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

Category: Antiwar crowd

  • Pinhead protests incognito

    Some of you may remember Robert Dennen AKA Pinhead from a post I wrote in December. It seems he was wearing some medals his father had worn in WWII to “Geezers For Sitting On Our Hands” protests in the Philadelphia area, but since he didn’t happen to have any medals from his service in the Navy, we busted him on it.

    Pinhead

    Well, our buddy Skye went trolling through a protest in Philly yesterday and spotted Pinhead again. It seems he’s thought better of wearing his woodland camouflage and unauthorized medals;

    Now don’t you feel better about yourself, Robert? I know we feel better.

  • IVAW’s Jacob Flom

    Chris Raissi sent me an email yesterday that accompanied the link he posted on his Facebook page when he resigned from IVAW;

    Jonn,

    Kristopher Goldsmith send me your info and suggested that I let you in on why I left IVAW. Here it is: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=83837947235

    I name names. Jacob Flom is a chapter president, and told me at the IVAW national convention last year that he’s a communist using IVAW to recruit veterans to his radical communist ideology. Oh yeah, he was in the air force for a little while after 9/11 and never left CONUS. He’s not even an Iraq vet. Fucking pathetic.

    Put it out there, add it to your blog, I don’t give a shit.

    By the way, I actually served in Iraq. I got an award for meritorious service out there. I served in the Horn of Africa before that, where I got a previous award for meritorious service. I completed my first enlistment honorably, reenlisted as a Sgt and went into recruiting.

    I ended up getting adsep’ed from the Marines for misconduct. I’m not down on getting hazed by fleet dodging loser career recruiters who’ve been sitting out the war on recruiting duty and then telling folks with combat tours that their previous accomplishments are old business and that they’re worthless unless they feed three bodies every month into the meat grinder. Sales is sales, but the Marine Corps doesn’t see it that way. I had to violate the UCMJ to get out of that hell, so I did.

    Bottom line is that I didn’t take to a fleet dodging MSgt with four ribbons and no combat tours telling me what a Marine is supposed to be any more than I take to Alex Bacon telling me what an Iraq vet is supposed to be.

    I figure I’d put my dirt out there before you have fun with it after some FOIA requests. We have some disagreements, but we’re more alike that unalike.

    Christopher

    I’m not going to judge Chris based on a recruiting assignment -but this Jacob Flom clown attracted my attention. Here’s his profile at IVAW – he never left the US, like Raissi wrote;

    But Flom is qualified to be Chapter President in Milwaukee. Probably because he has interests outside of IVAW that would be attractive to the ISO clowns of IVAW;

    Yeah, that seems to be the MO of the ISO dorks – they like wearing the “Iraq Veterans” banner on their shirts without having to actually serve in Iraq. Here’s Flom criticizing the troops using his tenuous veteran status, although he never really was one of the troops.

    The further they are from the war the more absurd their stories. But Flom has the same experienceas IVAW co-founder Tim Goodrich who also never got closer to Iraq than an airconditioned control center on a Turkish Airbase.

  • This ought to give John Grant seizures

    The other day, I wrote a post about how John Grant, communist sympathizer and Geezers For Sitting On Our Hands member complained about the Army Experience Center which made Army life seem like a video game. Well, according to the Stars and Stripes some units in the area of Heidelburg, Germany had the their own “experience center” for middle school kids;

    Students donned camouflage headbands, watched military working dogs from the 529th Military Police Company sniff out C-4 and drugs, and learned first aid basics from the Heidelberg Medical Activity. They also did physical training and gobbled down Army chow in a Meals, Ready to Eat buffet.

    PT, putting on camouflage paint, eating MREs all the stuff we miss from Army life, huh? Well, it seems the kids still loved the experience;

    “It’s pretty awesome,” sixth-grader Clayton Glauner said. “Dressing up in the armor was kind of cool.”

    Glauner, 12, who had his face painted in camouflage colors, said he also liked the Army grub that about 60 of his classmates got to sample.

    Sixth-grader K.J. Parker called the whole thing “good fun.” He said he liked hopping in a 5-ton Army truck. His mother, Staff Sgt. Anja Parker, is deployed to Iraq.

    The fact of the matter is, no matter how you present Army life to kids, it still comes out pretty cool.

  • The crazy comes full circle

    Someone sent me a link that warned me Mom’s basement-dwellers across the country received their marching orders this weekend from their central command center in the basement of Ron Paul;

    U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, a Texas Republican and a former presidential candidate, sent an e-mail to his supporters today urging them to help Adam Kokesh, who has formed an exploratory committee as he considers running against Luján.

    “Adam Kokesh has been a tremendous supporter — of both me AND you! As a leader of Iraqi Veterans Against the War, Adam has spent years traveling the country to spread our message of peace, a strong national defense and limited government,” Paul wrote in the e-mail. “Adam has tremendous credibility because of his service in the United States Marine Corps and I have deep respect for his commitment to principle.”

    Paul wrote that sending Kokesh to Congress “would be a tremendous victory for the Freedom Movement, and if we come together and stand behind him, he has a real chance to win.”

