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

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • Service, War, and Sacrifice

    A year or so ago, a very left-minded friend wrote a blog about his military experience and his vitriol sparked outrage in me. We served at the same duty station for 2 years. We are oil and water when it comes to politics. He has some of the same thoughts and ideas as I, but we differ greatly on how to make them happen.

    My problem with what he wrote is that he berated soldiers for making the choice to serve while boasting that he served for none of that “patriotic horseshit.” He snidely thanks American taxpayers for all the “pussy, beer and travel” he was paid for. So I got that he could care, it was all about him. Everyone has their reasons for doing what they do. I happened to cry when I said the words “I …do solemnly swear to support and defend…” And, I was filled with so much pride to be able to serve.

    He wrongly made the assumption that anyone who was serving was wasting their time. Why? Because all of those serving at the time he wrote the blog  were serving GWB, of course!  He also stated that soldiers were serving in a war that is for nothing and helping no one–because Sadaam, Bin Laden were never the threat that Hitler and the Japs were!!! (Did I mention that he performed autopsies on the Stark Sailors…37 of them.) He said that soldiers today were not serving in the same capacity as his father or we could throw in all my great Uncles.

    XXX!!! Wrong! How is what we do now any less patriotic and selfless? They were drafted, and today we volunteer, knowing the war is going on!! Those who sign the dotted line, They KNOW. They are not doing it for the money, but really and truly for Duty, Honor, Country and the chance to serve. He tried to make the argument that because Americans today have not been asked to sacrifice, it doesn’t mean the same thing. WTF is up with that???

    Talk about BS. Tell me that as individuals we can’t sacrifice on our own? I have and I do. He rants about the “fuckers” out there (of whom we now are among) who don’t do anything but consume, breed, indulge and bitch about paying taxes as if their legs and arms were being cut off.

    Uh, really. And I bet he hates to see a yellow ribbon, or a pink one, or a black one because it represents the slouches who don’t DO stuff to support those causes, like himself.

    I don’t begrudge those who don’t serve unless they throw out the chicken hawk lines. You know them–“if you support the war, go join up.“ It is a personal choice and not up to him to judge or justify it using them because he hates about war or having served. But this guy  wants the world to be “connected” personally to those who are making the biggest sacrifice and making the least amount of money for “nothing.“ You and I know it isn’t nothing.

    It isn’t going to be asked of the American public to sacrifice. But, when I asked him did he want to sacrifice,I didn’t get an answer. He would  not step forward for any of the things that would mean sacrifice because it was  GWB’s war and if the rest of America is not asked, to hell with that. I could be wrong, but I’d doubt it. He reminded me of statistics… I got the number of dead soldiers, wounded soldiers and a comparison of 400k automobile deaths and, (you know what’s coming, don’t you?) “Where is the outrage over those deaths. There were less deaths in the same time period from terrorist attacks!!” Holy cow, batman!!
    Whether we agree on the war or not, the soldiers are the ones who have made the choice to pay the price, be it blood, limb or life. They bear the burdens, the hardships. They oppose the enemies so we can indulge, breed and consume to our heart’s content and without complaint. They are the people who understand what my friend does not. They know why they chose to walk that line and gladly so. And they do it for the livelihood he continues to enjoy, yet has the audacity to impugn with his self-serving words.

    Personal sacrifice of civilians for this war will never equal that of WW2. But there are things one can DO. Why do we need to be asked? I have donated time, money, and stuff and I didn’t need someone to tell me to do it. Nobody that I know serving now is pissed at me because I can shop, or still travel freely and without threat. (Maybe not for long…ahem) They tell me that that is a good thing. Still, some do wish there was more acknowledgment that the military is engaged.

    I digress. The point of my writing is to say that America would not be what it is today if not for the American fighting military and the sacrifices made.  A simple thank you is never enough. Liberty and freedom do come with a price.

