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

Category: Usual Suspects

  • Weekend Phony Soldier round-up

    Our friend, CJ Grisham, ran into what looks like another phony soldier, Ed Hart from the Alabama Geezers for Peace. He claims to be a Marine aviator from World War II, but I think he looks a little too young to have served in some of the battles he claimed to CJ. What really sets off alarm bells, though, is the way Hart reacts to discussions about CJ’s combat experience as the same reactions I got from Jim Goodnow (a Coast Guard veteran from 1959-1961 who never served in combat) and Ward Reilly (the Army Ranger who fought the Vietnam War from Augsburg, Germany).

    Here’s a sample of the email exchange I had with Ward Reilly last week;

    I would be the FIRST man out on the streets defending my home and my family, and I have more honor in my asshole than you have in your entire being.

    In the same email that he wrote the above statement about his (shiver) asshole, he demonstrates how he’s superior to me;

    The difference between me and you is that I attack policy, and you attack persons, which shows you are soarly [sic] lacking in character.

    See, he doesn’t know me, but he attacks my honor – but only in regards to policy.

    Speaking of email, Jesse MacBeth and I exchanged emails briefly, until he discovered that I was saying the same things about him on this blog that he was saying about himself in his videos. But until he severed our communications, he wrote (and I use the term “wrote” loosely) this explaining how his DD214 got forged and who was involved with it. Again this is Jesse MacBeth in his own “words”.
    (more…)

  • Buying the veteran vote

    Everybody is slobbering all over themselves because President Obama has finally kept two campaign promises to veterans. You can just hear the lust in Paul Reickhoff’s words as he praises the President for his new plan veteran health care in the Huffington Post this morning;

    Today, President Obama has taken action on two key campaign promises to America’s veterans–and two of IAVA’s top legislative priorities for 2009. Advance funding VA healthcare and an overhaul of military and VA recordkeeping will eliminate two of the most significant bureaucratic hurdles that keep veterans from the healthcare and benefits they have earned. Veterans nationwide applaud the Administration for making veterans and their families a priority. And we look forward to continuing to work together on the many other issues facing today’s veterans, including psychological injuries, unemployment and homelessness.

    In the comments section of that article, a HuffPo reader reminds Reickhoff that Obama had to be dragged kicking and screaming into caring for veterans with this link to our post last month. Initially, the administration had planned on funding our health care on the backs of veterans and their insurance companies. But then they discovered how big of a voice veterans have in this country.

    Yesterday, Mr. Wolf from Blackfive emailed me this CNN link about how an “overtired” staffer accidentally forwarded an email discussion about the president’s schedule to the media.

    The last line that CNN quotes is pretty telling;

    In another exchange, one staffer recommended nixing a line about Obama meeting with leaders from the Veterans Service Organizations and Military Service Organizations since the president was now meeting with them before his remarks in an event closed to the media.

    “Can we keep it and just change it to say before. Its good for us to say we are meeting with them,” another replied.

    In other words; “Let’s fool them into thinking we care about veterans”.

    Michelle Malkin picked it up and said this about it;

    “It’s good for us to say we are meeting with them.”

    If this were Bush, of course, the media would pound his administration for cynically exploiting a meeting with veterans for political expediency.

    But since it’s Obama, he’s just “achieving another moment.”

    Actually, it much worse than that – Obama is buying veterans’ votes. If Obama really cared about veteran health, he wouldn’t let us fall behind in the military technology race by cutting weapons programs like he is planning to do with the defense budget. And he certainly wouldn’t have been so adamant about billing service-connected treatment to veterans’ insurance companies.

    Yeah, the HuffPoians are writing over there that Obama only “floated” the idea, but that’s not the way the story goes.

    Emanuel and Obama told the VSO reps that they wouldn’t budge on it – until they heard your voices. And when the Administration finally capitulated, Obama wasn’t even in the room – he sent in Emanuel to tell the VSO reps that the proposal was to be withdrawn. I guess he didn’t have the guts to admit he was wrong and tried to screw veterans to the wall.

