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

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • Is it any wonder that Egypt wants to keep Hamas sealed up?

    This seems like the weirdest continuing thing going yet. After the split between the Fatah and Hamas, the Fatah is all but forgotten compared to Hamas. Not only that but the continued stories in the Gaza and all the support for the Hamas at home and overseas.

    Yet the Egypt has closed off border again after a firefight with Hamas that left one Egyptian solider dead. The reason for the shooting was interesting to say the least.

    At some point, Hamas police fired shots to disperse the crowd and shots were also heard from the Egyptian side of the border. It was not clear who fired first.

    But that did not stop the attempt to open the border.

    Hamas is trying to rally Arab and Muslim public opinion against the barrier it has dubbed the “death wall.” Hamas-allied Muslim clerics have denounced the wall as “haram,” or forbidden by Islam, and protesters picketed Egyptian embassies in Lebanon and Jordan this week.

    Really? We are now getting lectures about how Muslims should act from a group that has regularly used suicide bombers and attacks civilian targets?

    Also there was a protest in Cairo over not having a open border with Gaza where some of the protesters got roughed up. But considering the shootings today that this quote seemed very ironic.

    The Gaza Freedom March represents people from 43 countries with a diversity of backgrounds. They include peoples of all faiths, community leaders, peace activists, doctors, artists, students, politicians, authors and many others. They share a commitment to nonviolence and a determination to break the siege of Gaza.

    Yep and we have seen just how well that worked today. I still believe that Hamas is causing the majority of all the problems that people face in the Gaza strip. With several groups willing to all but bend backwards to support Hamas, this terror group will have no reason not to continue their activities at the expense of the local population in and outside of Gaza.

  • [Army Sergeant] Partisan Politics Only Screws Veterans

    Now, I’ll start off by admitting that my politics may not look like a lot of the commentators on this blog. I’m not going to go into the specifics of how: most of you know. I am an IVAW member, and if you want to see more of my more nakedly political offerings, they’re over at Active Duty Patriot. That’s not what this post is about, though I’m sure it’ll be interpreted that way by those with an axe to grind.

    What I’m here to talk about is the way that veterans are constantly being exploited by politicians and over-bureaucratic systems, promised the world when it’s election season or when they want to look good, and then as the nitty gritty grind of the year drags on, people remember that helping veterans is work, and costs money, and not just money but actual commitment. And somehow, almost to a man, they all find better things to do.

    A few years back I was almost fangirlishly squealing over Senator Jim Webb’s Post 9/11 GI Bill. I loved it then, and I love it-in concept-now. But I know too many veterans who are having to drop out of school, who are getting evicted, or who are straight up not able to afford an apartment of their own because they haven’t gotten their check. Some still haven’t gotten their check. This is happening in an Obama administration just as much as it was happening in a Bush one, and you older vets will have to tell me if it was happening just as much under a Clinton one. The VA is broken. They’ve got some good people working for it, but the VA is still broken. They’ve been hiring some of their former most outspoken critics, but I haven’t seen substantive changes, and I don’t know that anyone else has either.

    The problem is right now, there’s a severe recession going on. How severe? Severe enough that I know more than a couple vets personally, my generation of vets, still in their twenties or early thirties, who are functionally homeless, couch-surfing across the USA because they don’t have a better option. There are veterans out in the streets right now-veterans who often have no ability to make it through the severe, complicated, time-consuming process that is applying for benefits. Severe enough that veterans are coming out of the woodwork to apply for their VA benefits and disability benefits for the first time in years. Veterans who know the VA is broken, who know they’re going to be engaging in a fight that will potentially take years. But they don’t have a better option.

    60 minutes recently did a piece on the VA issues, which, while it won points from me for using the phrase ‘Delay, Deny, and Hope You Die’ in national newsmedia, honestly turned into more of a light exfoliation than the gritty expose the VA actually deserves.

    For a million veterans to be waiting for their VA benefits is wrong, wrong, wrong. The fact that it can be glossed over by anyone is just straight jacked up. And this is where the partisan shit comes in-because it is just as wrong under an Obama administration as it was under a Bush administration, but there are a lot less of certain people willing to talk about it. Just as under a Bush administration, there were a lot less of a different kind of certain people willing to talk about the problem.

    We have to stop that. If we’re ever going to get anything accomplished, if these guys aren’t going to be languishing for years while the VA fantasizes about getting its shit together, we need to be united in these issues. Forget who’s in charge, forget who may gain or lose in political capital, stand united. Because let’s face it-much as everyone may hate to talk aloud about it, we have  a lot in common. We as veterans have a lot in common. We as politicized veterans who aren’t going to take things lying down have even more in common. Whatever else we may want, whatever else our personal issues may happen to be, whether they come with an elephant or a donkey or a little Ron Paul sticker, we all served, and we all want to have our brothers-in-arms treated as well as they deserve for that service. Most of us have been in the military so long that we have an inborn distaste of taking care of ourselves: well, think of it as taking care of your buddy while your buddy takes care of you.

