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

Category: Media

  • Iraq deaths down, but for how long?

    Associated Press is the first news agency to hope for more American deaths in Iraq – well, today. In an article entitled “Iraq deaths down, but for how long?”, they speculate how long the death rate among Americans will stay at all time lows;

    U.S. military deaths plunged in May to the lowest monthly level in more than four years and civilian casualties were down sharply, too, as Iraqi forces assumed the lead in offensives in three cities and a truce with Shiite extremists took hold.

    But many Iraqis as well as U.S. officials and private security analysts are uncertain whether the current lull signals a long-term trend or is simply a breathing spell like so many others before.

    AP has a nasty habit of changing their headlines after I write these posts, so this time I took a screen capture;

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    Funny, but they don’t seem to quote or name “US Officials” or “private security analysts” to support their supposition that this is only temporary. They weren’t this quick to cast doubt on analysts who wrongly said we were in a recession.

  • Playing politics with the troops

    I finished college with the Vietnam-Era GI Bill after I retired. I only needed one year of the benefit because I’d gone to college at night and on weekends off-and-on for my twenty years. It was probably my most important benefit, next to my medical benefit. But if I’d come in the Army three years later, I wouldn’t have gotten the extensive education benefit I did, because the Democrat President and the Democrat Congress lessened the benefit to the Montgomery GI Bill. To save money. And to undermine the effectiveness of military recruiting for our new Volunteer Army. Two years later, Jimmy Carter, that same Democrat President, brought back draft registration because recruiting was failing miserably and threatened out national security.

    Now, having failed at hindering recruiting, the Democrats want to undermine reenlistment by adding an incentive for troops to get out of the military after their first enlistment to get a richer education benefit. Of course, the media doesn’t explain that to the public. They frame it in terms that make Republicans appear opposed to the troops (CNN link);

    The new GI Bill being debated in Congress would expand education benefits for veterans who served at least three years in the military after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

    The bill’s main sponsor, Sen. Jim Webb, is a Virginia Democrat and, like McCain, a Vietnam War veteran. The Senate passed Webb’s bill 75-22 last week. McCain was not in Washington for the vote.

    Barack Obama used the same framing this weekend;

    “I revere our soldiers and want to make sure they are being treated with honor and respect,” Obama said Saturday. “I think the GI Bill is one way for us to do that, and I hope that John McCain and George Bush decide they believe the same thing.”

    This is cheap election year politics designed to undermine the war effort under the guise of supporting the troops – it’s a way to force the Republicans to enact a Stop-Loss program to prevent hemorrhaging combat-experienced junior NCOs and make them even less popular.

    The New York Times, the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party, tried to lie about the Administration this weekend, but the Administration shot back (Washington Times link);

    “This editorial could not be farther from the truth about the President’s record of leadership on this issue,” the White House said, adding that Mr. Bush asked Congress to address allowing service members to transfer their GI Bill benefits to their spouses and children, and to expand service members’ access to child care, among other benefits.

    “The President specifically supports the GI Bill legislation expansion proposed by Senators [Lindsey] Graham, [Richard M.] Burr, and [John] McCain because it allows for the transferability of education benefits and calibrates an increase in education benefits to time in the service,” the White House said. “Though readers of the New York Times editorial page wouldn’t know it, President Bush looks forward to signing a GI bill that supports our troops and their families.”

    The New York Times did not respond to a request for a response to the White House’s criticism.

    Of course they didn’t respond – they have nothing to say. The New York Times hopes the controversy disappears. The troops know that when Democrats do something for them, there’s a political angle, a political benefit for the Democrats. Democrats don’t do things solely for the troops anymore.

  • Bush to meet with al-Bashir

    This morning the Washington Post worries that President Bush isn’t being hard enough on Sudan for their behavior against the residents in Darfur;

    Sometime in the next few weeks, a special envoy of President Bush plans to meet with Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whose government sheltered Osama bin Laden and pursued a scorched-earth policy in southern Sudan that resulted in more than 2 million deaths.

    Bashir’s government has been accused by Bush of participating in a “genocide” in Darfur, the only U.S. government use of such a strong accusation. Yet Richard S. Williamson’s visit to Khartoum follows a series of direct contacts by senior Bush administration officials with the Sudanese president, including Secretaries of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Rice’s deputies, and several special presidential envoys.

    Bush has spoken to or exchanged letters with Bashir on numerous occasions, underscoring how White House policy has departed from his pointed public call to shun talks with radical tyrants and dictators.