    Don’t get me wrong, I applaud Obama’s support for veterans, but I’m not going to be sucked in. There’s another shoe to drop, and I’m just waiting for it.

    ADDED: Pat Dollard is on to IAVA, too, and finds Soros money.

  • Defense budget fight begins

    The Stars and Stripes reports this morning that the arrival of the 2010 defense budget has triggered a battle that the Obama Administration may not have anticipated;

    Virginia Democratic Sen. Jim Webb expressed deep concerns about reductions in Navy shipbuilding. Another group of senators lead by Alaska Democrat Mark Begich sent a letter criticizing proposed cuts in missile defense.

    House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member John McHugh of New York called the budget cuts too drastic for a nation still fighting overseas. Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma called it a plan to “disarm America,” adding “never before has a president so ravaged the military at a time of war.”

    Even supportive lawmakers, who praised Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the White House for making tough fiscal decisions to rein in military spending, emphasized that now they’ll be the ones to determine which programs actually need to be funded.

    Yeah, seein’s how the world has become more dangerous in the last few months and Obama has decided we’re going to kiss everyone’s ass instead of kicking them in the ass, the least he could do is make sure we can still kick their ass four years from now. Think we’ll get help from Republicans in the Senate? I wouldn’t count on it;

    Gates and President Barack Obama may have an unlikely ally in their effort to convince Congress to uphold the cuts: Sen. John McCain.

    The unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate, still the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called Monday’s budget plan “a major step in the right direction” and said he strongly supports the decision to restructure the way major defense programs are handled.

    Yeah, we’ll cut future weapons system development and cut personnel costs in defense while adding billions to the coffers of ACORN with the money we save on essential defensive measures and that’s a step in the right direction? Thanks, McCain – keep that in mind when you wonder why you got beat in 2000 and 2008.

    Added: Great opinion piece at Wall Street Journal on the subject.

  • Ward Reilly’s DD214

    Yes, Robert Ward Reilly is a great fan of This Ain’t Hell. Yesterday, we began an email exchange about him calling himself a Ranger. So as proof, he sends me this which is supposed to take the place of his DD214;
    Yes, I’m convinced that Ward Reilly is a Ranger now, aren’t you? I have a picture of me standing next to General Patton’s grave – so I guess that makes me a General.

    Supposedly, this should convince me that his unit called themselves Rangers when he was assigned there (when he wasn’t AWOL and a deserter). Now the picture is pretty old (like Reilly himself), but I noticed a flaw in the picture that might be tape or a piece of paper on the sign;

    I don’t know if there is something covering the word “Iron” or not, but it’s enough to make me wonder and the discoloration is just a little too coincidental. The thing I am sure about is that Reilly isn’t an Army Ranger no matter how many pictures he sends me.

    Oh, he also wanted me to know that he brushes his teeth every day – so he’s not as nasty as I think.

  • German ingrates strike for 8% pay increase

    In a country with a double-digit unemployment rate, German nationals who work for the US military have decide they want their cake and eat it, too, according to Stars and Stripes;

    Thousands of local national base workers, who support U.S. and other foreign military operations at facilities all over Germany, are on strike demanding an 8 percent pay raise.

    Wolfgang Brunner, a union representative leading negotiations for the strikers, said 3,000 to 4,000 base workers struck Monday, with another 4,000 due to strike Tuesday.

    U.S. Army Europe spokesman Bruce Anderson said Monday that more than 17,000 local nationals work at U.S. military facilities in Germany.

    Oh, the horrors! Does this mean the Polish Smoke Brigade won’t be laying down the smoke screens at Grafenwohr and Hohenfels on schedule? Does that mean that the German we’ve become accustomed to seeing stretched out in the sun behind the BOQ with empty beer bottles strewn about him won’t be there today? Will we have to pump our own gas at the AAFES pumps? There won’t be anyone at the AAFES garage to tell us they can’t get that oil filter we need for our German cars?

    “Gas, milk, bread … all are very expensive, not to mention the cost of health insurance,” [Karl Heinz Winter, a union representative for German workers] said.

