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

Category: Media

  • AP doesn’t like bloggers

    Reporting on the President’s speech to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association on Wednesday, for some reason the Associated Press felt the need to describ blogs thusly;

    Blogs are Web sites that tend to be narrow in focus and directed at a niche audience. Most operate without editors and give instant reaction to the news. Their freewheeling, open nature makes them popular but also ripe for unverified statements. 

    Now I’m pretty sure that AP has a hard-on for blogs since blogs, most notably Flopping Aces in recent months, have been responsible for AP’s decline in trustworthiness, but they should also be grateful because I’m pretty sure that blogs are responsible for the large volume of traffic that gets driven to their sites.

    Now, if there are any bloggers out there who need a professional editor on their masthead to satisfy the editors at AP, you’re welcome to use me – AP can just go pound sand somewhere.

    Their mischaracterization is unjustified in the case of IraqTheModel.com, as well. I remember reading short dispatches from the brothers Fahdil before the US invasion. They’ve always been there, and they’ve always given accurate and timely updates to events in Iraq.

  • Where are the Human Rights Democrats?

    According to John at Powerline, the Democrats are sitting on HR 267 that would condemn the Iranian capture and treatment of 15 British sailors and marines. The Democrats keep preparing for their Spring Break.

    Meanwhile the Iranians are broadcasting video footage of the capture and propaganda footage of the Brits along with the public release of their mail, a clear violation of the laws of land warfare.

    Dick Durbin couldn’t wait to call our own troops SS guards, so where is on this? Why is Pelosi so retiscent about being on the side of our closest and oldest ally? Where’s Amnesty International and the Red Cross who’ve spent reams of paper trying to convince the American public that the US is the worst terrorist in the world?

    Jimmy Carter called Israel an apartheid government. So where is the little cretin now? You’d think he’d have lots of advice and thoughts on dealing with hostages in Iran, but apparently not. I guess he’s still a little gun shy about Iran.

    John Murtha said our troops were cold-blooded murders. What has he got to say about this illegal capture and mistreatment of British troops by the Iranians?

    Not a friggin’ peep from the self-righteous Left.

    Pound sand you hypocritical freaks.

    Read the Right Wing Nut House’s Iran tries the old bait and switch.

  • How disengenuous can you get?

    I’m reading about the recent riots in Paris and how “youths” are clashing with police. Then the AFP mentions how the thing started with a 33-year-old. Since when is a 33-year-old a “youth”? Why can’t these journalists just tell us that this supposed religion of peace is represented in Europe by a bunch of anarchists?

    They also chanted slogans of “police are everywhere, justice is nowhere” and “down with the state, police and bosses”.

    And, as Little Green Footballs points out, “citizen journalists” are forbidden in France these days so we have to rely on the truth-deficient mainstream press.

  • To my critics

    Because there’s a serious lack of serious news, I’m using today’s space to answer some of my critics who took offense that I criticized Richard Cohen in his piece entitled “Wasted Lives” in the Washington Post. According to emails, my being named Idiot of the Day of some low-traffic Leftist blog (I’m not providing links because they don’t deserve the traffic) and comments here, I’m naive because I suggested that Cohen and the Democrats’ other willing accomplices in the media shut up for a change until the war against terror ends. This stems from the fact that I don’t understand asymetrical warfare, according to an aspiring journalist who hid her identity when she joined This ain’t Hell and posted a link to this particular blog post on her own blog at Salon.

    Let me explain to this professional feminist a little about warfare. The objective of warfare is to defeat your enemy and to force your political will upon them. As was proven after the First World War, the only way to completely defeat an enemy is to crush him into dust and take away all of his stuff to teach him that there is nothing to gain from miitary operations against the rest of the world. We learned that particular lesson during our Civil War and introduced the concept to the world in the Second World War.

    The Europeans had a tough time learning that lesson because they were pretty much convinced that State leaders were all rational people, which led to the Napoleanic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, the Great War and the Second World War. After the first three, armies that had been defeated on the battlefield, went home, rebuilt their armies and arms and started where they had left off. In fact, Europeans are so clueless, the Germans attacked France through the Ardennes Forest four times between 1870 and 1944 and each time the French were surprised. So why, pray tell, would we bother to listen to them when it comes to fighting wars? What lessons could we possibly learn from the apparently retarded Europeans who do the same thing over-and-over in exactly the same manner expecting different results each time?