  • Dustin Che Stevens; 2d dumbest deserter ever

    Sporkmaster sent me a link to a Courage to Resist article about three “brave” resisters who’ve refused to do the duty that they promised Americans they’d do. The first two were Victor Agosto and Andre Sheperd who we’ve already talked about here. The third one is new to me; CTR says is his name is Dustin Che Stevens, but I’d wager the Che part just got added recently.

    Stevens story makes him the 2d dumbest deserter of the ones we’ve encountered. The number one spot is occupied by Corey Glass who TSO wrote about last year. Glass is hiding out in Canada, but the Army says they’re not even looking for him. Glass found out that the Army isn’t looking him for him last year but he’s still applying for refugee status in Canada.

    Now, Stevens, on the other hand, decided to make his statement at his Airborne School graduation;

    After five months in the Army, Dustin Che Stevens sat down during Airborne graduation in 2002 in order to refuse graduation.

    Can you imagine the smoke those Blackhats brought that day? Well, that’s still not the part that makes him 2d dumbest – he claims that they told him to go home and wait for his discharge. I shit you not. Have any of you ever been told to go home and wait for your discharge? The Army just doesn’t send folks home to wait for anything without leave. Stevens is a lyin’ ass and the hippies prove themselves to be idiots once again by believing it.

    Now, after seven years of waiting for his discharge, he’s all upset because he got picked up in a traffic stop in his hometown as a deserter and he’s sitting in a jail cell (he claims it’s an 8 x 8 cell that he shares with three other derelicts – another lie the hippies suck up) at Fort Bragg.

    “Lots of other guys return from AWOL and test positive for drugs, and are processed out,” he said. But if you return without evidence of drug use, the Airborne wants you as a combat soldier in Afghanistan.

    Um, no they don’t, Dustin. They don’t want your stupid ass anywhere near some paratroopers.

  • Those who misquote Santayana are condemned to derision

    TSO sent me a sweet new link to the latest Jon Soltz missive at Vote Vets celebrating Bush Derangement syndrome. Soltz is worried that there still might be a Muslim or two in the wilds of Afghanistan contemplating martyrdom because Dick Cheney knows stuff he ain’t talking about;

    Did Dick Cheney knowingly send intelligence officials to Congress to mislead them about the use of waterboarding? Did the Vice President himself?

    We simply don’t know. But we need to know, in light of the explosive report in the Washington Post today, that the Vice President took a very personal role in some Congressional briefings.

    “We don’t know, so he must be guilty”. Of course, this is Soltz and the veteran arm of MoveOn.org blowing a smoke screen up our collective ass for Nancy Pelosi. In fact, if you think this isn’t a veteran issue, Soltz explains in his typical motor pool officer whiny voice;

    Now, why would veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan care about this? Isn’t this a political issue? Maybe, but it has far reaching implications for our troops in the field.

    First – we absolutely have to send the message to the Muslim world that to the degree that we did torture, we fully investigated how those tactics came to be employed (including how it may have been hidden at the time), and held accountable those who were at fault.

    To be clear, President Obama is making great progress by ending the use of torture, and moving to close the detainee facility at Guantanamo. But, it makes it harder for our troops to win hearts and minds, and still serves as a great terrorist recruiting tool, if there is word out there that the United States tortured, and let people responsible walk, without accountability.

    Um, Jon, m’boy, our enemy doesn’t give a rat’s furry ass if we punish people or not. In fact, they don’t even care if it happened or not (remember the flushed Koran story?). There aren’t any folks sitting around the hookah when one suddenly jumps up and screams “I’m so pissed that Dick Cheney didn’t get punished, I’m going to blow myself up, dammit!” Grab a bit of reality, here, Jon.

    Those three months you spent in Kuwait dispatching deuce-and-a-halfs didn’t give you any special insight into the Arab mind.