    We need to take on the VA-the whole bloated mess of it. Yes, Democrats, you too, even in an Obama administration. Yes, Republicans, even if they take back the Senate or the House. We need to take on the entrenched incompetence and apathy.

    People talk a lot about the old GI Bill, back in WWII. What they forget to remember is that those benefits didn’t come from nowhere. Those benefits came, in large part, because of what happened to the last veterans, the veterans of World War I. And those veterans had to march on Washington to get better treatment. Not as part of a protest march, some three hour shindig where everybody enjoys feeling good about themselves, and then goes home with their demands unmet and their needs unsatisfied. No, those veterans set up a camp and refused to leave until they got what they needed. Check out some history of the Bonus Army-it’s a fascinating read. And they weren’t divided by politics. They were of no political brand or creed. They united and said-hey, we’re starving here. We were promised these things and they didn’t materialize. There’s a Depression, and we really need the country we served to honor their promise to take care of us. Real issues faced by real veterans at the time-not pie-in-the-sky stuff. And what’s the important thing-they succeeded.

    We could learn a lot from those folks.

    “No, thank you, we don’t want food, sir; but couldn’t you take an’ write
    A sort of ‘to be continued’ and ‘see next page’ o’ the fight?
    We think that someone has blundered, an’ couldn’t you tell ’em how?
    You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now.”

    -Rudyard Kipling, Last of the Light Brigade

    I know that this doesn’t apply to all veterans. I know many veterans are making it, are successfully weathering out this economic downturn. But the thing is, there are a lot who aren’t. I’m not trying to make it sound like everyone is out on the streets. But there are a lot who are, and a lot who aren’t making it. And the more we fight with each other about what the concept of taking on the problem would mean to various political parties, the more the problem doesn’t get fixed.

  • The Left and their irrational babbling

    Now, I’m no expert on national security planning, but I’m pretty sure I’m smarter than Crooks and Liars’ John Amato and FireDogLake’s Eli based on today’s readings. Amato is upset that Cokie Roberts said what has been known about Democrats since the Korean War – when it comes to national defense, Democrats are idiots;

    ROBERTS: Well, it’s always politically difficult for Democrats when they are dealing with an issue like terrorism. It remained the Republican’s only winning issue through most of President Bush’s second term, and it’s a particular problem for a Democrat who hasn’t served in the military. But the policy problem is that it takes up a great deal of the administration’s time, and will from here on out – particularly when the Senate Intelligence Committee starts hearings in a couple of weeks.

    Here you have it. So sayeth Cokie, queen of the gasbags. All Democrats are weak, weak, weak on national security. It’s fine with Cokie and the Villagers that most of the Bush and Cheney team refused to serve in the military when they had the chance, but during the Bush years the Villagers never questioned Republicans over their military experience or commitment to national security. Yet, it’s just Jim Dandy to question a Dem’s military creds.

    Nevermind the fact that Bush was a fighter pilot in the National Guard and that Cheney was too old to be drafted for combat service in Vietnam. But no one ever questioned the Bush administration’s military experience or commitment? Really?

    Did I dream the 2004 election campaign? The whole misinterpretation of Bush’s DD214 and his performance evaluations which were read and commented upon by obviously illiterate baboons every night? The flocks of Democrats who tried to tell us that John Kerry’s Vietnam service trumped Bush TXNG service? The same dorks who placed such a high value on Cheney’s pre-Vietnam draft deferments who won’t even mention Biden’s deferments during Vietnam?

    So Eli from FDL explains to us how Obama can become a national defense expert;

    …what really makes someone a Serious Qualified Expert on national security is a little voice in their head screaming “AAAAAHHHH!!! The scary brown people are coming to kill us we have to kill them first OMG OMG OMG!!!” 24 hours a day, and the ability to bedwet on command.

    If Obama can develop an appropriately irrational fear and hatred of Muslims, then no one will care that he’s never served in the military. I suggest that he pretend that all Muslims are, alternately, health industry CEOs and progressive bloggers – that should make him a respected national security expert in no time.

    An irrational fear of Muslims? Really? The scary brown people? How naive and immature. Just days after an attempt on the lives of hundreds of folks peacefully flying into Detroit from Amsterdam, and countless others beneath their flight path. Weeks after one of those “brown people” shot scores of his comrades at Fort Hood. Months after a Muslim shot two Army privates catching a smoke break in Little Rock.

