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

Category: Media

  • Bias against veteran candidates

    On February 12, Stuart Rothenberg, a contributing writer for Roll Call attempted to write about the latest crop of veterans seeking office in 2010. Instead, he merely beclowned himself;

    My first meeting of the year (and the cycle) was with Kinzinger, and to be totally honest, I was dreading it. Another Iraq War veteran running for Congress? Oh, brother. Given the track records of veterans who have nothing else on their résumés, I wasn’t optimistic.

    Then I saw Kinzinger. I thought he looked old enough to vote, but I wasn’t sure.

    Yeah, that’s the way a supposed unbiased reporter begins an unbiased report to folks making up their minds about their choice for office. Let’s look at Rotherberg’s résumé on Wikipedia, shall we?

    Rothenberg, currently a resident of Potomac, Maryland, lived in Waterville, Maine while attending Colby College before relocating to Connecticut to earn his Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut. For a time, he settled in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, to teach political science at Bucknell University, a subject he has also taught at the Catholic University of America.

    In addition to his writing, he has been frequently featured in news broadcasts and worked with CNN as a political analyst for over ten years. Last election cycle,[vague] he also served as a political analyst for CBS News and for the Voice of America. He is also a guest contributor for Political Wire.

    Rothenberg is married and the father of two children.

    Whew, impressive, huh? Of course, I’m biased against people from Maine, but somehow Ph.D. doesn’t say experience to me, neither does being a teacher. Classroom isn’t real life.

    Now, the guy Rothenberg is writing about in this instance was an Air Force pilot…I don’t care if he flew trainers, it says a lot about his demeanor and his ability to reason in a tight situation. It says he ha more real world experience than a pointy-headed teacher whose toughest decision was whether he had time between classes to get a muffin at the student union.

    But Kieran Michael Lalor, a Marine Corps veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and chairman of Iraq Veterans for Congress Political Action Committee says it much more eloquently than I could;

    We expect a reflexive dismissal of the value of military service to appear in Department of Homeland Security reports, not in a “nonpartisan analysis of American politics and elections.”

    But it has been clear for years that most “analysis” of House races involves looking at Federal Election Commission fundraising totals and ensuring that candidates fit the narrow template that the pundits have developed for House candidates.

    Rothenberg’s analysis of Iraq vet candidates is equally superficial and couldn’t be more wrong.

    Veterans have already demonstrated selfless service to country, a credential sorely missing in Washington, D.C. The current generation of veterans is pure volunteer. They joined up when there was no draft, when military service was the exception rather than the rule as it was in previous generations. Many Iraq vet candidates enlisted after 9/11, knowing combat was inevitable. And each candidate led troops in the most arduous of conditions.

    Now, who has the thin résumé, Mr. Rothenberg?

  • The blogosphere crickets are deafening

    For the last twenty four hours, I’ve been monitoring Technorati for blog posts on the shooting in Little Rock yesterday. Unsurprisingly, I’ve found countless center-right blogs reporting and commenting on it, but the Left not so much. Most of them just toss up a news story and few comments. One blog I read last night cautioned his readers that the shooting yesterday and the other on Sunday were both terrible. I wonder why he thought he had to write five paragraphs explaining that?

    So this morning, I began my foraging again and I was relieved to see that the Huffington Post had something up – alas, it was just another reposted news story. However the HuffPo commenters can always be trusted to satisfy my evil wingnut lust for hyperbole;

    Yeah, the most important thing is that Obama not give political ammunition to his opponents – that’s more important than the lives of two young Americans.

    But, ya know, a guy trained in Yemen who guns down American soldiers in the streets of our cities should be reported by the actual media, ya know? Fox News usually shuts down broadcasting any real news for hours of video of police tape fluttering in the wind – not this time. The Washington Post puts the story in a column on page 16, and then just the AP blurb. But even that is better than the Washington Times which avoids the story. The New York Times ran one article yesterday and nothing today. As far as I can tell the article they wrote yesterday didn’t make it to print this morning.

    So why is the Left so scared of admitting that there is a real threat that has existed since 9-11 and that George Bush’s Administration kept us safe? I’m not saying Obama isn’t keeping us safe, I’m sure it’s his intention to do so. But isn’t it a bit disingenuous to ignore the problem and not give it the same measure of attention as the shooting of one single man who was killed because of his behavior? Do they truly think that the problem will go away if they bury their faces in their hands?

    And what does it say about the Left that they have to explain to each other why the senseless death of one man is the same as the senseless death of another. What does that say about their whole ideology?

  • DOJ won’t prosecute voter intimidation case

    I’m pretty sure you all remember the case of Black Panthers intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling station last election. Well, The Washington Times reports this morning that career prosecutors at the Department of Justice were ready to drop the hammer on three men involved in the incident, but they were prevented from prosecuting by their superiors;

    Justice Department political appointees overruled career lawyers and ended a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of wielding a nightstick and intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place last Election Day, according to documents and interviews.

