Category: Dumbass Bullshit

Last week a number of you folks sent me links to the story about a note a Georgia National Guardsman found on his windshield which was an overt threat. I explained to each of you who mailed the link that I didn’t trust the story, I think. It just sounded weird. The Army Times reports that my spidey sense was correct in this case;

According to an arrest warrant obtained by 11 Alive News, [Brett Downing, 23-year-old information specialist with Georgia National Guard] was re-interviewed on August 4th. According to the warrant “during the interview he admitted to manufacturing the letter/note and falsely reporting a crime.”

OIF’08 sends us a link to this story about Ricardo Saldana who claims that he joined the Army when he was 16 years old and after three years, he accidentally went AWOL for 86 days.

Saldana served for three years but was placed on emergency leave when his grandmother, his heart and soul, passed away, he said.

“After we buried her I didn’t know how many weeks I had left and when I called they told me, ‘You’re already AWOL Mr. Saldana,’ and I said I was on emergency leave. I didn’t know the days passed so quick,” Saldana said, adding he was gone for 86 days.

The mistake he made as a young man has haunted him ever since.

He was given an other than dishonorable discharge and has been denied medical assistance from the VA.

So now, he claims that he is sick and he needs the VA to help him out;

Saldana lost his job a few years ago after being diagnosed with a number of diseases, including cancer and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

“They found out I had a chronic disease for my kidneys, and I also have anxiety and asthma, and they also found out I have arthritis in my back,” Saldana said.

Well, he’s wearing a Vietnam Veteran cap. Saldana claims to be 57 years old, even if he joined at 16 (which I seriously doubt) that means he enlisted in 1974 – the war in Vietnam had effectively ended. The last combat troops left in August 1973. So, although he doesn’t claim to have served there, the hat implies that he’s a veteran of the war. The cutoff date for the National Defense Service Medal for the Vietnam Era was in August 1974.

I don’t know how someone accidentally goes AWOL for nearly three months. Regardless, there are tons of social programs that could help Saldana which are outside the VA, his AWOL ass doesn’t need to be clogging up the VA system designed for people who don’t go AWOL. But, yeah, the VA is in the news, so let’s beat up the VA for not giving relief to this one.

There was this fellow, Shawn McMurray, who applied for disability benefits last year and was unfortunate enough to explain his case to Social Security administrative law judge Gary Suttles who, according to the Austin Statesman, has denied more than 80% of the cases he hears. Mr. McMurray was seeking disability compensation for the injuries he incurred in a 2012 motorcycle accident and he tacked on some psychological maladies like depression, bi-polar disorder and PTSD that were a result of his military service in the 1st Gulf War.

Mr. McMurray served on the aircraft carrier, USS America, during that war as an aircraft fueler, He was discharged soon after because the Navy said he had a “personality disorder”. He has unsuccessfully tried to get the VA to compensate him but VA doctors haven’t found a reason to connect his PTS to his service in Navy. The ALJ, Judge Suttles tried to make that connection, too. The conversation recorded in the Statesman went like this;

Suttles: “What do you think happened to you in Iraq? I mean, hey, you were in the Navy. You weren’t even fighting on the ground. I mean, you were out in the ocean weren’t you?”

McMurray: “Yeah but, I was on a carrier. We lost a lot of planes.”

Suttles: “OK, you’re out there on this big old carrier that doesn’t even touch ground.”

McMurray: “It’s stressful.”

Suttles: “Well, life is stressful,” (laughing)

McMurray: “Uh, yeah.”

Suttles: “To me it would be exciting. What do you mean stressful? I mean you’re on this floating city in the middle of the (ocean)….Didn’t you find that exciting?”

McMurray tells the reporter;

“It’s tormented me since that day,” said the Navy veteran, 44, “He took my dignity away. I wasn’t proud to be a veteran.”

[…]

McMurray said the exchange “hurt me so bad. … He just slammed all of us. What judge in his right mind would tell a veteran that? He’s very biased and discriminating against the Navy.”

Veterans, like all Americans have to stiffen up and realize that just because you’re a veteran, that doesn’t shield you from criticism. Especially if you expect that shield just because you served in the military once.

Of course, the VSOs line up to defend McMurray;

[Anthony Hardie, spokesman with the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense] said those aboard carriers endured “the sheer terror of incoming missile attacks, any of which might have been laden with chemical or biological warfare agents.” Navy vessels in the Persian Gulf also confronted the threat of underwater mines and environmental hazards like smoke from oilfield fires.

“Fueler is a high stress job in itself,” [Jim Bunker, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center] said. “It’s extremely long hours in an extremely dangerous position. He’s being told people’s lives depend on him. Things can happen on those decks that we have no clue about, mishaps. You’re told you could die out there at any time. In most deployments you don’t have that kind of stress going.”

McMurray claims that he once witnessed a crash on the deck of the America and the pilot ejected into the sea.

Now, I’m no expert on post traumatic stress, and I know that stressful situations affect people differently, but it seems to me that if the VA can’t point to a reason to connect McMurray’s PTS to his Navy service, the judge probably couldn’t either. I have no doubt that this will go McMurray’s way because the Social Security Administration has apologized to him for the judge’s comments. For the judge’s part though, he denied McMurray’s claim which is probably why we’re reading about the hearing room exchange now.