    Here’s my advice for those two if they want to be national defense experts; abandon the childish baby crap and act your freakin’ age.

  • Alexander says we’re as bad as the Khmer Rouge

    Our favorite Air Force interrogator, Matthew Alexander, is writing at Vote Vets again. This time he says he’s been to a Khmer Rouge prison in Cambodia – and of course it reminds him of Guantanamo and the way we treated the folks we detained there.

    It is estimated that nearly 3 million people were executed during the Khmer Rouge’s purge of Cambodian society. It’s hard not to walk through the Tuol Sleng prison and read about the atrocities and not think about the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Although Gitmo has never come close to the scale and depth of what happened at Tuol Sleng, there are disturbing similarities.

    One of those “disturbing similarities”;

    The entire operation at Tuol Sleng was tightly controlled by the Khmer Rouge high command (they eventually even executed the torturers, cycling in new ones, fearing that they were contaminated by their proximity to the prisoners). Duch, the infamous Tuol Sleng warden who is currently on trial in Cambodia for crimes against humanity, took his orders directly from Pol Pot.

    Yeah, I remember Cheney ordering the guards at Gitmo murdered. Don’t you? Another “similarity”;

    The second thing that strikes you about Tuol Sleng is that many of its victims were children. Judging from the photos of the victims on display, some of them couldn’t have been older than five. The Khmer Rouge exterminated offspring of opposition members like pests. They were concerned that subversive tendencies would be inherited. At the Guantanamo Bay prison, the U.S. continues to hold minors under the age of eighteen. It is a barbaric practice.

    Yeah, there’s no difference between 5 years old and eighteen. And if I’m not mistaken, there are no more eighteen-year-olds at Guantanamo. Matthews’ experience as an interrogator lasted four months, according to his records and the extent of his experience was as a team leader who conducted few, if any, of the actual interviews. Matthews never went to Guantanamo – all of his stories are secondhand rumors, but that doesn’t stop him from using those stories in his book, or on Vote Vets for that matter;

    There is a sign depicting the rules for prisoners, called the Security Regulations, and rule number six reads: “While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.” That reminded me of the infamous sign at the Baghdad airport prison, allegedly used by Special Forces, which read, “No Blood, No Foul.”

    (Emphasis mine) Allegedly? Really? That’s a faithful telling of the tale?

    I guess it’s no wonder that at the AFOSI convention a few weeks back, when his fellow OSIs found out who Matthew Alexander really was and that this particular major was working for George Soros and the ACLU, he was a bit of an outcast. I wonder who put the word out about him.

  • The depth of Soltz’ intellect

    If ever there was someone who should be stripped of his veteran status, it’s Jon Soltz, the dork who is the public face of VoteVets, and mostly likely the guy who saddled the organization with it’s stupid name. The following is from his latest missive;

    The failed bombing of a Detroit-bound airplane by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has raised a ton of questions – from what holes there are in airline security, to how he wasn’t picked up before on suspicion of terrorist activity. But, to me and the forces in or heading to Afghanistan, one of the most pressing questions is why we’re sending nearly every Marine and Soldier we have to Afghanistan, when Abdulmutallab and a Somali man arrested for plotting a similar attack last month apparently had no real connection to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

    There you have – the depth of Soltz’ intellect. Because one guy almost bombed Detroit with his underwear, we should abandon the war in Afghanistan. Makes sense to me.

    …given the ability of al-Qaeda to spread and pop up in areas around the globe where we are not present, it simply doesn’t make sense anymore to engage in a long-term counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan, which focuses on beating back insurgents rather than al Qaeda, and securing the country at large.

    Now, I was never a motor officer in a combat situation for over four months, so I don’t have the “big picture” skills necessary to see the war from that vantage point, but I don’t think that we should change our entire strategy against al Qaeda because of one attack. How much of a simpleton must one be to think we should? In fact, if Soltz’ presidential choice (who is not a veteran, by the way) had forced his administration to pay attention to the warning signs, the underwear bomber wouldn’t have gotten through the layers of security.

    Besides, in the grand strategy of Obama, troop deployment numbers don’t matter, because the war against terror is now fought by the Justice Department and the law enforcement agencies. Didn’t Soltz get the message?

  • More moonbat math

    The other day I wrote about the latest crapola from the Left which somehow arrived at the conclusion that more than 77,000 members of the military had died in the war against terror. Today, they’re telling us that more than one million Iraqis have been killed in that war;

    Over one million Iraqis have met violent deaths as a result of the 2003 invasion, according to a study conducted by the prestigious British polling group, Opinion Research Business (ORB). These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the mass killings of the last century—the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia’s infamous “Killing Fields” during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.