    But the best part of the whole thing comes at the end of his fist-clenched rant. I had to screen capture it before the whiny little pseudo-intellectual brat changes it;

    The actual quote from Santayana is; Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Solz has not only misquoted Santayana, he’s also changed the meaning of the entire phrase. From some pointy-headed librarian;

    Contemporary Hispanic Biography [1] said that “students of Santayana’s work complain that the maxim has been taken out of context: Originally it formed part of a theory about how knowledge is acquired rather than being a moral exhortation to pay attention to history, and it has a didactic quality that is foreign to the subtle, paradoxical, and occasionally humorous quality of Santayana’s thought.”

    Now, this may seem like nit-picking to many of you, But remember VoteVets wasting column inches and an appearance on Keith Olbermann’s comedy show over Vets For Freedom’s Pete Hegseth who made the mistake of saying it’d been seven years since the invasion of Hussein’s Iraq instead of six – yeah, it’s just like that.

    Oh, so now I see that TSO wrote a post about it, too. Jeez, why’d he send me link? Well, I’m not wasting this research.

  • The blogosphere crickets are deafening

    For the last twenty four hours, I’ve been monitoring Technorati for blog posts on the shooting in Little Rock yesterday. Unsurprisingly, I’ve found countless center-right blogs reporting and commenting on it, but the Left not so much. Most of them just toss up a news story and few comments. One blog I read last night cautioned his readers that the shooting yesterday and the other on Sunday were both terrible. I wonder why he thought he had to write five paragraphs explaining that?

    So this morning, I began my foraging again and I was relieved to see that the Huffington Post had something up – alas, it was just another reposted news story. However the HuffPo commenters can always be trusted to satisfy my evil wingnut lust for hyperbole;

    Yeah, the most important thing is that Obama not give political ammunition to his opponents – that’s more important than the lives of two young Americans.

    But, ya know, a guy trained in Yemen who guns down American soldiers in the streets of our cities should be reported by the actual media, ya know? Fox News usually shuts down broadcasting any real news for hours of video of police tape fluttering in the wind – not this time. The Washington Post puts the story in a column on page 16, and then just the AP blurb. But even that is better than the Washington Times which avoids the story. The New York Times ran one article yesterday and nothing today. As far as I can tell the article they wrote yesterday didn’t make it to print this morning.

    So why is the Left so scared of admitting that there is a real threat that has existed since 9-11 and that George Bush’s Administration kept us safe? I’m not saying Obama isn’t keeping us safe, I’m sure it’s his intention to do so. But isn’t it a bit disingenuous to ignore the problem and not give it the same measure of attention as the shooting of one single man who was killed because of his behavior? Do they truly think that the problem will go away if they bury their faces in their hands?

    And what does it say about the Left that they have to explain to each other why the senseless death of one man is the same as the senseless death of another. What does that say about their whole ideology?

  • Carl Webb; the IVAW deserter who didn’t desert

    As most of my regular readers know, there’s turmoil churning around the ranks in the Iraq Veterans Against the War. Although it’s a result of many things, the most contentious point of the turmoil is between the regular patriotic members who merely oppose the war and the members who want the IVAW to become a tool of the International Socialist Organization – just a facade of veterans to lend some legitimacy to the entire socialist movement. The most vile and despicable member of IVAW, Carl Webb, belongs to that second group.

    Earlier this month, TSO wrote about Webb when Casey Porter resigned from IVAW and brought our attention to Webb. Since then, Kris Goldsmith resigned and this stirred Webb up again. He bragged on his own Facebook page that he forced another resignation of a “conservative” from IVAW;
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  • Geezers For Sitting On Our Hands freak out

    How many of you have been gone to your local county fair every year and passed by the National Guard or recruiters’ booths where they had military stuff on display? Everyone right? Well, now all of a sudden, the Geezers For Sitting On Our Hands freak out over the same thing we’ve been seeing for decades – suddenly it’s immoral. Here’s the picture from the Juneau Empire that set their bony asses on fire;
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  • The Vets For Peace clown show

    I don’t know if this guy’s story is true or not – it really doesn’t matter. It’s such a benign event, up until the part when he says he pulled a knife on his commander.

