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

Category: Politics

  • “Where have you been?”

    According to the Washington Post, during yesterday’s hearings about the Walter Reed dust-up;

    “I have to tell you, the first thing that pops into my mind is: Where’ve you been? Where has all the brass been?” said Rep. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.), who convened the hearing as chairman of the national security and foreign affairs subcommittee. “All the things that [were] heard, read about and heard earlier today, clearly, this can’t all be pushed down at the lower level. Clearly this is not some junior officer’s responsibility that nobody else has to claim anything for.”

    I’d ask Mr Tierney the same question. When this war began, supposedly back when the Democrats still supported the President, I made rounds to the wounded soldiers in some of the wards. The nephew of a high school friend had been in that Chinook crash right before Thanksgiving of 2003 when about 60 troops were killed. He miraculously survived but lost part of one of his legs. Well, anyway, I smuggled him in a bottle of Saranac Black and Tan, a local brew from back home, and his wife came over to our apartment a few times and fixed him a couple of homecooked meals to take to the hospital.

    While I was up there, I talked to some of the troops (one of my favorite past times) and none of them had been visited by their Congressional reps, so I started taking down their names and hometowns and faxing the information to Congressional offices.

    After awhile, it got too overwhelming because idiot staffers would call me at work and ask stupid questions about how they could verify that the information I sent them was true, doctors names and phone numbers – all the stuff they could find out with a simple call to the Walter Reed PAO. Besides, I’d influenced enough people to get them pro-active on visiting their constituents.

    The thing that really got me out of the business, though, was when I told a staffer who had waited five days to call me and ask about a young troop that the hero had died. He was a great kid with a lovely young wife whom I’d met on Thanksgiving when I was passing out pogie bait. It broke my heart that he’d died. Just thinking about his wife and their new baby, I just lost it on the phone with the tardy staffer. So I stopped doing it for completely selfish reasons.

    So where these pompous, arrogant congressmen all of this time? If they’d been REALLY worried about their constituents, they’d have already known about conditions in Building 18. They shouldn’t have had to wait to read it in the Post.Â

    UPDATE: Bob Dole and Donna Shalala have been chosen to head a presidential commission on veterans’ health care. Bob Dole I understand – he’s spent years in the vet health system. But what the hell is Shalala doing there. Other than teach at college, all she’s ever been is a shill for Clinton Administration. I guess she’ll play the Jamie Gorelick and deflect criticism from the Clinton Administration so like all other “bi-partisan commissions” this one will be useless, too.

  • Webb defends Iran, House caves on Iraq

    According to Christina Bellatoni of the Washington Times, freshman Senator Jim “Snippy” Webb is about to introduce legislation to prevent the President from defending us against Iran;

    Freshman Sen. James H. Webb Jr. yesterday introduced legislation to force President Bush to seek congressional authorization before using force against Iran.
        Democratic leaders, who indicated general support for the Virginia Democrat’s plan last week, are still deciding whether they will attach it to an upcoming spending bill.
        “This presidency has shot from the hip too many times for us to be able to trust it to act on its own,” said Mr. Webb, a decorated Vietnam veteran who won a hotly contested Senate race last fall in part because of his opposition to the Iraq war. “We need the Congress to be involved in any decision to commence military activities absent an attack from the other side or a direct threat.”

    Yeah, the Democrats have proven themselves so valuable in this war against terror that we need them to distinguish the events in Iraq from the events in Iran. Like I’ve said, it’s the same war – just like Cambodia was the same as the war in Vietnam. The Left kept us from cutting off the NVA from their supplies in Cambodia with their incessant chatter about “illegal war” and so on. Are they planning to get more US troops killed by preventing us from ending the threat from Iran, just so we can see this;


     

    While Webb is busy shielding his allies in Iran, the cut-and-run Democrats in Congress are busy working on another half-wit scheme to hamstring the president in Iraq. Since they can’t summon the testicular fortitude to come right out and defund our efforts, the Washington Post reports that;

    Senior House Democrats, seeking to placate members of their party from Republican-leaning districts, are pushing a plan that would place restrictions on President Bush’s ability to wage the war in Iraq but would allow him to waive them if he publicly justifies his position.

    Under the proposal, Bush would also have to set a date to begin troop withdrawals if the Iraqi government fails to meet benchmarks aimed at stabilizing the country that the president laid out in January.

    The plan is an attempt to bridge the differences between anti-war Democrats, led by Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), who have wanted to devise standards of troop readiness strict enough to force Bush to delay some deployments and bring some troops home, and Democrats wary of seeming to place restrictions on the president’s role as commander in chief.

    So what kind of magic bullet do they craft?