    The incident – which gained national attention when it was captured on videotape and distributed on YouTube – had prompted the government to sue the men, saying they violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by scaring would-be voters with the weapon, racial slurs and military-style uniforms.

    Yeah, it was a slam dunk – they were caught on video declaring “A Black Man will win today” and intimidating voters. Not like those unfounded cases we heard about in the 2000 and 2004 elections that the EEOC investigated and couldn’t prove happened, yet blamed Republicans anyway.

    This is a bigger scandal than the Bush Administration firing a few lawyers at DOJ – the Obama Administration has decided that they won’t prosecute voter rights cases as long as the voter rights being violated are those of Republicans. So we can expect the New York Times and the Washington Post to be all over this, huh? Eric Holder will be named Keith Olbermann’s Worst Person of the Week, right?

  • Missing the point

    I’m sure you remember the post I did the other day about super-studly Eugene Reed and his obviously false story of his capture by North Vietnamese troops and his Hollywood-inspired escape. Well I wrote a letter to the author of the newspaper story, Sarah Thompson to warn her of the deception. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to write to her because she sent a shotgun email to all of us last night;

    Hello,

    Foremost, I would like to thank you for reading my an article I wrote titled “A Time to Pause and Reflect.” It’s not very often a reporter in London, Ohio receives feedback from individuals living all across the country.

    Over the last 48 hours, I have received numerous e-mails and several telephone calls concerning the validity of K. Eugene Reed’s experiences/medals during his service in Vietnam.

    I contacted the Madison County Veteran Services office and received a legitimate public record (DD214) from them concerning Mr. Reed’s service and medals. This document confirms his tenure, as well as the medals he received (including a few he failed to mention). He was honorably discharged and went on to re-enlist. It also confirms several additional details that were not included in my story due to space limitations.

    Again, I appreciate your concerns and thank you for contacting me.

    Sincerely,
    Sarah Thompson

    Of course, none of this addresses the story that Reed told Thompson. I doubt very much that the Madison County Veteran Services Office just turned over Reed’s DD214 to a small town reporter. But even if they did, there’s nothing, aside from the award of a POW medal, that would have verified even one sentence of Reed’s story.

    The fact that Thompson thinks that the mention of the DD214 settles the issue proves that she has never seen the DD214. Needless to say, I sent her the links that POW Net posted the other night, but at this point it’s probably futile. Thompson has decided what she wants the article to say and there will be no deviation. She’s another one of those small town reporters who sees themselves as the arbiters of truth, one of the saviors of mankind.

    It’s what she wants to believe, so we must all believe it.

  • Revisiting the Camp Liberty slayings

    As more facts roll out of Iraq, a clearer picture emerges. The Washington Times is the only media source that warns against jumping to conclusions;

    No reason for the shooting has been determined, officials said, but soldiers in the field cautioned against jumping to a conclusion of “combat stress” until an investigation has been completed.

    But then, later in their story they start talking about a rise in suicide rates (and compare US civilians in 2006 to armed forces statistics from 2008) for some reason since we can all be pretty sure that this wasn’t a suicide attempt.

    The Washington Post adds that their had been concerns about SGT Russell by his leadership;

    A few days before the shooting at Camp Liberty, a military installation near the Baghdad airport, Russell’s commanders grew concerned about his state of mind and confiscated his weapon as a precautionary measure, according to Maj. Gen. David Perkins, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq.

    “He had been referred to counseling the week before,” Perkins said Tuesday. “His commander had determined it’d be best for him not to have a weapon.”

    The Post also reports that Russell’s father is making excuses for him;

    Russell’s father, Wilburn Russell, 73, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that counselors at the clinic “broke” his son, by putting him through stressful mental tests but not clarifying that they were merely tests. The elder Russell said his son had e-mailed his wife sometime before the shooting and told her he had had two of the worst days in his life. He told her that “his life was over as far as he was concerned,” the father said. Wilburn Russell said his son was not a violent man.

    Well, obviously, he is a violent man. AP also uncovered some domestic violence in his past. Apparently the Army is partly blaming the peace in Iraq for the stress, according to the Times;

    With combat in Iraq now at a low point and U.S. forces taking a secondary, supporting role to Iraqi forces, boredom could become a morale issue for some soldiers when not in the field.

    “Obviously you have to concern yourself with boredom, but we keep them very busy here – spiritually, mentally and physically – and not just on operations,” said Col. Burt Thompson….

    The Stars and Stripes hints at family problems as the reason Russell snapped;

    “Now that they’re not in life-threatening situations on a regular basis and the tempo’s calmer, the threat is lower, they do stay focused on those [family] issues,” Brown said. “And yet, the fact that they are so powerless to do anything to influence them probably has a major impact on folks.”

    And you can always count on the moonbat readers of the Washington Post to miss the whole point;
    (more…)

  • What Fragging? Where?