    Of course, the Washington Post totally ignored the Darfur emergency during the previous administration. The only news we got of the situation there was from Christian missionaries because the “main stream” press didn’t figure anything that happened in Africa was important enough for the Clinton Administration since they did so poorly in Somalia.

    Things like Darfur are more in line with the UN’s charter, though,, rather than the US policy. But, the UN is too busy getting their armed forces laid according to the Gateway Pundit;

    We’re from the UN and we’re here to help.

    The BBC reported:

    Children as young as six are being sexually abused by peacekeepers and aid workers, says a leading UK charity.
    Children in post-conflict areas are being abused by the very people drafted into such zones to help look after them, says Save the Children.

    The most shocking aspect of this abuse is that most of it goes unreported and unpunished, a new report argues, with children too scared to speak out.

    The UN has said it welcomes the report, which it will study closely.

    Yeah, like they studied the report on the oil for food program.

    The world is supposedly enraged because we “unilaterally” dealt with Saddam Hussein, yet they expect us to unilaterally deal with Kosovo, Bosnia, Sudan and now the Sudan.

  • Calm in Sadr City

    The Washington Times reports this morning that calm has returned to Sadr City after weeks of fighting between the Iraqi Army and the Mahdi Army;

     With not a Shi’ite fighter in sight, shoppers pushed through markets and cars packed the streets in Baghdad”s Sadr City yesterday — a positive early sign for Iraqi forces in their bid to impose control after a truce with the militia in its stronghold.

    But while peace held in the sprawling slum a day after thousands of Iraqi troops rolled in, there were indications that militants were increasing their activity elsewhere. Skirmishes broke out in some nearby districts, including a clash that the U.S. military said killed 11 Shi”ite gunmen.

    Support for anti-U.S. Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al Sadr is high among Sadr City”s 2.5 million residents, nearly half the population of Baghdad. Many see his Mahdi Army fighters as their protectors against Sunni insurgents and the distrusted U.S.-led forces.

    People yesterday, however, seemed relieved by the deployment and the calm it brought after weeks of clashes between his Mahdi Army fighters and allied U.S. and Iraqi troops on the edges of the district and in its southern sector.

    Although they call him “anti-US cleric” al Sadr is also anti-democracy. He wants to establish a government that resembles that of the Islamic Republic in Iran.

    Part of the cease-fire agreement between the Mahdi Army and the Iraqi Army was that US forces wouldn’t be allowed into Sadr City. The Washington Post, unwilling to give the US forces any credit for their victories in Iraq as evidenced by this headline;

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    The Post pounds that point home throughout the article;

    An offensive against militias in the southern city of Basra earlier this year required hastily organized support from U.S. and British forces, but this week’s deployment of thousands of Iraqi troops into Sadr City so far has included no overt assistance from the U.S. military.

    No overt assistance other than the training, weapons and equipment over the past five years. I guess that’s the only way the reporters could get the article on the front page – disparage US troops in the headline. But that must be the way the media plans to take this victory from the perseverance of the Bush Administration and our troops on the ground, by highlighting that tiny clause in the surrender of Sadr City.

    However, the story that the Post misses, the Times reports;

    But the U.S. military said it killed 11 Shi”ite gunmen in the nearby New Baghdad area. It said four heavily armed militants were killed while riding in a sport utility vehicle, four others were killed because they engaged in suspicious behavior, and three were killed after they were spotted planting two separate roadside bombs.

    Lt. Col. Steven Stover, a U.S. military spokesman, said U.S. troops were acting to stem “an increase in extremist activity” in the neighborhood “when everyone was focused on Sadr City.”

    So US forces are everywhere in Iraq, except Sadr City, and the Post wants to focus on that tiny aspect of the whole story in the Middle East.

  • George Bush made you fat

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    The Washington Post tries to lay out the case today that you’re fat, but it’s not your fault – it’s that damn George Bush in a front page article “Inertia at the Top“;

    The problem at first was that the problem was ignored: For almost two decades, young people in the United States got fatter and fatter — ate more, sat more — and nobody seemed to notice. Not parents or schools, not medical groups or the government.

    But since the alarm was finally sounded in the late 1990s, the problem has been the country’s reaction: a fragmented, inchoate response that critics say has suffered particularly from inadequate direction and dollars at the federal level.

