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

Category: Media

  • Secretary of the Army; comparison

    With nearly every news show and news paper focusing on the resignation of the Army Secretary Francis Harvey over the Walter Reed disgrace, I began wondering how the same media covered Bill Clinton’s first choice for the Secretary of the Army, John Shannon;

    THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

    Washington – The Army’s acting secretary, John Shannon, has been charged with shoplifting a woman’s blouse and skirt at a post exchange near the Pentagon, the Army said yesterday.

    The incident occurred Thursday at the Army PX at Ft. Myer, Va., said Army spokesman Col. Steve Rausch. A store detective apprehended Shannon for allegedly shoplifting a woman’s blouse and skirt, the spokesman said.

    Shannon, 59, was charged with misdemeanor theft of government property, an offense that carries a maximum penalty of 1 year in prison and a $100,000 fine, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Chesnut, a federal prosecutor in Alexandria, Va.

    Four one-line paragraphs.

    And the New York Times;

    August 28, 1993, Saturday
    By ERIC SCHMITT, (Special to The New York Times); National Desk
    Late Edition – Final, Section 1, Page 6, Column 1, 371 words

    The Acting Secretary of the Army, John W. Shannon, was placed on administrative leave today after being accused of shoplifting, the Army said. Mr. Shannon was accused of shoplifting a skirt and blouse valued at about $30 from the Army post exchange at Fort Myer, Va., on Thursday….

    Page 6, 371 words. A little different than this story in yesterday’s Times which is two .html pages long. And not a word in the Washington Post’s archives about the 1993 incident.

    Seems to me that an Army Secretary who shoplifts has more personal deficiencies than one who doesn’t personally inspect every building the Army owns. And, in case anyone is wondering what happened to John Shannon, the Clinton Administration kept him on the Pentagon payroll for eight years as a paid consultant.

  • Conflicted reviews

    Yesterday, I read Anne Applebaum’s reportage of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of a new book entitled “Infidel”. I recommended the piece to people around the office here because Ms. Applebaum’s “The Gall to Speak Her Mind” was such a well-written, unbiased article about this brave Somalian/Dutch woman who is currently targeted by Dutch of “Asian decent” to suffer the same fate as her co-producer, Theo VanGogh;

    For those who haven’t encountered her name yet, suffice it to say that Hirsi Ali is a European of African descent with an almost American rags-to-riches life story. As a young woman, she escaped from her Somali family while en route to an arranged marriage in Canada, made her way to Holland, learned Dutch, attended college and eventually won a seat in the Dutch parliament. Along the way, she also made an intellectual journey — beautifully described in her new book, “Infidel”— from tribal Somalia, through fundamentalism, and into Western liberalism. After Sept. 11, 2001, horrified by some of the things Osama bin Laden was saying, she reached for the Koran to confirm a hunch: “I hated to do it,” she wrote, “because I knew that I would find bin Laden’s quotations in there.”

    Partly as a result she lost her faith, concluding that the Koran spreads a culture that is “brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war,” and that should not be tolerated by European liberals. The conclusion led her into a series of controversies — and to the murder of a Dutch filmmaker with whom she had co-produced a film about the mistreatment of Muslim women. The murderer was the son of Moroccan immigrants, born in Holland; he pinned a letter threatening Hirsi Ali onto his victim’s chest. Ultimately, she left Holland for Washington, where she remains, ensconced at the American Enterprise Institute.

    I commend Ms. Applebaum for giving unbiased exposure to this brave woman. I highly recommend reading the piece as well the book.

    But then, I see, from Little Green Footballs, Newsweek isn’t so kind. Neither are all of the reviewers at Amazon. For those reasons alone, I’d buy the book.

  • Washington Post’s profits fall

    According to the Wall Street Journal’s Josee Rose and Jonathan Vuocolo, the Washington Post’s fourth quarter income fell nearly 7%;

    The Washington-based publisher’s net income fell to $95.5 million, or $9.97 a share, from $102.4 million, or $10.65 a share, a year earlier.