    I know the Left thinks it’s compassionate and enlightened to be merciful to our enemies. Look what being merciful to Saddam Hussein brought us. We let him escape with a large portion of his forces in 1991. Within weeks, he turned the remnants of his troops and tanks on his own population while we, the American fighting men and women who’d defeated Hussein’s Army, stood in mute disbelief along the Euphrates River watching the terror he’d wrought on the horizon. But we knew it was coming, we understand the consequences of not finishing a fight. In fact, when our commander announced on our radios that the ceasefire was in effect at about 8 am, February 28th, 1991, I turned to my Lieutenant and prophetically remarked “Our kids will be back to finish this”.

    At that moment, we were still receiving fire from an entrenched enemy force. We just turned and drove off while Iraqi bullets richoceted off of our turrets. It took twelve years for US troops to pick up where we left off.

    Well, I said all that to say this; war has objectives, it doesn’t happen in some vacuum of history like some arbitrary natural disaster. The war of the jihadists is a war against civilization. They prey on the sympathy of of reasonable people – but the jihadists are not reasonable people. Jihadists think that reasonable people are weak tools that they can manipulate to defeat a stronger, more rational foe. Jihadists live for headlines, they declare victory when reasonable people try to reach reasonable agreements with them. And because they’ve declared their victories, and consider themselves the victors, they feel as if they don’t have an obligation to live up to their end of the bargain. – and so the war continues.

    When Mr. Cohen calls our troops’ deaths “wasted lives”, the jihadists revel in it. If the media and the Democrats got behind the war, got behind our troops, if the Left decided that winning this war was more important than winning the next election, there’d be no small victories for the jihadists. In fact, I’d bet that if ya’all’d been behind the war from the start, it’s be pretty much over. Why do I think this? Look at how quickly Qaddafi surrendered his weapons of mass destruction when this administration launched attacks against Hussein in 2003. Look how willing Arafat was to negotiate with Israel after the Gulf War – and then look at how arrogant he became during the Rye negotiations eight years later, when the Clinton gang tried to give him everything under the sun.

    Without the purely political wrangling carried out on the front page of the newspaper everyday, there’d be nothing to win, asymetrical warfare be damned. Your asymetrical warfare is just a term used by pseudo-intellectuals to compound the sense of the uselessness of war, the immutable laws of total warfare remain in effect. The jihadists are only encouraged by your defeatist language. It’s you who doesn’t understand asymetrical warfare – all your handwringing and empty platitudes are exactly why the jihadists continue to fight. They have no real ideology to defend, no treasure to protect, no land or resources particularly worth our trouble. If you take away the possibilty of his victory, what cause has the enemy to fight and die?

  • So how’s the war going, journalists?

    While the US military is kicking ass and taking names, where’s the “mainstream media”? Well, they’d prefer to focus on idiot stories instead. from the NY Times we learn how the military has revised their desertion numbers up. And the Washington Post wants to tell us how insecure the UN Secretary General was yesterday when a rocket struck a block away from him.

    While they’ve vitually ignored the fact that the “surge” is working, you have to find out the truth from the blogosphere, places like Flopping Aces, Black Five, Mudville Gazette’s MilBlogs, Crotchety Old Bastard, Michael Yon, Bill Rogio, Dadmanly among countless others. If you want to find out how many veterans the war protesters encountered last weekend, you have to go to the blogs because the NY Times called them a “few hundred” and the Washington Post called them a “rally”.

    When John Murtha calls our troops murderers, when Dick Durbin says our troops are no better than SS guards, it’s headlines splashed across the Times and Post. When an American Marine throws himself on a grenade to save his comrades from certain death, you have to go to the blogs to find out about it.

    It’s a sad state of affairs when the media is so entrenched against the American people that they’ll sacrifice our national security for an empty and dying political ideology.

  • WaPo’s Eugene Robinson and bumpersticker journalism

    Columnist Eugene Robinson researched for his latest column from ANSWER posters;

    The “mission accomplished” president, once so full of certainty and swagger, isn’t telling Americans that victory is proximate or even inevitable, just that it is still possible.

    When I heard those words, I thought that either the president had decided “can be won” is now the outer limit of public credulity, or — foolish me — that maybe he had finally begun to see Iraq as it is, not as he would like it to be. But then he reverted to form, raising the specter of the Sept. 11 attacks, and the speech sounded like just another attempt at spin control rather than the product of any sort of presidential epiphany.

    Sigh. The White House remains an epiphany-free zone.