    “The sense of this as a national health priority just doesn’t come through,” said Jeffrey P. Koplan of Emory University, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and chairman of the Institute of Medicine’s 2004 study of childhood obesity. The top recommendation of that seminal report was for the government to convene a high-level, interdepartmental task force to guide a coordinated response. No such body has been assembled.

    They accompany the article with pictures of a morbidly obese child who is ten years old and looks to be about 200 pounds and her approximately 300 pound mother. You know she’s all George Bush’s fault since he’s been the President for most of her life. And the Post does it’s best to lay her at GWB’s feet;

    “The sense of this as a national health priority just doesn’t come through,” said Jeffrey P. Koplan of Emory University, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and chairman of the Institute of Medicine’s 2004 study of childhood obesity. The top recommendation of that seminal report was for the government to convene a high-level, interdepartmental task force to guide a coordinated response. No such body has been assembled.

    Contrast that with the offensive mounted in European countries:

    See, George Bush (and probably Dick Cheney, too) purposely ignored this important report released in 2004 and they aren’t caring enough to replicate the intrusive behavior of the European countries who arrest and fine their citizens for having opinions and drawing cartoons.

    Then the Post writes a paragraph that argues with itself;

    There’s no question that the U.S. epidemic won’t be reversed by federal fiat alone; responsibility lies also with individuals, the health community, corporations, local governments and others. Still, health experts insist that strong leadership from the top is crucial. They see the Bush administration falling short of expectations and few real champions in Congress.

    The Federal government can’t do it alone – but they’d better copy those intrusive European governments and do it alone. There’s a hundred more critical things I could say about the article, but I’ll leave the rest to my readers.

    I’m just glad there’s someone to blame for the 20 pounds I’ve put on from concentrating on this blog the last six months.

  • NYT tries to demean McCain’s experiences

    I’ll tell you what, if the New York Times is trying to drive me more solidly into the McCain camp, they’re doing a great job – and what they’re telling veterans about our service, I won’t be alone. Matt Bai writes “The McCain Doctrine” in the upcoming Times Magazine.

    Bai begins by pointing out that McCain happens to be the only Senator who served in Vietnam who also supports our efforts in the Middle East – as opposed to Kerry, Webb and Hagel – so that makes his opinion suspect. Bai neglects to mention that the other three are bald-faced opportunists who consistently subscribe to the politically expedient position at a given moment. Not that McCain doesn’t do the same, but at least as far as national security, McCain has been consistent. Kerry, Webb and Hagel have been cheap whores on national security.

    Since none of these three would say anything to Bai against McCain, Bai went to Max Cleland – the guy who says he lost his last election because his patriotism was questioned by President Bush.

    “McCain is my friend and brother, and I love him dearly,” Max Cleland, Georgia’s former Democratic senator, told me when we talked last month. “But I think you learn something fighting on the ground, like me and John Kerry and Chuck Hagel did in Vietnam. This objective of ‘hearts and minds’? Well, hello! You didn’t know which heart and mind was going to blow you up!”

    So the Battalion Signal Officer who blew himself up with an errant grenade inside the protection of a fortified fire base on his way to have a few beers with buddies claims he had some special experience that a guy who was in a POW camp for five-and-a-half years couldn’t have when it comes to national security. I’m not in the habit of disparaging veterans’ service, but people who start throwing crap need to understand it flies both ways.

    Of course, Bai doesn’t go into that much detail about Cleland’s injuries – probably because McCain is the target, and Cleland has already proved himself to be a crybaby when people bring up the actual story of his injuries. Checking on the details of Cleland’s injuries, I found this on Wikipedia about Cleland’s political defeat;

    Voters were allegedly influenced by Chambliss ads that featured Cleland’s likeness on the same screen as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, ads that Cleland’s supporters claim questioned his commitment to homeland security. The ads were removed after strong bi-partisan protest from prominent politicians including Republicans like John McCain and Chuck Hagel.

    So McCain stuck up for Cleland against the ads that were run against Cleland, but Cleland is unwilling to return the favor apparently and stabs McCain in the back by insinuating that McCain’s experience, flying planes at 15,000 feet and then locked in prison makes him retarded on the war in Iraq.

    Bai goes on to recite the fact that after McCain returned from the war, since he was locked away the only way McCain could learn about the war was from books – but that’s the same way that all of these dippy professors became such experts on the war since they dodged the draft and avoided service in Vietnam. So how did that influence McCain differently?

