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

Category: Society

  • Typical leftist techniques

    I was reading Curt at Flopping Aces early this morning – after my first morning cup – and saw his piece on “Celebrity Idiots Attack Karl Rove” and it sounded so familiar. Well, it’s familiar because it’s the same way I’ve been attacked by supposed friends and new acquaintances who’ve decided to wade into a political discussion with me. When they discover my political views, they feel it’s their appointed duty to convert me into “one of them”.

    When I try to avoid the conversation (usually when my wife is around because she hates it when my face gets red and I turn into “that guy”), they continue on with their blathering and grab me by the arm to keep me rooted in my spot while their spittle runs down their chin and the volume increases. I’ll make a one line reply  – a statement of indisputable fact – and the saliva count increases along with the decibles. As if volume and spittle production increases will convince me to be an intellectually-vacant moron. 

    The fewer facts presented only increases the volume – and the namecalling. At first, they avoid calling me names and the start with the President, then work through his staff, then Haliburton, and somehow Ken Lay always gets thrown in.

    When I don’t react to all of those vacuous debating techniques, the gun gets turned on me. First, by making sideways, glancing blows like “…well, anyone who thinks otherwise must be a moron…”, or “aren’t you ashamed of what those cretins have done to your party?”

    Then suddenly, I’m a jackbooted thug who eats puppies alive, kicks old people and murders unsuspecting teenagers.

    The more I appear like I won’t be convinced to surrender my soul to the gods of their weird religion, the angrier, louder, and more irrational they become. You can see examples of this behavior across the internet – especially in the comments section of HuffPo. And in my email.

    When I read about Al Sharpton getting death threats, I know it’s BS. The Left are the side that make death threats, hell, I’ve gotten them here. They like to say they get death threats – who would waste the time to make a death threat to those three pinhead Dixie Chicks? Who has time for that?

    I’ve never seen a Conservative on television get fist-pounding mad on any of the talk shows, but you see the Left doing it all the time. The closest I’ve seen from the Right is Bob Novak walking out of a CNN broadcast during a commercial break. The biggest emotional outburst from a conservative was Dick Cheney calmly telling Pat Leahy to attempt asexual reproduction. That’s it. That’s all they have.

    But almost nightly you can see the Left in hystrionics over something or other – especially when they have no real facts. I’ve never seen a Conservative crying in the Congressional hallways because no one is listening to them, but we were treated to that just a few weeks from Code Pink – grown men in pink sweatshirts with tears streaming down their faces because Nancy Pelosi won’t end the war in Iraq yesterday. I guess they’re comfortable with their masculinity – but the rest of us aren’t. Comfortable with their masculinity, I mean.

    You read about John “Christmas in Cambodia” Kerry storming into a confirmation hearing in a committee in which he’s not even a member, and grilling a political foe, then storming out again – the Left takes great glee in emotional, pointless gestures like denying an ambassadorship to Belgium. Then the feigned outrage at the recess appointment to Belgium (it’s fricken Belgium for pete’s sake).

    Despite the fact that there’s no real evidence that Alberto Gonsalez ordered the firings of several federal prosecutors for political reasons, the Left is jumping up and down screaming for his head. But, I guess they don’t see that keeping Sam Fox from being ambassador to Belgium as the same thing, huh?

    The left has nothing. No science, no morals, no sense of history – just emotional outbursts.  That’s why I don’t go out much anymore. And that’s why Leftists live in an echo chamber – no rational person wants to talk to them.

  • Sometimes I forget; today I remembered

    Sometimes I get so wrapped in the politics of this war against terror, I forget what it’s really about. When Harry Reid makes bonehead comments about losing the war in Iraq, when John Murtha calls our troops murderers, when Dick Durbin calls our troops SS concentration camp guards, when Nancy Pelosi kisses the ring of terrorist supporting despots, I get so fricken angry that all I can do is just pound out my thoughts about the hatred I have for those sorry excuses for humans on this poor cracked and dented keyboard.

