I’ve noticed that I get very little participation when I write about Hugo Chavez and Latin America here on this blog. That’s not a problem, I understand. If I hadn’t spent a large portion of my younger years down there, I probably wouldn’t either. But anyway, in the interests of keeping This Ain’t Hell a little more manageable, I’ve started another blog called Tall and Rich which will focus on Latin American politics.
A Panamanian friend of mine once asked me why I liked Central America so much. I answered that only in Latin America can I be tall and rich – so that’s where the blog name came from.
Those of you who did like my commentary on my adopted continent, please join me there, too.
Back on March 14th, Thus Spake Ortner and I live-blogged Winter Soldier II under the watchful gaze of the Stasi secret police of Veterans for Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. They monitored what we sent out to the internet, they limited our contact with IVAW members and the media. They even followed us to the bathroom and outside to the break area. But they were watching the wrong people.
We didn’t find out Rurik was there until most of the way through the testimony. He blended in well with crowd and hardly anyone noticed him. He carried a legal pad and a pencil and scribbled furious notes. Rurick has spent weeks ciphering and writing out his notes and he’s published them in three installments;
This is much more complete than my comparably incoherent ramblings – and much more damaging to the testimony given on the first day at Winter Soldier II. I commend Rurik and I heartily recommend that anyone who is interested in how history will judge the events go read them all. And in the last installment, Rurik names his candidate to be the next John Kerry. I won’t give it away.
I must be getting old – I’m only reading other people’s brilliant thoughts today from the blogs that link here.
People like Van at Kesher Talk who is convinced that McCain will tap Lieberman for VP.
People like my friend Kamangir the Archer – the most visible moderate Iranian I know – who rationally opposes Wilder’s Fitna. As opposed to the irrational Dutch moonbats who apologize for Fitna as reported by Gateway Pundit and Weasel Zippers. If you’re like the two or three people on the planet who haven’t see it yet, Moonbattery and Say Anything have it up on their servers. The Jawa Report writes that the Islamic Republic has summoned the Dutch ambassador – I wonder what they want now?
Folks like my buddy Skye from Midnight Blue who climbed back up on the horse yesterday after being attacked last weekend by an irrational moonbat in Chester County.
I got an email tip from the Milblogs this morning about the upcoming Bad Voodoo’s War from PBS and Andi’s got the teaser video.
If you’re wondering what I think about the recent uptick in violence in Iraq, it’s best described at Neptunus Lex. The Iranians are trying to upend our elections with total disregard for Iraqi lives. al Sadr finally realized it this morning. Rick Moran at the Right Wing Nut House questions Maliki’s judgement. McQ at Q&O dissects the events leading up to the Basra battle and provides links. Haystack at Redstate catches the LA Times painting al Sadr as a poor victim in the latest flare up. The Lonely Sandpiper blames the Brits. I think it’s just Maliki’s version of the Whiskey Rebellion.
The only woman with whom I agree all of the time (except my wife and my Mom), Beth at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy posts John McCain’s first national campaign ad.
Marooned in Marin (who is actually marooned in Northern Virginia these days) examines the rumor that while super-delegates decide between two candidates, the Democrats are plotting to throw all of the primary voters under the bus and just pick their favorite loser of all time. So much for the democratic part of their party. Mike Tippet at Wake Up America is thankful for the democrats’ biggest loser.
Bob Parks at Outside the Wire examines a survey that declares there’s no indoctrination at our schools.
In case anyone is wondering, Snapped Shot is still behaving himself.
Solomon reviews and dissects the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” at Solomonia.
Spanish Pundit writes that Palestinian Christians are being harrassed by a fundamentalist Islamic mafia in the Holy Land.
Wordsmith at Sparks From the Anvil writes about an Iraqi translator who was denied resident alien status.
The Avid Editor claims (and rightly so) that we’re already at war with Iran.
Wolf Howling has more links to other blogs for something different.
Chicagoan Marathon Pundit, who seems to have something against an Obama Presidency, writes about Obama’s latest embellishment.
And just go visit The Jungle Hut and Don Surber because they both exhibited exceptionally clear judgment by adding me to their blogrolls last night.