    The Vietnam veterans say McCain didn’t experience the war the same as they did and that’s why he differs from them on this war, but McCain did experience the war the same as the so-called intellectuals who sat out the war on hairy-legged hippie chicks and McCain differs from that class, too.  You can’t have it both ways, Bai.

    Maybe the truth is that McCain’s experiences, the physical and the intellectual experiences, have made him the only one in the two groups that might be right. But, of course, Bai would say that, would he?

    Nope, Bai goes off on a tangent after an interview with McCain in which McCain gives him reasons for NOT using US military force in places like Zimbabwe and Burma. So Bai encapsulates “The McCain Doctrine” as;

    In other words, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy, while most politicians looked at injustice in a foreign land and asked, “Why intervene?” McCain seemed to look at that same injustice and ask himself, “Why not?”

    Well, what’s the problem with that? “Why” and “why not” intersect at the same point regardless from which direction you reach that point.

    The article is eight pages of irrelevant crap, typical Leftist navel-gazing that borders on the Jay Rockefeller bit on McCain;

    Rockefeller believes McCain has become insensitive to many human issues. “McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit.

    “What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”

    Except this time, Bai claims that because John McCain was insulated from the war because of his good fortune to have been captured and stuffed in a jail cell for over five years he just doesn’t understand warfare and politics.

    h/t The American Pundit and Hot Air.

  • Meyerson’s McCain’s America

    This morning Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post tries to blunt Republican campaigns impaending against Obama by penning “McCain’s America” a very weak piece that regurgitates all of the Code Pink talking points and contains little substance – and begins and ends with his personal rendition of Gilbert and Sullivan, that somehow proves a point that went right over my head. What two 19th century English songwriters have to do with 21st Century American politics, I’ll never understand. but I suppose meyerson wasn’t talking to me anyway;

     In more recent elections, Republicans have depicted Democratic presidential candidates as un-American cultural elitists heading up a dangerously diverse party.

    This year, we can expect to see almost nothing but these kinds of assaults as the campaign progresses. The Republican attack against Obama all but ignores the issue differences between the candidates to go after what is presumably his inadequately American identity. He is, writes one leading conservative columnist, “out of touch with everyday America.” His reluctance to wear a flag pin, writes another, shows that he “has declared himself superior to an almost universal form of popular patriotism.”

    There are good reasons Republicans are focusing on identity rather than issues this year: In poll after poll, there’s not a single major issue on which the public agrees with them or their presumptive nominee. Not Iraq, certainly. Not the economy. Should the election turn on the question of “What are you going to do for America?” rather than “Are you a real American?” Republicans are doomed. They offer no solutions for the stagnation (or decline) of American living standards, or for the weakening of America’s economic power. They offer no resolution to America’s war of choice in Iraq. Their party leader, the incumbent president, let a great American city drown.

    No, Hal, a good reason that Republicans should focus on “identity politics” is because that’s all Obama has to run on. It’s the basis of his entire campaign – like recent Democrat candidates, he feels he deserves the presidency, so he’s just hoping we vote for him because he cuts a dapper image on the stage. Other than some vacuous platitudes, what else does he have? Hillary’s wins in recent non-urban areas reflects Obama’s vulnerability among real Americans who want real answers to real questions. You know – the voters.

  • Washington Post reads minds

    The Washington Post has begun it’s “whites won’t vote for Obama” narrative again this morning in an article titled “Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause“. After some unsupported third-hand reports about name-calling and slammed doors, their really damning evidence is the vandalism of an Obama campaign office;

    The bigotry has gone beyond words. In Vincennes, the Obama campaign office was vandalized at 2 a.m. on the eve of the primary, according to police. A large plate-glass window was smashed, an American flag stolen. Other windows were spray-painted with references to Obama’s controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and other political messages: “Hamas votes BHO” and “We don’t cling to guns or religion. Goddamn Wright.”

    Now what’s bigoted about that, other than they were writing these things about Black people (without even mentioning their race)? The Washington Post can read minds – and they know that the vandals were thinking racist thoughts.
    Well, I can see you’re still doubtful. Well this ought to convince you of the racists in Indiana;

    On July 4, 1923, Kokomo hosted the largest Klan gathering in history — an estimated 200,000 followers flocked to a local park.

    Never mind that every person who attended that Klan gathering is probably dead now – it proves to me beyond a shadow of doubt that the whole state of Indiana is populated with racists because the Washington Post told me so.