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

Category: Politics

  • TAH goes to Washington

    TAH goes to Washington

    Its not often when I wake up to check email and find something from the Secret Service lurking at the InBox.  On short notice we were asked to attend a Reception with VPOTUS to commemorate one of the bombings that occurred in Beirut, Lebanon.   Had it not been for the tireless efforts of Jeff Hamman, editor and historian for all things Beirut related, the event would have been diminished to little more than a hand full of people and a cup of coffee.  Because of his relentless efforts to organize and be the liaison between the White House and those within the Beirut Community, it turned out to be something very special.  We all owe him our humble thanks for a job well done.

    Beirut Survivors, veterans and next of kin with Vice President Pence. I am the tall dark handsome one…it should be obvious which one is me.

    You can see more about the ceremony held in the very heart of the Corps at 8th and I … HERE

    I stopped by the TAH Bunker to get the proper clearances and check on my Lapua.  I was detained on the front porch for a time, but using the Soviet as the effective distraction that she can be, I seen my opportunity and crept inside the compound.   It might have been coincidence, but some Army guy kept putting himself between me and the Gun Vault.  Gun Nutz…they get all territorial over the smallest of things.  In any event, the TAH compound is all secure and may only be missing a little ammo.  I have to say there is a Goddess withing those walls, Jonn married up.  Her warmth and humor almost make it unnoticeable that Jonn has locked up all the valuables when I visit.   I am always welcome at the TAH  Compound…as long as I bring the Soviet with me.

    I don’t want to describe the actual ceremony too much because there are plenty of links to other, less informed media outlets than TAH for that stuff.    What none of those other News organizations know is what we are here for.  To the right of VP Pence in the picture above is Morris Dorsey and his wife.  He is one of the very few Marines with two Purple Hearts from Beirut that are alive to talk about it.  The last time some of the people in that picture seen Morris Dorsey he was being carried out of the largest Non-Nuclear explosion on Earth and one of the few survivors.

    Morris Dorsey rescue.

    VP Pence went out of his way to recognize Dorsey’s service and sacrifice to this country.  Words can not describe the joy I felt watching Dorsey get the long overdue recognition he deserves.  We had a ball at 8th and I.  Both of our spousal units brought Bail money on the trip and neither of us needed a dime.  I used the crapper in the Commandants house…and he didn’t seem to mind at all.

    The Soviet got her own escort of course, I was pushed aside and left to find my own way around.   I tried to get this nice looking WM Captain to walk with me but she said if I didn’t stop stalking her she had no problem beating my old ass.

    Then this guy showed up.  He seemed to like her.  I asked if she knew who he was…she said “Some guy, he seems nice”.

    VP Pence invited us to his office.  I was told not to touch anything, but of course the Soviet could do whatever she wanted.

    The drawer actually does have the former VP’s signatures in it.  Rumor has it that at some point we must have had a VP named, Jonn “Lapua” Lilyea.  I can neither confirm or deny this.

    The Secret Service unlocked the Balcony overlooking the West Wing,  probably just because I was there.  She was kind enough to take a picture with some old guy.

    Zoya proving that Melania is not the only one that knows how to make an entrance.

    In the end, VP came over and shook the Soviets hand and said, “Thank you for coming”.  He then shook my hand and said, “Thank you for bringing her”.   That’s pretty much the same thing Jonn said when we left the TAH Compound.  Come to think of it…I hear that a lot.

    Traffic in DC being what it is…I tried to borrow a car to get out of town.  The guys with the guns said that was probably not a good idea.

     

     

  • Robert Guillaume passes

    Robert Guillaume passes

    Robert Guillaume, known for his role as “Benson” on the show of the same name, has passed at the age of 89. Wiki only mentions that he served in the Army. Judging by his age, I have to guess that he served between World War II and the Korean War.

    I met him briefly once, in the National Press Club. He wasn’t what you’d expect a star to be. He was very friendly and engaging. I don’t remember him mentioning his military service, but neither did I, so….

    Fox News has a wonderful tribute to him.

  • Gregory Schaffer; guilty

    Gregory Schaffer; guilty

    another fake-seal

    Someone sent us a link to the news that Gregory John Schaffer has finally been convicted. We first wrote about him in 2012, he was indicted for sex with a minor and for making child pornography in 2013. According to the Hudson County, New Jersey View, he was convicted in a trial lasting three days last week. The jury deliberated for an hour and a half;

    In 2010, Schaffer sexually abused a 12-year-old girl in a tow-truck office in Union City, and video recorded the abuse without her knowledge. He later stored the video recording on a laptop computer found by law enforcement in his office in Jersey City, according to court documents.

