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

Category: Media

  • Nidal Hasan and gun control

    Olga sent us this article from the Associated Press and the Marine Times last night about how the Pentagon has fallen into the same trap as some local governments; gun control regulations only provide a temporary sense of security for the uninformed;

    Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered this week that a new comprehensive policy be developed to cover all branches of the military and its bases and offices. The standardized policy would replace or buttress a patchwork of regulations adopted by each service or individual military installation.

    The weapons policy is among recommendations for security and administrative upgrades released by the Pentagon on Thursday. Gates ordered that an interim weapons policy be in force by June, and a permanent one is due early next year.

    Since Nidal didn’t store his weapons on the installation, this new policy woudn’t have stopped him. Unless the military is willing to search every vehicle and person when they enter an installation, they won’t be able to stop a flow of weapons. This is so much mental masturbation and typical Liberal thought process.

    But I think the most insulting part of the whole article is this single line;

    A disgruntled Army doctor is charged in the deaths.

    Is that all he was? Just another disgruntled Army doctor? Does AP think that we’ve already forgotten the details of the shooting spree?

  • Stephen Colbert Does What Nobody Else Has the Balls To Do

    We’ve been calling out WikiLeaks and their friends in the anti-military left over the “collateral murder video” pretty frequently here at TAH for the last week. We aren’t the only ones: most of the milblog community (including many left-leaning and anti-war veterans blogs) has been demolishing this blatantly editorialized video.

    Last night Stephen Colbert did what seems like nobody else in the media has the balls to do: call out WikiLeaks director Julian Assange and expose him as a fraud.

    Watch the whole thing, it is worth it:

    The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
    Julian Assange
    www.colbertnation.com
    Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

    Beautiful. Finally, someone takes Assange and WikiLeaks off its high horse and exposes them as another anti-military propaganda outfit with an agenda. I bet this guy was expecting a softball interview too. Does anybody honestly believe they leak everything they get now? How much more footage or documentation are they sitting on in regards to this incident?

    It is a sad commentary on the state of big media in this country that a professional comedian with a fake news show exposes more about a major news story than an established REAL media outlet.

  • Were Confederates terrorists?

    Claymore sent me an article this morning from Roland S. Martin, one of those CNN political analysts who tries to make the case that the Confederates were somehow terrorists in the image of Muslim jihadists. Apparently, he’s somewhat butt-hurt because he got a slew of emails and tweets that told him he was wrong and because he’s minor opionist, he feels the need to defend himself. After recalling some of his detractors’ remarks, he asks;

    If you take all of these comments, don’t they sound eerily similar to what we hear today from Muslim extremists who have pledged their lives to defend the honor of Allah and to defeat the infidels in the West?

    Um, no. Standing here nearly a century and change in the future from the beginning of that war, I can clearly say that I’m not a supporter of slavery, and I can probably say that I wouldn’t have been a big slavery proponent in 1861. My great-great grandfather, George Washington Twitchell, traveled from Massachusetts to Indiana (a fur piece in those days, I’m certain) to join the 44th Indiana Regiment – the other side of my family was still in Europe, so I’m pretty sure they didn’t have an opinion on the war. So my familial credentials are established.

    Martin begins his article with superficial talking points;
    (more…)

  • TAH on Fox News?

    I just watched a segment on Fox and Friends with Steve Doocy, one of the Baldwins, Robin Givens and some comedian dude. They were supposed to be discussing Matthis’ flag burning theater and why the media isn’t covering it. Doocy said something to the effect that none of the media are covering it, that there’s just one blog out there saying anything. Um, Steve, the name is “This Ain’t Hell”.

    Of course, Givens sucked all of the oxygen out of the room with her answer that all of the media only covers what they want. So it wasn’t really a discussion, it was Givens attempt to cover for the media and the White House with the “everyone does it” excuse.

    Apparently they’re not putting the video up because they just posted the following segment while I was typing this.

  • The Media’s Dirty Little Secret About The Iraq War

    The coverage of the WikiLeaks “collateral murder” video continues to send my blood pressure higher and higher. Here is a choice article from AlterNet, in which the author repeats the “This is a horrible war crime” nonsense. A choice quote:

    This is definitely not Academy Award winner The Hurt Locker – where American soldiers are selfless heroes and Iraqis are faceless ghosts. This is real life – with American soldiers as video game killers and Iraqis as corpses. These are the kind of heroes who mistake a telephoto lens for an rocket-propelled grenade.

    Of course, yet again, no mention in the article of the fact that the insurgents that these Reuters employees were prancing around Baghdad with had REAL RPGs or of the fact that after the grunts arrived on scene they started taking more fire from an abandoned building that had to be blown up. For the author of this article, those are simply inconvenient facts.