    Today, though, I forgot about them for a minute.

    Most of my readers know that every Saturday morning I go to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for my weekly dose of SOS (it stands for “Shit on a Shingle”; hamburger gravy over scrambled eggs and a biscuit – the real reason I stayed in the Army for twenty years). I love being among soldiers, and I love SOS so it’s the highlight of my week.

    Today was a little different. My wife and I were coming out of the parking garage and a young soldier and his wife were making their way into the hospital, too. He was in a wheel chair and his right leg was gone just below his thigh – I noticed he was wearing an 82d Airborne Division T-shirt. So as I walked by him, I shook his hand and said “Thanks, Airborne”. He gave me a big smile and took my hand firmly and said “Thanks” to me.

    Then I asked him what unit he was in and he told me he’d been attached to the ’05 (That’s the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment) when he’d been wounded in Tikrit. That’s what he called it – wounded. His whole right leg was gone, but he called it a wound. So I grabbed his wheelchair and started pushing him toward the elevators and we talked – I’d told him I’d been in the Three-Two-Five 25 years ago and he laughed and asked how my knees were holding up. We carried on like two old friends, two brother paratroopers reminiscing.

    He told me that he was convalescing well and he hoped to be out of the hospital soon and that he wanted to remain on active duty. That he’d heard other guys whining about their condition, but he was going to hold up just fine. I told him that he sounded like he was holding more than just fine and we smiled at each other. I hope he didn’t notice I was holding back tears – tears of pride in the generation that succeeded mine. 

    We all got on the elevator and went up to the third floor where my wife and I were getting off. He stuck his hand out and thanked me for my service. HE THANKED ME! I was dumbfounded. This twenty-year-old kid, missing his leg, was thanking me for my service. I grabbed his hand and thanked him for doing what I couldn’t do any more, and I got off the elevator in a partial daze.

    It was at that moment I realized these kids don’t care about the politics, they don’t give a tiny rat’s ass that Code Pink stands their drones up in front of Walter Reed with idiot Bush=Hitler signs. They don’t care that Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House or that Harry Reid makes moronic statements that he later “regrets” were taken out of context. They don’t care what Jack Murtha or Dick Durbin say about them.

    All they care about is their job, doing it right, keeping us safe and living up to legacy that they’ve been left by the generations of warriors that came before them. All the talk about conditions at Walter Reed, all the surrender flag-waving rhetoric and hippie drum beating is just background noise. These folks are writing our history and they don’t have time for the critics and naysayers.

    Sometimes I forget that this war isn’t about the politics, but today a young paratrooper and his young wife reminded me. And I think we’ll all be just fine.

  • Gun Control as a weapon

    I know I’m late to the Virginia Tech “massacre” debate, but not so late that I don’t get to see ass clowns use it for a reason to undermine our rights, apparently.

    In today’s DC Examiner, Harry Jaffe complains that not enough DC residents are protesting for “states rights” for DC. As an excuse that DC needs states rights (which as I’ve explained before is like giving car keys to a 10-year-old) jaffe presents the fact that courts have sided with Americans’ right to protect themselves in their homes with firearms. Jaffe begins by butressing his argument with the Virginia Tech shootings;

    I tend to be a practical protester, with an eye toward results. Here’s my take on three worthy reasons to take to the streets in Washington: voting rights, righting judicial wrongs, and gun control — in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.

    And ends with an idiot mish-mash of garbled reasoning;

    For years, we had a strong gun–control ban as a bulwark against the tide of handguns that come our way from Virginia. It gave teeth to our laws and power to our cops to grab guns.

    Now courts have overturned that law, and we could lose one of our best defenses against mayhem. But the best way to keep guns off our streets would be to encourage Virginia to make it harder to buy deadly weapons, such as the semiautomatic guns that killed 33 at Virginia Tech, and the ones that migrate to our streets.

