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

Category: Support the troops

  • We’re winning the war at home, too (UPDATED)

    I got wind a few weeks ago that ANSWER was planning a protest in DC on March 15th. So my immediate reaction was to check the Gathering of Eagles forum – and they had already planned a counter-protest. Well, that was good news for me because protests always raise my traffic through here.

    Today, I went back to ANSWER’s website and there was no mention of the March event. Strange. So I went to GOE’s forum and lo and behold, ANSWER had cancelled their protest;

    Do you ever think that we’re spinning our wheels in fighting the America-hating moonbats? Well, consider this:

    A.N.S.W.E.R., MoveOn.org, and their affiliated purveyors of political puke have canceled their planned March 15th event! They are increasingly intimidated by the prospect of us and our allies confronting them in the streets wherever that might be, in Hometown, USA, or Washington, DC.

    Accordingly, we will not have the “Americans Standing Up” rally in DC on the weekend of March 15th, as there will be no opposition to confront, and you KNOW we love to intimidate those misguided souls and their anti-American leaders like Cindy Sheehan and George Soros!

    In a nutshell, WE ARE WINNING THE BATTLE! And we will win the war for the soul of America!

    Now you have to remember these clowns had anti-war protests in DC planned BEFORE 9-11, and now they’re canceling events during the war. They just might be getting it that they’re not accomplishing anything.

    Adam Kokesh and the IVAW haven’t gotten the news yet apparently because they still plan to have their John Kerry-style theatrics called Winter Soldier II. But it may just be that they’re is too lazy to update their websites. When I hear more, I’ll post more.

    UPDATE: Gathering of Eagles is planning on being in town for the Winter Soldier II thingie, so your blogger will be there, too. Good excuse to take a coupla days off from work. You up for it, Kate?

  • Lawyers suck

    Blackfive writes about a young Marine sergeant who has been victimized by a smart-assed punk lawyer with shit-for-brains;

    While saying goodbye, at about 11am, he noticed a man leaning up against his car. Mike left his friend’s apartment and caught the man keying his car on multiple sides.

    After caught in the process, the man told Mike, “you think you can do whatever you want with Department of Defense license plates and tags”. (In Illinois you can purchase veteran, Marine, or medal plates. Mike has Illinois Marine Corps license plates.) During the exchange, he made additional anti-military comments.

    Mike called the Chicago police and had the man arrested. A citation against the man was issued for misdemeanor criminal damage to private property.

    The story all boils down to this; the scumbag piece-of-shit is a lawyer (sorry for being redundant) named jay Grodner, the Marine sergeant is deploying to Iraq in two days and the scumbag piece-of-shit lawyer plans on filing a continuance so he can avoid paying for his malfeasance.

    Blue Star Chronicles has Grodner’s contact information, if you’re so led.

    And, yes, I’m impugning an entire profession based on the underhanded behavior of a few – if the rest of you scumbag piece-of-shit lawyers would police your ranks the way you should, maybe I wouldn’t. Cry me a friggen river.

    And this guy should have been disbarred a loooooooong time ago;

    In addition to being disciplined for being involved in a scheme to forging documents, it has been reported to CLR that attorney Jay Robert Grodner has since then engaged in a conflict of interest with his clients, has abandoned his clients, has engaged in false billing, has engaged in a fraud upon his clients, provided ineffective assistance of counsel, and has engaged in a “fraud upon the court”.

    Um, forging documents – isn’t that like the most heinous crime for a “man of letters”? Of course, in Chicago that resume` could get him a judgeship – maybe even mayor.

    Crotchety Old Bastard is contemplating a legal fund for the Marine.

