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

Category: Media

  • Sinking CNN refloats the swift boats

    Sinking CNN refloats the swift boats

    In the media kerfuffle regarding Donald Trump’s stupid remarks about John McCain’s Vietnam service, the ratings-sinking CNN noted that while Jeb Bush had condemned Trump’s boorishness, he had long ago defended the swift boat veterans’ attacks against John Kerry. Had CNN been content to leave their news article with a passing reference to political history, I wouldn’t be writing this. But no, they just had to follow with a couple of pernicious lies that have long been poisonous serpents in that increasingly fetid swamp called the Democratic Party.

    From the article:

    All of the charges were contradicted by official military records and almost all of the men who served with Kerry came out in defense of their former crewmate, praising his courage. Only one of the swift boat critics served with Kerry.

    Kerry received several medals for his service in Vietnam, including several Purple Heart medals for injuries he sustained in combat.

    The CNN writer, perhaps a student at the time, apparently has no real knowledge of those records, or he would know that John Kerry cherry-picked for release those parts of his military records that were supportive of his heroic fairy tales, while refusing to open his entire records for media examination. When called out on that by the many men of the swift boat veterans organization who actually did serve with him – not the one man claimed by CNN – Kerry repeatedly promised to sign an authorization form allowing the Navy to release his full records. The operative words there are repeatedly promised. And then he promised again. And again, and again, and again and again, but guess what! It never happened throughout the course of the campaign, because John Kerry knew that what was in those records would torpedo his prospects as a presidential candidate.

    And what might that torpedo be? Most likely it was a dishonorable or other form of unfavorable discharge given to Lieutenant Kerry for his traitorous behaviors in treating with the enemy. Kerry was still a commissioned junior naval officer when he met with North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris in May 1970, an action that could have brought charges of treason and a lengthy prison sentence. During the 2004 campaign, there was speculation by those investigating Kerry’s discharge that Jimmy Carter had reversed Kerry’s bad discharge in 1977 and issued an honorable version. That would have been an unusually long time between an officer’s separation from service, 1970, and the issuance of his discharge in 1977.

    The fact that John Kerry to this day has never released his military records is quite telling when one considers the fact that upon losing the 2004 campaign, he vowed to sue the members of the swift boat veterans organization for defamation. After all, those sailors who had served with him in Vietnam had publicly challenged virtually every claim to valor and wounds that Kerry had made and ballyhooed during the campaign, effectively calling him a liar and a fraud, a candidate for president who had committed the later to come crime of stolen valor. Those were serious charges, and they were made quite prominently and quite publicly. Most importantly, they likely cost John Kerry the presidency of the United States of America.

    If those swift boat charges were untrue, then John Kerry had himself the biggest, most publicly and financially damaging case of defamation the world has ever seen. There were of course the lost prestige and the need for vindication of character and valor, but more importantly, think of the financial losses. Kerry’s lawyers could point to the tens, maybe hundreds of millions made by Slick Willie since he left office, using that as a template for determining monetary damages. John Kerry could have won the largest defamation lawsuit in history, except for one thing: discovery. In any defamation suit against the swift boat veterans, John Kerry knew full well that first among the documents subpoenaed by the lawyers for the swifties would be his full and entire military records.

    The primary defense against defamation, libel, or slander, any of those torts against demeaning and damaging a person’s character or performance, is truth. If what they say about you is true, then you can’t sue them successfully for saying so. John Kerry knew that not only was truth on the side of the swift boat veterans, but there might also be further disclosures in those records that he did not want to see made public. That has to be the only reason that John Kerry’s long-promised and repeatedly threatened lawsuit against the swift boat veterans never came to be.

    John Kerry is and was a phony hero. Of course, the fact that he lied about his military service and caused truly good and faithful sailors to be demonized by the liberal media actually qualifies him for heroic status in the Democrat party’s pantheon.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • San Francisco news crew mugged

    San Francisco news crew mugged

    I’m sure you remember the story yesterday of the former CNN correspondents who were mugged in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but they were armed and their attacker was pronounced DRT. Well, an NBC news crew was mugged yesterday on a pier in San Francisco and it didn’t end so well for them. They were there to do a segment on a woman who had been killed on the same pier the night before, so you know, who would ever expect another crime to happen in the same spot?