    That’s pretty convoluted thinking, for one thing. The best way DC residents have to protect themselves from criminals is giving up their weapons? DC has the highest violent crime rate in the country and yet Jaffe trumpets the 31-year-old liberal draconian gun laws as the District’s best chance to beat crime.

    All the appeals court said was that DC residents could own guns and keep them in their homes for self-defense. Does Jaffe think that the DC cops have time to do a house-to-house search to “grab guns”? I doubt you could pry a sizable number of DC cops away from the Popeye Chicken joints long enough to check even one home. When DC had a gun buy-back program in 1999 and 2000 (25 years after the gun law was enacted) they took in 6253 guns – there were still that many guns in the District. Doesn’t sound like the laws are working – so why write more?

    Luckily, I have Charles Krauthammer on my side;

    Unfortunately, in today’s supercharged political atmosphere, there is the inevitable rush to get ideological mileage out of the carnage.

    It did not take long for the perennial debate about gun control to break out, preceded by the inevitable scolding and clucking abroad about America’s lax gun laws.

    Yeah, I caught bits and pieces of that clucking this week. Euro-weinies scolding us for our “gun culture” yet unable to protect themselves from gun and knife-wielding lunatics and asundry “youth” criminals destroying half of Europe everytime the weather gets warm.

    But that doesn’t stop perpetual handwringer EJ Dionne from complaining that Europe is laughing at us;

    Our country is a laughingstock on the rest of the planet because of our devotion to unlimited gun rights. On Thursday, an Australian newspaper carried this headline: “America, the gun club.”

    Dionne proves he doesn’t understand the debate;

    Any reasonable measures are blocked because most Republicans are opportunists on the gun issue and Democrats have become wimps. Republicans have exploited support from the NRA for years, and Democrats, eyeing rural congressional seats, are petrified of doing anything that offends the gun lobby.

    Republicans have this weird thing where we think the Constitution protects the rights of citizens, not it’s a list of suggestions for privileges that politicians can use to reward their constitituents. Democrats are the ones exploiting the fear of more gun violence instead of accepting the fact that guns protect us more than they kill us.

    But, honestly, I hope Democrats take Dionne’s “Democrats are wimps” line to heart. Nothing would wipe out Liberalism in one fell swoop like a national campaign against gun owners.

    Actually, I figure it’s this lunatic liberalism that thinks judges can predict human behavior – especially if they’re allowed to ignore other liberal “experts”. And, Lord knows we can’t violate the rights of lunatics to own guns, even though we think it’s fine and dandy to restrict mostly sane and rational people from owning guns. Which is exactly what Jaffe is supporting.

    I’ll bet cash money that neither Jaffe nor Dionne would have supported putting a note on Cho’s NAC file that hinted he might be a little nuts and shouldn’t be sold a gun. They’d just rather broadbrush paint the entie nation’s residents as potential lunatics instead of just restricting the dangerous guys.

    It’s comforting to know Mr. Krathammer thinks as I think;

    In a previous age, such a troubled soul might have found himself at the state mental hospital rather than a state university. But in a trade-off that a decent and tolerant society makes with open eyes, we allow freedom from straitjackets to those on the psychic edge, knowing that such tolerance runs a very rare but very terrible risk.

    It is inevitable, I suppose, that advocates of one social policy or another will try to use the Virginia Tech massacre to their advantage. But it is simply dismaying that a serious presidential candidate should use it as the ideological frame for his set-piece issues.

    Yeah, Democrats are good at standing on dead bodies for their political advantage. Look how tall they stand on our dead troops. I expected it when I first heard of the shooting.  But Clinton’s gun policies is what ultimately doomed the Gore presidency – too many hunters in Florida. Any Democrat who thinks that gun control is good way to get the White House is deluding themselves, but the Democrats’ field of candidates isn’t short of deluded people, is it?

