This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Poetrooper

  • You Lie! Says Lightweight Harry Reid

    Remember the high dudgeon exhibited by the mainstream media when Congressman Wilson yelled out, “You Lie!” at Barack Obama during the State of the Union Address? Most of their frothing went something like (I paraphrase), “How dare that Southern redneck defile the sanctity of that hallowed chamber and show such disrespect for the nation’s chief executive with such an outburst.” Well, all that makes me wonder how they’re going to defend this insult.

    War on Women alert! Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid just called a female leukemia patient a liar. He evidently believes countless other women across the country who have reported unsatisfactory experiences with ObamaCare are liars, too.

    Yes, that is the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, standing at a podium in our Capitol and labeling every American citizen who has spoken up in public to describe his or her problem with Obamacare as a liar. That’s right, by Harry’s lights it’s not the president who lied when he was selling this legislative lemon to the American public; no it’s the folks complaining about all the breakdowns in this clunker they were sold who are the liars. With his bitter denunciation of those victimized by the disastrous legislation he played a major role in enacting, Lightweight Harry Reid has declared war on a significant sector of the American public which includes a huge number of women, as well as their children, and in the process proven indisputably that he’s no Lighthorse Harry. But then, that Harry wouldn’t have tried to ride to victory on a jackass.

    The alleged Republican War on Women? That pales into insignificance when you consider that the leader of the senate has denounced and demonized almost the entire American citizenry because they are being victimized by the results of his ill-advised legislation and dare to have the audacity to speak up about their plight. He who gave us that which must be passed so that we can know what’s in it apparently doesn’t want the peons complaining now that they’ve found out what’s in it.

    What a political genius that Harry Reid. The only thing he didn’t do was come right out and haughtily say to those who would describe the injury to them and their families caused by his flawed policies, “How dare you!” He’s just handed the Republicans a leaf-chipper of a video for Democrat opponents in the upcoming congressional elections. Feed ‘em in feet first or head first, won’t matter; they’re chips. How are the folks going to respond to endless videos of one of the most powerful Democrats in the land arrogantly dismissing all of them and their problems as liars and lies? Harry is proving that he is the intellectual lightweight we believed him to be.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Prostituting Science

    Over at Forbes, Patrick Michaels, Director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute and a senior fellow in research and economic development at George Mason University, has written a serious and thought-provoking piece regarding the deleterious impact of the fraud of global warming on the world scientific community. Michaels, citing an article in the Australian literary journal, Quadrant, by Garth Paltridge, whom Michaels characterizes as one of the world’s most respected atmospheric scientists, posits a harsh view of the inevitable and devastating impact of the current climate change hysteria on future scientific research.

    For those of us who have smelled a rat since the outset of this latest “sky is falling” phenomenon, there’s little in the article to surprise us and a whole lot of material to support “I told ya so’s.” As we Deniers long suspected, Paltridge and Michaels lay the blame for the specious science supporting the Goreist fanaticism right at the feet of leftist politics and federal funding. Says Paltridge:

    “…the average man in the street, a sensible chap who by now can smell the signs of an oversold environmental campaign from miles away, is beginning to suspect that it is politics rather than science which is driving the issue.”

    And then continues with this:

    “Science changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the reward structure in the profession began to revolve around the acquisition of massive amounts of taxpayer funding that was external to the normal budgets of the universities and federal laboratories. In climate science, this meant portraying the issue in dire terms, often in alliance with environmental advocacy organizations. Predictably, scientists (and their institutions) became addicted to the wealth, fame, and travel in the front of the airplane:

    “A new and rewarding research lifestyle emerged which involved the giving of advice to all types and levels of government, the broadcasting of unchallengeable opinion to the general public, and easy justification for attendance at international conferences — this last in some luxury by normal scientific experience, and at a frequency previously unheard of.”

