Congress is back to the business of larding up the bill that’s supposed to be funding our troops in the field. Even the President is getting in on the act;
President Barack Obama originally sought $83.4 billion for the two wars and more foreign aid for countries like Pakistan.
But then he too sought more — $4 billion extra to combat H1N1 swine flu and $5 billion to back credit lines to the International Monetary Fund, which is trying to help developing countries weather the global economic downturn.
Last month, 168 House Republicans supported the war-funding bill, but that was before the Senate inserted the IMF provision. The commitment reflects President Barack Obama’s promise at the April G-20 meeting of world leaders.
To give the IMF this line of credit “to bail out the rest of the world, I mean, this is lunacy,” said House Republican leader John Boehner , R- Ohio .
CNN reported a few hours ago that Congress decided to drop language that would release the so-called torture pictures from the bill;
House Democratic leaders plan to drop a provision — backed by President Obama — from the $100 billion war funding bill that would bar the release of detainee photos, according to House Democratic congressional aides.
President Barack Obama’s penchant for last-minute demands, and a rebellion by liberal allies over his efforts to block the release of detainee abuse photos, have combined to sidetrack his bill to pay for an expanded war in Afghanistan as well as continuing military operations in Iraq.
Democratic Representative John Murtha, who heads the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, managed to get $3.1 billion for eight C-17 and 11 C-130 military transport planes included. However, that has been pared back by four C-130s.
The Pentagon did not request the aircraft but lawmakers want them to preserve jobs in their home states and Murtha disputes the military’s contention that they are not needed.
Despite the fact that Democrats stalled for more than a year passing funding for the troops, they are now adopting the language of their former critics to plow some pork through Congress;
“This is a dangerous game Republicans are playing by jeopardizing the well-being of our soldiers to score political points,” the aide said. “The supplemental will be passed, but they will have to answer for their actions if they oppose it.”
Imagine the gall it takes to say that after Democrats spent two years trying to end the war by holding up funding.
Looking for some laughs today, I cruised over to read some of Soltz and the gang to see what they think is important. I was justly rewarded. What with a war looming with North Korea and Iran, Israel changing some of their policies in regards to Palestinians, the president in Europe, Cuban spies arrested in DC, what is our buddy Dicksmith worried about? Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell;
Well, you know, I looked at the chart from Gallup that shows a shift in US public opinion, and my first thought was “So?” Since when do we ask the general population to write military policy?
I’ll bet if we polled the general population on whether the UCMJ’s Article 15 or Captain’s Mast policy is fair, they’d probably disagree in large numbers. If we asked them if the Army should be able to punish people for the violation of the Army’s 670-1 Wear and Appearance regs, they’d probably tell us “no”.
So why should VoteVets, ostensibly a veterans organization (the word “vets” is right there in their name) even care what what civilians think? Why don’t they commission a poll of veterans and active duty soldiers instead of parroting the MoveOn line? Well, probably because the polling data wouldn’t come out like they want it.
Dicksmith continues;
As you can see, repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (a discriminatory policy that has harmed unit cohesion, readiness and combat effectiveness) has broad support across every single ideological, partisan and geographic demographic with every demographic also trending toward increased support for the repeal.
I wonder where he got the information that DADT has “harmed unit cohesion, readiness and combat effectiveness”. Like everything else they write over there, it probably has anal origins. He claims there’s “broad support across every single ideological, partisan and geographic demographic” – well, except veterans and the military.
But see, just because he’s parroting the MoveOn line (more accurately, the Human Rights Campaign line) and he’s a veteran, dicksmith lends a measure of legitimacy to illegitimate data – and thus taking a little bit more credibility away from all veterans just to pay off Vote Vets’ pay masters on the Left.
Notice, I’m not taking a stand on either side of the DADT issue. What I take issue with is the fact that a veterans’ organization doesn’t represent veterans at all. A group of people who should know better than to listen to polling in regards to military policy, don’t. Anyone who has spent more than a day in the military knows why we don’t ask society how to govern military members.
In Politico this morning, Chris Frates ruminates over the cross-dressing nature of the various “activist groups” in Washington these days. Basically, since these organizations helped to get President Obama and the Democrat Congress elected, they’re reticent about criticizing their beneficiaries. I mean, Code Pink was all about ending the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama hasn’t changed from the Bush policy, and you hear nothing from them on that much anymore.
