Author: Poetrooper

I’ll wager that most readers here at [This Ain’t Hell] are just as fed up with meaningless polls as I am. You probably hang up on the endless callers wanting just a few minutes of your time to conduct yet another survey, don’t you? And the result of all this endless polling is that every day of the week, the American public is subjected to the publication and broadcasting of multiple polls telling us that this person leads or that person’s numbers are climbing/declining; Americans love/hate guns; Syrian refugees should be accepted/rejected, on and on until it all blends together into media blather.

Remember when you actually paid attention to the results of a Gallup Poll? Now you hardly ever hear of Gallup; there are so many polling agencies feeding their confusing results into the media stream that it is impossible to keep track of who polled what

With all that being considered, I’ve decided to ask AT’s editor, Thomas Lifson, in the spirit of the season, to allow me to use his conservative flagship for the purpose of conducting a truly meaningful poll that should generate record-setting results for this format. It is a simple, single-sentence poll with a simple yes-or-no response. If you’re reading this, then Mr. Lifson has shown his usual generosity and approved my poll. Are you ready? Here it is:

Should the American people pardon the turkey in the White House?

Please register your vote in the comments section; commentary regarding your vote is encouraged, but please keep profane and scatological embellishments to a minimum.

Thank you for these few moments of your time.

Crossposted at American Thinker

Recently the Obama administration was crowing loudly about its success in vaporizing a single, notoriously vicious jihadist with a well-placed Hellfire missile. Mohammed Emwazi was a British citizen who not only joined the jihadist movement, but became one of its leading public executioners, quickly dubbed by the media Jihadi John. John had no qualms about publicly incriminating himself in widely distributed videos showing him sawing off the heads of helpless kneeling victims. His flair for such bloody publicity placed him at the very top of the high-value targets list and resulted in his mission as a fervent executioner for ISIS being abruptly truncated last week, according to U.S. authorities. Since John earned his own execution by drone missile last week, the Obama administration has been basking in the warm glow of his fiery demise, citing the event as evidence that its strategy for combatting ISIS is effective.

And therein lies the problem. In its article relating John’s demise, the U.K.’s Daily Mail includes a photograph that pretty much sums up the slapdash aspects of Obama’s strategy of going after newsworthy targets rather than those that are truly significant in terms of reducing the jihadis’ ability to wage war. View for a moment this aerial photo from the Mail’s article.

Note that the location of the drone strike on Jihadi John appears to be but a few city blocks from a large building marked “ISIS Main HQ.” Does the question not immediately arise in your mind why we would target a specific human enemy and yet leave perhaps hundreds of them alive and well to continue to conduct their war against us?

Will you please explain this strategy, Mr. Commander-in Chief?

Crossposted at American Thinker

It was Friday evening, and I was listening to a survivor of the Bataclan Theater terrorist attack in Paris describe how it took place. The attackers wisely seized the high ground, the balconies, where they were able to fire down into the masses of people packed into the overcrowded main floor. According to this witness, the terrorists were able to continually fire their weapons randomly into their helpless victims for ten to fifteen minutes before the police assault finally took them down.

Listening to that, my first thought was this: what if the members of that audience, who were all unarmed by French law, didn’t have to simply wait passively to be random victims? What if Paris was a city that permitted concealed carry? In an audience of more than a thousand, perhaps one in twenty might have been packing. That’s more than fifty citizens who could have been returning fire on those terrorists. Sure, it would be handgun rounds against automatic rifles and possibly shotguns, but trust me, those three shooters wouldn’t have been randomly shooting helpless fish in a barrel had they had incoming rounds from that many firing points – even from half that many. When they were able to raise their heads over the balcony rails, they would have been targeting those citizen shooters instead of killing the helpless…or they might have fled in the face of return fire, as terrorists sometimes do.

The growing body count as of this writing is 120 slaughtered in the Bataclan. We’ll never know how much that body count could have been reduced if the foolish French allowed their citizens to go armed. Their imprudent gun control laws contributed to unnecessary carnage.

Once again, when seconds counted, the police were just too many minutes away.

Crossposted at American Thinker

During those years when I was coming to realize that all my television news and much of my print news were becoming increasingly biased toward the Democratic Party, I began to pay closer attention to all media that came my way to see if the trend encompassed more than just news organizations. One publication that was a bit slower to jump on the Jackass bandwagon, but was showing the by-now familiar signs, was the AARP magazine. Once I began to more closely scrutinize this free monthly publication, to actually read it instead of tossing it on the bathroom stack, it became clear that the Democrats had developed the means to insidiously place their liberal propaganda into the most conservative of households under the guise of looking out for the interests of senior citizens.

Now, many years later, I am no longer surprised when I read or hear of AARP selling out seniors. Like most of the mainstream media organizations, AARP no longer even tries to hide its blatant bias – but in spite of that, you’ll be amazed at how many conservative seniors are aghast when you point out that their dues and health care premiums are supporting a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.