    Every incentive reinforced this behavior, as the self-selected community of climate boffins now began to speak for both science and in the service of drastic regulatory policies. In the measured tones of the remarkably lucid and precise writer that he is, Paltridge explains how the corner got painted:

    “The trap was fully sprung when many of the world’s major national academies of science (such as the Royal Society in the UK, the National Academy of Sciences in the USA and the Australian Academy of Science) persuaded themselves to issue reports giving support to the conclusions of the IPCC [the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. The reports were touted as national assessments that were supposedly independent of the IPCC and of each other, but of necessity were compiled with the assistance of, and in some cases at the behest of, many of the scientists involved in the IPCC international machinations. In effect, the academies, which are the most prestigious of the institutions of science, formally nailed their colors to the mast of the politically correct.

    Since that time three or four years ago, there has been no comfortable way for the scientific community to raise the specter of serious uncertainty about the forecasts of climatic disaster.”

    Michaels closing quote from the Paltridge article is this:

    “In the light of all this, we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem — or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem — in its effort to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavor.”

    There it is from an eminent climate scientist, just what we here at American Thinker have been suspecting all along. Global warming is a both scam perpetrated by greedy opportunists like Al Gore, as well as a cult composed of those disaster-dependent ding-a-lings among us who have no incentive in life if that life is not imminently threatened by whatever the latest perceived threat may be; and lastly by a bunch of avaricious academics willing to sell their scientific souls to that big government devil for a place to nose into the trough of federal funding for research.

    I’m not sure it’s quite as bad as Paltridge predicts but I do know that for me, someone’s scientific credentials on whatever I read from now on will be immediately met with a cynical,

    “So who funded your study?”

    Crossposted from American Thinker

  • Waving a Hero

    I’d like to introduce a new term into the political lexicon: waving a hero. For that is precisely what America’s commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, did last week at the conclusion of his State of the Union speech. As an old infantry sergeant, I was watching that young Ranger NCO from the time he entered the chamber, taking note of the fact that he was seated next to the first lady. I told my wife right then, “He’s there as a prop, they’re going to use him.”

    Unfortunately for me, and the young sergeant first class, Cory Remberg, we all had to sit there through the entire boring speech for both of us to be validated. He received his sorely earned tribute with an extended standing ovation by all present in the chamber. However, being the cynic that life has made me, I knew that the duration of the ovation was largely based on the fact that both parties feared being the first to sit down. I’m just an undergraduate cynic; those duly elected members in that chamber have advanced degrees in that finely honed sense of distrust, disbelief, and “do whatever it takes.”

    American Thinker had a recent post by a young Marine officer who tried to defray the charges of cynicism being leveled at the Obama administration for its callous exploitation of a grievously wounded combat veteran. This Marine wisely noted that Pericles had eons ago explained why young warriors must sometimes be sacrificed for the good of a virtuous state. But, and that is a huge but, the essence of Pericles’s observation is that the nation being defended must be one of virtue and truth, and therefore worthy of defense and the resulting sacrifice of its brave warriors.

    As someone who fought in ground combat in Vietnam, I agree with that. At no time in my service there did I feel like I was fighting to protect hearth and home back in America from invasion by Asian hordes. I accepted that I was a small cog in the vast machine that my country, my supposedly virtuous country, had employed to counter the machinations and threats of those other superpowers, China and Russia, on the chessboard of their Southeast Asian strategy.

    I would wager that if you surveyed surviving veterans of all the wars this country has fought since WWII, you would find that the two most prevalent emotions are first pride in service and then, most disturbingly, a disillusionment that they will carry to their graves that they were somehow used — simple pawns moved about to protect the political queens and kings. Yet we look at the larger battlefield and realize that no matter if our service and sacrifice were misused in certain campaigns, what we fought and died for was the particular mission assigned us by this greatest nation the world has ever seen. That is the Pericles justification for sacrificing our young warriors. We believed in America — and I’m certain that that is still the driving force within those who now serve.