    Since I’d never heard of “Opinion Research Business”, I went to their website to find out how they arrived at that number. First of all, I couldn’t find the survey, or anything about it, but this is from their “What We Do” page;

    ORB provide a full range of quantitative and qualitative research services. We have expertise in ad-hoc and continuous research in the UK and over 60 other countries.

    Perhaps unique among research agencies ORB offer an in-house messaging service. This provides research-led communication and message development consultancy, helping to ensure our clients’ research is presented in the most lucid and persuasive manner possible.

    Quantitative Research

    Telephone (CATI), Face-to-Face, Omnibus, Online, Hall Tests, Audience Response (Dials):

    In-house Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) unit with 25 stations.
    Nationwide random face-to-face surveys.
    28 regional supervisors with access to a field-force of over 300 interviewers.
    Real-time audience monitoring using a System of Testing Audience Reactions

    So, basically, they do opinion research (like their name tells us). If they did any research on casualties in Iraq, it was based on opinions and perception that are favorable to their client – the Left. So I guess that makes it more credible to anyone who thinks the war in Iraq was wrong. It’s just simply not true. But, hey, who needs truth?

  • Sarah Lazare is exhausting

    I have an internet feed that tracks a good number of the anti-war bozos and the news all this weekend has blared out headlines that “The US military is exhausted”. All of the far Left, anti-war blogs (by “all” I mean literally hundreds of cut and paste blogs) are running an Al-Jazeera article by that title written by Sarah Lazare, who happens to be the “project coordinator” for Courage to Resist – a band of smelly hippies who help the military’s derelicts be derelict.

    But anyway, her contention is that the military is just worn out from the war. Of course, the best way to spread that kind of lie is on Al-Jazeera, which has a stake in the defeat of the US military, Besides no semi-legitimate news organization would give the hairy-legged Lazare a column inch for this kind of tripe;

    Many from within the ranks are openly declaring that they have had enough, allying with anti-war veterans and activists in calling for an end to the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with some active duty soldiers publicly refusing to deploy.

    This growing movement of military refusers is a voice of sanity in a country slipping deeper into unending war.

    Many? She counts two – Victor Agosto and Travis Bishop. Seems to me if there are “many” she’d have more stories than those two. Digging a little deeper, I found she’s been collaborating with Dahr Jamail who has also been trying to pimp the story that the military is on the verge of complete collapse because of all of the desertions – based on interviews he did five and six years ago with stellar troops like Geogg “Stolen Valor” Millard.

    Of course, Lazare sees the real reason for the US war in the Middle East as a war of imperialism;

    The never-ending nature of this conflict belies the real project of establishing US dominance in the Middle East and control of the region’s resources, at the expense of the Afghan civilians and US soldiers being placed in harm’s way.

    The region’s resources. Because every imperial power needs a major shit hole to administrate. Our children are always demanding newer sources of sand and rocks for their playground antics.

    Lazare, you’re an idiot – I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s the closest thing to a compliment I could summon.

  • Moonbat math

    Sporkmaster sent me this article from the Leftist Op/ED News which demonstrates to me that the Left has a reading comprehension problem. Look at these statistics they post;

    Total U.S. Military Gulf War Deaths: 73,846
    – Deaths amongst Deployed: 17,847
    – Deaths amongst Non-Deployed: 55,999

    Total “Undiagnosed Illness” (UDX) claims: 14,874
    Total number of disability claims filed: 1,620,906
    – Disability Claims amongst Deployed: 407,911
    – Disability Claims amongst Non-Deployed: 1,212,995

    Percentage of combat troops that filed Disability Claims 36%

    Now, according to the article, this proves that military is hiding servicemembers’ deaths. Their claim is that 77,000 US service members died DURING the current war in the Gulf region. And the author’s source for the statistics is strangely missing.

    So what’s his point?

    More than 1,820 tons of radio active nuclear waste uranium were exploded into Iraq alone in the form of armor piercing rounds and bunker busters, representing the worlds worst man made ecological disaster ever.

    Yes, we’ve heard it before at Winter Soldier from mega-moron Matt Howard who claimed that we’re disposing of our nuclear waste by firing it off in two pound chunks as DU-tipped tank rounds. How big of a moron do you have to be to believe some stupid shit like that?

    Actually, it’s the reason that New Mexico Congressional candidate Adam Kokesh was storing his urine the refrigerator at the DC IVAW House – he thought he was poisoned by DU-tipped darts. Turns out he wasn’t, though.

    It seems to me that someone might’ve noticed 77,000 dead soldiers.