  • Clinton (Hearts) Vets – suddenly

    The Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire recounts a Hillary speech to veterans in Iowa yesterday;

    Speaking to a crowd of mostly elderly and wheelchair-bound veterans from World War II and the Vietnam War, Mrs. Clinton announced her plans to enact an updated version of the GI Bill of Rights that would expand education, housing and entrepreneurial benefits. (more…)

  • Thanks to the troops

    I’ve been tying up loose ends at work today (because I have four…count ’em…four days off) and trying to hook up with my former battle buddy so I missed this today – time to catch up.

    Last week the guys at Blackfive, offered to assemble a video “thanks” for bloggers to send out to the troops for the holidays. This is the finished product. Some day I’ll figure out this embedding video stuff, until I do, just click, please. 

    I don’t know how many Christmases I spent away from my family, with no computers, no email, no YouTube – not knowing what the people in my country were thinking about me and my troops – just doing our jobs and hoping for the best. This was a great opportunity to tell this generation of warriors that they’re loved and thought of fondly.

    I’d like to thank Blackfive and Uncle Jimbo for giving me the opportunity to send my thanks and holiday wishes to the troops.

    Other bloggers who took advantage of this great opportunity were:

    Michele Malkin

    Mary Katherine Hamm

    Churchill’s Parrot

    Some Soldier’s Mom

    Baldilocks (I’ve never met her, but I knew her as soon as she came on the screen)

    Army Wife Toddler Mom

    USO Girls

    Loopy Libertarian at Chromed Curses

    Bear Creek Ledger

    Love, Mom (Notes from the fridge)

    Tammi’s World

    That 1 Guy at Drunken Wisdom

    Click these guys, thank them and support them because they aren’t ashamed to support the troops.  And check the video response to Blackfive’s video – with scenes from all my favorite movies.

  • COB gets an early Christmas Gift

    The Washington Times’ Sara Carter reports this morning that Congressional pressure has been brought to bear on an investigation of Lieutenant General Francis Kearney who has been busy bringing up charges against American warriors doing their job in the Middle East; (more…)

  • Final chapter of the Scott Thomas Beauchamp saga

    Franklin Foer has written the final chapter of the “Shock Troops” saga. Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee fame writes at Pajamas Media;

    It takes him fourteen pages, but Franklin Foer finally makes an admission regarding Scott Thomas Beauchamp’s posts in The New Republic.

    …in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

    Foer’s opus begins 13 pages earlier and attempts the impossible feat of justifying his editorial leadership at The New Republic from the time period leading up to the publication of Beauchamp’s work to the fourteen-page long screed that culminated in the pained retraction above.

    It’s beyond me why it has taken this long – except that I know the Left has taken a page from the Clinton book. They wait a sufficiently long time hoping no one is paying attention, or sick and tired the whole thing, when they finally admit they were wr…uh…wr…uh…wr…uh…wrong.

    Spree at Wake Up America has the transcripts and background leading up to this point. Bloggers are declaring victory, once again. Of course, this blogger said it was BS back when it began – I took a personal interest when I found out it was my last company, A 1/18th Infantry, and wrote a piece that is still one of the highest traffic posts on this blog though it was written back in July. In August, Beuchamp recanted, but we already knew it was a fantasy because GI Jane posted an email she’d gotten from Beauchamp’s First Sergeant.

    Michele Malkin says “Buh-bye, Franklin Foer“. Jimbo at Black Five says “Please fire Foer“. DrewM at Ace of Spades says;

    I’ve read it all now and it’s a sad story about people who should have known better but were blinded by their faith in The Narrative. TNR was like Fox Mulder, they wanted to believe.

    Actually, it’s more than that. Everyone who had spent more than a day in the infantry was telling these guys they were wrong, but they’re so steeped in their elitist bullshit culture that tells them everything they need to know is in books, they disregarded people with actual experiences similar to Beauchamp’s fantasies.

    If they’d stopped and swallowed their pride for a moment and asked actual authorities, instead of the gumballs that tell them what they want to hear, they could have avoided this whole mess from the start. And apparently, according to Michele Malkin’s transcripts, Foer knew Beuachamp was lying back in August. By not apologizing back then, he needs to lose his job.