    In fact, I think we need to ban Spring. Every Spring these youthful gunmen come out – it usually happens in mid-April – and start blasting away at their fellow classmembers. It must be the Spring weather. Maybe we should lock up all males after the first week of April.

    Or maybe as Diana West of the Washington Times says today, we should scrap liberalism;

    Since for a long time. Since we, as a society, decided to abolish “normal,” effectively eliminating the parameters of, well, normal behavior. Since we, as a society, decided to rid ourselves of taboos, effectively disarming basic self-defense mechanisms, including good judgment. It is unlikely Cho realized any of this as he maniacally exploited society’s weaknesses. But it is crucial we understand our inaction on Cho’s warning signs as a consequence of political correctness and begin to reverse it. Otherwise, we won’t have even a hope of warding off such evil next time.

    But, then how many Democrat Presidential candidates would there be if we reinstituted “normal” – or even “rational” for that matter.

  • Reading assignment and miscellaneous stuff

    Having a busy weekend. Something happened thirty years ago today and my wife is fairly angry that I don’t remember what it was. Hope I figure it out soon so I can get pancakes for breakfast. So while I get my brain housing group soaked in RBC, get smarter and stuff at these blogs;

    If you read nothing else this weekend read Andrew Walden’s “Learning from George McGovern and Earl Browder” on The American Thinker. Excellent.

    And, if you’ve got an hour or so, read this from Eject! Eject! Eject! and every time you need an uncommon dose of common sense.

    Blackfive discovers why the Iraqi Parliament was vulnerable to attack this past week. 

    If you still think that Liberalism hasn’t become a religious faith, read Samhita’s “analysis” – notice the emphasis on the first half of the word – (via Crotchety Old Bastard, Ace Of Spades and Protein Wisdom) of the Duke University cluster. Please be prepared to take a shower afterwards. 

    And, if Sharpton “brought down” Imus, Imus’ fall couldn’t have started very far from the bottom. And who believes anyone on this planet would waste even a nanosecond of their life to locate contact information so they could threaten Al Sharpton? I figure he’ll choke on his own bile soon enough.

    Don’t miss Sharpton’s stammering defense of his inability to apologize for his misdeeds in the Tawana Brawley case (oddly enough, it echoes the post from Samhita mentioned above) to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday when it gets rebroadcast this afternoon. While waiting, read about Sharpton’s attack on the entire German Army. I guess Imus gave him the courage to run to every open mic he sees. If there’s a reason Imus deserved to be fired, it was for kissing Sharpton’s ring more than anything else.

    Meanwhile, Curt at Flopping Aces , via Screw Loose Change, discovers the REAL reason Imus was fired.

    El Presidente at Slapstick Politics asks why we should trust climate experts on Global Warming when they can’t get the weekend weather right. 

  • Where is shame?

    A conversation I had with a co-worker the other day got me to thinking about this. I know it’s outside what I usually post here, but two articles on Drudge Report this morning struck me as similar and in the same vein as the discussion my friend and I had.

    The first article on Drudge was from the Guardian – not usually my favorite read – about Tony Blair catching flak because he dared to say that the recent spike in violence in Britain was caused by Black youths.

    His remarks angered community leaders, who accused him of ignorance and failing to provide support for black-led efforts to tackle the problem.

    One accused him of misunderstanding the advice he had been given on the issue at a Downing Street summit.

    Black community leaders reacted after Mr Blair said the recent violence should not be treated as part of a general crime wave, but as specific to black youth. He said people had to drop their political correctness and recognise that the violence would not be stopped “by pretending it is not young black kids doing it”.

    Imagine that! Having the audacity and temerity to mention that Black culture is affecting civil society! How dare he. But, seriously, that’s the problem – we can’t fix the problem of violent youths if we can’t isolate the cause, and it appears that the culture is the problem. 

    Ignoring the root causes only encourages the offenders – they’re kids looking for boundaries and as long as society makes excuses for their bahavior, they’ll continue being sociopaths. If the reason that they’re supposedly misbehaving is a perceived racism that’s directed against them, why can’t we admit in public the race of the perpetrators?

