Category: Politics

According to the Military Times, the 2016 Republican platform, adopted at their convention this week in Cleveland, includes improving pay and benefits for the military as well as ending “social experimentation” and focusing on readiness and morale;

“Military families must be assured of the pay, health care, housing, education, and overall support they have earned,” the platform states. “In recent years, they have been carrying the burden of budgetary restraint more than any other Americans through cuts in their pay, health benefits, and retirement plans.

“About 75 percent of enlistees come from military families. We cannot expect that level of patriotic commitment to continue among young people who have experienced the way their families have been treated.”

Yeah, well, the Republicans bear some responsibility for the deterioration of readiness and morale over the last eight years. They’ve been more than willing to screw the troops to appear as if they were eager to get along with the President.

“We believe that our nation is most secure when the president and the administration prioritize readiness, recruitment, and retention rather than using the military to advance a social or political agenda,” it states. “Military readiness should not be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.”

Republicans were in a position to prevent that from happening during the Obama years, but they would rather pander to traditionally Democrat voters rather than listen to their own base. While the GOP platform looks good on paper, they haven’t done anything lately to make me think they’re serious about actually accomplishing anything in this regard.

I guess CBS News is competing with CNN’s article about PTSD and the the Baton Rouge murderer today. They blame the murderous rampages of the Baton Rouge killer and the Dallas killer on anger issues that are common among combat veterans;

A study published by Army psychiatrists in 2015 found “anger and aggression are among the most common issues reported by returning service members from combat deployments.”

[…]

But a 2013 Army study of 2,000 combat veterans found thirty-five percent getting angry enough to kick or smash something, twenty-two percent angry enough to threaten someone with physical violence and seven percent angry enough to actually hit someone.

A separate study pointed to something called “trait anger,” defined as a propensity to become angry under stressful conditions. In other words, anger could have been a personality trait before they joined the military and the stress of service made it worse.

The Dallas murderer was an Army Reserve carpenter who was sent home from a deployment because of sexual harassment. The Baton Rouge murderer, a Marine veteran, was a “data network specialist”. Neither was involved in actual combat, however both were involved in the Black Lives Matter movement after their military service.

So, what, besides the fact that they both wore uniforms and fought boredom during their deployments, do they really have in common that would cause them to hate white cops to the point of murdering mostly white cops? Seriously. Sometimes the most obvious answer is the correct answer.

The stress of living among stupid pointy-headed civilian know-it-alls makes me angry.

According to the Associated Press, the military coup in Turkey against the Recep Tayyip Erdogan government has failed.

Erdogan was on a seaside vacation when tanks rolled into the streets of Ankara and Istanbul. He flew home early Saturday and declared the coup to have failed.

The uprising appears not to have been backed by the most senior ranks of the military, and Turkey’s main opposition parties quickly condemned the attempted overthrow of the government. Gen. Umit Dundar, newly appointed as acting chief of the general staff, said the plotters were mainly officers from the Air Force, the military police and the armored units.

Prime Minister Benali Yildirim said 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the overnight violence. He said 2,839 plotters were detained. A source at the office of the presidency, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government rules, said the 161 toll “excludes assailants.”

A group of the lead plotters flew to Greece in a Turkish Army helicopter and asked for asylum. I guess they had planned for failure, not for success – that’s why coups fail in the modern era. In the good old days, it was a fight to the death. Last man standing.

A report at ABC News quotes former Defense intelligence Agency head, retired LTG Michael Flynn, as saying that almost 80% of the material on computers captured from ISIS, Al Qaeda and other Jihadist was pornography. In his new book, Flynn says:

“We were facing a despicable foe, one who would rape and pillage women and children, boys and girls, behead for fun, all while watching pornography on their laptops,” Flynn writes, after describing U.S. efforts in Iraq in the mid-2000s. “In fact, at one point, we determined that 80 percent of the material on the laptops we were capturing was pornography.”

Other counterterrorism officials, while not affirming the 80% figure confirmed that pornography is often found on terrorists’ computers. “Some of it was really bad, and it was all over the map. Some of it was kids, animals,” said one former analyst.