    Iraq had nothing at all to do with Sept. 11, as Bush himself has grudgingly acknowledged. Yesterday, Bush brought up Sept. 11 in the context of what would happen if the United States decided to “pack up and go home.” Iraq would become a haven for terrorists and a possible launching pad for attacks on the United States, Bush warned, much as Afghanistan was on that tragic day.

    One thing the president failed to mention was that the al-Qaeda presence in Iraq was zero before the American invasion, which was a big welcome sign for jihadists from around the globe.

    No one ever questions Robinson – it’s like he just allowed to say anything. “Possible to win” means it’s not impossible to win in Iraq, dimbulb. I know that’s tough for you to wrap your peanut-sized brain around, but take my word for it. You should listen to the whole speech rather than cherry-picking bumpersticker phrases. 

    So allow me to arrange for someone to counter Robinson’s idiot blathering - Christopher Hitchens;

    …[T]he presence in Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a very dangerous al-Qaida refugee from newly liberated Afghanistan, was established [before the US invasion of Hussein’s Iraq]. The full significance of this was only to become evident later on. 

    The Bush administration never claimed that Iraq had any hand in the events of Sept. 11, 2001. But it did point out, at different times, that Saddam had acted as a host and patron to every other terrorist gang in the region, most recently including the most militant Islamist ones. And this has never been contested by anybody. The action was undertaken not to punish the last attack—that had been done in Afghanistan—but to forestall the next one.

    Maybe Robinson should do a moment’s research before he tries to assemble bumpersticker slogans into a Washington Post column. I’d also remind Robinson that Abu Nidal died in his Baghdad apartment just a few months before the invasion. He’d been living there for more than decade. I guess that’s not a terror ist connection is it?

    More Robinson;

    George Bush, Dick Cheney and the rest of this administration encountered a dangerous, unstable Middle East and proceeded to make it more dangerous and more unstable.

    Yeah, right. How does a flat tire go more flat? The only thing that makes the Middle East more unstable is weak-kneed and ineffectual handwringing about the US using too much force in the region. Remember how Arafat almost broke his neck rushing to the negotiating table after the first war against Hussein, but by the end of the Clinton years, he was turning down sweetheart deals from Israel. That should be our example – those sixth century clods only understand force, but force without the crybaby intellectualism from braindead idiots on the WaPo’s staff.

  • WaPo’s Cohen “Wasted Lives”

    For some reason, Richard Cohen thinks it’s OK to call American lives “wasted because he prays at the altar of John McCain and Barack Obama. In the Washington Post this morning, Richard Cohen, runs a piece entitled “Wasted Lives“;

    Back when I was in the National Guard and fearing a call-up for the war in Vietnam…

    Whoa, whoa, wait…one of the members of the press was in the National Guard during Viet Nam? To hear them yammer on about President Bush and Dan Quail, I always thought journalists all spent that entire war on patrol in the Mekong Delta armed with only a spear and living off of field mice turds. Oh, sorry, please continue, General Cohen;

    It is painfully hard to say — and even harder to write — that the lives lost in Iraq were wasted. It sounds like a judgment on the dead when it is meant, of course, as an indictment of the living: America’s political leadership. But some sort of finger has to be pointed at the president and some sort of reminder offered that it is not just a policy that has failed but that people have been killed or wounded. This is the real cost of a war that need not have been fought.

    What is not painfully hard to say nor write, Mr. Cohen, is that you’re an idiot and your life has been wasted. Of course you want to point your finger at the President, but how about pointing a finger at your-damn-self and all of your fellow journalists – just for a change. Wasn’t it the journalists that forced an end to the first war against Saddam Hussein with idiot reports and photos about “The Highway of Death”? Wasn’t it the journalists who trumpeted that Clinton’s asprin factory bombing was a blow against terrorism, and his bravery at firing off a cruise missile at Iraq’s Defense Ministery, how brave and bold Clinton was for withdrawing our troops from Somalia with their collective tail between their collective legs. And now you have the temerity to champion the same strategy that led us to 9-11;

    The way to protect our soldiers is not to double our losses but to agree on a sensible withdrawal policy. Particularly for the Bush administration, all this concern for the troops comes a bit late and smacks of insincerity. The war may not have started with a lie, but it seems it will end with one.

    Yep, the lie told about an honorable exit from Iraq before the job is finished – told by you and your journalist buddies.