A little over three years ago, the Code Pink freaks began a death vigil outside of Walter Reed Army Medical Center every Friday night to greet the weekly bus bringing in casualties from the war against terror. After their first Friday night a group of local people who frequent the Free Republic forums decided that Code Pink shouldn’t go unchallenged. They organized a weekly counter-demonstration.
Code Pink had their group on the southwest corner of the main entrance into WRAMC, the Freepers got permits for the other three corners and it became a weekly stand-off. Code Pink coerced the unions into swelling their ranks for awhile and Freepers enjoyed sporadic reinforcement when Gathering of Eagles and Eagles Up folks came to town. Memorial Day weekend saw participation from Rolling Thunder folks. I don’t know how many times I’ve read other blog and read about bloggers who happened to be in town would just show up and join in. I remember last March, Michele Malkin wrote about the great time she had out there with the folks before the first Gathering of Eagles.
Well, tonight marked the 3rd anniversary of the Walter Reed Freep – every Friday night, in rain, snow, sleet, blistering heat for three years, Code Pink has had to face counter-protesters. I was told tonight that Code Pink lost their permit for the front gate recently when Concrete Bob, a frequent visitor here and blogger at DC Protest Warrior kept a close eye on Code Pink’s permit and the day that it expired, he went down and secured their corner. Now Code Pink is exiled down at the end of the block and the Freepers own all four corners.
Here’s a picture I took of the Code Pink protesters three years ago;
This is what Code Pink’s corner looks like tonight;
Concrete Bob and Tom the Redhunter (also a frequent visitor here) invited me down tonight, so I stopped for awhile and took these pictures.
The Freepers’ cars have signs that warn of the Code Pink folks ahead.
The Freepers love telling the story of the night after the bus of wounded troops passed through the gate, it stopped and the door opened and one lone soldier, barely able to walk, limped back to the counter protesters and thanked them all for welcoming him home.
The reaction from people passing the intersection surprised me, so I video’d it so you can experience, too (Editor’s note:OK, the videos are fixed now – thanks for being patient. There’s two of each video – I’m trying out Google video in case I run into problems with YouTube like I did last night);
Those stalwart folks from Free Republic and Protest Warrior deserve our thanks for braving the elements for us.
Welcome Free Republic readers – feel free to stay and look around. Especially the Protests/Counterprotests category – you’ll see some friends there.
UPDATED 4-2-08; Tom the Redhunter put up an excellent post about the history of the FReep at Free Republic and at his blog The Redhunter.
Cao’s Blog posts the picture of the coward who slapped my buddy Skye from Midnight Blue this last weekend;
This what he looks like with perp-wear
Of course, the Left defends him as a kindly old man who has nothing to apologize about. But in my world men, regardless of their age, regardless of their politics, regardless of the veteran status don’t hit women. My hope is that he rots in a Pennsylvania jail – but we all know how this stuff turns out. In my opinion, the goofball leaning over the cops in the photo above needs a nightstick to the forehead, too.
There’s a picture of Skye and me in the “About” section taken after a night of suds-slurping at Kelly’s Irish Times in DC last month when she was in town for the CPAC. We shared a moment just two weekends ago when she was in town for the Eagles rally. Oh, and she’s Democrat.
I felt no small measure of satisfaction this morning when I was doing my daily reading and stumbled over An Ol’ Broad’s Ramblings‘ personal list of favorite blogs (in response to Right Wing News invitation for bloggers to submit their own “favorites” list) and found this humble blog in her top ten. It’s a surprise, a very nice surprise.
So I thought about listing my Top Ten, but I’m such a coward that I just can’t. I know I’d leave someone out and I’d be editing the list all day. However, I will point my readers to the list of bloggers in my blog roll who’ve shown uncommon good taste (I’m sure they’re all very good looking, too) by linking to This Ain’t Hell at one time or another over the past year (the blog has been here for well over a year, but no one ever linked to me until last March).
I read every one of those blogs everyday after I go through my usual news sources and you should read them, too. Aside from all being excellent sources for the news, they’re all well written and offer great and diverse insight into the events of the day. For me to cull out ten or even forty does a great disservice to the rest because they’re all number one blogs in their own right.
Well, technology is finally keeping up with the needs of intelligent discussion on the internet (from the Wall Street Journal);
Though frequently compelling, online message-board discussions can also be inane. Gabriel Ortiz thinks this is a problem, so he has a simple proposition: Ban stupid comments from the Web.