    The new plan would demand that Bush certify that combat troops meet the military’s own standards of readiness, which are routinely ignored. The president could then waive such certifications if doing so is in “the national interest.”

    Democrats hope the waiver and benchmark proposals, whose details were confirmed by aides and senior Democrats close to the House Appropriations Committee and leadership, will keep the policymaking responsibilities on Bush. That should allow the committee to move forward next week with a $100 billion war spending bill.

    Since the Democrats can’t even agree on the single issue that they believe got them in office, they’re punting. Probably because they’re coming to realize that it wasn’t their opposition to the war and the president that got them into office at all. Or maybe it’s because they never had a plan to end the war until the last three plans since January.

    They were too busy gloating, partying and attacking the President’s every word to actually put a moment’s thought into what their policy would look like. Now they have to cobble together SOMETHING…ANYTHING to save their stupid faces.

  • Secretary of the Army; comparison

    With nearly every news show and news paper focusing on the resignation of the Army Secretary Francis Harvey over the Walter Reed disgrace, I began wondering how the same media covered Bill Clinton’s first choice for the Secretary of the Army, John Shannon;

    THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

    Washington – The Army’s acting secretary, John Shannon, has been charged with shoplifting a woman’s blouse and skirt at a post exchange near the Pentagon, the Army said yesterday.

    The incident occurred Thursday at the Army PX at Ft. Myer, Va., said Army spokesman Col. Steve Rausch. A store detective apprehended Shannon for allegedly shoplifting a woman’s blouse and skirt, the spokesman said.

    Shannon, 59, was charged with misdemeanor theft of government property, an offense that carries a maximum penalty of 1 year in prison and a $100,000 fine, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Chesnut, a federal prosecutor in Alexandria, Va.

    Four one-line paragraphs.

    And the New York Times;

    August 28, 1993, Saturday
    By ERIC SCHMITT, (Special to The New York Times); National Desk
    Late Edition – Final, Section 1, Page 6, Column 1, 371 words

    The Acting Secretary of the Army, John W. Shannon, was placed on administrative leave today after being accused of shoplifting, the Army said. Mr. Shannon was accused of shoplifting a skirt and blouse valued at about $30 from the Army post exchange at Fort Myer, Va., on Thursday….

    Page 6, 371 words. A little different than this story in yesterday’s Times which is two .html pages long. And not a word in the Washington Post’s archives about the 1993 incident.

    Seems to me that an Army Secretary who shoplifts has more personal deficiencies than one who doesn’t personally inspect every building the Army owns. And, in case anyone is wondering what happened to John Shannon, the Clinton Administration kept him on the Pentagon payroll for eight years as a paid consultant.

  • Reality starts seeping in

    Apparently, Congress is waking up to the fact that the majority of Americans actually want to win the war in Iraq. According to S.A. Miller of the Washington Times;

    Republicans in Congress — including most who have defected from President Bush’s plan to send reinforcements to Iraq — have closed ranks and are prepared to thwart the Democrats’ continued efforts to undermine the war strategy.
        Most of the 17 House Republicans who voted for a resolution against the troop-surge plan — which was about half the number predicted by Democrats — now oppose moves to cut war funding or attach conditions to appropriations bills that would hamstring the war effort.
        All but one of the seven Senate Republicans that backed the anti-surge resolution in their chamber say they will not support any funding cuts. The one other dissident Republican — Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska — declined to comment on the issue.
        “I don’t think we should micromanage the war or tie the president’s hands,” said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, a Virginia Republican who last month voted with Democrats to pass a nonbinding resolution disapproving of Mr. Bush’s plan to deploy 21,500 more troops.
        “The question of the surge was one of policy [and] an opportunity for me to express my frustration with the policy,” Mr. Davis said. “But when it comes to conducting the war, that is the president’s authority. … We have to close ranks behind him and allow this [plan] to work.”

    What else could make those purely political animals do such a sudden about face unless it’s the realization that Americans aren’t supporting their stance against the President.

    Republicans aren’t the only ones. Donald Lambro of the Washington Times writes;

    A senior Democratic adviser said yesterday he is disappointed and dismayed by the efforts of House and Senate Democrats to change administration policies in Iraq, predicting they would lead to further division and stalemate in Congress on the war.
        “If you stand back, the whole debate has been pretty frustrating. The bigger problem is that [Democratic leaders’] proposals are not going anywhere, such as some revised authority for the war,” said Leon Panetta, a key Democratic member of the Iraq Study Group whose proposals to stabilize Iraq were largely dismissed by President Bush.
        “But those efforts are doomed. Either they are going to be blocked in Congress or vetoed by the president, or both. The end result is that it will make us more divided and impotent on war policy,” President Clinton’s former White House chief of staff said in an interview with The Washington Times.
        Mr. Panetta’s blunt complaints about how his party has bungled the war debate underscores a partywide discomfort among many Democrats that their leaders have failed to craft a politically viable compromise that can draw some bipartisan support.