    “When members of Congress pursue an antiwar strategy that’s been called ‘slow bleed,’ they’re not supporting the troops, they are undermining them,” Cheney said last week. Bush, who is a softer, gentler Cheney, has said substantially the same thing. “I think you can be against my decision and support the troops, absolutely,” the president said last month. “But the proof will be whether or not you provide them the money necessary to do the mission.” In other words, the only acceptable way to support the troops is, paradoxically, to put more and (it seems) more of them in danger. The present “surge” threatens to become an open-ended escalation. The war goes on.

    What makes this “surge” an open ended escalation is the refusal of the media and the Left to shut up and stop encouraging the jihadists. I’m not saying you should shut up for all eternity, neither is the Vice President. Just shut up long enough to make the jihadists at least think there’s no way out, no way he can win the war.

    Unless, of course you want to “waste” more American lives.

  • Gathering of Eagles wrap up

    Wow! What a weekend. I’d like to thank the people who visited more than 43,000 times since 3pm Saturday and special thanks to Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, Curt at Flopping Aces, Michele Malkin, Crotchety Old Bastard and all of the rest of the bloggers who linked me up to their front pages. I’m honored.  

    Mostly, I was truly humbled by the reaction and the traffic. The emails were just wonderful, even if I didn’t answer them all. Thanks so much. But honestly, it was just a continuation of the high I felt from being surrounded by my brothers and having several exhilerating discussions with them on Saturday morning. It was probably one of the best weekends I’ve ever had. Thanks to all.

    I suppose I should mention that I was linked up to less savory websites, too. I deleted the trackbacks, pingbacks and brokebacks because (mostly to my glee) they had some nasty things to say about me and us in general. The worst, though, were over at (surprise, surprise) the Huffington Post. And that’s mainly what this blog entry is about – clearing up some of the misperceptions of this blog and some of the reports I read from the MSM.

    First to the throngs of Leftists who are mad because I didn’t approve your comments, ya’all pretty much said the same things – it was as if you were working off talking points or something (that would never happen, though, would it). So I put up one negative comment that pretty much said everything the rest of you said.

    The same thing was evident in the HuffPo comments. Everyone was just yapping about “why aren’t the veterans over in Iraq if they support the war so much” – mostly the reason we veterans aren’t in Iraq fighting the al Qaida is that we’re too old and the military won’t take us back. Most of us probably would go – but, one thing we all realized looking at our generation all around us at the march – we’re all pretty old. One veteran told me, “Geez, we’re older than the WWII guys were when we came back from Vietnam.”

    But, betcherass, alot of us have our kids over there. So quit wearing out that stupid, ignorant cliche and find something else to bleat incessantly.

    And, yes, the video I took of the protesters’ area could be deceiving – if you didn’t bother to read that I had written that I got there at 8:30 am – 3 1/2 hours before the march started – while the hippies were still enjoying room service in the $600/night hotel room that their parents had paid for. The videos compared the participation early on. I know reading comprehension is problem for the Left who like uber-life-sized puppets and pretty yellow signs with Hitler-Bush pictures, so I’ll give ya’all a pass on that one. It was my fault so next time I’ll put up crayon drawings.

    And, yes, I am worse than Fox News (or Faux News which ya’all think is so clever apparently) – they’re the number one cable news network. We’re all worse than Fox News – that’s why they’re #1.

    But Fox News was just as bad as the other networks in their coverage of this event. All of the news trucks were parked on Constitution Ave – the little “S” part that divided the veterans from the Leftists. They were directly behind me as I filmed the protester’s part of the area. There were no TV news people interviewing the veterans early in the morning. They had thousands of people they could have been interviewing before the parade of clowns and they didn’t take advantage of that opportunity. Now, I know the Left is more spectacular and more flambouyant, but c’mon guys – you missed half of the story this weekend.

    As far as numbers go, I’d say the estimates of 30k veterans is probably right – but I’m no math whiz. If you look at the map of the event I posted from the Gathering of Eagles on Thursday night below, veterans occupied the area from the shaded area right (east) of the Vietnam Memorial all the way west to the Lincoln Memorial – every square inch, with exception of the part that the Park Police had fenced off around the Wall. 

    The Left was pretty much confined to the area west of the “S” portion of Constitution. Granted there were probably more that straggled up at the last minute, but that area was never full the whole time I was there.