    So the crazy comes full circle. Two inflated egos come together to shake the nickels and dimes out of the pockets of people who think they’re serious. The presidential candidate without a foreign policy meets the IVAW candidate who runs for public office just because he can’t find a job.

  • Biden is the smartest guy in the Democrat Party; proof

    Yesterday, I wrote a short screed about Joe Biden being a boastful braggart, like he usually is and telling the people at his table at the Gridiron Dinner how Dick Cheney’s “undisclosed location” was in a bunker beneath the VP’s living quarters at the US Naval Observatory in Northwest DC. Of course, the Left immediately discovered my post, especially since I disparaged the whole party by claiming that they’re dumber than Joe Biden. I can’t blame them, I’d be upset at that discovery, too, if I were a Democrat.

    So immediately, the first nutroot to weigh in was my old buddy TBogg at Firedog Lake who admits that we have an actual braintrust here at This Ain’t Hell, a fact that must really grate on TBogg. But not understanding the difference between speculation and confirmation, TBogg posts a Washington Post article from seven years ago in which author Nakamura guesses that there’s some construction going on under the Naval Observatory. Good catch, TBogg, but I don’t believe anyone actually knew what was going on there until Biden admitted it. Kind of like we didn’t know there weren’t WMDs in Iraq at the time of the invasion until we got there and looked around. See how that works?

    And then I got a link from the Village Voice. Somehow, my post was lumped in with WHOLE bunch of reaction from the Right on the President’s speech at Notre Dame yesterday as proof that we (The Right) make mountains of molehills. Kinda like the mountain that the Left made a mountain of out of the waterboarding issue.

    But, I don’t think comparing my post to the anti-abortion issue is quite fair, since I’m just talking about how stupid Democrats are for selecting Joe Biden while the abortion issue is about saving millions of innocent lives. But, since Joe Biden is the smartest Democrat, I wouldn’t expect the nutroots to understand without getting Biden’s opinion first.

    If my post about Biden didn’t ring true to the nutroots, they would have ignored it, like usual.

  • John Grant; innocence or ignorance

    I got a call last night from someone who alerted me to a Philadelphia Enquirer opinion piece written by Geezers for Sitting on Our Hands (Vets For Peace to some people) member John Grant who has made it his mission to shut down the Army Experience Center in Franklin Mills Mall outside of Philly. I wrote about their protest there last week. Also, check out Skye, at Midnight Blue who lifts a corner of the Philly anti-war refrigerator to shine a light on some of the cockroaches dwelling there.

    I waded through the drivel about the Army’s tax payer funded child abuse and the complaints that the staff of the AEC “soft sell” Army recruiting (imagine how much he’d complain if they “hard sold” it instead), but it was the last few lines that I really have to take issue with;

    The taxes that support the Army Experience Center come from a variety of Americans, many of whom – like me – are troubled by this means of recruiting young people. Society agrees that many of them are not developed enough even to drink a beer or drive a car.

    This is not an argument against defending ourselves, or against employing violence when it’s necessary. This is an argument for giving kids the information they need to make the best decisions for themselves. One thing we can do is instill in them a much more rich, complex, and cooperative view of human life on the planet – not the good-guys-blasting-bad-guys dichotomy drilled into them by the Army Experience Center.

    First of all, it wasn’t society who raised the drinking age, it was the government. I’m pretty sure, if polled a vast majority of Americans would return the drinking age to a more reasonable 18 years of age and then just punish the people who violate the responsible civil behavior.

    Secondly, sometimes bad guys need blasting and the “rich, complex and cooperative view of human life” is abundantly provided in countless other mediums outside of the AEC. Now, if the AEC is living quarters for the sequestered youth of Philadelphia, Grant might have a point, but I’m pretty sure the teens who live in that area experience other things outside of the Army’s recruitment facility. And they’re not as dumb as Grant and the rest of the Geezers For Sitting On Our Hands think.

    Grant and his pals should be more concerned about the image of veterans that is being propagated in Pennsylvania by their own universities, among other stereotypes taught in college. He should be concerned about a whole generation of veterans being smeared by their own government. But that task must seem daunting to Grant since he prefers to focus on a few video games at the Mall.

  • Army Sergeant on Duncan/Strandlof

    In case anyone is still interested in the Duncan/Strandlof saga, Army Sergeant, the IVAW member who TSO refers to as our “Frenemy” (I don’t refer to her as such, though), has published the IVAW’s unofficial excuse for their association with the complete fraud. By complete fraud, I refer to the fact that Jesse MacBeth at least spent 43 days in the Army, which is 44 days more than Duncan/Strandlof spent in the Marines.

    Army Sergeant tells us that she isn’t the official source for any excuse the IVAW might decide to publish, mostly because Alex Bacon, the IVAW’s Executive Director, is engaged in a private matter. The official excuse has to have the approval of a guy who went went AWOL from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration or some other Department of Transportation agency. So we’ll be waiting on pins and needles from that expert.

