03 March 2004

Down and Dirty

The news this morning is cautionary and brisk. Spring Training for Big League Baseball kicked off in Florida and the Southwest, and the photos were taken for bubble-gum cards. There is a furor over Human Growth Hormone use by some of the stars. I don't believe a word of it. Just because Barry Bonds is now eight feet tall doesn't mean a thing.

The plans of the Jordanian mastermind in Iraq are coming to fruition. His suicide bomber kids killed 140 Shias yesterday, at the height of their holiest days of Ashoura. The festival commemorates the death of Hussain, the third Shiite Imam, in A.D. 680. Saddam repressed the celebration during his reign, and this should have been a time of liberation and empowerment for the Shia majority. It proved to be an irresistible target for Jordanian mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi, a self-proclaimed pan-Arab Jihadist with links to al Qaida.

He knows his role in this story. Despite having a seventeen page letter to Osama intercepted last month, he forged ahead with his plans and attacked his brother Muslims, just as they did in Morocco. It is easier. Word on the street was that the Americans were responsible, because we did not protect them. I'm a bit of a cynic, but it still strikes me how inverted I have to think to understand things. It is a useful exercise, like listening to All-India Radio in the days of socialism. Black is white and all that.

The terrorists are down and dirty on this. They will strike soft targets first, and no one is more vulnerable than their own family. But the wolf is shedding his sheepskin and we will see how long the Iraqis will allow foreigners to swim in the sea of their population and blow up their mothers and sisters.

No Americans died in the attacks, though some were attacked trying to help in the aftermath of the bombings.

No one died in Super Tuesday, either, although some candidacies were shot cleanly through the head. Aloof John Kerry is anointed as the standard-bearer in the great crusade against the Republicans. Al Gore and Bill Clinton are deep on the sidelines. Al screwed up in his early endorsement of Howard Dean, who at lest won his home state yesterday, and Bill has not been heard of in weeks. Hillary was heard, a bit querulous in a sidebar argument about gun control, but she too has been marginalized. If Kerry wins this fall, her shot at the White House may be delayed for eight more years. That will put her in her mid-sixties by the time the stage is clear for her, and that may be too late.

There is some speculation that they will trot her out to balance the Kerry ticket. It could happen, I suppose. But after the Clinton sponsorship of Wes Clark's sad little return to the spotlight, I think John would welcome Hillary on the ticket as quickly as I would clasp an asp to my lily-white bosom.

This is going to be an ugly campaign, and thoroughly entertaining. By the time we are done with it, we will have beaten this process almost to death. I appreciate the Parliamentary system at times like this, with the knowledge that the rascals can be sent packing before the requisite four years have passed and the general elections can be carried off in a matter of weeks. This endless campaign makes my head hurt.

I had occasion to try to lobby Senator Kerry one time, and looked at his record in the Senate to prepare to deal with his staff. I understood he was a former Naval officer, and that seemed to be an avenue of kinship that I could exploit to gain support for a shipbuilding project that meant a great deal to us. I was selling a submarine in exactly the same manner as some people sell aluminum siding for homes.

At the time I did not have the benefit of the ancient newsreels that showed him, shaggy as we all were, doing his performance in Congress upon his return. As I tried to gain some access there, I discovered his voting record was solidly left, straight down the line.

We'll see what the President's people do with that. Carl Rove and a hundred million bucks will afford us the opportunity to learn all about it.

The impression I had of Kerry back then was that no one was home in his office for national security issues, and as distant and remote as Mars on my submarine construction. But he looks sober and serious, and he has supported free trade and historically has opposed the sort of knee-jerk protectionism that shut down international trade and plunged us into the Great Depression.

I have the sense that his rise to this point was scripted from John Kennedy in the same eerie way that we could see the reflection of doomed Camelot in Bill Clinton's toothy ingratiating grin.

The Spring is coming on and the snow is behind us, hopefully. Enter the Ides of March, and the Virginia plants coming up out of the dirt. I know how to do Spring, and it is time to get on with it.

All the players know what they must do and who they have to do it to. The President is said to have called Senator Kerry to congratulate him on the victory. That might be the last note of civility for eight months. Maybe they will prove me wrong, but I don't think so.

I think it is going to be down and dirty.