    The video confirmed a dirty little secret about how the media has covered the Iraq War. Many major news organizations (Reuters, the AP, Time magazine, the networks, etc.) outsourced their reporting responsibilities to Iraqi journalists, many of whom were sympathetic to or actively involved in the insurgency. Does anybody really believe that if those two Iraqi Reuters employees weren’t in bed with an insurgent group that they wouldn’t have been on Al Jazeera begging for their lives or getting their heads chopped off? After the invasion, very few Western journalists embedded for long periods of time with American or other coalition units. If they did, it was only for a couple of weeks at the most. Most of the time, after their first firefight they would pop smoke and head back to the states thinking that they knew everything there was to know about Iraq. We all hear about people like Michael Yon, Michael Ware, and Pat Dollard who stayed in the fight for long periods of time and kept going back but unfortunately they are few and far between.

    Most of the time your typical Western journalist would fly into BIAP and stay in the Greenzone or on some big FOB around Baghdad. They would get their stories mostly through Iraqi “fixers” who would bring them photographs, videos, and packaged stories. Probably the most famous example of this is the Time magazine article on the Haditha killings. Tim McGirk, the author of the article, was not in Haditha nor was he even in Anbar province at the time. Instead, he got the bulk of the info for the article from an Iraqi named Taher Thabet, who was part of a group called the Hammurabi Human Rights group. It would come out  later that Thabet was a known AQI propagandist who even was suspected by the Marines of helping to film IED attacks on Americans. Did McGirk mention any of this in his article? No, another inconvenient fact for another lazy and bias lamestream media reporter. Of course, Mr. McGirk declined to testify in the hearings on the killings after the Marine Corps revealed these facts.

    I believe strongly in a free and independent press and I believe the media has a right to cover American military operations without compromising the integrity of those operations. Sometimes the military makes mistakes and only bad press will make them correct those mistakes (i.e. the debacle with the SEALs in Fallujah). However, the way that many journalists have behaved in their reporting of the Iraq War has been borderline treasonous in my mind. Now before some people jump on me, let me explain what I mean. If you want to go to Iraq and come back and say the war is illegal, immoral or whatever, that is your right. But when you go to a warzone and actively abet an international terrorist group like Al Qaida by hiring its members to do YOUR JOB, that in my mind is treason.

    I wonder what Ernie Pyle would think of all this…..

  • Eugene Robinson: what Left-wing terrorism?

    Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson is the absolute King of Left Wing Adherence. Nearly every word that appears in his Pulitzer-Prized column is pre-chewed at the White House for easy consumption by the drooling morons who still read the Post. Today’s missive is equally digestible by the chirping heads;

    But for the most part, far-left violence in this country has gone the way of the leisure suit and the AMC Gremlin. An anti-globalization movement, including a few window-smashing anarchists, was gaining traction at one point, but it quickly diminished after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. An environmental group and an animal-rights group have been linked with incidents of arson. Beyond those particulars, it is hard to identify any kind of leftist threat.

    By contrast, there has been explosive growth among far-right, militia-type groups that identify themselves as white supremacists, “constitutionalists,” tax protesters and religious soldiers determined to kill people to uphold “Christian” values. Most of the groups that posed a real danger, as the Hutaree allegedly did, have been infiltrated and dismantled by authorities before they could do any damage. But we should never forget that the worst act of domestic terrorism ever committed in this country was authored by a member of the government-hating right wing: Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

    Yes, the Far Left political violence has somewhat dissipated since 9-11, with some notable exceptions Amy Bishop who shot up her peers in a meeting at her Alabama College, also an Obama acolyte, Andrew Stack who crashed his plane into an IRS office after leaving a suicide note referring to Marxism, the damage the protesters left in their wake in NYC this year and in Pittsburgh late last year. The planned terrorism at the RNC in 2008 that was disrupted by law enforcement.

    But that’s all penny-ante bullshit, right? In order for Robinson to find some real Right Wing terrorism, he has to reach back 15 years (which is before 9-11, too, Gene, since 1995 comes before 2001 in my calender) to Oklahoma. It serves two purposes, it raises the specter of the military-trained killer gone wild and it scares the straights away from anyone with a right-wing ideology.

    McVeigh was in my unit in Desert Storm, so if it’s the military that made him that way, I guess there’s a few thousand more of us out here who’ve managed somehow to avoid blowing up Federal Buildings with fertilizer bombs in a rental truck. I wonder how we beat the odds? Nothing McVeigh did that day had anything to do with his military service – no matter how much the militia crews wish that were true.

    Almost half of the country voted against Obama, yet a very minuscule number have managed to get themselves arrested for making a nuisance of themselves in public in regards to the President. Thousands gathered in Washington DC over the past few months and beyond some ill-conceived signage, they haven’t damaged one little bit of Federal property or injured one person.

    The danger of political violence in this country comes overwhelmingly from one direction — the right, not the left. The vitriolic, anti-government hate speech that is spewed on talk radio every day — and, quite regularly, at Tea Party rallies — is calibrated not to inform but to incite.

    Not like Eugene Robinson’s daily fear-mongering for the idiot class that reads the Washington Post. The same idiot class which, in the comments section, said that John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, funded by wealthy New Yorker Republicans is further proof of Right Wing terrorism.