    Results from the latest quarter included a charge of $3.30 a share for early-retirement buyouts among other items. Results from the year-earlier quarter included items such as a charge of $1.80 a share associated with Hurricane Katrina and other hurricanes.

    Operating revenue rose 10%, to $1.04 billion from $948.7 million a year earlier, due to growth at the company’s education, television broadcasting and cable television divisions, offset by declines at the newspaper and magazine publishing divisions.

    While the Washington Post faces the same advertising pressure as other publishing companies, it finds relief from those problems because of its Kaplan and television operations.

    I hate to take comfort in others’ misery, but the Washington Post has made it so easy for me to abandon that particular trait.

  • EJ Dionne is still smearing like it’s 1998

    My favorite Leftist moron (you can hear him lisping as you read), EJ Dionne proves that he doesn’t understand the reality of the war against terrorists in today’s Washington Post;

    The fabricate-and-smear cycle illustrated so dramatically during the case of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby explains why President Bush is failing to rally support for the latest iteration of his Iraq policy. The administration’s willingness at the outset to say anything, no matter how questionable, to justify the war has destroyed its credibility.

    He could be talking about the Clinton Administration, couldn’t he? He completely disregards the fact that Joe Wilson has lied more times to the American people than the entire Democrat Party has lied to the American people in it’s two-hundred-year history. He claims he was sent to Nigeria by the Vice President (in his New York Times opinion piece) whic turned out to be false. He went on to claim that his wife had nothing to do with his being sent to Nigeria, which turned out to be false as well. 

    Wilson claimed that there was no evidence that Hussein had been shopping for uranium in Nigeria, which is also false. Wilson claimed that the Bush Administration “outed” his wife the secret squirrel CIA agent, yet it turns out that Wilson himself outed her to General Paul Valelly.

    So why does Dionne bring up that old hack again? To compare it to Cheney’s statement last week about Blinky the Botox Queen;

    Yet Cheney has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. His latest demon is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom he accuses of validating al-Qaeda’s objectives.

    “Al-Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will,” Cheney told ABC News on Friday by way of explaining his earlier attack on the speaker. “That’s their fundamental underlying strategy, that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we’ll quit and go home.”

    Cheney added: “And my statement was that if we adopt the Pelosi policy, that then we will validate the strategy of al-Qaeda. I said it, and I meant it.”

    Dionne doesn’t think this is productive (much like Pelosi herself in her statement that I reported last week);

    No doubt he did, and those words illustrate the administration’s political methodology from the very beginning of its public campaign against Iraq. Back in 2002 and early 2003, it browbeat a reluctant country into this war by making assertions about an Iraqi nuclear program that proved to be groundless and by inventing ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that didn’t exist.

    Then, once our troops were committed, anyone who had second thoughts could be trashed and driven back as a pro-terrorist weakling. The quagmire would be self-perpetuating: Once you checked in, you could never leave.

    Um, EJ, think maybe because your side (ya know the side that the editorial staff of your own paper thinks is “alarmingly uneducated about conditions in Iraq” ) has been lying since the beginning. Can I mention the “quagmire” word to which you and your buddies have been clinging since before the troops set foot in Iraq? Before the first sand storm hit on the second day, ya’all were invoking Viet Nam (which you were also responsible for prolonging with the rest of your chattering class).

    In fact, the crowd at the Huffington Post, more specifically, Paul Abrams can’t resist the urge to invoke Viet Nam even today – as if to make my point for me, and proving you a yammering fool.

    And in case you haven’t noticed, EJ, dear boy, the Left are completely pro-terrorist, and complete weaklings on the war against terrorists. You blast our troops for minute violations of the law of land warfare, and completely overlook the enemies’ huge, nose-on-your-face violations. Ya’all are willing to forgive complete nutjobs, while warning that we can’t stop people who intend to do us real harm. What’s up with that, EJ?

