(Think you are having a bad day? Lt. Col. Krusinski’s mug shot. Photo Arlington County Police via AP).

I think the Wings lost in OT, and that is it for the truncated season and post-season quest for Lord Stanley’s Cup. I don’t know if the Wings lacked offense, I wasn’t awake.

I could have been at the Nat’s game in which their offense triumphed over the Tigers, 3-1, but I think I hurt my leg again horsing around furniture in the unit and did not want to risk the walk up the ramps at the fancy new stadium. I didn’t hear anything about the PowerBall jackpot. I threw a $20 bill at some numbers while sitting with Old Jim at the bar, but I didn’t hear any news that I had won. Pity. We had pretty much made plans to spend the whole $222 million.

Maybe that is why I was awake way too early, and what awaited me was more analysis from the media. For me, that starts with the BBC content delivered in the hours of darkness on NPR, since they can’t support a real 24-hour news cycle, and instead give us one of the world’s most respected purveyors of News.

This morning I was stumped by the time we got around to the hours when Americans talk about America. What are we to make of incidents like Cleveland and the kidnapping, serial rapes and the rest that played out over a decade?

That is a hard one.

Take an easier one. What are we to make of the drunken assault perpetrated by an active duty  Lieutenant Colonel named Jeffrey Krusinski? It was right here in my Blue Arlington, VA. He was arrested and charged with sexual battery by local law enforcement.

So far, so good, but it gets much better. Krusinski, in his day job, was the officer in charge of sexual assault prevention programs for the Air Force. He had just completed his annual sexual assault victim training. Maureen Dowd had one of her hit-it-out-of-the-park essays in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/opinion/dowd-americas-military-injustice.html?hp&_r=0

One of my pals in an adjacent country wrote to ask me what I thought about it, since my active service spanned the pre-and-post Tailhook universes in the Navy.

I wrote back at some length, trying to work through the fact that criminal behavior is criminal behavior, that sexual assault should be punished, and that I generally have no truck with violence in the larger society, much less the small sub-set of the military. But there is more to this, of course.

I live in a town where people sit around and game these things out. I was talking to Chanteuse Mary at Willow last night. She works for one of the industry groups in town.

My progressive media input, NPR, had a great story about the sheer number of professional lobbyists. They mentioned Mary’s organization as having nearly two hundred well-paid people who knock on doors, generate point papers and talking points, and generally influence how this ponderous beast of a government really works with ideas and money.
Mary said that they did.

Which led me to a minor epiphany about media and narrative. I am such a chump. I listen to what is presented and accept it, sort of at face value, just like everyone else.

What I had not considered was the Unifying Field Theory. Since the interests in this town are so narrowly balanced, and all sides so well funded, it takes a defining moment to change the calculus of the balance of power.
The old saying here parallels Harry Truman’s advise about having a friend in Washington. Some people get dogs. The other one is that “if you are explaining, you are losing.”

It is always better to play offense than difference. What we see as the News is actually just the offense being played out in a really serious game of hard-ball. Much more seriously than the Detroit Tigers or the Detroit Red Wings.
No revelation there, and I am not going to play defense this morning on any particular issue. For one that does not have raw visceral emotion, take the bill wending its way through the Congress about taxing everything sold on the Internet.

Governments at all levels want more revenue. One of the talking points probably generated by the brick-and-mortar stores is that it is only fair for competition. I flinch instinctively when I hear the word “fairness,” since that normally is followed by a tug on my back pocket, but the countervailing talking point is that it would make Socotra Industries LLC subject to 9,600 tax jurisdictions if I decided to sell coffee cups on the site.
I have no idea what is true, and I think that probably goes for my elected idiots as well. Why not just leave it alone?

Oh, forgot. There are lobbyists involved. And it would not be “fair.”
I am not going to tick off the litany of cases that illustrate my larger point. Sometimes the defense actually wins, but by the time the tattered truth eventually plops out, the party is over and moved on to the next indefensible horror.

I think that might be why the GOP always seems to be losing. They only have the one network, after all.

For what it is worth, I agree with Maureen Dowd on this particularly grotesque event, at least for the most part. But of course, she is one of the ones who gets to play offense all the time.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vocsocotra.com