    As the two were about to go on air, a man pulled up to the curb in a black four-door BMW, approached the photographer and pistol-whipped him with a gun then shoved him to the ground, the photographer and reporter said. The man then grabbed the photographer’s camera gear, and as he was struggling to get it inside his getaway car, returned to pistol whip the photographer again, the news crew reported.

    The reporter was not injured and the photographer suffered a cut to his ear. The photographer was checked out by paramedics along the Embarcadero and declared OK. Both returned to work later to the warm embrace of their colleagues.

    I remember the good old days when crooks drove shitbox cars, but I guess times have changed and crime does pay enough for them to drive BMWs. I wonder if the reporter isn’t a little brain damaged from the incident, along with her editor after reading the lead paragraph of this article;

    An NBC Bay Area news crew was attacked early Thursday morning while reporting a story in a mugging that injured the photographer, whose camera gear was also stolen.

    You’d think that someone would have had the language skills to write a coherent sentence, but, you know, I’m sure everyone caught PTSD from the reporter while they were in their warm embrace.

    Thanks to Poetrooper for the link.

  • The WaPo Misrepresents Propaganda as News – Again

    Yesterday, the Washington Post published        some anti-gun propaganda     an article.  Its title tells you all you really need to know about it:

    The “legal loophole” that allowed Dylann Roof to get a gun

    I’ve put “legal loophole” there in quotes for a couple of reasons.  The first reason is – it’s absolute bullsh!t, and it’s misleading as hell. IMO, that’s by intent.

    The second reason is that it the whole article appears to be factually incorrect.  No “legal loophole” – imaginary or otherwise – appears to have been involved at all.

    Here are the facts of the case.

    The apparently-racist bastard named Dylann Roof who murdered 9 innocents in Charleston was arrested for felony drug possession 28 February of this year.  According to the WaPo        propaganda       article, he obtained the weapon used in his crime as a birthday present this April.  (This now appears to have been proven false – I’ll cover that below).

    The WaPo writer seizes on this, claiming that this is the result of the “gun show loophole”.   He does so after acknowledging that it was already illegal under current Federal law for him to have been given a weapon as a gift while under indictment for a felony crime – see 18 USC 922(d)(1).

    So, even if the original reports of Roof receiving the firearm he used in his murders as a gift had been true, the reporter’s article would still have been bullsh!t.  Why?  Because there was no freaking “legal loophole” here.  Roof was facing felony charges – and his family had to know he’d been arrested.  They thus had good reason to suspect he could be facing felony charges – and therefore giving him a weapon would have already been illegal under Federal law.  There’s no “loophole” there, folks.

    In fact, later news reports indicate that Roof in fact bought the gun himself at a local gun shop.  My guess is that he probably falsified the purchase form (ATF Form 4473) and claimed he was not under “indictment or information” for any felony crime.  (I’m pretty sure that being out on bail after arrest while awaiting further court action virtually guarantees the latter – e.g., that Roof was legally considered “under information” of a felony, even if he hadn’t been formally indicted by a grand jury.)  Falsifying an ATF 4473 is also a Federal felony.  I suppose it’s theoretically possible that the gun shop was “dirty” and ignored a truthful answer – but since that’s kinda easily discovered, I rather doubt it.  Most business owners want to stay in business and stay out of jail.

    I’ll spell it out for any logic-challenged “liberal brethren” who might be reading this. Roof was apparently willing to lie on the purchase form in order to purchase a firearm himself.  That is itself a felony.  So, how would requiring him to take a firearm received as a gift down to the same firearms shop to “complete the transfer” for a gift have made any difference?

    Answer: it wouldn’t have.  He’d have simply lied on the ATF 4473 then, too.

    However . . . having him do that to “complete the transfer” would indeed assist in later compiling a database of who owns firearms, should anyone in the future want to do so.

    Bottom line:  that WaPo        propaganda       article yesterday wasn’t about gun safety at all.  It was about misleading people.  It was designed to convince people to support whatever is necessary to facilitate backdoor gun registration in the future – plain and simple.

  • LACSD and “accidental” weapons discharges

    LACSD and “accidental” weapons discharges

    M&P9

    The LA Times, whose habit is to blame guns for problems rather than the operator of a firearm, blames the gun for what they call accidental discharges among LA County sheriff deputies since they changed their duty weapons to a Smith and Wesson M&P9. After reading the reports of the weapons discharges, they seem more “negligent” than accidental. In every instance, the officers involved had their finger on the trigger before they intended to fire the weapon.