    Schaffer also backed-up the video recording to another electronic storage device found in his office.

    Around the same time, Schaffer also sexually abused a 14-year-old girl in a hotel room and video recorded the abuse without her knowledge. Schaffer again stored the video recording on the same laptop computer and electronic storage device that law enforcement found in his office, officials said.

    Law enforcement also found additional sexually explicit videos and images of minors on Schaffer’s laptop computer and electronic storage device, authorities said.

    He used his fake SEAL persona to lure the young girls into doing his bidding. According to the article, he also pretended to be a talent scout, producer and swim instructor, among other professions, on dating websites and social media. It only took them four years from his indictment to his trial. The wheels of justice.

  • Harold “Tidley” Hannon comes home

    Harold “Tidley” Hannon comes home

    A week or so ago, Hondo told us that the remains of Harold Patrick Hannon, Company E, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, 2nd Marine Division, Fleet Marine Force, USMC, had been identified from a grave near where he had fallen in the early hours of the battle for Betio Island. The Scranton, Pennsylvania Times-Tribune reports that Harold “Tidley” Hannon, who earned his nickname from his tiddly-winks prowess, is rejoining his family.

    Jefferson Twp. resident Bill Hannon, who was 2 years old when Tidley Hannon died and has no memory of his uncle, said his family had all but given up hope of ever bringing him back to Scranton for a proper memorial and burial.

    “Really, words can’t even describe how we feel — myself and my brothers and my sisters,” the 76-year-old Navy veteran said. “I don’t even know how to say it.”

    Albert and Catherine Hannon received a telegram from the Marine Corps informing them of their son’s death two days before Christmas in 1943, but it did not say how or where he was killed, The Scranton Times reported at the time.

    The telegram stated only that it had been necessary “to temporarily bury the body in the locality where death occurred.”

    Bill Hannon said neither his grandparents nor any of his uncle’s siblings, all now deceased, ever learned much more detail than that.

  • Alex Horton: For some veterans, John Kelly’s remarks add to a worrying military-civilian divide

    Alex Horton, former VoteVets writer and propagandist for the Shinseki Department of Veterans’ Affairs, now writes for the Washington Post as a hand-wringer over John Kelly’s remarks to the press the other day. Horton claims that Kelly’s comments “alarmed some of those who study relations between the military and society”. Who might these people be? Well, Horton only includes the remarks from one person – Phil Carter.

    Phil Carter used to write for the Post in a weekly column that was anti-George Bush, then he became a founding member of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America when they made the transition from anti-Bush group, OpTruth. Then Carter was Obama’s veterans advisor in the 2008 presidential campaign, and finally he became the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, a job from which he was fired because he couldn’t close Guantanamo detainee facility.

    So, you know, this is a totally unbiased evaluation of Kelly’s speech/sarcasm if you didn’t notice.

    Kelly’s words Thursday worried Carter and others. His somber ordering of how a dead service member is moved from battlefield to burial was a helpful glimpse for Americans who have not experienced that trauma. But Carter said he paired the idea with a belief that most civilians could not conceive — or intentionally fail — to understand that burden.

    “It was odd. The military does not have a monopoly on loss and hardship,” Carter said.

    Another moment also struck a dissonant note. When Kelly ended his remarks by accusing Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) of using a dead soldier for political points, he told reporters he was only interested in questions from those who had a direct connection to those killed in combat.

    The military does, however, have a monopoly on “loss and hardship” in service to the nation as protectors of the Constitution, something that Carter and many in the journalistic community have forgotten. The American public has overwhelmingly given high marks to the military, in the form of poll results, for the past two decades as compared to the press and politicians.

    Anyone who doesn’t think that Francesca Wilson wasn’t standing in the blood of Sergeant LaDavid Johnson and using the grief of his widow for political points among the anti-Trump crowd hasn’t been paying attention to Horton’s pieces in the Post and any other piece in the Post which doesn’t like that Hillary Clinton didn’t win the election – and now the Post and Horton are trying to drag Kelly and the rest of the military down to their level.

    Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.

