Author: Jonn Lilyea

  • What’s in Sandy’s pants?

    According to Jerry Seper at the Washington Times, eighteen republicans are trying to get Sandy Burglar to a polygraph machine;

    …Reps. Duncan Hunter, Darrell Issa and Brian Bilbray of California, John L. Mica of Florida, F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, Dan Burton and Mark Souder of Indiana, Christopher Shays of Connecticut, John M. McHugh of New York, Chris Cannon of Utah, John J. “Jimmy” Duncan Jr. of Tennessee, Michael R. Turner of Ohio, Kenny Marchant of Texas, Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, Patrick T. McHenry and Virginia Foxx of North Carolina and Bill Sali of Idaho.

    According to Thomas Davis (R-VA), part of Berger’s deal was a polygraph test;

    Mr. Davis said that during sentencing, Mr. Berger agreed to a polygraph examination as part of a plea deal, but Justice never administered the test, according to two Justice officials closely connected to the case — John Dion, chief of the counterespionage section, and Bruce Swartz, deputy assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division.

    So let’s see it done.

    Fined $50,000 and barred from access to classified material for three years, he faced a year in prison and a $100,000 fine, but his plea deal reduced the fine and kept him out of prison.

    If he won’t take the polygraph, revoke that sweet deal he got and toss his wide, ample buttocks into a ten-by-ten for about twenty years.

  • So what did Webb say?

    For reasons similar to Michael Ledeen, I watched neither speech last night. I pretty much knew what each side would say. So since I missed the whole thing, I can’t comment on it much. But I can comment on what Washington Post’s Michael Shear said about Jim Webb’s rebuttal of the President’s State of the Union Address (full text without coddling commentary at the Washington Times).

    According to Shear, Webb began by stating the obviously false;

    Webb accused the president of taking the country into Iraq “recklessly” and forcing it to endure “a mismanaged war for nearly four years.”

    “Many, including myself, warned even before the war began that it was unnecessary; that it would take our energy and attention away from the larger war against terrorism; and that invading and occupying Iraq would leave us strategically vulnerable,” Webb said.

    What is larger than Iraq in the War Against Terror? Jihadists from around the world have been pouring into Iraq from Iran and Syria to sacrifice themselves in the name of Allah. I think that’s a good thing – at least they’re not pouring into Europe and the United States to sacrifice themselves. And contrary to what Webb said, that makes us strategically stronger since we’ve chosen the battlefield – like every victorious military leader in history.

    Then Webb makes a completely intellectually dishonest statement;

    We need a new direction,” said Webb, a decorated Marine veteran of the Vietnam War. “Not one step back from the war against international terrorism, not a precipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos, but an immediate shift toward strong, regionally based diplomacy.”

    How do we step back from Iraq, like Webb demands, without that being a step-back from the War Against Terror? The Democrats are so steeped in their own propaganda and rhetoric that they’re beginning to believe it. Just like their “worst economy in 60 years” manure in 2004.

    But then Shear goes on to lick Webb’s feet;

    Democrats owe their newfound control of the Senate to Webb’s slim and improbable victory over former Virginia senator George Allen. Webb — who served as secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan — also embodies his party’s central message: a determination to oppose the Iraq war while supporting the troops who are there.

    Webb has become a folk hero among liberals and Democratic bloggers for brusquely telling Bush at a White House event that questions from the president about Webb’s son are “between me and my boy.”

    So after just three weeks as a U.S. senator, Webb became the choice of the Democratic leadership in the Senate and House of Representatives to carry their blunt warning about Bush’s new war strategy.

    Mindless drivel spoken at the altar of lies. Now Webb is a folk-hero for being an impetuous child in the White House. The Kos Kids must have been peeing themselves with excitement last night. Webb is a vacant imbecile who changes parties when it’s politically expedient and he can fool voters ONE MORE TIME. With Dingy Harry Reid carrying his water;

    “He represents to me what the new America is all about,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) as he faced about 40 reporters with Webb and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.). “Someone who understands what it means to go to war, what it means to have peace, what it means to work on a bipartisan basis. I think he’s the perfect person to answer the president.”

