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

Category: Media

  • Guns and class

    In this morning’s Washington Post, Paul Duggan does his level best to make gun ownership in DC an issue of class since his attempts at making gun ownership immoral have failed;

    In the 2½ years since the U.S. Supreme Court ended the District’s handgun ban, hundreds of residents in Washington’s safest, most well-to-do neighborhoods have armed themselves, registering far more guns than people in poorer, crime-plagued areas of the city, according to D.C. police data.

    Well, maybe that’s because the “people in poorer, crime-plagued areas” 1) can’t afford to legally purchase handguns and then jump through hoops of registration the city has arrayed in front of them, 2) already own illegally purchased and unregistered guns, or 3) don’t own anything worth stealing.

    Of course, the Post has to make it look like a class thing to shame the rich liberals into abrogating their responsibility to protect their families and property. Yes, crime in Georgetown and Chevy Chase is infrequent, that doesn’t mean it never happens. And it only happens to the unprepared.

  • Village Voice meets TAH

    Some dimwit clown named Roy Edroso who writes at the Village Voice decided to write about my commentary yesterday on Washington Post’s “Five Myths About Reagan“;

    Yeah, even though Jimmy Carter was the worst President in American History by any intelligent measure (well, until Obama who seems to be on track to take the title), we can expect only tender treatments of the most venomous ex-President from the Post. Prove me wrong, Edroso. And prove me wrong that Desert Storm would not have been a close-run with Jimmy Carter’s army. He had to reinstate draft registration in he face of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Islamic Revolution in 1979, just seven years after Nixon ended the draft when recruiters were forced to recruit from the ranks of boderline retards. The Army had to boot the Cat IVs a few years later when recruiting under Reagan ballooned.

    Like I said in my original post, we wore cold weather gear from the Korean War era, our weaponry was mostly left over from the Vietnam War. Tankers were a generation of armor behind the Soviets while infantry defended the Fulda Gap with the M113 which was first fielded in 1962 Vietnam.

    Under Reagan, we fielded the M1 and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the heavy-barreled M16A2, with which we leaped over the Soviets…and more importantly, the Iraqis.

    And oh, let’s talk about Reagan’s poll numbers…He carried 49 states in 1984. How’s that for poll numbers?

    I hate hippies, especially the smarmy, know-it-alls who rely on the Left’s lies.

  • WashPost: Five Reagan myths

    First of all, I can’t imagine the Washington Post running an article on five myths about Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter, yet on Reagan’s 100th birthday, they have the gall to run an article entitled “Five myths about Ronald Reagan’s legacy“. Of course, none of those myths are about Democrat charges against Ronald Reagan – that would be too much to expect, I suppose. So, author Will Bunch begins;

    1. Reagan was one of our most popular presidents.

    It’s true that Reagan is popular more than two decades after leaving office. A CNN/Opinion Research poll last month gave him the third-highest approval rating among presidents of the past 50 years, behind John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. But Reagan’s average approval rating during the eight years that he was in office was nothing spectacular – 52.8 percent, according to Gallup.

    Yeah, we’ll just disregard the poll and go with the polls that were taken during his presidency. I was on Pennsylvania Avenue the day they brought Ronald Reagan’s mortal coil to lie in state at the Capitol building – along with about a million other people. The Metro ridership record was shattered that day – the record it shattered was Bill Clinton’s inauguration.

    2. Reagan was a tax-cutter.
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    Certainly, Reagan’s boldest move as president was his 1981 tax cut, a sweeping measure that slashed the marginal rate on the wealthiest Americans from 70 percent to 50 percent. The legislation also included smaller cuts in lower tax brackets, as well as big breaks for corporations and the oil industry. But the following year, as the economy was mired in recession and the federal deficit was spiraling out of control, even groups such as the Business Roundtable lobbied Reagan to raise taxes. And he did: The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 was, at the time, the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history.

    Yeah, Reagan signed the tax hikes because the Democrat Congress promised that they’d cut $3 of spending for every $1 of tax increases. Of course, they never did.