    And now Ms. Rice is jumping in, too. According to Eric Pfeiffer at the Washington Times this morning;

    Miss Rice strongly criticized the Democrats’ plans, some of which would also restrict what actions U.S. troops may take or put impossible conditions on their funding.
        “I think policies that diminish the flexibility of the commanders, the commander in chief, but especially the commanders in the field, that disrupt the normal process of allowing the executive branch to determine things like training times and so forth, this would be a problem,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.”
        She said that while “it’s very important for to have the oversight role when it comes to the execution of policy in the field, there has to be a clear relationship between the commander in chief and the commanders in the field.”
        “If you ever disrupt that chain, then you’re going to have the worst of micromanagement of military affairs, and it’s always served us badly in the past,” Miss Rice said.

    So, I guess EJ is going to get on the name-calling bandwagon against the Madam Secretary now.

    And Carl Levin admits that he wants to enable terrorists;

    Mr. Levin said Democrats still plan to bring forward a resolution that reverses the congressional authorization for President Bush to invade Iraq. Democrats have said they would approve a new resolution limiting the scope of Mr. Bush’s ability to wage war in Iraq, with an aim to bring home most U.S. forces from the country by March 2008.
        “Hopefully, we’re going to come with a resolution which is going to modify, in effect, the previous resolution that was very broad,”

    “Well, then we have a constitutional battle on our hands because this is a binding resolution,” he said. “It would be very difficult, I think, for him to sustain that position given the fact that he has relied so heavily on our resolution authorizing him to go to war in the first place.”

    Doesn’t sound like any of the Democrats want the US to win, does it, Dionne, Jr.? In fact, it seems that Democrats are doing their best to lose while trying to rewrite the Constitution. Doesn’t sound like the American thing to do, does it?

  • Global warming

    That global warming is getting all over the driveway again.

  • I guess ya hafta be there to understand

    After Tony Blair announced that the UK was drawing down 1/3 of it’s presence in Iraq, the whiteflag Republicans started freaking out according to the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker;

    “What I’m worried about is that the American public will be quite perplexed by the president adding forces while our principal ally is subtracting forces,” said Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), a longtime war supporter who opposes Bush’s troop increase. “That is the burden we are being left with here.”

    The notion that the British pullback actually signals success sounds like bad spin, added Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). “I think it’s Alice in Wonderland looking through the looking glass,” he said.

    It’s almost as if they didn’t believe the President when he said we wouldn’t be in Iraq one more minute than we needed to be there. Blair is only pulling 1/3 fewer troops than he has now because THEY’RE NOT NEEDED. When was the last time we heard of a major assault in predominantly Shi’ite Basra?

    In fact on the second internet page of the WaPo story cooler heads are quoted;

    “What the British are doing, and what we really need to do, is to tease out the cultural complexities of this thing,” said Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest (R-Md.). “On the one hand, they are signaling to all the Iraqi people, whatever sect they are — Sunnis, Shias, Kurds — they are not going to be an occupying force. That’s a powerful signal to send. And the other signal is that they are passing the torch to the Iraqis, who are the only ones who can handle this ancient — I’d say primitive — sectarian dispute.”

    The White House argued that comparing the British situation in Basra and the U.S. position in Baghdad fundamentally distorts reality. The south, where the British have been in charge, has no Sunni insurgency and far less violence than Baghdad or Anbar. The coalition plan all along has been to pull out foreign troops when an area is ready for Iraqi control, the White House said.

    The announcement was hardly a surprise to Bush Administration despite the WaPo’s opinion posited as a headline that it was awkward timing. Sharon Behn of the Washington Times quotes Secretary of State Rice;

    “The coalition remains intact,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said during a visit to Berlin. “It is the plan that — as it is possible to transfer responsibilities to the Iraqis — coalition forces would no longer be needed.”

    And the Brits aren’t withdrawing completely. Apparently Prince Harry is being deployed to Iraq in the Spring;

    Harry – a second lieutenant – has expressed his desire to serve alongside his comrades in Iraq, saying that there was “no way” he was going to undergo rigorous training and then stay away from the battlefield. He graduated last year from Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

    Good on him! That might help the British understand why soldiers go to war. Might.