    I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen the way Horn told the story, but, I’m not getting into a big research project over it.

    Anyway, 1stCavRVN11B sent me the picture and I responded that this Alan Horn fellow looks like a clown college drop out. Honestly, would you buy insurance from someone who looked like this?

  • Bush policies unassailable

    We, the Americans firmly rooted in reality, as opposed to those other Americans who live in a fantasy world where bombers magically stop bombing when you build them a road or school, are slowly being vindicated by current events. The Wall Street Journal notices in “Bush’s Gitmo Vindication“;

    Yet for all of his attacks on the Bush Administration, which he accused of making “decisions based upon fear rather than foresight,” Mr. Obama stuck with his predecessor’s support for military commissions, adding some procedural bells and whistles as political cover to justify his past opposition. For the record: Both the left and right, from the ACLU to Dick Cheney, now agree that the President has all but embraced the Bush policy.

    Mr. Obama also pledged to release at least 50 detainees to other countries — about one-tenth the number released under President Bush — and added that the Administration was in “ongoing discussions” to transfer them. Good luck with that: The Europeans who were so robustly against Gitmo in the Bush years have suddenly discovered its detainees are dangerous. Meanwhile, the countries that might take them, such as Yemen, can’t be trusted to prevent them from returning to the battlefield, where they can kill Americans again.

    In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer writes “Obama In Bush Clothing” ;

    The latest flip-flop is the restoration of military tribunals. During the 2008 campaign, Obama denounced them repeatedly, calling them an “enormous failure.” Obama suspended them upon his swearing-in. Now they’re back.

    Of course, Obama will never admit in word what he’s doing in deed. As in his rhetorically brilliant national-security speech yesterday claiming to have undone Bush’s moral travesties, the military commissions flip-flop is accompanied by the usual Obama three-step: (a) excoriate the Bush policy, (b) ostentatiously unveil cosmetic changes, (c) adopt the Bush policy.

    Krauthammer recounts some of the flip-flops of the Change Administration which changed into the Bush Administration on national security;

    Observers of all political stripes are stunned by how much of the Bush national security agenda is being adopted by this new Democratic government. Victor Davis Hanson (National Review) offers a partial list: “The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq (i.e., slowing the withdrawal), Afghanistan (i.e., the surge) — and now Guantanamo.”

    Jack Goldsmith (The New Republic) adds: rendition — turning over terrorists seized abroad to foreign countries; state secrets — claiming them in court to quash legal proceedings on rendition and other erstwhile barbarisms; and the denial of habeas corpus — to detainees in Afghanistan’s Bagram prison, indistinguishable logically and morally from Guantanamo.

    Harry Reid declared yesterday that there will be no detainees on American soil. Where then? Europe doesn’t want them, the countries in the Gulf region who are willing to take them are less than trustworthy in keeping terrorists from returning to their former lives and their former fights. Dick Cheney reminded the Obama Administration yesterday;

    The administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism. They may take comfort in hearing disagreement from opposite ends of the spectrum. If liberals are unhappy about some decisions, and conservatives are unhappy about other decisions, then it may seem to them that the president is on the path of sensible compromise. But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States.

    Triangulation is a political strategy, not a national security strategy.

    While Obama declared yesterday that the Bush Administration’s policies “created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained” and “has weakened American security” without examining the fact that there have been no successful attacks on American soil since the event that was the catalyst for those Bush policies. The Democrats are real good at campaigning, but they’re not real successful at actually accomplishing things. So their strategy has been to campaign as Democrats and fight for our national security like Republicans. We’ve recounted some of the reactions from the Left on the Obama policies here on this blog – but it’s not like the hateful rhetoric we heard against the Bush Administration for the same policies. That makes them kind of disingenuous, doesn’t it?