    3. Reagan was a hawk.

    Long before he was elected president, Reagan predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse because of communism’s inherent corruption and inefficiency. His forecast proved accurate, but it is not clear that his military buildup moved the process forward. Though Reagan expanded the U.S. military and launched new weapons programs, his real contributions to the end of the Cold War were his willingness to negotiate arms reductions with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his encouragement of Gorbachev as a domestic reformer.

    “It is not clear”, but apparently it’s clear enough to dispute it it an article, huh? When I first went to Germany, also the day of the Desert One fiasco, we were wearing clothes and cold-weather gear left over from the Korean War and equipment left over from fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. The Soviets, in the meantime, were two generations ahead of us in armor. When I left Germany the second time, on the day that the Soviets also left Afghanistan, we had surpassed the capabilities of the Soviets. If we had gone to Desert Storm with Jimmy Carter’s army, we’d have won, but just barely.

    4. Reagan shrank the federal government.

    The number of federal employees grew from 2.8 million to 3 million under Reagan, in large part because of his buildup at the Pentagon. (It took the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton to trim the employee rolls back to 2.7 million.) Reagan also abandoned a campaign pledge to get rid of two Cabinet agencies – Energy and Education – and added a new one, Veterans Affairs.

    Yeah, making the Department of Veterans’ Affairs a Department instead of an agency is what swelled federal government. Never mind that Defense is one of the things that government should be doing. Reagan increased the size of the Defense Department because Jimmy Carter allowed it to atrophy to a dangerous condition. Witness: Desert One. Bill Clinton reduced the ranks, not the civilians at the Pentagon, by buying out careerists, and then within a few years he was trying to bring them back on active duty when his meals-on-wheels programs were affecting morale.

    5. Reagan was a conservative culture warrior.

    Reagan’s contributions to the culture wars of the 1980s were largely rhetorical and symbolic.

    Um, aren’t culture wars “largely rhetorical and symbolic”. I know Democrats are famous for legislating morality and behavior, but that doesn’t mean that Republicans should do the same just to prove their point.

  • Vet arrested near mosque with firecrackers

    1stCavRVN11B sends us news that a Vietnam-era helicopter pilot was arrested in Dearborne, MI yesterday for plotting to illuminate the night sky over a mosque there. It’s funny how the media describes the plot in their headlines. The Chicago Tribune says 63-year-old Roger Stockham was arrested with explosives;

    The Denver Post, meanwhile, says it was fireworks;

    Of course, both articles call them “Class C fireworks” which are the low grade commercial fireworks you can buy along the road around the Fourth of July. Scary, huh?

    Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly said the suspect “had a lot of high-end fireworks.”

    “It was the max you could buy legally.”

    They were not “conventional explosives,” O’Reilly said. “But at that level, those things misused are terrific weapons.”

    Whew! we really dodged the bullet on that one didn’t we? There were 700 people at a funeral in the Mosque. Stockham could have blown a finger off every single one of the funeral-goers.

    “He’s very dangerous,” Dearborn Police Chief Ron Haddad told the Free Press. “We took his threat to be very serious.”

    Haddad said the man was previously known to law enforcement officials in other parts of the country.

    “He’s had a long history of being angry with the United States government,” Haddad said.

    Stockham, in jail on a $500,000 bond, drove from California to Dearborn and was caught with a car packed with high-end fireworks. The FBI has been notified about the incident, Haddad said.

    How does being angry at the government translate into bombing a mosque with low grade noisemakers?

    Yeah, if it was a Muslim person with a truckload of pipebombs we wouldn’t know his name yet and we’d be cautioned not to jump to conclusions about terrorism. But a pensioner with firecrackers in his trunk is “very dangerous” and worthy of involving the FBI.

    What was that police chief’s last name again?

  • Chris Matthews: Egypt has the Panama Canal

    I don’t know how they did it, but those engineering wizards in Egypt have somehow moved the Panama Canal to Egypt according to airhead Chris Matthews;

    I just drove over the Panama Canal back in 2009, so Egypt was able to move the whole thing in two years.