    When the media and the Left learn a term, they apply it to everything. Today’s word is “fragging”. The first place I saw in relation to the incident at Camp Liberty was on a VFP blog of sorts called “Imagine” (recalling the John Lennon song) in which the author, James Starowicz, one of the chief crackpots of the Geezers For Peace writes;

    Yeah, just like Vietnam – well, not really. There were 230 deaths from the practice we now call fragging (some Leftist sites say 730 – but that’s including attempts) over the 10 years we were in Vietnam. Since the 2003 invasion of Hussein’s Iraq, there have been three, this one being the third. The second one is unsolved and the motives are unclear. That doesn’t stop the Associated Press from falsely claiming;

    There have been several previous fragging incidents in the Iraq war.

    Yeah, um, three, including this one doesn’t make “several” unless you call one incident “many”.

    During and after the Vietnam War, the Left used the fragging incidents as evidence that soldiers were unhappy with their leadership in particular and the war in general. I disagree, but for the sake of argument, I’ll continue.

    Since this one seems to have been targeted towards a counseling clinic and the staff and SGT John Russell actually left his unit with the firearm and went to the counseling center kind of disproves that he was unhappy with his leadership and more unhappy with the medical treatment he was getting.

    That doesn’t stop the media from mischaracterizing this one, too;

    An American Army sergeant shot and killed five fellow soldiers following an altercation at a military counseling center in Iraq Monday, officials said. The attack drew attention to the issues of combat stress and morale among soldiers serving multiple combat tours over six years of war.

    Um, Russell was an electronics technician who was transitioning out of the service after 21 years – not someone who was being ordered to do something that would get him injured or killed. So frustration with the war kind of gets tossed out as an indicator, too. He was leaving the war and the Army for the last time.

    He was just one guy who snapped and did terrible things. Are all of those guys going to do what Russell did? Not any more than all Georgia professors are going to do similar things.

  • Taliban may have used Willie Pete on civilians (Updated 2x)

    That’s how the headline of this Associated Press article should have read;

    Of course, the story here is that the Taliban is using white phosphorous against civilians, AP can’t bring themselves to tell that story – they’d prefer to feed the anti-American conspiracy by alluding to US’ use of white phosphorous. The US does use what the troops refer to as Willie Pete to conceal movement and disorient the enemy – it makes a very nice smoke screen – and it’s legal under the laws of land warfare to use willie pete in that role.

    In Journalism 101, students are taught that they should tell the story in three places, once in the headline, once in the first paragraph and again in the body of the article. Apparently, at the Associated Press, they tell half of the story in the headline and the same half of the story in the first paragraph. I have a copy of the AP Style manual and I don’t see where that is their accepted policy.

    Olga, who sent me the article, reminds us that AP did the same thing earlier this year during the Israeli occupation of Gaza. Here’s an AP article that accuses Israel of firing WP at villages;

    Other than dispersing a dismounted enemy, there’s no reason to fire WP at people. Unless, like Taliban is likely to do, it’s used to terrorize civilians.

    If the folks at AP are having trouble writing their articles, I’m more than willing to lend them my copy of the AP Style Guide.

    UPDATE: See how the headline and the story changes when one of the journalists is dropped (Rahm Faiez) and it’s published in the Army Times;

    Funny how that works, ain’t it?

    Thanks to TSO for the link.

    UPDATE II: The Joint Task Force PAO sends this about the 44 times that the Taliban has been known to use willie pete as an indirect fire weapon and as IEDs in Afghanistan (below the jump);
    (more…)

  • Al Jazeera draws targets on troops

    Al Jazeera is trying to stir up the Afghan population by misrepresenting events at Bagram Airbase last year;

    In other footage captured at Bagram, Sergeant Jon Watt, a soldier set to become a military chaplain, said during a Bible study class: “I also want to praise God because my church collected some money to get bibles for Afghanistan. They came and sent the money out.”

    It is not clear that the Bibles were distributed to Afghans, but Hughes said that none of the people he recorded in a series of sermons and Bible study classes appeared to able to speak Pashto or Dari.

    [Brian Hughes, a documentary maker and former member of the US military] said: “The only reason they would have these documents there was to distribute them to the Afghan people and I knew it was wrong, and I knew that filming it … documenting it would be important.”

    Yeah, however, according to the Stars and Stripes, it is clear whether or not those Bibles were distributed;

    The Bibles were confiscated before they could be distributed because that would have violated General Order No. 1, which prohibits proselytizing, said Spc. Mary L. Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Combined Joint Task Force 101.

    “The servicemember was not aware of that at the time,” Gonzalez said Monday.

    The Bibles were not paid for or translated by the U.S. military, she said.

    Of course, even though it happened a year ago and the military prevented the young sergeant from distributing the Bibles, Afghan officials are calling for an investigation and getting their 12th century panties in a wad.

    Now it gives Obama something else he can blame Bush for while Al Jazeera paints the war as a religious occupation.

    Added: A frequent, but silent, reader tried to convince TSO and I to go easy on Al Jazeera based on the obvious superficial content of this video. You don’t even need to turn the sound on to see why this particular reader begs our sympathy for the news service.

    Um, how many are “zerty” seconds?