    Now Foer calls it “The Fog of War“, invoking Tzun Tzu as an excuse for his own journalistic failures. The last four months have had nothing to do with war, Franklin. You should have called the “Fog of Leftist Manipulation”.

    Patterico quotes Foer;

    When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that.

    Horseshit. Your magazine has no standards – especially if you’re blaming your writers for your own shortcomings. Beauchamp gave you exactly the stories you were looking for – you used him just like you used the entire military for sensationalist journalism. Maybe Mad or Cracked can use your brand of journalism.

    See Blue Crab Boulevard‘s “Fouteen Pages and Run For Cover” for more links and a perfect cartoon. Allahpundit writes;

    On the very first page, Foer introduces Beauchamp’s pieces as exercises in “how war distorts moral judgments.” That’s what they wanted to hear, that’s what they got. Their explanation for why they have to cut Beauchamp loose now: War distorts mental judgments, too. Perfect.

  • MSN: More bad news from Iraq

    Earlier in the month we were shocked to find that Iraq’s gravediggers were in danger of being unemployed with the sharp decline in violence in Iraq. While we barely recovered from that news, we soon discovered that emergency workers’ jobs in Baghdad were being threatened by the same events (or, rather the lack thereof) as the poor grave diggers. While this is terrible news indeed, prepare yourself for, perhaps the worst news of all.

    Refugees returning to Iraq are clogging border checkpoints from Syria and Jordan according to Agence France-Presse;

    Iraqi generals say refugees are streaming back to their homeland from Jordan and Syria in such large numbers that frontier guards are struggling to prevent the smuggling of insurgents and arms.

    “We are receiving tremendous numbers of displaced families at the borders of Syria and Jordan,” said Maj. Gen. Mohsen Abdul Hassan, head of Iraq’s department of border enforcement.

    Border crossings are becoming congested with returning refugees waiting to re-enter Iraq, Gen. Hassan said at a press conference.

    “We have difficulties dealing with the large numbers. There are long lines of vehicles,” Gen. Mohsen said, adding that his guards were already hard-pressed trying to intercept arms smugglers and insurgents attempting to cross into Iraq using forged passports.  

    Yes, terible news indeed. Hasn’t the most recent complaint of the Left, since they can’t seem to agree on a number of dead Iraqis, been that millions have been displaced? So this should be more good news for them, right? They’ll be celebrating and clapping our troops on the back any minute now.

  • Thanksgiving wishes

    Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday – it seems in the infantry it was the only holiday we always had off guarenteed. Well, “off” was a relative term. I remember times when I’d pick up the free turkeys from the First Sergeant that were donated to our unit and drive them around to my soldiers’ families and drop them off to beaming, thankful smiles. I always got the “thanks”, but actually it was our silent and constant supporters who gave us the birds.

    When I was in the same general location as my family on Thanksgiving, we’d get into our finery, my daughters in their pink skirts, my son struggling against having his hair brushed, and I in my dress blues. Then we’d head over to the mess hall and have our Thanksgiving dinner with “our” troops. It wasn’t really mandatory most of the time that we eat with the troops. But I figured those 30+ guys kept me alive and well and employed for another year, so I was thankful to them – who better to spend the day with.

    Besides, despite the reputation of Army chow, Thanksgiving meal was always as close to Mom’s cooking as I could get.

    But anyway, anything else I could add was said better by some of the folks in my blogroll;

    Castle Argghhh

    Flopping Aces

    Hang Right Politics

    Dadmanly

    Blue Crab Boulevard

    Chickenhawk Express

    Blue Star Chronicles

    and most importantly Mark Steyn.

    To Crotchety Old Bastard, with whom I’ve shared Thanksgiving meals with in an Army Messhall a couple of times – have a safe trip and thank that son of yours for me and my family. I’d wish blessings for you, but it seems you’ve already gotten a bunch.