Specifically, Mr. Ortiz wants Internet users to be able to block out stupid comments in much the same way they use spam filters to sift useless email from their inboxes. He has turned this idea into a project called Stupid Filter. After months of fine-tuning, Mr. Ortiz has begun sharing his software code with others and says he hopes to turn the idea into a business.
Ortiz compared YouTube comments to literature to define “stupid”.
Here’s how the process works. Mr. Ortiz compiled a library of more than 225,000 comments gleaned from YouTube. His volunteers—he says he has 800 of them—view comments and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most stupid. (Example of a 5: “This song was sooo sick at projekt rev.”) While no single volunteer could wade through all those comments, Mr. Ortiz says he hopes to have each one in his library rated at least twice.
Once rated, these sample comments are then compared to “smart” text from a body of work on sites like Project Gutenberg, an online catalog of great world literature. Mr. Ortiz says he took snippets from classics by such authors as Jules Verne and J.D. Salinger to serve as a baseline for “the edited English language.”
Well, you can bet Democratic Underground won’t be installing it – there are no budding Jules Vernes over there.
I’ve been ruminating how I would close out this weekend after focusing on Winter Soldier for the last few days. I thought a point-by-point refutation of the testimony, but I figured that’d be disingenuous of me, since the testimony lacked context – there were no dates or times or places (other than general references) or even participants in some cases. So, just like the participants, I can only give general impressions – only I’ll do it without playing to the applause.
First, my personal experience with the IVAW/Veterans for Peace and the other and sundry people was professional. I wasn’t especially pleased that I was escorted everywhere I went, or that we spent the day surrounded by security people, or that our blogs were being monitored – however, it does lend what I wrote a measure of credibility. But there were news outlets like the Guardian and al Jazeera wandering around without security and writing what they want. I’ll grant that my readership is somewhat less than theirs, but the product I created was under much more scrutiny while it was being released to the public.
I commend Army Sergeant for her hard work in getting access to the event for us. I’m sure she burned off more than a few calories running in circles making sure we weren’t overly-harassed or confined. Without her support, we’d have been stuck watching the streaming video from our homes like everyone else. We were instructed to only photograph the panels and that we couldn’t photograph the audience. When one member of the audience took a snap shot of TSO and me, I brought it to the attention of one security member and she deleted the picture from his camera.
However, I do condemn them for tackling from behind Gerry Kiley whom I reported stood up and yelled “Kerry lied and good men died”. I don’t agree with what Mr. Kiley did – it certainly didn’t remove any scrutiny from what we were doing – but tackling a frail 61-year-old from behind was just as cruel as any testimony from the panel. I’m sure they could have easily pulled him from the room without the drama. But then the whole day was about over-reaction, wasn’t it?
But to the testimony; War sucks. It’s sucked since the beginning of the invention of the rock as a weapon. Innocent people die in war, and that sucks, too. But not since the beginning of warfare has any Army taken such care to minimize innocent deaths as the United States armed forces. Never. That’s indisputable.
But, the people who testified Friday glossed over that fact. Take Kelly Dougherty’s testimony that Kellog, Brown and Root prevented scavengers from taking the diesel fuel from their disabled vehicles by firing beanbag rounds at them. What other military entity in the world uses beanbag rounds in a combat zone?
Jason Hurd testified that the ROE ALMOST forced him to shoot a woman carrying home groceries – he broke into tears and slung snot all over the panel because he ALMOST shot a woman. I guess the fact that escaped him was that the ROE worked – he didn’t have to shoot her.
Hurd also tearfully testified that his unit, when fired upon from a building turned a 50-cal on the building and unleashed 200 rounds on the masonry structure. The firing stopped and the unit continued their mission. Hurd went into great detail explaining the size of the rounds and the brass (by the way, Jason, a fifty-cal is a half-inch in diameter, you missed that) and how much ammo is in the metal container – but I fail to see how that reflects on the Bush administration or that Pentagon entity he was trying to blame. Hurd admitted that he doesn’t know how many people were in the building, that he knows of no casualties resulting from that action – so one is left to wonder what was his point?