    According to BBC News, Tony Blair insists that he’s not opposed to sending more troops if they’re needed in Iraq again;

    However, when he was asked about reversing that decision on the Today programme, he said: “I don’t want to get into speculating about that because we have the full combat capability that’s there.

    “So, if we’re needed to go back in any special set of circumstances we can, but that’s not the same as then increasing back the number.” 

    So how the Washington Post considers this “awkward”, I have no idea.

    UPDATE; By way of Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, I discovered that Reihl World View has a link up to a January 11, 2007 BBC article announcing Blair’s plan to withdraw some troops from Iraq.

  • Washington Post’s Walter Reed story

    Dana Priest and Anne Hull have a widely circulated story in the Washington Post today about the horrible condition of Building 18 at Walter Reed Army Medial Center, in DC. I haven’t been in the building, but I can imagine they aren’t exagerating much. Having spent two decades in the Army myself, I’m familiar with these kinds of conditions – the conditions that the Carters and Clintons of the world handed us.

    I’m certainly not excusing the Army from culpability here. They should have known that in a city where half of the population are journalists, it seems at times, they were going to get caught at this.

    The main facility at WRAMC is state of the art. I eat breakfast there every Saturday morning (the only place in town that serves SOS on a biscuit – the main thing I missed when I retired). It’s clean and relatively quiet and one of the reasons we moved here back in 1999 – the medical service is the best of any military or Veterans’ facility I’ve seen. My wife and I have both been under the knife at Walter Reed and a better bunch of surgeons and staff you’ll find no where.

    But, the Army has always treated soldiers to bad living conditions for extended temporary assignments. Always. I’m not excusing it, just saying it. And it’s one of the reasons that Walter Reed is closing its doors and moving to the Bethesda Naval facilities. Aside from the horrible labor force available in the area, the out buildings, apart from the main hospital, are nearly 100 years old. Its too expensive for the Army to repair them, especially with leftists who’ve suddenly become “fiscally responsible” and demanding that the government spend on social programs while facilties neccessary for defense are crumbling.

    I could go on-and-on about facilities where we had to live and work because the priority has always been on equipment, training and bullets, but I won’t bore you (if you promise not to bore me with “I walked ten miles through snowdrifts to get to school” stories).

    But I will take exception with one particular part of the story;

    Family members who speak only Spanish have had to rely on Salvadoran housekeepers, a Cuban bus driver, the Panamanian bartender and a Mexican floor cleaner for help. Walter Reed maintains a list of bilingual staffers, but they are rarely called on, according to soldiers and families and Walter Reed staff members.

    My wife, a native Panamanian on the full time medical staff in one of the wards there, regularly helps spanish-only family members, nearly daily at Walter Reed. There are only a few Salvadorans employed at Walter Reed, and no bartenders (what’s a bartender doing at a hospital?) or cuban bus drivers that I know of, so is this just literary liscense? Going on the story of one Puerto Rican lady (how’d she get to Washington – sign language?) is fairly disengenuous.

    “They’ve been behind from Day One,” said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), who headed the House Government Reform Committee, which investigated problems at Walter Reed and other Army facilities. “Even the stuff they’ve fixed has only been patched.”

    Who is “they”, Congressman? The Army, the Administration? So Congress already knows about this? So what are they doing about it – since they’re the ones who fund this stuff. Maybe Murtha, et al. should do their jobs instead of trying to be generals.

    When the war first started, I made the rounds a coupla times and wrote down soldiers’ names and hometowns then faxed their congressmen that their constituents were in town. I got few responses and some responses came too late (Republicans were just as guilty as Democrats, by the way). Maybe if Congress got off it’s lazy ass for a change, things would be different. Maybe if they’d focus on THEIR JOB instead everybody else’s.

    And where was the Post seven years ago on this? Building 18 didn’t fall into disrepair beginning January 20, 2001. Oh, that’s right they were too busy writing stories about the wonderful job that the Clinton Administration had done lowering the budget deficit on the backs of the military.