    I read some report from AP  (can’t find the original story now, AP’s changed their links so often since Saturday) that claimed some poor hippie girl had her sign torn up and she was crying to reporters that some big biker dudes had accosted her; I doubt that it happened. For one thing, I can’t find the story on the web except where it’s been quoted by bloggers and as we’ve learned from dealing with AP, stories that turn out to be untrue, mysteriously disappear.

    The veterans stayed south and east of Constitution. The only Leftists that ventured over to our side were trying to provoke veterans. They paraded through our ranks waving their signs and shouting at the top of their lungs – even calling us “baby killers”. I guess some platitudes never get old. And most of them were tiny hippie girls. I never saw any of them get physically abused or their signs taken away – although I can’t vouch for any comments that might have been sent their way. All-in-all, veterans remained fairly civil. I guess, generally, they just wanted to protect the Wall, like they said – and they respect free speech. A concept lost on the Left.

    But I will admit, I saw one 60s-era hippie (who’d probably been at the Lincoln Memorial since 60s in a pot-induced state) get his sign mishandled on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The sign was something clever like “End the Bush-it” or a reasonable facimile. A burley biker-type grabbed the pole the hippie had holding up his sign. Immediately, three other burley biker-types forced the first to release the guy’s sign and the old hippie went merrily on his way – uninjured and feeling safe deep in veteran territory – waving what he thought was a clever slogan. Veterans policed their own ranks – and they aren’t so pleased as the Left to get thrown in jail, or have their own thrown in jail. They have jobs.

    And I’d like to know which part of my original report could be considered spewing hate. Sure, I don’t like ya’all on the Left, but the only thing I really “hate”, per se, is wet toilet paper. So I don’t know where ya’all got that.

    I guess none of ya’all see the irony in claiming that my videos and photos are somehow misleading, while at the same time you claim that you put more trust in the national news organizations’ pictures and videos. We all took pictures and posted pictures that would appeal to our particular audiences – to say one set is more trustworthy than the other is just lying to yourselves. I never claimed that the media’s pictures or videos were false – merely that they didn’t bother to show both sides. I, at least, showed both sides. I guess that’s spewing hate, huh?

    But what really gets me ta-gigglin’ is the email I got that claimed I somehow manufactured the number of veterans in my pictures. I guess if you weren’t there and your only frame of reference was that you saw the shoddy coverage by all of the networks, you’d doubt the numbers. But, please don’t tell me what I saw and filmed, OK? I’ll admit that I own a copy of Adobe Photoshop – but that damn thing keeps me confused. I’ve just recently figured out the cropping thing. Thanks for thinking I’m more adept at this computer stuff than I really am, though. I guess it’s like the “Bush is an evil genius/Bush is an idiot” paradox ya’all have goin’.

    And Michele Malkin’s prediction that the Left would put up the Washington Post’s one picture of a veteran in full blown insanity mode came to fruition on a leftist blog called “The Populist” (which seems to have a partner bog called DC Direct both written by someone in Michigan. Editor’s Note: The hardcase just sent me a comment and announced he’s not from California, so I’ve adjusted the entry to reflect what his IP address said. I’d post the comment, except he accused me of doing things with the President I’ve never been close enough to him to accomplish. I just broke the links to his websites because he doesn’t deserve the traffic) who wrote a piece called “Gathering of Eagles, and Just a Right Wing Nutjob Concert” which used the stereotype of mean biker-dudes who “flexed their collective testosterone stoked muscles and fists at those concerned about this so-called War in Iraq.”

    But on the other hand, several Pro-War rally participants stooped to destroying other people’s personal property. A sign was ripped up, by a Pro War Attendee. Which shows the new low that this Pro-War, Right Wing nut jobs will go to. To further their cause. 

    So this person who didn’t bother to attend, succumbs to the stereotypes and linkless news reports. I’d like to see some proof that some Leftists’ signs got destroyed. I didn’t see it and I walked the whole area about 10 times during the 4 hours I was there. That’s why my pictures are of the whole event, not some little corner of it like most of the media’s pictures.

    I resent being called “pro-war” – no one is more anti-war more than those who have to fight the wars. However, we’re not intellectually crippled by the fact that, in some cases, war is a neccessary evil. If you fool yourself into thinking that all wars can be avoided with a few kind words, you’re more a danger to yourself than anyone else.

    And you don’t try to make yourself sound more intelligent by insinuating that Michele Malkin and Ann Coulter are secretly lesbian lovers, gumball.

    YouTube has a video of one protester who tried to get to Wall – she was stopped by the Park Police and a companion with more commonsense. So, she flips off the vets.