  • Reuter’s proof there are Gays in the Military

    Jerry920 sent me a link the other day related to a Reuters Don’t Ask Don’t Tell themed series of photos. I wasn’t quite sure what Jerry was pointing to, but I kept going back to it. Finally today I got to this photo at the end of the series. I guess this is Reuter’s way of proving to us that there are already gays serving in the military;

    gays-in-the-military

    So what if it’s just his last name that is Gay, it’s still proof that Gays are in the military and performing their jobs admirably, right?

  • The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

    Howell Raines is the disgraced former editor of the New York Times who was forced resigned due to his involvement in the Jayson Blair scandal. He was responsible for the “diversity above all” atmosphere that inhabited the newsroom at the Times that allowed Jayson Blair to be continually promoted despite his shoddy reporting. Raines also quite clearly failed to do his job as an editor and failed to pick up on the fact that Blair was embellishing most of his stories.

    But despite his obviously failings as an editor and his role in creating one of the biggest journalistic scandals in recent history, Raines still thinks that he comment with authority on the state of media in America today. In a column in the Washington Post, Raines goes after Fox News for its coverage of the healthcare issue. Here is the opening paragrah:

    One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

    I think a better question would be who hasn’t tried to blow the whistle on Fox News? The only point to MSNBC’s existence (which ironically evolved from a network Roger Ailes founded) seems to be to bash Fox News. Not to mention the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and just about every other major newspaper in the country runs a hit piece on Fox or one of its anchors on a pretty much a weekly basis. Oh and if you want to talk about propaganda campaigns, why not talk about the slobbering love affair that was the mainstream media’s relationship with the Obama campaign in 2008?

    The American people and most of our great modern presidents have been demanding major reforms to the health-care system since the administration of Teddy Roosevelt. The elections of 1948, 1960, 1964, 2000 and 2008 confirm the point, with majorities voting for candidates supporting such change. Yet congressional Republicans have managed effective campaigns against health-care changes favored variously by Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. Now Fox News has given the party of Lincoln a free ride with its repetition of the unexamined claim that today’s Republican leadership really does want to overhaul health care — if only the effort could conform to Mitch McConnell’s ideas on portability and tort reform.

    Healthcare was not the dominant issue in all those elections and those presidents weren’t elected simply to reform healthcare. Anybody with any sense of American political history in the 20th Century would know that. Nice try changing history Raines.

    My great fear, however, is that some journalists of my generation who once prided themselves on blowing whistles and afflicting the comfortable have also been intimidated by Fox’s financial power and expanding audience, as well as Ailes’s proven willingness to dismantle the reputation of anyone who crosses him. (Remember his ridiculing of one early anchor, Paula Zahn, as being inferior to a “dead raccoon” in ratings potential when she dared defect to CNN?) It’s as if we have surrendered the sword of verifiable reportage and bought the idea that only “elites” are interested in information free of partisan poppycock.

    Having watched Paula Zahn’s show on both CNN and Fox, I can say that is definitely a proven fact that a dead racoon is more interesting and could garner better ratings.

    As for Fox’s campaign against the Obama administration, perhaps the only traditional network star to put Ailes on the spot, at least a little, has been his friend, the venerable Barbara Walters, who was hosting ABC’s Sunday morning talk show. More accurately, she allowed another guest, Arianna Huffington, to belabor Ailes recently about his biased coverage of Obama. Ailes countered that he should be judged as a producer of ratings rather than a journalist — audience is his only yardstick. While true as far as it goes, this hair-splitting defense purports to absolve Ailes of responsibility for creating a news department whose raison d’etre is to dictate the outcome of our nation’s political discourse.

    Raines conveniently fails to mention that Huffington is an unabashed liberal who runs a left-wing news website whose “raison d’etre is to dictate the outcome of our nation’s political discourse”. Naturally she is going to attack someone who she views as competition. Not to mention that Walters is also a frequent guest on Fox, especially on O’Reilly’s show.

    I also have no doubt that Ailes is in the ratings business before the political business. If left-wingers like Olbermann and Maddow could pull the ratings they would be on Fox. But instead they are stuck getting their asses beat by their competitors on Fox because their shows suck.

    The conclusion:

    As for Fox News, lots of people who know better are keeping quiet about what to call it. Its news operation can, in fact, be called many things, but reporters of my generation, with memories and keyboards, dare not call it journalism.

    So what would the fuck would you call journalism Mr. Raines? Continually promoting a reporter who obviously was fabricating many of his stories simply because he was black? Compromising sensitive national security programs while you keep quiet about your own reporters being kidnapped in Afghanistan? Displaying an incredible amount of bias towards conservative and Republican political figures? If thats your version of journalism, than I guess the New York Times is the most pure journalistic institution in the country.

    The fact that the Washington Post would print trash like this written by a hack like Raines says a lot about the state of “America’s old-school news organizations”. They are in their death-throes, but they refuse to admit it.