Vote Vets’ former motor officer who fought his portion of the Iraq War from Kuwait Jon Soltz was featured in the article trying to weakly explain why veterans should be concerned about labor, environmental and energy policy;
Labor law and climate change don’t immediately strike most folks as veterans’ issues, but VoteVets has found an angle.
The group’s chairman, Jon Soltz, said the energy bill is relevant because it would help reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and keep U.S. troops out of Iraq and other oil-producing countries.
Playing on more issues appeals to VoteVets because it keeps it in the bigger debates and offers a chance to expand its donor base.
But it’s not abandoning its core constituency.
Soltz said his group will also be getting more involved in the torture debate and will monitor the phasing out of the Iraq war and its effect on veterans.
“To continue to stay relevant, you have to … find where your organization can make a difference,” Soltz said.
Relevance. That’s not usually a word I’d associate with Vote Vets. In fact, the other day TSO discovered that Vote Vets and IAVA combined get less daily traffic on their web presence than This Ain’t Hell – a private blog on Yahoo servers that gets virtually no money that doesn’t come out of my pocket (because you cheap skates won’t even click the stupid Google ads). We don’t have Wesley Clark and Keith Olbermann stumping for us – although that may be to our advantage. It’s not that our traffic is so high – it’s that theirs is so low.
Soltz forgot to mention that he really doesn’t have control over the direction his organization takes. He takes his marching orders from MoveOn.org which takes it’s orders from the DNC. That’s why John Bruhn left Vote Vets two years ago – they are too partisan.
Yeah, Soltz is making a stretch. He’s not trying to keep Vote Vets relevant in the veteran community, he’s trying to keep it relevant in the MoveOn community. Veterans don’t care about environmental, labor and energy policy to the extent that Soltz tries to make it seem – otherwise we wouldn’t have Soltz trying to explain to us why we should care. Remember in the article that Soltz wrote yesterday about former Vice President Cheney also included an explanation about why veterans should care about the Democrat witch hunt in Congress.
We veterans know what our concerns are, we don’t need someone to tell us what we should care about – we need someone who’ll represent our concerns.
Notice how everyone we criticize usually shows up here to explain themselves? Ever seen any of the Vote Vets weasels do that? Nope, because they’re so intellectually shallow, their positions won’t stand up under the slightest bit of scrutiny – and they know it.
Vote Vets is too concerned about the past administration than the future of veterans – because their MoveOn masters have told them that’s how it’s going to be.
Through the use of delicate internet technology NOT pioneered by Algore, and in common use with all of the major VRWC cells in operation throughout the US, I’ve intercepted the following planning session held yesterday.I offer it here for your perusal, unedited or redacted.
I guess we’re all heroes and martyrs these days, well as long as we adhere to the Leftist doctrine (Washington Times link);
“This is about the loss of a man who was a saint and a martyr,” [Very Rev. Katherine Ragsdale, president of Episcopal Divinity School] said in an interview before the service. “He was a prayerful man who put his life at risk to protect others and died for it. People are in shock, outrage and mourning. They need a place to go.”
Ms. Ragsdale said she once visited Dr. Tiller’s clinic in Wichita to defend it from anti-abortion protests. She has been excoriated on conservative Web sites for a July 21, 2007, speech in Birmingham, Ala., where she called abortion “a blessing.”
Reconstructionist Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Philadelphia-based Shalom Center said Dr. Tiller “joins the list of martyrs for ethical decency and human rights, killed for healing with compassion.”
The rabbi said Dr. Tiller was “a religious martyr in the fullest classical sense, killed in his own church as he arrived to worship, killed for acting in accord with his religious commitments and his moral and ethical choices.”
Like I said the other day, I think that what happened the other day to Dr. Tiller was terrible and his murderer should be punished to the extent that the law allows – but, Tiller was no saint. You can’t call his profession “moral and ethical” with a straight face. Oh, and how is the murder of innocent children “a blessing”?