    The M&P has obvious benefits. It is easier to shoot accurately, can be fired more reliably under stress and is a better fit for people with small hands. The switch was prompted in part by the threat of a lawsuit by women who had failed the Sheriff’s Academy. More recruits — including more women — are now passing the firearms test, and veteran deputies are also logging better scores at the firing range.

    I don’t know anything about the M&P9, I’m not a S&W fan, but only because of my experience with them decades ago. I’m sure it’s a better pistol than when they tried to keep up with the demand of Models 27 & 29 during the Dirty Harry craze. I’m also not a Beretta fan – the gun that the Smith & Wesson replaced.

    I do have a Glock 30, one of the guns that the Times blames for negligent discharges, but only because it has a couple of 25-round magazines for that day that the Zombie Epoc begins. When I carry it, the chamber is empty, because I don’t like a safety that is on the trigger – that really doesn’t prevent negligent discharges, like the three safeties on a 1911. Which is why I mostly carry my Colt Defender and not my Glock.

    The article complains that the Beretta is too big for folks with little hands to operate;

    People with small hands often have trouble flipping up the Beretta’s safety as they prepare to fire. The first shot requires 12 to 15 pounds of pressure on the trigger, forcing some to use two fingers and reducing shooting accuracy for many. Subsequent shots take about 4 pounds of pressure.

    I haven’t heard any complaints about that from the military, that also uses the Beretta. In fact one of the reasons that military went to a Beretta was because the 1911-style handguns were supposedly too big for the ladies. While the 1911 was the Army’s service handgun, the lady MPs were issued the smaller .38 caliber revolvers for exactly that reason.

    It sounds to me from the description above, that the Beretta is a double action semiautomatic because the initial trigger pull is so much more than follow-on shots. It seems to me that a solution to that would be leaving the gun cocked when the round is chambered – but still you’d have to keep your finger off the trigger until you’re aiming at your target. That doesn’t seem like something in the realm of possibility of the LA County deputies;

    In 2012, there were 12 accidental discharges, none involving the M&P. In 2013, there were 18, eight of which were M&Ps. Of the 30 incidents in 2014, 22 involved M&Ps.

    […]

    In one December incident, a sheriff’s deputy in Compton approached a car he thought might have been stolen. The occupants had already ran off. As he walked up with his M&P drawn to make sure there was no one else inside, he accidentally pulled the trigger.

    The bullet hit the driver’s side door. There were bystanders nearby, but no one was injured.

    A month earlier, a Lancaster deputy was following a driver he suspected of having a gun. When the man got out and walked toward the patrol car, the deputy took off his seat belt and was pulling out his M&P when he fired it into his own thigh.

    […]

    In a Walnut-area house in January 2014, a deputy accidentally fired a round into the ceiling when a golf bag fell on his hand. Another deputy was in the room at the time.

    When a deputy tripped over a stroller and fired a round through a wall in October 2014, there was another deputy nearby, with more deputies and a civilian elsewhere in the Huntington Park house.

    Yeah, those are negligent discharges. It has nothing to do with “accidental” and everything to do with officers who have their fingers on the triggers when it’s not necessary. You can’t blame the gun for this one either, LA Times – it has to do with training and the operators.

    The bigger question should be; why are they using 9 millimeter handguns? Do they plan to shoot a lot of Europeans or something?

  • New York Times seems surprised that people die in war

    New York Times seems surprised that people die in war

    The New York Times ran an article this last weekend entitled SEAL Team 6: A Secret History of Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines written by a fire-team-sized group of journalists, Mark Mazzetti, Nicholas Kulish, Christopher Drew, Serge F. Kovaleski, Sean D. Naylor and John Ismay, in which they express their dismay that SEALs have actually killed the enemies of our country, pretty much on command;

    The SEALs’ armorers customized a new German-made rifle and equipped nearly every weapon with suppressors, which reduce gunshot sounds and muzzle flashes. Infrared lasers enabling the SEALs to shoot more accurately at night became standard issue, as did thermal optics to detect body heat. The SEALs were equipped with a new generation of grenade — a thermobaric model that is particularly effective in making buildings collapse. They often operated in larger groups than they had traditionally done. More SEALs carrying deadlier weapons meant that fewer enemies escaped alive.