    No pity wanted here, though; we’re not looking for that. We are that proud few who stood when called and served — and as such, we do not look favorably upon a so-called commander-in-chief who uses one of our own’s badly battle-battered body as a political prop to shore up his piss-poor performance as a leader of America’s fighting forces. I would hope that future commanders-in-chief would have the decency to refrain from making a prop of such a grievously injured warrior.

    This nation has done an acceptable job of honoring and recompensing those who fought on its behalf: G.I. Bill benefits enabled millions of us to get college degrees and buy homes. I availed myself of both. The health benefits promised us are an entire book unto themselves, a tome filled with grievance. The one thing our country seems to have done well is to establish beautiful national cemeteries where our remains can rest among our fellow veterans.

    But please, no more waving of heroes for political drama.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • The TOTUS Who Can’t Look America in the Eye

    Not once — not even once — did the man who claims to be the legitimate leader of our nation ever look me, and all the other watching citizens of this nation, in the eye during his State of the Nation speech. He was a dash-top bobble-head, swinging back and forth from prompter to prompter.

    Good grief! The man can’t uncouple himself from his comfort-zone technology for even a moment to look Americans in the eye just once, and give us some sense of our comfort that he is sincere.

    For those of us who endured the entire speech, it was painfully obvious that our nation is being led by a man who lives and dies by the teleprompter — Teleprompter Rex. It would be exceedingly interesting to see what would transpire should that teleprompter technology crash in the midst of a major speech like this one. Perhaps America would be treated to the real Obama, without the technological defenses that wall him off from we, the unworthy.

    Reality is, this affirmative-action president, a man elevated far beyond his capabilities by those who would use him for their own ends, has failed. He’s failed himself, and he’s failed America. Deliciously, he’s failed those who put this puppet into the role of power. He’s failed them because he hasn’t been able to enact their great socialist takeover of America.

    Sadly, we as a nation will be required to endure three more years of executive ineptitude — unless we take the Senate in 2014, which would afford America the means to rid itself of this aberration and restore some semblance of responsible leadership.

    And yes, it still irks the hell out of me when my president can’t look me in the eye, even over a television network. What a clueless, classless political weasel. Think about that, America: the guy who leads you and the world won’t look you in the eye.

    Crossposted from American Thinker

  • Holding Onto Hallowed Ground in Hawaii

    An old paratrooper, with whom I once served, sent me a heads up on a situation from which I am geographically distanced, but as a one-time combat infantryman in the far-western Pacific, find close to my heart. On the Hawaiian island of Oahu is one of the most beautiful resting places of American war dead to be found anywhere in the world. I know this because I have been there and gazed out over the green expanse of the Punchbowl and felt the same sense of awed reverence as when I have visited my Vietnam Wall, the World War II Memorial, and the Korean War Memorial in Washington. The Punchbowl is the Arlington Cemetery of the Pacific and like all those other sacred sites the Punchbowl is hallowed ground, infused with the sacrifice of the tens of thousands buried there who gave their all in service to this nation. That lush green resting place in paradise is a fitting tribute to that long blue, green, and khaki line of sailors, soldiers, and marines who died fighting on, over and even under those coral seas and on those endless deadly islands of the Pacific.

    The conventional wisdom has been for years that the Punchbowl, due to its terrain limitations, is at full capacity and incapable of accepting new burials. I heard that decades ago, when I was there, and believed it until I received an email from someone well-attuned to the POW/MIA scene, Bill Bell, a man whom I served with in the 101st at Fort Campbell back in the early sixties. Bill went on, after a stint in Special Forces, to become the lead military investigator in the Vietnam POW/MIA issue and author of a book describing those events. While long ago retired from active duty, he remains energetic in that honorable pursuit of what is right, just, and dutiful in bringing home our honored dead from foreign battlefields.