    Yeah, they thought John Kerry was the perfect person to answer the President in 2004 – until a couple of thousand veterans showed up at the Capitol on a sunny September afternoon and declared “Kerry lied while good men died”.

    Webb should have remembered where his “brothers” fall on this issue before he gets the same treatment.

  • Where do they find these peckerwoods?

    While leisurely reading Sister Toldya this afternoon she points her readers (by way of Hugh Hewitt) towards this piece of shit in the LA Times by Paul Whitefield (they like it when I mention their names – they google themselves during down time);

    LISTENING TO President Bush’s speech on Iraq earlier this month, my first thought was: “Where the heck are we going to get 21,500 more soldiers to send to Iraq?” Our Reserves are depleted, our National Guard is worn out, our Army and Marine Corps are stretched to the limit.

    Then it hit me: Re-up our Vietnam War veterans and send them.

    They’re trained. They’re battle-hardened. Many already have post-traumatic stress disorder. Also, some have their own vehicles — Harleys mostly, which are cheap to run, make small targets and are highly mobile. I’ll even bet that lots of these guys still have guns (you know, just in case).

    OK, some vets are a bit long in the tooth (or don’t have teeth — because of Agent Orange?). Or their eyesight isn’t what it was. Or their reflexes have slowed. But with today’s modern weaponry, how well do you have to see?

    Too out of shape, you say? Listen, if Rocky Balboa can step back into the ring at age 60, all these Vietnam War vets need is a little boot-camp magic and they’ll be good to go. I mean, who doesn’t want to drop a few pounds?

    Don’t want geezers fighting for us? Well, let’s face it, our young people have greater value right here. Most of us want to retire and collect our hard-earned Social Security, and we need those youngsters here, working and paying taxes — lots of taxes.

    Finally, these Vietnam War guys are hungry for revenge. After all, they fought in the only war the U.S. ever lost. And they didn’t even get a parade. So this is their chance. We can throw them that big parade when they come marching home.

    Yeah, I copied the whole thing, just hoping some peckerwood LA lawyer writes me a letter to complain.

    Whitefield better dig himself a bunker. I’m not a Viet Nam veteran, but I’m a Viet Nam Era veteran (according to the VA), and I already volunteered to go back on active duty. And if the military is so hard up for bodies, why haven’t they called me back? Numbnuts.

  • Liz Cheney lays out the case for war

    I don’t usually put much stock in what relatives of politicians have to say about national policy, but today in the Washington Post, Liz Cheney has an excellent piece in which she lays out the case for the war against terrorists and the war in Iraq.

    She begins by criticizing both sides;

    In fairness, Clinton, with her proposal for arbitrary caps on troop levels and hemming and hawing about her vote for the war resolution, has company on both sides of the aisle. Sen. Joseph Lieberman is the only national Democrat showing any courage on this issue. We Republicans — with help from senators such as Chuck Hagel — seem ready to race the Democrats to the bottom.

    She also includes the military bloggers in her case;

    · Our soldiers will win if we let them. Read their blogs. Talk to them. They know that free people must fight to defend their freedom. No force on Earth — especially not an army of terrorists and insurgents — can defeat our soldiers militarily. American troops will win if we show even one-tenth the courage here at home that they show every day on the battlefield. And by the way, you cannot wish failure on our soldiers’ mission and claim, at the same time, to be supporting the troops. It just doesn’t compute.

    It’s very readable, I just wish a politician would summon the testicular fortitude to say the same things.

  • Senate bill still exempts Samoa

    Nearly two weeks ago, I wrote about Nancy Pelosi’s exemption of Samoa from the new minimum wage bill. Well, she promised to change the bill and include Samoa, however as we read in the Washington Times this morning from Charles Hurt;

     “I have asked the education and labor committee as they go forward with the legislation to make sure that all of the territories have to comply with U.S. law on the minimum wage,” Mrs. Pelosi said earlier this month.
        The House, however, passed the minimum-wage bill with the American Samoa exemption. And yesterday, Senate Democrats were moving ahead with the original legislation, which for the first time would enforce the minimum wage on the Northern Mariana Islands, another territory in the Pacific with a similarly low minimum wage.
        That bill is co-sponsored by several dozen Democrats, including Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California.
        In addition to San Francisco-based StarKist, San Diego-based Chicken of the Sea also has a cannery in American Samoa. Together, the California companies employ about 75 percent of the Samoan work force.