    Fewer enemies escaping alive translates to more good guys leaving alive. It’s simple math. But, if you were a regular reader of the Times (still convinced that they provide you with unbiased news that matters) you would come away from the article believing that they are a band of hatchet-wielding blood-thirsty savages that kill indiscriminately anyone who doesn’t speak English fluently.

    Take, for example, the first paragraph of the article;

    They have plotted deadly missions from secret bases in the badlands of Somalia. In Afghanistan, they have engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own. On clandestine raids in the dead of the night, their weapons of choice have ranged from customized carbines to primeval tomahawks.

    The hatchets again. I’m not going to pretend that I know much about any special operations forces, but I do know the people who fight our wars. The NYT seems to think that the indiscriminate killing of non-enemies is some sort of habitual practice and because everything about SEALs is so secretive, they can accuse them of the murder of innocent people in the furtherance of our national policies. I can assure the casual reader that no innocent non-combatants are intentionally killed in combat, mostly because it serves no purpose and it’s a waste of resources, time and ammunition.

    Are there civilians who get themselves killed, yes, of course. Especially with an enemy that hides behind innocents as a tactic. The enemy also kills non-combatants by the scads because they see civilians as tools, self-propelled sand bags.

    It’s funny (not ha-ha funny, though) that the New York Times in the hundreds of words that they printed on this piece, didn’t bother to mention how the SEALs who went after bin Laden in Abbottabad didn’t kill any of the women or children in the compound, accidentally or intentionally. In fact, they did their best to be careful that none of bin Laden’s family was killed.

    You know, if it had been al Qaeda and they busted into the White House under the same circumstances, they would have ended the Obama blood-line right then and there in the most gruesome manner possible.

    Someone should tell the New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti, Nicholas Kulish, Christopher Drew, Serge F. Kovaleski, Sean D. Naylor and John Ismay that this country is engaged with an enemy which would kill them for no other reason than that they are Americans. The SEALs, Delta, the snipers, the sappers, the pilots, the riflemen are in the business of making sure that the enemy doesn’t get that opportunity by killing those enemy people first. If it makes them feel outraged to think that it’s all done by tomahawk, well, fine, they can think that. I’m just glad that the bad guys are dead and I don’t care how they got that way.

  • Brooke Baldwin apologizes to veterans

    Brooke Baldwin apologizes to veterans

    Our buddy, media critic, Eric Wemple, reports in the Washington Post that Brook Baldwin, the CNN reporter who accused veterans of being the cause for the riots in Baltimore, apologized yesterday morning;

    Wemple says that Baldwin “shows the rest of the media how to apologize”, and I’ll admit that it is a good apology, it was better than many and certainly puts Brian William apologies to shame. I have no doubt that Baldwin is contrite and I can tell that she is contrite by her words, but that’s not the problem.

    I made a mistake yesterday. We were in the middle of live TV, I was talking to a member of Congress, and I was recounting a story, a conversation I had had recently just referring to police. And I absolutely misspoke, I inartfully chose my words 100 percent and I just wish speaking to all of you this morning: I wholeheartedly retract what I said. And I’ve thought tremendously about this, and to our nation’s veterans, to you — this is just who I want to speak with this morning — I have the utmost respect for our men and women in uniform. And I wanted you to know that this morning, so to all of you, I owe a tremendous apology. I am truly sorry.

    If, for example, I had made the statement that all Black people are savages who would act like the looters and pillagers in Baltimore if given the chance, how many apologies would I have to make? Would an apology ever make that statement go away? OK, so what if I mitigated the completely racist and unsupported statement by telling you, that it is OK that I said that because members of my family and some of my best friends are Black – would you accept that as an excuse? Of course not, and you shouldn’t. My friends and family members who are Black, probably wouldn’t forgive me either.

    But that is what Baldwin said essentially in her first Tweet on her insensitive statement;

    And then, the great defender of veterans’ reputations, Paul Reickhoff rode to her defense with some nebulous friendship that Baldwin has with veterans that only Reickhoff knows about, because, aside from being a valor thief, he’s a selfish little twit and this is how he feathers his nest by sucking up to the media;

    Here’s the whole problem in a nutshell – Baldwin should not have said that veterans are ticking time bombs just waiting to explode on their communities. The culture in many news organizations makes it OK to disparage veterans and the veteran culture by blaming that which they don’t understand for all of society’s problems.

