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

Category: Media

  • MSNBC fact checkers declared dead

    TSO sends an article in keeping with our media fact-checking theme today. It’s about a veteran who depends on his disability check being declared dead by a dead government agency;

    The U.S. Veterans Administration has declared him dead four times, but Miller, a Brevard County resident, has refuted the claims.

    “To me, it’s stupid. I can’t die but one time. They have killed me four times,” he said.

    Miller, a former drill sergeant, served 10 years in the Army. He said he lives on a government pension and Social Security.

    Yeah, there hasn’t been a Veterans Administration since March 15, 1989. You know what else I discovered? If you do a fricken Google search for Veterans Administration, the search takes you the the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. In fact, it’s impossible to filter out DVA links if you’re looking for some information about the VA.

    Of course, the terrible part of the story is the bureaucratic terror that Jerry Miller is experiencing. Maybe he should make stories up about his career like Matthis or Joe Cryer and the DVA will leave him alone. We certainly can’t get the DVA’s OIG to look into their pasts when we supply them with documentation.

  • S&S admits they were duped

    S&S admits they were duped

    Larry-Marquez-S-and-S1

    Stars & Stripes just published a follow up to the story we did yesterday about Larry Marquez who claimed to have served in Cambodia while he was 16.

    The word I’m getting from people in his unit is that when his first sergeant called him in, after word came down from the brigade commander after S&S’s inquiry, Marquez went all secret squirrel on the first sergeant and said he couldn’t talk about his time in Cambodia. Of course, the 1SG wasn’t hearing that shit and got Marquez to fess up to his deception.

    I’m glad that Stars & Stripes came around after being dickish yesterday. They made the story more about me than Marquez, which feeds my massive ego and makes me feel a little dickish myself. But S&S is off of my shit list now. Thanks to Martin Kuz, the author, for not blowing off my emails when I made the first inquiries.

  • The wayback machine

    Today Real Clear Politics’ Morning Edition very slyly ran an Airpower article from 1972 titled The Press and the TET Offensive: a flawed institution under stress.

    The Tet offensive of 1968 must surely be regarded as one of history’s chameleon campaigns. When the North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops assaulted targets throughout the Republic of Vietnam at the end of January 1968, they expected to trigger an uprising of the South Vietnamese people against their government. Despite some spectacular early successes, the attacks failed. The South Vietnamese did not embrace the cause; thousands of sappers, assault troops, and cadres met their deaths before overwhelming allied counterattacks; and the insurgent infrastructure was so decimated at the end of the fighting that no large enemy offensives could be mounted for four years.

    Nonetheless, the Tet offensive was a turning point in the war, and the North Vietnamese were successful in altering the course of the war far beyond the accomplishments of their army. The American people were shocked that the Vietcong/ North Vietnamese Army (VC/NV A) possessed the strength to make the widespread strikes. In the public clamor that followed, President Lyndon Johnson announced a bombing halt and withdrew from the 1968 Presidential race. The policy of Vietnamization was launched, and many Americans concluded that the war was too costly to pursue.

    It has always been clear that the press played a vital role in this dramatic shift of opinion. It has been evident that dissatisfaction with the war among media opinion-makers helped form an American public attitude of discouragement.

    Written at the very tail end of our war in Vietnam the article details the ignorant and sometimes ideologically duplicitous role the media played in spinning the Tet Offensive. Of course a substantial amount of contemporary scholarship has covered this subject in great depth but to see that, even then, those in the know were well aware of the media’s role in shaping the vital public perception of our wars is quite the juxtaposition of the understanding of the war as portrayed by popular culture. There isn’t much new here but, as we fight out own wars at home against corrupted media institutions, perhaps it will serve as reinforcement of the very real, very tangible, stakes 40 years later.

  • Getting ahead of the PTSD thing

    Dirty Mick sends us a link to the story of Jason Edward Prostrollo, 25, a veteran who was shot by police in a stand-off in Scottsdale, Arizona early Saturday.

    The incident unraveled just after 4 a.m. when a 35-year-old woman called police reporting that her boyfriend was in a fight with another man who had a knife.

    While police were responding to the couple’s residence near 136th Street and Via Linda, they received another call allegedly prompted by the same suspect.

    The caller was a cabdriver who said a male customer held a knife to his throat and forced him to drive back to the neighborhood where he was picked up, from which the first call came.

    When police arrived, they called the female victim and her 50-year-old boyfriend out of the house. Both victims were unharmed.

    The suspect shortly followed with the pool cues in hand, Clark said.

    Apparently, what happened next; the police released a dog, “Raider”, on Prostrollo at the same time that another police officer fired two shots, one round hit and killed Prostrollo and the other wounded Raider, who, by all accounts, is recovering nicely.

    Some of Prostrollo actions as described in the media could lead folks to think that Prostrollo was a victim of PTSD, but Dirty Mick writes to tell us that Prostrollo has been a little nutty since high school and that this has little to do with his military service or his deployment to the war against terror. Dirty Mick must know the guy because he’s going to the funeral along with Operator Dan.

    So, this is a preemptive move to warn any journalists who are doing a Google search for background on Prostrollo, that we can put you in contact with people who will dispute your claim that Prostrollo suffered from PTSD and died as a result of his military service.

  • Who wrote this smoldering turd?

    Usually at Associated Press, they put their names on their articles, but this smelly turd is unsigned, and whoever regurgitated this bullshit is obviously embarrassed by it.

    The Navy SEAL operation that freed two Western hostages in Somalia is representative of the Obama administration’s pledge to build a smaller, more agile military force that can carry out surgical counterterrorist strikes to cripple an enemy.