    But this is not about Bill; it’s about the Punchbowl. While it has long been thought to be filled to capacity, a strange thing is happening due to the residual effects of the program that Bill helped initiate. Formerly unidentified remains interred in the Punchbowl now are being identified and removed for reburial in their mainland home communities. That presents a unique opportunity for the reburial of former sons of Hawaii who served in units such as the fabled 442d Regimental Combat Team, a unit primarily comprised of Nisei, loyal Japanese Americans, many from Hawaii, who served with exemplary distinction in the European Theater in WWII. I can’t think of anything more justifiable than that any sons of Hawaii, who have fallen in service to their island and their mainland nation, whether in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or the Middle Eastern wars, should find their final resting place in that sacred green Punchbowl.

    But surprise, surprise; according to this article, the federal bureaucracy has been hiding the information that disinterments due to remains identification have created available burial sites for those, who more than any other, are entitled to be buried there. You would think this is an issue to be taken up by the Hawaii media and their leftist Democrat government, but since they tend to march in lockstep with the all too often anti-military Obama administration, lots of luck there. It makes me wonder, in light of the rumors that he intends to retire to Hawaii, is our narcissistic CinC planning ahead a few decades, concerned about saving a large, presidential burial plot in the Punchbowl, complete with the space necessary for an outsized monument to mark his own highly regarded remains? That may sound a bit out there to some of you but when you consider this president’s self-centeredness; it isn’t out there that far. Presidents do tend to think in grand terms; for a narcissist president make that grandiose. So, if his goal is retirement in Hawaii then burial in the Arlington of the Pacific could be an attractive finale; thus the space saving.

    From this old sergeant’s point of view, the man who tried to fundamentally change the nation those Punchbowl warriors fought to preserve is not fit to rest among them. I say bury him in Southside Chicago where removing the spray-painted gangsta graffiti from his tomb and picking up the litter will be required daily.That seems altogether more fitting, since that was Chicago that foisted him on a well-intentioned but naively unsuspecting nation. Chicago made him… let Chicago keep him… forever.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • The Holder Effect

    In spite of the best efforts of the liberal media to first suppress news reports about the Knockout Game phenomenon, and then, when that failed, to poo-poo the idea that any such thing as this violent and obviously race-based crime even existed, the truth will out. Thanks to the internet, the liberal elites who censor the output of the major news organizations can no longer cover up events that fail to depict contemporary life as they wish it to be. But even if you don’t hear about it or read about it from one of their publications or networks, your chances of learning about these crimes are much better today than just a few years ago when the so-called mainstream media could effectively bury what was unfavorable to their vision of fit to print.

    This inability to totally control the dissemination of news now causes the media establishment to put even more than their normal amount of spin on their output when they are forced to cover an issue or risk looking foolish for the outright denial of an ongoing crime wave that everyone knows is growing. For instance, when they are forced to cover this offense, they still will not use the actual name of Polar Bear Hunting because of its all too obvious racial implications. Unable to ignore it any longer, they play it down — especially the racial aspects of it, because that may put our black president, his black attorney general, and all those black and liberal white lawyers in Holder’s civil rights division in a bad light because they aren’t investigating what appears to be serial hate crime.

    Which of course is true; our president is silent on what is a matter of growing public concern primarily among white Americans, who constitute, to date, all but one of the victims of this criminal game. That he remains silent when it is a particularly supportive and primarily Democrat demographic, white Jewish Americans, who appear to be the most at-risk group, offers even greater testament that the Obama administration and the Holder justice department are deliberately disinclined to prosecute hate crimes where blacks are the perpetrators and whites are the victims. Jewish Democrats should take heed of this policy where race trumps ideological loyalty.

    Liberals who do acknowledge the existence of the Knockout Game and who its perpetrators are, trot out all the old chestnuts about racist white America being responsible for troubled black youth. I’d like to see Obama, Holder, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and other so-called black leaders and all their white liberal defenders watch this truly disgusting video and then tell us that we, white America, are responsible for such pathologies of black youth as the Knockout Game.