But, this is proof that Leftism has become a religion of sorts – a morally bankrupt and intellectually vacant religion. The degree to which you accept Leftist doctrine into your life determines your station in life.
This morning, North Korea decided that, since the world hasn’t made an active response to their missile launches and nuclear tests, they’d abrogate the 1953 armistice that ended the hot war on the intra-Korean frontier (CNN link).
“Our revolutionary armed forces … will regard” South Korea’s participation “in the [the 6-year-old Proliferation Security Initiative] as a declaration of war …” the North’s official news agency said.
Pyongyang also announced it was no longer bound by the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War.
“The Korean Peninsula is bound to immediately return to a state of war from a legal point of view, and so our revolutionary armed forces will go over to corresponding military actions,” North Korea said through its news agency.
Sweet. It’s the 1950s all over again. But that’s not the extent of the dangers we now face because the Obama Administration wouldn’t take the lead in shutting down North Korea’s nuclear program. Israel has discovered that Bolivia and Venezuela are supplying Iran with uranium (CBS News link);
“There are reports that Venezuela supplies Iran with uranium for its nuclear program,” the Foreign Ministry document states, referring to previous Israeli intelligence conclusions. It added, “Bolivia also supplies uranium to Iran.”
The report concludes that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is trying to undermine the United States by supporting Iran.
So hugging Hugo Chavez did Obama a lot of good, didn’t it? Of course, if you read this blog in December 2007, you’d have got a whiff of the uranium connections, when a suitcase full of cash was discovered on an airstrip in Bolivia’s uranium-mining region.
Since there was supposedly collusion between the North Koreans and Syrians on Syria’s own nuclear program, we can probably assume that the North Koreans lent aid to the Iranians – so it’s come full circle.
So President Obama picked his first Supreme Court justice today – Sonia Sotomayor. You’d have thought he’d called angels from heaven listening to the media.
As soon as the nomination was announced, Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox News beclowned himself and announced that she wasn’t the first Hispanic judge on the Supreme Court – he named Benjamin Cordozo as the first. Cordozo was Jewish and about 5th generation Portuguese, so I don’t think that counts, Judge.
But, reading the Washington Times, I found this jaw-droppingly ignorant line from our President;
The president said he wanted a nominee with intellectual rigor and an appreciation for the limits of judicial power — “a judge’s job is to interpret, not make law.” But he said it was Ms. Sotomayor’s “own extraordinary journey” from the housing projects of the South Bronx that he thinks will give her the “common touch” he wanted in a justice.
While I’ll agree a judge should interpret and not write law, how does a “common touch” help her interpret law? The law is what it is, it’s words on paper and a judge has to be able to read. A common touch doesn’t help her read – a common touch helps her to write new law that never existed before she applied her common touch to it. Why do we bother sending people to law school if when they become judges they rule according to their background and upbringing instead of their studies?
On a related note, the California Supreme Court ruled to uphold the gay marriage ban. Imagine that. A US court determined that it’s OK for people to change their constitutions. How do you think Sotomayor’s “common touch” would have affected her vote?
So, it was with little surprise that I read this post of Dicksmith’s that Mr Wolf sent me late last night.
Vets for Freedom was founded a few months after the progressive Veterans’ organization I work with (not for, since I volunteer), VoteVets.org. You’d have to ask Pete [Hegseth] and his cronies to confirm this, but as best I can tell Vets for Freedom has served no other purpose than to be a GOP front group countering the work of VoteVets.
Now, I’m not saying that Dicksmith likes to bugger young boys, to drink the blood of young virgins from a rugby boot, to drink and then drive home to beat his girlfriend and dog, I mean, you’d have to ask his cronies about that, but what I can tell you is that master of the intertubes he is not. Rather than just using SourceWatch as a one stop shop, he might have been able to find that one of VFF’s first endorsements was for Jim Marshall, Democrat from Georgia. It would be hard to figure out why VFF’s masters in the GOP would stand for VFF endorsing their House Target #1.
….said Vets for Freedom Chairman, Pete Hegseth. “Jim has stood with us on Capitol Hill, and it’s time for us to stand with him. During his tenure in Congress, Jim has proved time and time again that politics always takes a back seat to doing what’s right when it comes to fighting our enemies and supporting those who wear the uniform. Our country needs more people like Jim in Washington.”