    That’s a strategy much preferred to the land invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that have cost so much American blood and treasure over the past decade. The contrast to a full-bore invasion is stark: A small, daring team storms a pirate encampment on a near-moonless night, kills nine kidnappers and whisks the hostages to safety.

    Yeah, that’s how you win a war…by surgical strikes at point targets. It worked so well when the French and Dutch Resistance movements employed it as their singular strategy and they beat the Germans and drove them from their countries with pin pricks…oh, wait…no, they didn’t.

    Not to be discounted is the feel-good moment such missions give the American public, a counterbalance to the continued casualties in Afghanistan.

    Yeah, that’s how you win a war…make people feel good in an election year. Swell.

    So if we can arrange to have an enemy that just kidnaps our citizens, wars will be all gravy.

    Notice how the article uses Panetta’s term “agile” to describe the new military, implying that today’s military is unreasonably bloated and cumbersome. I’d like them to point to one successful military endeavor in history which was won because the force was merely “agile”. I suspect that this will is only the first of many articles supporting the Obama military by being completely void of substance and facts to support their wishes and dreams.

  • Naw, this ain’t class warfare at all

    The Washington Post this morning decides that for some reason they’d take some shots at Mitt Romney’s income taxes by publishing a chart from Citizens for Tax Justice who they say “is liberal-leaning but nonpartisan”. Yeah, I could almost imagine the Post calling an organization like the Cato Institute or the Heritage Fountation “right-leaning, but non-partisan”. But here’s the chart, which, you already know shows Romney taxes going down;

    But the cheapest shot is that they still call it “the Bush tax cut for the rich” like you can’t say any of those words without the other in Liberal Land. I seem to remember the whole country in an uproar when the bush tax cuts were about to expire and everyone suddenly realized that everyone’s taxes were going up, not just the rich.

    But, me personally, I hate taxes and I don’t trust anyone else to do my taxes. My taxes hover around 5% of my real income because I take every tax credit I can find. It might go up a few points this year because I used up all of my home improvement tax credits last year.

    The difference between me and the Washington Post, I don’t wish for anyone to pay higher taxes than they do. If Romney legally takes steps to avoid paying taxes, good for him. If he has plan to reduce taxes for the rest of us, good for him again. I’m not jealous because other people pay a lower rate than me, and I’m not jealous if they make more money than me, they probably worked harder at it than I did.

  • Ombudsman urges Post to “scrutinize” Obama

    The Washington Post’s ombudsman,Patrick B. Pexton, writes a column this weekend advising the newspaper to “Scrutinize President Obama’s record” after he read the reportage that preceded the 2008 election;

    I think there was way too little coverage of his record in the Illinois Senate and U.S. Senate, for example, with one or two notably good exceptions. But there were hard-hitting stories too, even a very tough one on Michelle Obama’s job at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

    And that’s what The Post needs to do in covering his reelection campaign this year: be hard-hitting on his record and provide fresh insight and plenty of context to put the past three rough years into perspective.

    Yeah, this me not holding my breath.

    Of course, if the Post had scrutinized Obama’s previous legislative record, the would have had to admit that record was light on actual performance, and he probably wouldn’t have been the nominee and we’d have another Clinton presidency (because admit it, John McCain wasn’t winning against anyone that year). Obama shouldn’t have been in the Senate based on his performance in the Illinois legislature

    Pexton continues that the Post should highlight Obama’s performance in office as president. Yeah, that’s pretty sparse, too. What isn’t sparse is his drive towards partisan division focusing on politicizing the Executive Branch. Things like the Fast and Furious failure, the Solyndra debacle, the Philadelphia Black Panther prosecutions which never happened, losing the house to Republicans, failure to go ahead with the Keystone Project, failure to approve oil exploration in Alaska, the Gulf cleanup, the failure to capitalize on the riots in Iran, compromising on the Afghanistan surge, well, you get the idea.

    But the Post is too focused on defeating any Republican candidate than on informing the public. Pexton’s column is just the Post’s way of saying “See, we’re not biased”, and nothing will change.

  • Time and Ron Capps make me grab the BP meds

    Jeff sends us a link to this in Time magazine in the discussion of the CNN article we talked about the other day;

    Yeah, it pissed me off at first, too. Author Ron Capps, supposedly a veteran, raised my blood pressure even higher with his first line;

    NEWS FLASH: The new threat to American security seem to be the very people we laud for providing our security: the veterans who fought America’s wars.

    Two recent reports by reputable journalism outlets (CNN and the Christian Science Monitor ) have re-positioned the “psycho-veteran back from the war” scare front and center.

    Luckily for Capps and my cardiologist, that’s as bad as it got;

    It seems to me that these murders have spawned a new round of “if it bleeds it leads” journalism rather than a discussion. Both articles feature a number of reasoned comments by professionals in mental-health care and policy. And both articles seem to roundly ignore the reasoned advice of the experts that two incidents are not a trend.

    In their favor, both articles spend significant time detailing the real trend of large numbers of returning combat veterans needing and seeking help from DoD and the VA. Both articles also highlight the grim fact of 18 veterans’ suicides per day. This is helpful.

    What’s not helpful is the note that we should expect “more and more of this,” made by one of CNN’s experts being echoed in the headline. What we should expect more of is combat veterans returning to overfilled and under-resourced health care facilities. CNN and the Monitor might focus their light on these issues to greater effect.

    Thanks, Ron for giving us a voice in the liberal media, for a change. Just so you know, I was halfway through dialing the subscription department to cancel mine, by the time I got to your point.