    Of course I know he meant the Suez Canal, but since he’s made a career of nitpicking over every Republican misstatement, why should I give him a break?

  • Seymour Hersh; incurable dumbass

    Seymour Hersh sees conspiracies around every corner. His latest is that the command staff in Afghanistan is riddled with Christian zealots at war with Islam according to Fox News;

    Hersh criticized the policies of the current and last administrations and accused the military leadership of being religious crusaders and members of the controversial Opus Dei and other groups. He specifically singled out those heading Joint Special Operations Command, a military organization ex-Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal once led.

    “That’s the attitude,” Hersh said, according to Foreign Policy. “We’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals.”

    He said the military leaders carry “crusader coins” around with them. “They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war,” he said.

    In the Stars & Stripes this morning, retired General Stan McCrystal denies those charges, but Hersh says he has proof…but you have to buy his book to see it;

    Hersh told Stars and Stripes he has proof to back up his claims but he declined to provide any because he is writing a book that will touch on the subject and revealing his evidence before the book is published would be “unethical.”

    Yeah, unprofitable, too.

    The most hilarious charge that Hersh makes;

    …that it is impossible to be around special operations troops and not notice just how religious they are.

    Yes, shrines have been built to honor the saints of Special Forces all along Bragg Boulevard in Fayetteville. The Rusty Nail, The Flaming Mug, The Backdoor.

    Thanks to Jeff for the link.

  • Washington Post’s Toles cartoon today

    The above cartoon is from today’s Washington Post by far leftist anti-gun nut Tom Toles. The implication, of course, is that Republican Congressmen are the real gun nuts since they won’t have an emotional knee-jerk reaction to every instance of gun violence and write more laws when government won’t even bother to enforce the laws they’ve already written.

    Toles thought that he needed to explain his cartoon to those of us who don’t understand the imagery, because, you know, cartoons are hard to interpret for us Neanderthals.

    First has been their long descent into ever more flamboyant distortion of facts. The health-care debate, the actual nature of the deficit problem and climate change come to mind. Second has been their increasingly imaginative conjuring of bizarre conspiracies and deployment of innuendo. Try the birth certificate “issue,” that Obama is an unpatriotic socialist, or conversely, or simultaneously, Nazi, “death panels” and again climate change. Third is their edging ever closer to hysterical talk, phrasing and imagery about revolution and violence as political tactics.

    Now, however, the mere suggestion that in light of horrible shooting deaths and injuries, somebody might want to rethink the ramifications of their choice of words and images is depicted as some manner of totalitarian jackboot. A REQUEST for some restraint on violence-inflected language is painted as yet another outrage, to the permanently outraged. Is this a serious position? No more than the rest of the wacky menagerie of chimeras they’ve gotten into the cozy bad habit of bedding down with.

    You’d think an employee of the Washington Post would actually read their paper and notice that much of the “outrage” of Republicans stems from the early nineties when we were accused of plotting to toss the elderly out into the street, starve children, make the elderly eat dog food and any number of other stupid shit they could think up. We’ve been accused of wanting to bring back slavery, drag black people behind our pickup trucks, burn black churches with impunity. We’ve been lied about and slandered and it’s only been in the last few years we quit turning the other cheek.

    In the paragraph that I left out of the quote above, Toles rails against the commenters at WaPo who argue with him about things he didn’t say in his cartoons. I wonder if Toles noticed that he just spent three paragraphs explaining nothing that is represented in his cartoon above.

    And, honestly, I’m a little bit insulted that someone who makes a living making really bad drawings with crayons thinks he has the moral authority to tell me how I should conduct myself. No, he can have his own opinions, I just don’t think he has brain in his thick skull so he should just keep his written opinions to himself and keep his thoughts confined to really bad drawings.

  • A Public Service Announcement From Operator Dan For My Friends In The Liberal Media

    This is a clip:

    This is a magazine:

    Its not hard to figure this stuff out (all of thirty seconds on Google), but I guess it just takes less time to type clip instead of magazine which leaves you more time to attack Sarah Palin. I betcha she knows the difference however.