    Millions of veterans don’t commit violent crime every day, thousands of veterans in police uniforms act honorably every day while saving the world from itself. But the Brooke Baldwins of many of the media outlets don’t find that sexy enough to report – it’s easier to make veterans out to be monsters and to blame those monsters for all of society’s ills – instead of looking at the real problems, the problems that are politically incorrect to talk about.

    Yeah, that was a nice apology, probably the best I’ve heard, but the problem is that the statement she made can’t be apologized away. That statement is indicative of a larger problem that the media has with reporting about veterans.

  • NBC: At least 10 Brian William embellishments

    NBC: At least 10 Brian William embellishments

    While NBC fans are calling for the return of Brian Williams to the network, CNNMoney says that the network has found “at least 10” incidents of Williams embellishing his news stories;

    But The New York Times and The Washington Post reported new details on Friday night that painted Williams in a decidedly negative light.

    The Times reported that Esposito’s team has uncovered “discrepancies” in Williams’ accounts of his reporting from Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt in 2011.

    The Times said it was one of a “half-dozen instances” that have raised eyebrows internally.

    The Post reported that the investigation has “turned up 11 instances in which the anchorman publicly embellished details of his reporting exploits.”

    From the Washington Post;

    The investigators, led by NBC News senior executive producer Richard Esposito, have also raised doubts about Williams’ comments about his experiences covering Israel’s military action against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. In an interview with a student-run television station at Fairfield University in Connecticut in 2007, Williams said he saw rockets passing “just beneath” the Israel helicopter in which he was traveling. But Williams gave a less harrowing account of the same trip in an NBC News blog a year earlier.

    From the New York Times;

    In an appearance [in February 2011] with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” Mr. Williams described his reporting from the square. Speaking of clashes between protesters seeking the overthrow of the Egyptian government, and a pro-government group on horses and camels, he said he had “actually made eye contact with the man on the lead horse.” Mr. Stewart then referred to reports that the pro-government group had used whips. “Yeah,” Mr. Williams replied, “he went around the corner after I saw him, they pulled out whips and started beating human beings on the way.”

    The NBC News report on the clash between the protesters that day did not show Mr. Williams in Tahrir Square during the protest. Subsequent reports said that Mr. Williams was reporting “from a balcony overlooking Tahrir Square,” rather than from inside the square itself, a description that matches footage that was broadcast, and that he repeated in an interview with The New York Times last year.

    Apparently, it all comes from that nasty habit that journalists have lately of inserting themselves into the news rather than just reporting the facts. The Post and the Times, of the old print media, seem to be enjoying this scandal that doesn’t involve their own employees a little too much.

  • Congressmen and their scary gun

    Congressmen and their scary gun

    Buck & Gowdy

    Somehow the Washington Post thinks it’s news that Congressmen Buck and Gowdy posed for this picture in Buck’s office with a patriotically decorated rifle. According to Congressman Ken Buck, the bolt carrier group is in Colorado while the gun is in his DC office, so it’s nothing more than an expensive paper weight;

    Lt. Kimberly Schneider, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Capitol Police, said members of Congress “may maintain firearms within the confines of their office.” Not only that, Schneider said, members “and any employee or agent of any Member of Congress may transport” weapons within the Capitol grounds as long as the “firearms are unloaded and securely wrapped.”

    In an interview Tuesday, Buck, a House freshman, said he sought approval from numerous authorities: “I went to the Ethics Committee; I got permission to accept the gift” from a business. “I went to Capitol Hill police; I got permission to bring it into my office. They went to the D.C. police; they got permission for me to transport it into the District. I went to TSA, and followed all of the regulations in getting it onto the plane and getting it here.”

    Nonetheless, it’s worthy of a Washington Post story. Something, something, Congressional privilege, something, something, scary gun.

    For some reason the incident is under investigation, according to The Hill;

    Having the AR-15 in the District could be a violation of the city’s strict gun laws, and the city attorney general’s office has referred the matter to police, a spokesman told The Hill.

    “The matter has been referred to the Metropolitan Police Department for further investigation,” he said.

    Good, do that. I mean, what else does the Metro PD have to do? 31 homicides in the District so far this year, but yeah, investigate this incident.