The article goes on into the VA guidelines being expanded in 2010 to include events “related to fear of hostile military or terrorist activity.” But, you know what? I doubt very much there was much danger of either of those things on the decks of the USS America during the Gulf War. Then the VSOs go into the old “forgotten Gulf War veterans” canard. I haven’t felt forgotten, not even for a minute, but then, I don’t make up ailments and injuries related to my military service.

It all reminds me of another fellow we all know who claims false maladies from his service on the decks of another carrier in another war related to duties that he never performed.

Did the Duffel Blog see this coming?

I heard this a few days ago, but it’s only hitting the media this morning that a drug enforcement unit in Mendocino County encountered Bowe Bergdahl, the blue falcon who was a guest of the Haqqani network in Afghanistan for five years, at a marijuana growing facility, according to Fox News;

[Captain Greg Van Patten with the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office] said Bergdahl was detained, but ultimately was “determined not to be connected to the operation, at least there was no evidence to suggest he was involved.”

When Bergdahl encountered the law enforcement team, Van Patten said he identified himself while the sheriff’s office reached out to the Department of Defense. The agency confirmed Bergdahl was on leave, and asked for their assistance in getting him back.

Sheriff’s office personnel later drove Bergdahl “to a halfway point,” where he met up with army representatives.

Apparently, Bergdahl was on a legitimate leave from his duty station at Fort Sam Houston, Texas and the Army isn’t pressing charges against him. I hope they do a urinalysis test on him. The police say that they encountered 180 mature marijuana plants at the grow site, that’s a lot for Bergdahl not to notice.

It’s strange though, that Bergdahl gets a leave and doesn’t use it to go home and visit his parents, isn’t it? The Department of the Army needs to hurry up and get this case cleared from the docket.

Andy11M sends us a link to Vanity Fair about that woman, Rachel Dolezal, who pretended to be a black woman.

Dolezal was knocked off the front page by the murders in Charleston. She was big news back then, if you can remember back that far, and you would think that she’d be ready to put it all behind her and start acting like herself. Well, you’d think that if you hadn’t seen so many stolen valor phonies who won’t admit that they’ve been lying to friends and family for years.

Dolezal’s claim on black womanhood still seems to be non-negotiable. Even in conversation with an actual black woman on the other end of the line or sitting in her cozy home, Dolezal unequivocally identifies as black. (Never mind the ancestry.com heritage test that arrived on her doorstep the day I visited.)

Dolezal spent years researching and then perfectly molding her black identity. She commands an impressive knowledge of African American literature, its writers, and the history of the Civil Rights movement. She attended graduate school at the historically black Howard University (where, The Smoking Gun reported, she unsuccessfully sued for being discriminated against because she was white). She is an expert in black hair, both as a practical matter and as a subject of academic inquiry. She makes it clear she doesn’t plan on altering the way she presents herself anytime soon.

“It’s taken my entire life to negotiate how to identify, and I’ve done a lot of research and a lot of studying,” she says. “I could have a long conversation, an academic conversation about that. I don’t know. I just feel like I didn’t mislead anybody; I didn’t deceive anybody. If people feel misled or deceived, then sorry that they feel that way, but I believe that’s more due to their definition and construct of race in their own minds than it is to my integrity or honesty, because I wouldn’t say I’m African American, but I would say I’m black, and there’s a difference in those terms.”

I get emails quite frequently from graduate students who want to drill down into these liars’ heads to find out why they do what they do. There’s an entire psychology textbook full of material waiting for someone on the subject of pretending to be something that you aren’t, right there in Dolezal’s carefully coiffed noggin.

But, to some people what you are, rather than who you are is the most important thing.

Someone sent us these pictures from their cell phone last night that they took at the Chattanooga recruiting station memorial for the five service members killed there last week;

I’m not saying that this guy isn’t a veteran, but he looks like warmed over dogshit in that uniform. His flag is on the wrong shoulder, he’s wearing no cover and who rolled those sleeves for him. But, then, him showing up dressed like that was all about him, wasn’t it? You don’t need to show up in your AirSoft play clothes to pay homage, in fact we would prefer that you wouldn’t.

The Office for Personnel Management finally admits that they lost the personal information of 21 million US citizens to Chinese hackers, according to Fox News;

Katherine Archuleta, director of the federal Office of Personnel Management, said she has no plans to step down and is committed to continuing her work for the agency. The White House, which had previously stated that President Barack Obama was confident in her leadership, said there were no plans to change its position despite the calls for her resignation.

The increased calls for Archuleta to be replaced came as the Obama administration disclosed Thursday that the number of people affected by the massive data breach was far higher than previously reported.

They first admitted that over four million victims’ information had been breached by hackers, but now it turns out that was only about 20%. Typical for this administration, no presidential appointed politician is at fault – you know, even though every legal gun owner is at fault for mass shooting incidents.

I’m here to tell you that OPM is packed with the most incompetent boobs in government. They’re a bunch of back-stabbing bureaucrats who are quick to screw their fellow government employees right to the wall. And you contractors who had security clearances, your shit is in China, too, right along with the PII of your relatives and friends that you used for references.

If you think that veterans working for the VA are bad, that’s only because you haven’t dealt with the stumble-bum ritards at OPM and I have to think that is a culture that has it’s roots in the leadership of the organization.

Update: OPM has released their “plan” to protect employees and contractors as well as the people you listed on your application for a clearance. Actually, it’s just a list of steps for closing the barn door after the horses ran far, far away.