For those of you who continue to believe in the benevolence of this truly malevolent organization, here’s an example to set you straight.

Jonah Bennett, writing over at Daily Caller, reports that AARP mag had put together an article for Veterans’ Day about six doctors who had signed up for military service later in life. One of these was emergency room physician Mark Plaster, whose bio demonstrates a life of sacrificing for others. The part of that sacrifice that attracted AARP mag was Dr. Plaster leaving behind a lucrative medical practice to serve as a trauma detachment leader in Iraq at the age of fifty. That’s just the kind of person AARP is looking for, right? Right?

Well, yeah, until, that is, AARP editors learned at the last minute that Plaster wasn’t just a Republican like most veterans, a truth they could probably swallow without gagging for the sake of their article. But Dr. Plaster is also a candidate for the U.S. Congress from Maryland, and that, friends, is when their story ran smack up against the implacable reality of their leftist, Democrat politics and their party loyalties. So Dr. Plaster was surgically excised from the article, which still describes itself as an account of six heroes, according to Bennett. Not even for the brief period of their article, nor for Veterans’ Day, could the party hardliners running AARP set aside their political bias to include an account of a good man, an exceptional man, sacrificing for his country, because they simply could not bring themselves to print anything good about a person they consider the enemy. Even the author of the AARP article confessed that it was purely politics.

Now I ask you, my fellow conservative senior citizens, who, despite all evidence to the contrary, continue to think of AARP as a benevolent organization looking out for your best interest, do you not see how appallingly politicized AARP truly is? AARP dues are $16 per year. May I suggest that readers donate that amount to Dr. Plaster’s campaign as a symbolic rebuke to this abhorrent organization?

I just did, and it felt damned good.

Crossposted at American Thinker

With increasing forensic evidence pointing to an in-air explosion as the cause of the crash of the Russian airliner over the Sinai, the taunting claim from ISIS that it is responsible for the disaster is becoming ever more convincing. Coming just weeks after the major Russian escalation of its military role in support of the Assad regime in Syria, it is not difficult to understand the motivation for the terrorist event. But it is a different matter when trying to fathom the wisdom of attacking Russian sun-seekers, vacationers returning to their northern motherland from a tropical vacation, innocent citizens far separated from their nation’s geopolitical activities. It is a bloody provocation the instigators well may come to regret.

In the few years that ISIS has been extant, there have been many occasions when its members’ behaviors have been brutally bizarre and unnecessarily provocative – symbolic pokes in the eye of Western sensibilities – but they have thus far refrained from such a terrorist attack on American citizens. Whether or not such an attack would bring any sort of meaningful response from the clueless and neutered puppy in our White House, there should be little doubt that poking the Russian bear in such brutal fashion will draw a disproportionate response that will result in the deaths of far more ISIS followers than the number of Russian civilians blown to dust over the Sinai. And it is quite easy to predict that the Russian response will not be limited in any way as a bow to humane Western sensibilities.

It is glaringly obvious to the world, except perhaps to the wildly unpredictable ISIS leadership, that Vladimir Putin is no Barack Obama. It is not a matter of whether but rather when the Russian leader will take his revenge upon ISIS for those innocent vacationers. It is not difficult to assume that the Russian response will be sufficiently disproportionate so as to provide a memorable lesson, not just to ISIS, but to the myriad terrorist organizations that might consider testing Russian mettle.

If I may be so bold as to offer a suggestion to Colonel Putin, why not bring in Russian strategic bombers and carpet-bomb the entire ISIS operational area until nothing remains except smoking sand, a strategy I have long been urging our own ineptly commanded military to pursue? Such a response might make future terrorist planners consider options other than killing innocent Russian civilians. Let them learn the wisdom of neither poking the Bear nor killing her cubs.

Crossposted at American Thinker

Maybe we need a new law banning mixed-race, homosexual ex-reporters from owning guns. Hey, a guy who’s pretty obviously mixed-race and openly homosexual, as well as a documented ex-reporter, killed two people in Virginia yesterday, and all the usual left-wing gun-grabbers are focusing on only one aspect of the crime: the inanimate handgun used by the mixed-race, homosexual ex-reporter who committed the despicable act. These lefties use every sensational killing as an excuse to call for more gun restrictions, almost like your neighborhood dogs that start howling when they hear a siren go off somewhere across town.

My reasoning is that if it weren’t for the actions of the mixed-race homosexual ex-reporter, we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all. So obviously it is those three elements of the crime, every bit as much as the fact that a handgun was used, that we should be looking at to prevent future reoccurrences, right?

Right?

Of course, you readers see the preposterousness of the above argument. The fact that the perp was a mixed-race homosexual ex-reporter has no bearing on the events that transpired except the last element: his being fired most likely was a triggering event for this tragedy. And had we possessed laws that forbade mixed-race homosexuals from buying guns, these killings took place at such close proximity that a machete or an ax would have served as effectively as the handgun.

