dovish Secretary of State, largely because he could see how they were both right and both wrong)
Good afternoon Dark Wraith.
I agree with your comments but I am perplexed about why so many others will not or can not see the virtues of so many centrist politicians from the past.
Granted, none of them were saints, but most of them were not the sort of evil bastards that we see today. I've been around a little more than a half century, which makes most older than I laugh and the younger view me as a dinosaur. But gawddamnit, all points need consideration as long as the justification is there. Without that, then fuck you, your point is invalid.
Great claims and fantastic opinions require great proofs and justifications.
Otherwise I'll have to fashion a new foil hat.
I'll shut up now, otherwise I may bite someone. I know I'm no genius, but I am not stupid.
Late, late, late as usual. But I wanted to wish you a beautiful holiday and a magic 2007, Sir Wraith.
May you live as long as you want to, and want to as long as you live.
Cheers,
D.
XX
Good morning, litbrit.
Good wishes never wear watches; that's so they're always right on time.
Best wishes to you too, lovely lady.
Hallmark's got nuthin' compared to the Dark Wraith.