Animals? Like maybe a video of young goats in garterbelts pole-dancing and twerking their nubile nannie fannies while Parviz and pals pound their puds?

Rejected by American Thinker

In a clear case of closing the barn door after the horse is out, the Associated Press reports that the Army is investigating why the Dallas murderer got out of the service with an honorable discharge;

XXX deployed to Afghanistan in 2013, but was sent back to Texas with the recommendation that he be removed from the Army with an other-than-honorable discharge, said Glendening, who prepared the other-than-honorable discharge papers in September 2014.

However, XXX did not actually leave the service until the following April, according to service records released by the Army that do not classify his discharge.

His attorney later learned that the discharge was honorable.

“I was shocked to see that,” he told The Associated Press by phone last week, less than 24 hours after the Dallas shooting. He said he never received final documentation on how XXX’s case was resolved.

“Somebody really screwed up but to my client’s benefit,” he said.

The lawyer has since been ordered by the Army to shut his mouth.

The murderer was sent back early from a deployment to Afghanistan because a female soldier complained that he was harassing her. There are stories about him stealing her panties and ordering panties for her on the internet from Victoria’s Secret. He was clearly a problem and they did the right thing for the female soldier by getting him a half a world away from her.

While many leaders in the Army are always doing the right thing, Big Army is gun shy about punishing people and doing the paperwork necessary to remove them from the service for minor offenses. I’m sure that to that female soldier, it wasn’t a minor offense, but in the Scheme of Big Things, it was minor to the Army. I’d guess that they excused him from weekend drills and continued to pay him so he and his lawyer wouldn’t bitch.

Also in the Scheme of Big Things, an other than honorable (OTH) discharge wouldn’t have prevented him from killing those police officers in Dallas, otherwise, the Army would have done something about the murderer’s discharge before now. Who goes from stealing panties to murder and then blames a discharge record? Stealing panties isn’t something that the Army teaches or condones. Whatever that was, he came in the military with that. Same with the murder thing. I’ve never stolen panties or murdered anyone, and that had nothing to do with my service, either.

The Hillary campaign has floated the possibility of retired admiral, James G. Stavridis, as a vice-presidential pick, a man who appears to fit the mold of a Democrat military leader quite well. He’s an intellectual, a military egghead with a PhD and numerous other academic honors and accomplishments. Under the Obama administration he became the first naval officer to head up NATO as Supreme Allied Commander Europe and he was probably headed for greater heights in the Pentagon had he not become mired in a tacky scandal.

While Stavridis was serving as SACEUR, anonymous tipsters apparently provided sufficient evidence to justify the initiation of an extensive investigation into his reputed misuse of government aircraft and automobiles, unauthorized use of government communications, receiving unauthorized per diem compensation and taking unreported gifts from foreign nations. No wonder Hillary likes the guy.

The lengthy investigative report (.pdf link) determined there were grounds to, “take appropriate corrective action with regards to ADM Stavridis,” but it was disregarded by über progressive navy secretary, Ray Mabus, who concluded, “I have determined that ADM Stavridis never attempted to use his public office for private gain nor did he commit personal misconduct.”

You should note that “I” not “we,” nor “a lengthy naval investigation,” which is a not unexpected response from the arrogant and narcissistic Mabus, a Pentagonian prince not known for heeding subordinates nor following naval tradition. What’s likely is that Stavridis was a “four star” in favor with the Obama administration for his progressive sympathies in diversifying the navy, and as we have most recently seen, under this administration, high-ranking, in-favor, Democrat wrongdoers operate by a different set of laws and regulations than we, the great unwashed, so Stavridis walked. However, the scandal must have been seen by the Obama administration as being sufficient to prevent further military advancement for Stavridis as he retired in 2013 without additional promotion.

For those of you who might question the admiral’s qualifications to be vice-president, I say,

“Hey, at least he’d go into the job with an up close and personal understanding of the Democrat system of justice.”

Crossposted at American Thinker