Once again, the siren of tragedy has gone off, and every liberal gun-grabbing mutt who hears it begins to howl for more gun control and more restrictions on the rights of non-criminal free citizens. Amidst their liberal caterwauling, one good idea has come to me as a result of this latest tragedy. While I obviously hold no animosity against persons of mixed race or homosexuals, the same can’t be said for ex-reporters, or more precisely, all reporters, who should, to my way of thinking, all be made ex-reporters. Even without banning them from owning guns, we’d all be better off for it. Maybe we could ban them from owning computers and smartphones.

Maybe we need a new law…

Crossposted at American Thinker

Remember Leona Helmsley, the billionaire Queen of Mean, whose infamous attitude of, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes,” presaged Hillary Clinton’s mocking attitude towards national security and classified documents? While the two are similar in other ways, such as being hugely wealthy New Yorkers who were and are snottily rude and abusive to the hired help, including those who protect their lives, it is Clinton’s queenly dismissal of the rules governing the handling of the nation’s secure electronic transmissions that got me to wondering how her Leona-like, I’m-above-the-law behavior might affect her election prospects in 2016 even if the corrupt Obama administration lets her skate on her clearly criminal violations of federal security statutes.

From what I’m hearing, those of us who have served our country in positions requiring us to handle classified documents and transmissions take a much dimmer view of Hillary’s behavior than those who have never borne that responsibility. Perhaps that’s because we have a better understanding of the potentially perilous consequences of her crimes, actions that done by us could have, and sometimes did, imprison we “little people” who dared handle classified materials with the Clinton circle’s cocky contempt. There are many Americans out there whose careers were stunted professionally, if not ended, by mere allegations or suspicions of mishandling of such materials. Some actually have, and still are, serving hard federal time for far less risky behaviors than what we have seen from Hillary Clinton.

The question in my mind is just how many current and former security clearance holders there are in America right now who are following Hillary’s deliberate and intentional treachery and who will be absolutely livid if this Clinton Queen of Mean ultimately pays no price. Determining current numbers is no problem. As reported by defenseone.com approximately 4.5 million Americans held security clearances at the end of 2014. That figure is down significantly from 2013 when it was over 5 million. According to that same article, requests for new background checks is also down but still is 665,000 annually, including first time requests as well as reissuances, which are required every five years for Top Secret and every ten years for Secret. But these numbers only tell us about current holders. How many Americans are out there who like me haven’t held a clearance for decades but who still hold a very healthy and patriotic respect for the process?

Because figures on the Internet vary, even from supposedly authoritative sources, all the figures that follow are approximations. There are roughly twenty-plus million veterans alive today with about two million of those being retirees. Since almost all retirees are senior officers and senior NCOs, you can make a safe estimate that virtually all of them held security clearances and most of those Secret or higher. Also most of those retirees are married to spouses whose lives at times were constrained by the necessities of their mates protecting sensitive, national security information. How many of them heard many times in their lives, “Sorry, Babe, but I can’t talk about it.”? Being more familiar with the need for tight lips and the concept of national security than your average American, most of those marital partners will tend to vote like their spouses.

Now, let’s take a very conservative estimate of fifteen percent of the remaining eighteen million, non-retiree veterans as having held security clearances which gives us another 2.7 million voters. Figure most of those are married to similar-voting spouses and round the figure to four million.

As for retired federal employees and federal contractors who held security clearances, that’s anyone’s guess. The total number has to approximate the military figure but since so many are unionized and thus Democrat voters no matter how corrupt the candidate, I’m only going to take a very cautious figure of one million and double that for spouses. Retired federal contractors who held security clearances is another rough guess, but based on the graph attending the article at defenseone.com, it looks like they are roughly one-quarter of the current active total. Let’s call it one quarter of the combined military retired with spouses and retired federal employees with spouses and when we account for their spouses, we have a figure of 2.5 million contractors.

Now add ‘em up: 4.5 million active security clearance holders, 4.0 million military retirees with spouses, 4.0 million non-retired veterans including spouses, 2.0 million retired federal employees plus spouses and finally, 2.5 million retired contractors and spouses. I get roughly 17.0 million American citizens in the high-voting, senior age category with the potential of becoming single-issue motivated, negative voters if Hillary is allowed to skip on these national security violations.

Even if I’m off by half, this “Classified” voting bloc is still substantially more than the number of votes by which Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012. It’s also more than the entire Jewish population in America and many more times that of the much vaunted “Jewish vote” which the Democrats tend to claim as their own. And if I’m off by only a third, we’re talking possible political disaster numbers somewhere between the Reagan-Carter debacle and the Reagan landslide over Mondale. Were I a Democrat strategist, or more importantly, a party powerbroker or fund-bundler, I’d be taking a hard look at the huge negative consequences to the party if Queen Hillary is allowed to continue to her criminally assisted coronation.

Crossposted at American Thinker