  • Lisping sissy advises Democrats: “make it about Bush”

    EJ Dionne, columnist for the Washington Post, gives advice to the anti-war crowd in Congress;

    The challenge to critics of the war is to make the debate about Bush, not about themselves, and to make clear that the president has rebuffed all efforts to pursue a bipartisan path out of Iraq, beginning with his rejection of the core recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, headed by James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton.

    UM, EJ, where have you been the last six years? If you hadn’t noticed, everything has always been about the President. And it’s always been clear that the “core recommendations” of the ISG were pie-in-the-sky, fruity recommendations anyway.

    I know little EJ wants us to negotiate with Iran (which underlies his idiot statement about the ISG recommendations) but how are we supposed to sit down with a government whose lead politician says things like this and this. Hardly seems like a rational person that we can trust to keep his word, does it?

    And, EJ, my boy, tell me what good a “bi-partisan solution” to the war in Iraq would do our troops? There’s a way to win that war, and there’s a way to lose that war, but there is no way to compromise between winning and losing that’ll make everyone happy.

    We’ve been compromising up to this point (despite the rantings of the Left) and that’s why we’ve been there so long, taken so many casualties, and spent so much money on this war – because we’ve been trying to asuage the guilt of the Left for making them vote for the war in the first place. We need another Sherman, Patton or Grant, that’s what we need, not bi-partisan compromises.

    Of course Dionne endorses the Murtha proposal;

    For now, the war’s opponents are focused on three strategies. One would be to cut off funds for the war, but there is currently no majority in either house for this. A second approach, expected to come from Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), would propose restrictions on troop deployments — for example, forbidding the redeployment of units that have been home for less than a year and imposing substantial training requirements on the troops who are sent.

    The Murtha measure would at least force a much-needed debate on the damage this war has done to our armed forces and the extraordinary burdens being borne by the brave minority of Americans who serve. It would also sidestep the political damage of doing anything that could be construed by Bush’s supporters as “failing to support our troops.”

    Yeah, we need more debate. Oswego, NY needs more snow, too. And the damage to our troops has already been done, EJ, in case you haven’t been paying attention. There’s already been a recorded incident of your side spitting at a wounded soldier – what more do you need. Murtha cloaks his disdain for the soldiers in pretty phrases about readiness and rest, but he still hates the fact that they might win.

    A third path, offered by Sens. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.), would have Congress revisit its original 2002 Iraq resolution to make clear that the war authorized then (against Saddam Hussein and what turned out to be nonexistent weapons of mass destruction) had nothing to do with putting American troops in the midst of a Muslim civil war now.

    This is a setup to begin impeachment proceedings against the President by changing the rules at the end of the third quarter. I know the Left thinks Biden is a fricken rocket surgeon, but anyone who had to use other people’s research for a college paper probably shouldn’t be held in such high esteem by people who think college education is the answer to all of the world’s problems.

    And Dionne ends his piece with a quote from my very own Congressman – in all of his whining glory, Chris Van Hollen (D-MD);

    “The refusal of the administration to try to work with others to resolve this in a responsible manner has created a very polarized atmosphere,” Van Hollen said. “They’ve refused to listen to anyone else.”

    Maybe, Chris, that’s because you haven’t had a strategy. All you have is “we hate Bush” and “we hate Rumsfeld”. Have you bothered to read the ISG’s recommendations, Chris? It’s fantasy land nonsense written by politicians. Even Sandra Day O’Connor wondered what she even doing in the Group. So did the rest of us.

    Besides, why should the President pay you any notice? You’re not the commander-in-chief, according to the Constitution. You can declare war and fund it and that’s it. Period. The fact that Democrats can’t produce a coherent policy on Iraq is proof of the genious of our founding fathers. There is no compromise to victory – unless of course, victory is what you’re trying to avoid.

    So, I guess the whole point of today’s post is that EJ Dionne, John Murtha, Joe Biden and Chris Von Hollen are not generals – they’re political creatures looking for a political solution to a complex problem – none of them have had to lead troops in combat, none of them understand how their idiot ramblings affect the war and our enemies, so all of them should sit down and stfu. Especially, Little EJ Dionne.