    The latest example of a Knockout Game attack is going to make this head-in-the-sand policy a bit difficult to maintain but they are trying their best. The Daily Caller’s lead article from that day has the goods on a young black thug who assaulted an elderly white woman in Rochester, NY recently — and I do mean the goods, with Facebook videos, photos, and audio boasting that should enable the Rochester Police Department to put him away for a stretch on charges of harassment. Harassment? Yep — according to the RPD spokesperson, Sgt. Elena Correia, the crime committed by the appropriately self-styled True Goon Tocool Sneekey, appears to be harassment, not felony assault, even though True Goon allegedly struck the woman full in the face with his fist at the end of a roundhouse left. That’s some fairly serious harassment by anyone’s definition. And this is not RPD’s first attempt to play down this despicable crime. I’d dearly love to see that portion of the New York criminal code that Sgt. Correia claims to define such an act of felonious assault as harassment, wouldn’t you? Makes you wonder that if some white gun-loving male punched his wife in the face with his fist if that would be handled by the politically correct Rochester Police Department as a case of domestic harassment, hmmm? Any bets?

    Update: New York Teen Arrested In Connection With Videotaped “Knockout Game” Attack On Elderly Woman

    It is becoming increasingly disturbing that it is not just the Obama administration and the brown-nosed media that have attempted to sweep this new criminal activity under the rug but these local police departments. It’s happening all over the country, and not just in the major urban centers. I call this racialization of the law and criminality the Holder Effect, for it was the relatively new attorney general who famously announced that his justice department would side with his people.

    Of course, the Holder justice department has not ignored the Knockout Game entirely. A recent such attack in Houston has been charged as a federal hate crime, and the perp is going to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Anyone care to guess the races of the perp and the victim? Mind you, I’m not defending the despicable behavior of this racist and probably mentally unbalanced jerk — just making the observation that out of the hundreds of these crimes that have occurred, the first Knockout Game perp to be charged by the justice department with a hate crime, and done so with great swiftness, is white.

    Holder Effect, indeed…

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • The Suddenly Competent Incompetents

    All I can say is “Wow!” Just when we’re all are thinking this Obama administration is corrosively corrupt and consummately incompetent, they go and do something that just has to make us all pause and rethink our strongly held beliefs that federal government is too massive and immovable to be either responsive to the needs of the citizenry or efficient. Here we are out here in flyover country, remote from all those coastal centers of incestuous intellectualism, pounding on our keyboards about all the predicted and daily unveiling failings of ObamaCare, and damn all if this Obama administration doesn’t go and show all us religious, gun-clingin’ fools that, by gosh, they can move with amazing alacrity when it is important to America suits their agenda.

    What I’m referring to, if you haven’t heard, is the absolutely amazing rapid response to a request by several Democrat senators, to do something, for Pete’s sake, about this horrendous, looming mandate (federal noncompliance fine) that’s going to really piss off some voters back in their home states if it isn’t delayed. What’s ever so surprising is that some of these solicitous senatorial signatories, Begich, Pryor, Landrieu, and Hagan, all of whom voted for this lame legislation, are up for re-election in November. My own senator, Mark Pryor, has suddenly rediscovered the importance of the bible in this campaign year and another senator to my south, little Mary Half-Moon Landrieu, who’s support for ObamaCare came at a hefty price, has discovered that maybe she shouldn’t have sold out, too cheaply or otherwise. Little Contrary Mary peddled her political posterior and now wants it back when her pastis coming back to bite her.

    But enough about senatorial weasels, let’s look at those improbably industrious administration ants who, unable to build their humongous health-care system and its online enrollment website in three-plus years, have managed to respond to the demands of those senators in less than a day. All I can say, once again, is “Wow!” That’s right, in just one day, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, under tremendous pressures to correct all the many problems with her legislative Frankenstein, amazingly found the time to sit down and compose this extensive missive to the concerned senators. This executive edict grants them their every wish, by exempting failed applicants to Obamacare who have lost their insurance due to the poorly thought through provisions of the original, recklessly passed legislation,so that they now will be considered as hardship cases and therefore exempt from the fines mandated for those who fail to obtain coverage.