The point of the whole testimony, for the entire day I spent there was that the war is illegal from the get-go. They offered no evidence that the war is illegal – but when there’s room full of aged bobbleheads nodding on cue – who needs evidence? All of these terrible things that happened could have been avoided if George W, Bush and the evil neo-cons hadn’t invaded Iraq in the first place. No one had stories of torture or atrocities – they only described the horror of being in war. You could only accept these things as atrocities if you accepted at the beginning that war is illegal. Without that admission, you were left to wonder what everyone was talking about.
That was one of the problems – I was probably one of the youngest people in the room and I’m nearly 53 years old. The audience were a bunch of old hippies who’d never served in the military and had never seen a war outside of the context of the politics of war. They tch-tched their way through the hearings without understanding the pains the military had to suffer to avoid real atrocities. Their only solution to the war was ending it – today with no real thought of the consequences. The only victory they sought was a victory of Democrats over Republicans regardless of what the nation would be forced to deal with when their solution was enacted.
Almost everyone testified that they were confused as to the ROE – but then they all testified to a measure of restraint they all knew was present. Um, the ROE. The confusion came when they actually had to apply their own common sense in relation to the ROE and their circumstances.
Jon Michael Turner started telling us how he shot people, he showed us pictures of his kills (dare I say trophies?) – but he neglected to fill in the part about why he shot those people in the first place. I’m pretty sure he didn’t just indiscriminately shoot “the fat man” or the guy in the bicycle. Why didn’t he tell us about the events leading up to his pulling the trigger instead of beginning his stories with the death of his targets? He referred to his “choking hand” and his bracelet on his choking hand – but he failed to tell us if he ever used his “choking hand” to choke anyone that didn’t deserved to be choked. Just that he had a “choking hand”. And then he went on to tell us that he’s not the monster he once was. Well, fellow Vermonter, what made you a monster – the fact that you designated one of your hands a “choking hand”?
His testimony has changed somewhat since January when this video was posted on YouTube and Turner announced that atrocities against innocent civilians was the policy of the military in Iraq.
From his testimony Friday, it seems the only policy of committing atrocities against Iraqi civilians was his own.
James Gilligan’s claims were funny. Some troops stole a few gold coins they found (wasn’t that in the movie “Three Kings?) – what about the troops who found billions of US currency and didn’t take even a George Washington? His first sergeant threatened a boy with a pistol – he didn’t kill the boy, he didn’t harm the boy, he just threatened him. hardly an atrocity. Oh, and he outright lied about witnessing someone being waterboarded – but then he was playing to the crowd. More detractors of the practice have been waterboarded to demonstrate it to the masses than have been actually waterboarded to extract information. But as soon as he said “…and of course they were waterboarded”, all of the bobbleheads in the audience went to nodding.
While we’re on the subject of lying, Adam Kokesh began his testimony with a lie – that’s why I switched on the video – so I didn’t have to listen to him and then get dragged out like Gerry Kiley. He claimed that he’d opposed the war before it began but joined because he thought it was his duty – his website used to claim he joined because he was a real hoo-ah guy and supported the war against terrorists and he’d been influenced by recruiters but the horrors of war turned him against it. So now that he’s established that he’s a liar. when was he lying – on Friday or on his blog? Kokesh depends on people to forget what he’s said in the past.
The real atrocity stories were being told out by the ashtray, though. I don’t know how many of the IVAW kids I heard relating their tales to the belly-shirt, hip-hugger wearing college aged chickies while I took my smokebreaks. But I don’t want to c***block on any of those guys who might still be laid up with their airhead honeys today – that’d be a neocon atrocity.
No matter how hard the panels tried, they tried to make it about the Bush Administration, but their testimony all boiled down to the actions of the soldiers. They claimed to support the troops, but their supposed atrocities were all the result of small unit leaders’ actions (yes, guys, your captains and lieutenants are “troops”, too). No matter how hard they tried to deflect their criticism away from the troops, it hit all of our service members square in the forehead. Registering your gun with willie pete isn’t a decision made by some faceless neo-con in the Pentagon, calling for fire on a village is a company commander’s decision, not Dick Cheney’s. Bragging about firing up a civilian car isn’t coming from the Defense Department. George Bush wasn’t pushing down on the 50-cal’s butterflies or reloading the gun.
I may have some more thoughts as the day goes on, but I’m going to spend the day with my grandson. Keep an eye on The Sniper, TSO is supposed to be live-blogging the media portion of the testimony.