Vets For Freedom has emerged as one of the most influential and authoritative voices in the debate over the war in Iraq. As soldiers, the members of VFF answered the call to duty to serve our nation. Now they stand among our nation’s leaders to remind us to do our duty.
– United States Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT)
And how does one explain the comments of Brian Baird with regard to VFF?
Vets for Freedom speaks with unique authority and is an essential non-partisan voice supporting those who are committed to success in Iraq.
– United States Congressman Brian Baird (D-WA)
Wait a minute? How the hell can that be? Isn’t Baird a Democrat? Isn’t that what the “D” means? And, holy hell, isn’t he a liberal? The American Conservative Union gave the guy a 4 out of a possible 100 in 2008. That means he’s to the LEFT of Baghdad Jim McDermott.
Well, possibly it has more to do with his position on Iraq than any partisan angle. This is from Baird’s piece from August 24, 2007 in the Seattle Times.
As a Democrat who voted against the war from the outset and who has been frankly critical of the administration and the post-invasion strategy, I am convinced by the evidence that the situation has at long last begun to change substantially for the better. I believe Iraq could have a positive future. Our diplomatic and military leaders in Iraq, their current strategy, and most importantly, our troops and the Iraqi people themselves, deserve our continued support and more time to succeed.
I’m not going to go into some lengthy defense of Pete, who can ably do so himself, but a few things about Dicksmith and his post. He goes on some rant about Pete apparently now writing at the Weekly Standard. Not sure why this is even relevant, but good for Pete, he got a paying gig. And thanks for all of us it isn’t as an accountant, because Pete refers to 8+ years without an attack, when it is 7+ years without an attack. Seemingly Pete saying this is far worse for veterans than say (hypothetically) a guy who stole a car in Nevada, and was in mental health counseling during the Battle of Fallujah that he claimed to have been injured in despite never having served in the military at all. Or, worse (again, hypothetically) than saying that Viet Nam-issued vests were being distributed to our troops in Iraq, when in fact no such thing was taking place. Pete’s inability to differentiate 7 from 8 is clearly one of the biggest problems faced by returning veterans, and I am on board for jacking him up over it. VFF should do what VoteVets does and just take all his shit down, issue only a press release to a media outlet without putting anything on this blog about it, and then just go along pretending that VFF never knew the mathematically challenged Mr. Hegseth. (Here is where I would link to the many comments of Dicksmith located on “Rick Duncan’s” various VoteVets postings, but alas, they are preserved for posterity only on Jonn’s computer.)
And to close out, Dicksmith cites to Matthew Yglesias. I know the name, but know nothing about the guy and don’t care to, but Dicksmith uses this quote to characterize his belief on the fallibility of Pete’s argument that we were safer post 9/11 for our actions:
The overwhelming majority of Americans to ever be killed by foreign terrorists were killed during Bush’s presidency. And even if you give him a pass on 9/11 itself it’s still the case that his conduct of the “war on terror” led to the deaths of thousands more Americans.
Well, let me take that quote and change it a bit, and you tell me if there are any inaccuracies.
Option A:
The overwhelming majority of Terrorists to ever be killed by American Military Forces were killed during Bush’s presidency. And even if you give them a pass on 9/11 itself it’s still the case that the conduct of the “war on terror” led to the deaths of thousands more Terrorists than Americans.
Option B:
The overwhelming majority of Americans to ever be killed by a foreign government were killed during Roosevelt’s presidency. And even if you give him a pass on Pearl Harbor itself it’s still the case that his conduct of the “war on the Axis powers” led to the deaths of thousands more Americans.
So, here we go again, a VoteVets guy who doesn’t do any research, throws in some ad hominem attacks under the guise of “go look for yourself at Source Watch” whose primary concern is with Pete’s ability to count, who closes with an argument from another liberal blogger than has no bearing on the argument at hand. It’s almost becoming cliché at this point, no?
ADDENDUM: For a bit of added idiocy, or to get a 2404 if you need one, go read Jon Stolz’s piece over at VoteVets today on why Petraeus could never be the 2012 GOP Nominee because he thinks we shouldn’t torture people and we should close Gitmo.