    So now the conspiracy to use their position of power to pay off constituents has been expanded to the two Senators from California and yet another constituent, Chicken of the Sea.

    So much for “draining the swamp“.

     

  • AQ planned to hit the US from Iraq

    According to an ABC News story, al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) planned (or is planning) an attack on the US using 20 operatives;

    Mimicking the hijackers who executed the Sept. 11 attacks, insurgents reportedly tied to al Qaeda in Iraq considered using student visas to slip terrorists into the United States to orchestrate a new attack on American soil.

     

    Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, recently testified that documents captured by coalition forces during a raid of a safe house believed to house Iraqi members of al Qaeda six months ago “revealed [AQI] was planning terrorist operations in the U.S.”

    That’s no real surprise to rational people, of course. Personally, I’m more surprised that there hasn’t been a successful attack in the last five years. But what got me, in the story, there is a poll in the middle of the story that asks

    Related: Is Iraq’s Sucess Tied to Our Safety?

    So just for chuckles, I decided to take the poll. The possible answers were;

    Yes. Without a peaceful resolution in Iraq, more terrorists will find their way to U.S. shores.

    No. Iraq never had any connection to the real enemy

    No. Even if U.S. troops pull out, our homeland is an ocean away and will still be safe.

    Now, I’m pretty sure that ABC’s audience is fairly center Left. At the time I took the poll, nearly 3/4 voted “Yes”, which seems reasonable, but the fact that 1/4 of the voters would vote “No” kinda has me worried. The larger portion of the “no” voters voted for the first “no” answer – despite the fact that the poll link is in the middle of the story about AQI attempting to attack the US.  The 116 voters who voted for the last selection must be in the hills of South Dakota or somewhere remote enough to not be aware that there are these new-fangled flying machines that cross our oceans in hours these days.

    But I know people like that – people who might surprise you if I told you their background. They actually believe that if we pulled out of Iraq, aQ’s hatred for westerners would dissipate and they’d ignore us. Educated people, worldly people. I guess ignorance is indeed bliss.

  • How is Iraq lost?

    I read a Joe “do my hair plugs look straight to you” Biden quote by Rob at Flopping Aces this morning;

    I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost,” Biden said. “They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy — literally, not figuratively.” Joseph Biden 

    A Washington Post/ABC poll comes up with the conclusion that;

    The poll also finds that the public trusts congressional Democrats over Bush to deal with the conflict by a margin of 60 percent to 33 percent.

    Somehow, it’s become a foregone conclusion in discussing the war in Iraq that we’ve lost it and Democrats will somehow save us.

    How did that happen? We’ve been killing these numbnut jihadists in droves for years. Yeah, it’s cost a few thousand Americans in doing so, but that’s the cost of doing the business of fighting chickenshit cowards.

    Speaking of chickenshit cowards, who was it that moaned that we needed to stop killing Iraqis on the “Highway of Death” (known to rational people as Highway 1) back in 1991? When we had Hussein’s Army on the run and bottlenecked on Highway 1 scurrying their their famished thread-worn asses back to Basra, the media and the Left put up a hue and cry that our aircraft were making the highway slick with the blood of surrendering, unarmed Iraqi soldiers (who, by the way, had, until recently, been raping and pillaging a surrendering and unarmed Kuwaiti population).

    So the Republican administration surrendered to the Democrat Congress’ protests and ceased the destruction.

    But I can attest (along with Crotchety Old Bastard who was on my flank the day the Gulf War ended and we both ended up alongside Highway 1) Highway 1 was no “Highway of Death”. There were very few dead. The US aviators had taken out the the first few vehicles on the highway and the last few vehicles, effectively stopping traffic. Then as the Iraqis fled the highway on foot, the aircraft destroyed the parked vehicles. So many vehicles it took days for US engineers to make the highway passable again. But the Iraqis fled on foot to Basra. Not dead.

    But because the media took a few grisly pictures of some mangled corpses, Highway 1 became the “Highway of Death” and our aviators became inhuman killing machines who were stopped from their grim task of murdering unarmed soldiers by the courageous Democrats and the media.