    But just put it out of your damned old suspicious, conservative minds that such an executive fiat is clearly illegal and unconstitutional and that those issues were probably not considered by these incompetent clowns in their haste to serve their needy allies:

    Democrat senators… up for re-election.

    I know, I know, you’re thinking it’s just another cynical set-up by an arrogant administration led by the most self-centered and inept president in our nation’s history.All you skeptics reading here who see this event as just another pre-planned, butt-covering move by this Keystone Kops administration, should lighten up just a bit and give some credit where credit’s due; such as for these corruptocrats who are clearly and cleverly competent at covering up their incomparable incompetence. Hey, when this hapless turkey can respond to a senatorial request and effect the requested policy change in less than a day, you have to put aside your suspicions of a political fix and give credit where credit is due.

    Yeah, right…

    Who do these bungling fools think they’re fooling?
    Crossposted from American Thinker

  • ‘On Behalf of a Grateful Nation, Please Accept This Flag…’

    That’s an abridged version of the words uttered by the officer or NCO in charge of the burial detail to the surviving spouse or next of kin of an American warrior killed in action as they are handed the carefully folded flag that had covered the coffin. Many of us have witnessed the ceremony and sometimes heard those quiet words, our hearts heavy with shared grief, but grief not remotely equal to the loss being felt by the person accepting that national symbol of supreme sacrifice. It is a solemn ceremony, steeped in tradition, meant to demonstrate not just to the family of the fallen but to all observing citizens that we as a nation value our warriors.

    Now, our Democrat Senate, with the aid of nine Republican senators has just passed legislation which denies the promise of the above referenced ceremony, that is, that we are in fact a grateful nation. Looking for ways to cut the national budget, an ungrateful congressional conference has targeted our military community for reductions in their retirements while maintaining billions of dollars of support for far less worthy federal programs such as one providing federal assistance to illegal aliens. Yes, that’s right, this Democrat senate is willing to put constraints on pension benefits for those Americans who have served honorably, all while maintaining welfare for those who have entered our country illegally. The Democrats choose to reward those who have no regard for the system of laws growing out of our constitution, the same document our military personnel all must swear an oath to uphold, even at the cost of their lives.

    I suspect that even some liberals will acknowledge the inherent unfairness of this particular legislation. After all, even leftists need a viable military to defend their cockamamie concepts of governance. The largest leftist regimes like the Soviet Union and Red China, in point of fact, have always showered awards and honors on their military forces for the protections they provide. Few soldiers anywhere have more medals to wear than those who fought to preserve and expand communism. But not this country, the United States of America, that supposedly is the beacon of liberty. The hypocrisy, the irony, the tragedy of reducing the pensions of those who have served this country honorably to the benefit of those who are living in this country illegally, defies all logic and reality, which is exactly where the liberal left in this country has taken us since their Messiah took control five years ago. We are in Alice’s Wonderland and descending into a dystopian society where wrong is right and down is up is government policy.

    Once again, those who have served in the nation’s conflicts, many of whom are inclined to vote conservative and Republican, are being sacrificed by the ungrateful, leftist Democrat party in order to incubate and cultivate a few million additional Democrat voters. The corruption of the Democrat party is complete. They look at those hordes crossing our borders and say:

    “Please accept this flag and all the benefits life under it confers on behalf of a grateful Democrat party,” while at the same time saying, “Veterans, soldiers and those who’ve served, you will accept this pay cut because you are not important to us as a sympathetic voting bloc.”

    Grateful nation? Certainly not when liberal Democrats control our government.

    Crossposted at American Thinker