    And Panetta’s not the only one;

     “A lot of [the Democrats’] efforts have been pointless,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution who advises Democrats on national security issues.
        “So I think, rather than monkeying around [with anti-war legislation], they should wait until the fall and basically say, whether you like Bush’s handling of the war or not, at least recognize it is reasonable that it could work and give it six more months,” Mr. O’Hanlon said.

    So, everyone is beginning to realize that the voters’ revolt against the Republican congress wasn’t about the President at all. It was about AMericans’ frustration with Republicans in Congress and their inability to run it with any semblance of order. Now the Democrats are beginning to realize that they didn’t win the election because of President Bush at al, no matter how hard they tried to make it about him. And the group they’ve been pandering to are just a tiny bunch of whackos trying to end the war for their own selfish reasons.

    Nothing in the Washington Post about this. Only stories about the chief of Walter Reed being fired and some Congressional Democrat who happened to be an Iraq vet. I guess the fact that the Democrats are losing their one big issue isn’t worth a column inch or two.

  • Dems porkin’ out on defense money

    Now we find out why the Democrats really want to restrict funding for the war. The AP writes;

    The expected battle with the White House over the add-ons is getting far less attention than debate over Iraq, but it could reveal a lot about how much Democrats will be able to rewrite the president’s budget later this year.

    Bush has yet to veto a spending bill, and Democrats are gambling he’ll sign the Iraq measure despite objections to spending he didn’t seek. Republicans, meanwhile, would be reluctant to vote against the package since it contains funds for U.S. troops overseas.

    Both Democrats and Republicans are pushing extra spending into the war funding bill as they seek to advance pet projects that likely would fail if advanced on their own.

    In a related AP piece, the highlights of the Democrats’ wishlist are;

    _$3.4 billion for housing assistance and infrastructure improvements associated with Hurricane Katrina.

    _$200 million for other agencies.

    Potential congressional add-ons to the bill:

    _$4 billion in drought relief for farmers in the Great Plains.

    _$3.1 billion for military base construction and closings.

    _$1.3 billion for New Orleans levee improvements.

    _$1.2 billion in relief, unemployment, food and housing aid arising out of a freeze that destroyed citrus, avocado and other crops in California’s Central Valley.

    _$745 million to deal with a shortfall in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program in 14 states.

    _$400 million for a one-year extension of payments to rural counties in the Pacific Northwest to make up for timbering cutbacks in national forests.

    More dirty politics from the dirty politics people.

  • So this is draining the swamp, huh?

    So trying to create trust in Congress means assigning accused criminals to one of the most sensitive positions in Congress, I guess. Blinky the Botox Queen has appointed William Jefferson to the House Homeland Security Committee. From The Hill’s Susan Crabtree and Jackie Kucinich;

    In an interview with CNN’s Larry King, which aired Tuesday night, Pelosi said that after learning about the $90,000 Jefferson stashed in his freezer, she stripped him of his Ways and Means seat.
     
      “What I said to my colleague is, you have $90,000 in your freezer, whatever the explanation, you have a problem with me,” she told King.
     
      Pelosi then said she named Jefferson to the Homeland Security panel because it has jurisdiction over his storm-ravaged district and because the tax-writing panel deals with some of the business and financial issues involved in the allegations against him while the Homeland Security Committee does not.
     
      “But Mr. Jefferson’s district has been New Orleans, greatly affected by Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. And the committee of jurisdiction there, Homeland Security, is an appropriate place for him to be,” she said. “But I removed him from the Ways and Means Committee, [which] had something to do with the accusations made against him. Homeland Security does not.”

    Um, aren’t the agencies investigating his bribery case also under the aegis of Homeland Security, Nan?

    At least Republicans are speaking up this time;

    “You gotta wonder where Jefferson’s gonna store all those homeland security secrets,” said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (N.C.), a deputy Republican whip. Other Republicans said Pelosi’s decision contradicted her promise to create “the most ethical Congress in history.” Said King: “It shows hypocrisy. Before the election, they made a big point of pulling him from Ways and Means and after the election, they put him on Homeland Security.”

    Yeah, well, the election’s over and Democrats have saved their jobs one more time. In two years the mush-heads who voted for Democrats won’t care what happened two years ago.