  • Political correctness craziness: US Air Farce edition

    For almost thirty years I called on military installations all over the United States as a health care marketer. Something I learned in that time is that each of the services has its own culture, with the Army being the most relaxed and receptive to new ideas, the Navy being somewhere in the middle, and the United States Air Force acting as if it had a permanent stick up its derrière. These last were sticklers for operating strictly by the rules and regs and resistant to change, even though such change might benefit their troops. I remember asking an older rep who’d called on them for decades about this and being told, “Who knows, son? It’s just the way they’ve always been.”

    That is precisely why I have been amazed to see how rapidly and thoroughly the Air Force has seemingly succumbed to the leftist groupthink processes of political correctness. I was reminded of this by an article at Townhall by Todd Starnes relating just how thoroughly the zoomies have been infected with all the liberal leftist nonsense about race, gender, and sexual orientation. It seems that a very high-performing officer, Colonel Leland Bohannon, a pilot with combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and enough of the right stuff to be a candidate for a general’s star, has run afoul of the P.C. rules and now faces disgrace and dishonor.

    So just what ghastly thing did Col. Bohannon do that merits the total destruction of his honorable and admirable career? As Starnes relates:

    Last May the colonel declined to sign a certificate of spouse appreciation for a retiring master sergeant’s same-sex spouse [sic].

    He was unable to do so because it would have caused him to affirm a definition of marriage contrary to his sincerely held religious beliefs.

    According to the article, Col. Bohannon had already been selected for promotion to brigadier general, but that promotion (and perhaps the colonel’s current rank) has been sacrificially burned on the altar of political correctness for what can only be described as a frivolous matter: the signing of a thank-you note at a retirement. Good thing no one asked him to bake a cake – the Air Farce might bust him all the way back to airman first class.

    I wonder what would happen if this politically correct injustice were brought to the attention of Donald Trump and General Mattis.

    Donald Trump’s Twitter account

    White House phone: (202) 456-1111 or 256-1414

    Email: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

    SECDEF phone: (703) 751-3343

    DoD Twitter Account

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Gold Star families as political fodder

    Gold Star families as political fodder

    The political Left has decided that they’ll start attacking the President using Gold Star issues. First, they started attacking President Trump for not making phone calls to folks who lost loved ones in the war against terror. Trump correctly responded that all Presidents haven’t made those phone calls.

    This is from one of our friends who happens to be a Gold Star mother;

    Next, they started in on a report from Florida Democrat, fashionista and Congressional Representative Frederica Wilson that, for some reason, she had been in the limo when Sergeant LaDavid Johnson’s widow received a call from the President. Johnson was killed in an ambush in Niger last week, along with three other special forces soldiers. According to the Associated Press;

    Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Florida Democrat who was in the car with Johnson’s family, said in an interview that Trump had told the widow that “you know that this could happen when you signed up for it … but it still hurts.” He also referred to Johnson as “your guy,” Wilson said, which the congresswoman found insensitive.

    What the president actually said was “They know the risk, They know what they sign up for but they still volunteer to put their lives on the line for their fellow Americans. We owe them a debt that can never be repaid“. Quite a bit different than the edited quote.

    So, to summarize, the Left claims that Trump doesn’t make phone calls to Gold Star families, except when he calls a widow while a Congressional Representative is in a limo with a widow, and they don’t like parts of what he says.

    For some reason, AP thought it was appropriate in an article about Trump and Gold Star families to put a picture of Obama saluting a fallen soldier at the top of their article;

    If anyone doesn’t deserve to be dragged into politics, it’s Gold Star families.

    Like or hate Trump, let’s focus on policy and leave these folks out of it.

  • Richard Barnett; perv

    Richard Barnett; perv

    Ex-PH2 sends us a link to the news about Richard Barnett, a 14-year US Navy veteran (an Aviation Electronics Technician) currently employed by the Federal Aviation Administration (Aviation Safety Inspector) who was using a music app to converse with young girls and solicit them for pictures of themselves in various stages of undress;

    When [the teenage girls] wouldn’t send him what he wanted to see, he threatened to show up at their homes to rape and kill them.

    […]

    In his messages to girls on the internet he often bragged about how many guns he owned. At one point, he sent a picture of a semi-automatic handgun with the words, “That’s mine; I can and will shoot you; keep talking crap; I’m sick of your crap; now your [sic] done.”

    He later sent the message, “I can hurt you and then dump you where no one will find you. I carry a gun every day.”

    According to his Linked In profile, he was previously employed by the Transportation Security Agency.