    And not to equate being black with same-sex sex, the other story (from Breitbart – AP in drag) was about police catching an unusual number of men in Atlanta’s airport bathrooms having sex;

    At the world’s busiest airport, plainclothes officers patrolling public restrooms in search of luggage thieves have instead uncovered a rash of other, more sordid crimes.

    The new restroom dragnet has led to the arrests of more than 30 people in three months for indecent exposure and public sex acts at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

    Now, what does one story have to do with the other? Well, this line;

    “Police have far better things to do with their time than to arrest people for this,” said Kenneth Sherrill, professor at Hunter College of The City University of New York. “Being ‘sex police’ in bathrooms strikes me as a perversion of rational law enforcement activities.”

    Yes, police do have far better things to do. I agree that public officials shouldn’t have to range the restrooms for people who can’t control themselves in public. Which brings me to my point.

    Where is shame these days? I hate to sound like the old coots from my youth, but when did criminal behavior become the norm? When did people start making weak and petty excuses for what used to be acts that stayed on the fringes of society – out of our public restrooms and off of the front pages of our newspapers?

    When I was a non-commissioned officer, one of our tenets was that we would never turn our backs on a deficiency – that we’d correct problems on the spot. I’ve tried to carry that same nugget with me to civilian life. I’ve stopped mugging, I’ve stopped winos from harrassing innocent people , I’ve broken up youths fighting, I’ve chased down people who’ve lost their wallets and purses, reported crimes to police as they were happening and reported drug dealers. Of course, I could make that a full time job here in Washington, DC.

    The reaction I get from the police as well as my friends is that I must be crazy. I’m just trying to be a good citizen, and I’m ashamed as an American to see what’s happening to my community. But I’m more ashamed that no one else, or very few people, here are doing their part.

    Maybe if we all were a little more ashamed of what we’ve let this society become, we can start doing our part.

  • OK, maybe it is Hell–

    My bride and I arrived back from the beach yesterday to witness the biggest bunch of crybabies on the planet trying to run a city. First, let me tell ya’all that it took us longer to get from our suburban Maryland home to Reagan National Airport on the subway than it did to get from Reagan to our hotel in South Beach Miami (that’s including the taxi ride and picking our luggage up from the airline) because a whopping 1/2″ of snow had fallen by the time we left home.

    That was on Tuesday – the snow stopped late Tuesday. This morning, four days later, schools are still closed because the people who get paid to shovel municipal sidewalks, clear shool driveways of snow, keep the school buses maintained are all on their collective ass.

    So instead of someone taking charge, schools are just closed. Is it any wonder that large numbers of schoolchildren don’t take their education seriously when the bloated bureaucracy that’s responsible for teaching those schoolchildren don’t take their jobs seriously?

    How many times have we seen those videos over the past week of kids in Redwood, NY and Oswego, NY plowing through 100″ of snow to get to school? I grew up a little south of there and I remember very few “snow days”.  

    Instead of attending school, the under-educated drones of the DC and bordering MD school districts were all riding the rails to-and-from the malls yesterday when we got back from Miami. They can zip back-and-forth to the malls, but because area bureaucrats can’t drag their ample buttocks out of bed on a schoolday and do the jobs their paid to do, they can’t get educated beyond a grade-school level.

    how is this your problem? Well, DC schools are Federally-funded to the tune of $811 million. How much of that do you figure comes from 1/2 million residents here?

  • Thanks, Troops

    I just want to thank all of my readers who are still in uniform for giving the citizens of this great country another peaceful and hopeful holiday.

  • Pelosi’s district disputes liberal image

    I just couldn’t help but snicker as I read this article about San Franciscans calling themselves mainstream. It reminds me of the George Clinton lyrics to some forgotten song that “a fish don’t know he’s wet”.