    A spokesman for Pelosi said she opted to place Jefferson on Homeland Security because the panel oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Jefferson had been a vocal critic of FEMA’s performance during Hurricane Katrina, which affected thousands of his constituents.

    Those dipshits in Louisiana don’t deserve representation; they keep sending the same incompetent morons and criminals back into the same offices that inflicted that 2005 mess on the area. At least Republicans are forcing Democrats to go on record with their vote;

    “House Democrats and their leaders should immediately reconsider this baffling and troubling decision,” said Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican.
        “The Democrats previously determined Congressman Jefferson is unfit to serve on the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the nation’s finances and trade, so it is difficult to comprehend how they can approve of Congressman Jefferson’s fitness for a seat on the Homeland Security Committee, with access to America’s most sensitive and closely guarded intelligence information,” Mr. Boehner said.
        The threat is likely to prompt Democrats to ratify Mr. Jefferson’s seat in a late-night voice vote, but a senior House Republican aide says Republicans will monitor floor proceedings day and night to block the unanimous-consent measure.

    I just wish the FBI would hurry up and charge the guy, actually.

  • John Kerry, sign your Form 180 or shut up

    Reading Mary Ann Akers in the Washington Post column “The Sleuth” today, I’m reminded of John Kerry and his childish refusal to sign his Form 180 and putting all of this “swiftboating” nonsense behind him.

    Kerry “swiftboated” himself by not being forthcoming with his military records and proving his detractors wrong. So anything else he has to say about the people who ended his stillborn ambitions is just mindless blather.

    Every veteran has been challenged about his accomplishments. The veterans who have actually done the things they claim to have done don’t mind proving themselves. Every soldier who had ever reported for duty has had to display his bona fides. Why won’t Kerry, and why won’t Kerry shut up about it?

    According to AP, by way of Fox News;

    But Kerry said the incident raised questions about Fox’s fitness to serve as an ambassador.

    Why? Because he opposed a politician in an election a donated money to that politician’s opponent? I guess just about anyone would be unfit using that measure.

    Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., a presidential hopeful and chairman of Tuesday’s hearing, said he found Fox’s responses “unsatisfying.” He said he would have preferred if Fox admitted it was a mistake to contribute to the Swift Boat group.

    I’d have preferred that Fox just come out and tell Kerry to sign his fricken Form 180 and admit that he’d done nothing wrong and declare that both Obama and Kerry resign their respective positions if they plan on using those positions to intimidate their political enemies – like two spoiled little brats.

  • “…make sure this is still President Bush’s war’

    Reading the Washington Post this morning I see the Democrats still have their panties wadded up over how best to hamstring the President and his troops;

    House Democratic leaders offered a full-throated defense last night of their plans to link Iraq war spending with rigorous standards for resting, training and equipping combat troops, saying that they would hold President Bush accountable for failing to meet those readiness tests.

    But after a fractious meeting of the House Democratic caucus, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said Democratic members still have not united around the proposal.

    They all seemed so united recently when the war protesters were in town. It was like there was blood in the water and it was feeding time. So what could have happened? Maybe the left discovered that the average American citizen (as opposed to the below-average American citizens who make up the vocal anti-war crowd) isn’t ready to admit defeat. Notice that only Democrats in secure seats are supporting Murtha – very few secure seats. Included in that number is my favorite (drunken, loutish) Jim Moran from across the Potomac – despite the WaPo calling his district in Alexandria, VA “conservative”;

    But some Democrats, especially those from conservative districts, remain wary. Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (Va.), who supports the plan, said many Democrats “want to make sure this is still President Bush’s war. It’s his war to manage, and it’s his war to end.”

    It’s the president’s war, huh? Then let him fight it, gumball.

    AP reports that Democrats may be finally awakening to the fact that they don’t really have a say in the war after all;

    Bush “hasn’t to date done anything we’ve asked him to do, so why we would think he would do anything in the future is beyond me,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., one of a group of liberal Democrats pushing for an immediate end to the war.

    Across the Capitol, Carl Levin suddenly decides that Syria is the problem, according to Flopping Aces and RedState. Remember before the war in Iraq, the Left was yelling that Iran would be a better a more logical objective than Iraq. And they pointed out that several of the nineteen hijackers on September 11th were Saudis – why don’t we attack Saudi Arabia? Now that we’ve tied Iran into the murders of our troops, Levin points us in the other direction.

    I was just wondering, does the military have a plan to, if necessary, to go into Syria to go to the source of any weapons coming from Syria?

    What’s up with these nimrods? Do they so want the war against terror to be such a failure that they’ll advocate a war anywhere except where our troops happen to be deployed?  

    I sure hope the American voters are watching this circus and will take it into consideration next November.