    Total Bullshit (note the capital B).

    And those Iraqi soldiers who escaped to Basra were re-armed, turned around and turned loose on the Shi’ite civilian population. Crotchety Old Bastard and I saw the results of that, too, when we were sent deep into Iraq to shield the Shi’ites from the marauding Iraqi Army in March and April.

    So why did I recount all of that? To remind people that Democrats don’t know shit from shinola when it comes to warfare. I don’t think Democrats even know how to say the word “victory” let alone define victory. Look at the back-clapping they’ve done for “their” wars – Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, etc.

    They take great pleasure in the US military’s failures – most of which they’ve caused with their infantile, political tantrums and their incessant meddling in the business of real men – merely for political gain and their personal wealth.

    I guaren-damn-tee that if the Democrats sat quietly for just one year, we’d wipe out terrorism in our time, but their hand-wringing apologies, their finger-pointing, their rush to surrender is what’s getting our troops killed in Iraq. If they has just kept their criticism to themselves until after the war was over, it’d be over.

    But they support the troops.

    Pffft!

    Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette asks and then answers;

    What exactly is this plan that most Americans “want to work“?

    In the meantime, I’d like to know what the Democrats plan since they can’t seem to drag their sorry-asses into line for the “surge”. If Americans think the Democrats can do better, what are Americans basing this on?  What have the Democrats presented as an alternative? Besides cutting and running, of course.

    And from the Guardian, via Hot Air;

    One of the things that I have found hard to deal with is the people who have called me to pass their condolences then gone on to tell me that the war in Iraq is wrong and that we should pull the troops out.

    Of course war is wrong, but they are also wrong: we should not pull the troops out. If we had pulled the troops out last week, my son would still be alive but that is not the right thing to do.

    If you want to take them out, fine, no British soldiers will be killed, but who will go in? It’s as if the British public are saying ‘We know there are going to be deaths in that country to restore democracy but we don’t want our boys dying – send somebody else’s.’

    But what do you do? Sit and watch our high definition televisions and not give a shit? If you say that, then what was my son’s life for. Then you are saying he died in vain.

  • Thoughts on Hillary’s voters

    Just the usual crapola in the news today, but it got me thinking (what I do best, despite my wife’s complaints about the odor). Hillary will probably walk away with her party’s nomination for the very simplest reason; Democrats hate to put any actual thought into their political decisions (if they did they’d be Republicans) and Hillary is the perfect superficial candidate for the intellectually vacant.

    She’s really as vacuous as that Barack Obama. Neither have done or said anything of note since they’ve won their respective offices, yet the Media is collectively peeing itself a little everytime it mentions either’s name. 

    She’s been on both sides of nearly every issue (except abortion which Democrats are avoiding at the moment) at one time or another, so it’s fairly easy to ‘google’ a reason to support her. Everyone supposedly knows what issues she support (pick an issue, any issue), and everyone wonders what Bill will do in the White House when he’s not the one everyone is watching (personally, I imagine it’ll be a more grotesque version of Tom Cruise’s tidy whitey dance from “Risky Business”).

    I’m sure she can talk Al Gore into being her straightman VP again – that’ll make it even easier to attract the intellectually barren who’ve already pulled the lever twice for Clinton/Gore – and they won’t have to pull off the stickers from the bumpers of their 16-year-old Volvos.

    And since she’s already been the co-President, we know we can expect more of the same antics of their cabinet members, too. They had a hard enough time finding the first iteration who wasn’t tainted by scandal and corruption, you don’t think they’ll change the nominees do ya? I wonder if they’ll appoint Sandy Berger to the National Archivist job this time around.

    And maybe they can finally get us out of the dirty war we’re involved in over in the Balkans like they promised they’d do before the 1996 election.

    They can even borrow their campaign slogan from the Seinfeld’s character George Costanza; “I like stuff I don’t have to think about”.

    Now, I see that Clinton water-carrier and professional toady Bill “No, Really – I’m Hispanic” Richardson has tossed his hat in the ring. I suspect he thinks his portly visage will cut a fine figure alongside Hillary as her runningmate.