    In the interim, let’s look at Army Sergeant’s excuse. It typically avoids all of the issues that are involved. “Oh, I met him once, but it was so insignificant that I don’t remember the meeting.” So? When TSO and I went to Winter Soldier, we had to prove we were veterans by sending copies of our DD214. Duncan/Strandlof went to Winter Soldier, too. If TSO and I could figure out the technology to send our’s, why couldn’t IVAW force the same restrictions on their membership?

    AS glosses over the fact that Duncan/Strandlof also attended IVAW Warrior Writer workshops and on at least two separate occasions attended Tower Guard events in Colorado. So we don’t get in a pissing contest over minutiae (as a discussion of facts usually becomes with Army Sergeant), here’s a screenshot of one of the few remaining Rick Duncan videos left on YouTube since IVAW started scrubbing the internet the other day to create a some deniability. This is a Warrior Writer video;

    The end of the video has credits;

    The videos are the YouTube channel of CSaction, following the links you end up at a webpage with this banner;

    Here’s a picture from CSaction of Duncan and Garret Reppenhagen, former IVAW board member. The caption of the picture is “Mark shares a laugh with Joe and Garrett, while Hank keeps guard”.

    So now that we’ve avoided the discussion that Duncan/Standlof wasn’t just some IVAW straphanger groupie off of the street as Army Sergeant tried to make him appear in her post, let’s look at some of AS’ other excuses, for example “We also did not have the amount of staffers perhaps necessary to handle the influx of members last year.” Yeah, Duncan joined in 2007 not “last year”, as the pictures and videos above prove. Nice try, though.

    Some have charged, mainly in the milblogosphere, that we should have known that “Duncan” was a liar because of his claims. It’s something that’s really easy to say after the fact, but I’ll examine them.

    Then she go on to dispute the “shot off finger” and the “openly gay battalion commander” stories with some stories about her mother’s reattached finger and some gay soldiers she’s known. Big whoop. My point about the gay BATTALION commander was that there probably hasn’t been a captain battalion commander in the Marines since World War Two. Did I really have to say that? Her mother’s finger was cut off with a power saw, not blown off by a bullet – why did I have to type that, too?

    Now, I see in the comments of her post (comments were closed last night when I read it), TSO asked her some of the questions I presented here. Her response was to give an Infantry Salute (shrugging her shoulders while reciting “Ah dunno”.) The answer to Battalion Commander thing was;

    As for 03 Battalion commanders in the Marine Corps, I really have no idea. I know that it wouldn’t happen in the Army, but the Marines are smaller. It wouldn’t occur to me to say I knew one way or another. I’m just speaking for self here.

    Army Sergeant sounds like an abused spouse making excuses for her tormentor.

    The “Bacon is incommunicado” is weak, too. How long does it take to tell a subordinate to write a piss-poor excuse for their incompetence? Staying true to form, I expect Bacon, if he releases a statement at all, will blame Kelly Dougherty, the previous ED, for Duncan.

    I don’t really care what their statement says, however. The fact remains that fakes get into IVAW because their mentors, VFP and VVAW, are generally fakes, too. Their board is tied by purse strings to organizations that wouldn’t know a phony veteran if they were bit by one. The whole anti-war Left is more concerned about WHAT is being said than WHO is saying it since the whole ideology is based on emotions and not facts.

    IVAW, nor their handlers, are willing to scrutinize their membership because scrutiny will run some off. I’m pretty sure we’ll see more of these phonies – and I’m doing my best to embarrass IVAW – you’d think they would want to get ahead of me.

  • An Armed Forces Day message from the Left

    On this day, the day during which we set aside a moment or two to thank our Armed Forces for keeping us free and prosperous, at least one anti-war blogger published this message on his blog;

    Saying no to war is the most important way to bring it to a halt. If troops had the guts they think they have they would get up and walk away from the most blatant display of American arrogance in this Century.

    So I suppose that, since they can’t really blame Obama for the continuing wars without calling him a lying hypocrite, they can blame the troops instead. But that blogger isn’t the only one. On Alternet, some gumball named Jeremy Scahille starts another rumor about our troops in Guantanamo;

    …an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.

    His source? Human rights lawyers and former prisoners. Lord knows they never lie. Like this hilarious story;

    In April, Mohammad al-Qurani, a 21-year-old Guantánamo prisoner from Chad managed to call Al-Jazeera and described a recent beating: “This treatment started about 20 days before Obama came into power, and since then I’ve been subjected to it almost every day,” he said. “Since Obama took charge, he has not shown us that anything will change.”

    Um, did anyone notice that the guy is supposed to be in the most secure prison in the world, isolated even from the people on the same island – yet he supposedly called Al Jazeera? If he was being treated that badly, how was he able to get a call out, for Pete’s sake?

    Regardless, do these nutballs realize that they’re talking about the same kids they went to school with? The same guys they grew up with in their neighborhoods? The same folks who were on their Little League teams and at their summer camps? Why are they so eager to believe this about the people with whom they have more in common than they are to disbelieve the folks who have a stake in lying about their behavior?