    Well, then find other jobs on the German economy, you ingrate. See how expensive those things are then. And I thought German health care was the best in the world? Isn’t socialized medicine the answer to all of our woes? I can’t remember how many Germans tell me about the benefits of their free health care.

    They don’t need to spend a lot of money on work clothes – unless the price has risen on those Jethro Bodine overalls.

  • IVAW member declares she’s not socialist

    I don’t link to Army Sergeant often, or at all really, but she’s declared over the weekend that she’s not a subversive socialist bent on over throwing our system of government. Odd that a member of an organization supposedly made up of patriotic former servicemembers would have to make such a statement, isn’t it?

    I love America. I love my brothers-in-arms, even if it is in a dysfunctional way. I love the Constitution, and the founding fathers. I have a slightly unhealthy obsession with Alexander Hamilton. I believe in a system of democracy. I believe in our freedoms. I may think some things in our country aren’t working perfectly, but I do not believe in changing them with any particular ‘ism’ of the moment. If you have an agenda? I’m against it. If you are attempting to use what I believe in for your own purposes? Feel free to consider me your implacable enemy. I am not your soldier. I swore an oath, and I meant it.

    This is not a post of support for Army Sergeant, it’s a condemnation of the realities of Iraq Veterans Against the War. It is a complete lie, right from the name of the organization – it’s not an association of Iraq veterans. Even one of the founders of the organization never got closer to Iraq than a safe and warm office in Turkey monitoring overflights of the No-Fly Zone – he left the Air Force the month before the war in Iraq began.

    The organization exists to give, what Medea Benjamin called “street creds”. It’s organized so that an elite, photogenic few live a decadent life of drugs and sex, while others who are in need of the organization’s funds and connections are forgotten and left to fend for themselves. I could cite specific examples, but I’ve promised some people that I wouldn’t tell their stories of instances that the group’s leadership neglected them – preferring to keep them supplied with illegal drugs and alcohol than getting them the help they need.

    I can also cite specific examples of their VVAW and VFP mentors abandoning some members. One member of IVAW told me how Bill Perry was specifically responsible for his VA claim being denied.

    Some of you might remember the post I did about Darnell Stephen Summers, another mentor of IVAW in Germany, and how he belonged to to the radical VVAW-AI (the AI meaning anti-imperialist) which was actually the socialist/communist membership of the VVAW who left and formed their own, more extreme organization. It seems that IVAW may be heading down the same road – except looking at the recent membership, I suspect that the more moderate IVAW members will be leaving this time because they’re outnumbered by the far-Left extremist whackos.

    There is no place for people who merely oppose the war in IVAW, there’s no place for real Iraq veterans in IVAW. They’re more concerned about providing economic opportunities for people like TJ Buonomo and Matthis Chiroux who are worthless turds and couldn’t find productive employment anywhere else.

  • The chill wind blows over Billie Ayers

    Bill Ayers 013
    According to unrepentant domestic terrorist Billie Ayers, McCarthyism lives. That must be the reason that Americans are expressing their opinions in public that they don’t want the terrorist turned teacher to become an icon. According to Matthew Rothchild of The Progressive, life has been tough for Little Billie the last few months;

    You’ll recall that his name surfaced during the Obama campaign as Palin and McCain tried to smear Obama with the old guilt-by-association brush.

    When that failed, I thought Ayers could go back to his life, and we could all grow up.

    So did he. But no such luck.

    “I thought it would end,” he tells me, “but it’s escalated in a very weird way. I was canceled at a University last December, and then at the College of DuPage.”

    Earlier this week, Boston College yanked Ayers.
    […]
    Also this week, Naperville High School, near where Ayers grew up, changed its mind and said no to Ayers.
    […]
    To cap off the week of suppression, Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville cancelled a book signing by Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn.

    Yeah, let’s put aside that Sarah Palin was “smeared with the old guilt-by-association brush” too. But Obama launched his political career in the living room of poor little Billie, the guy who gloated as he left the court room where he was found not guilty “Guilty as hell, free as a bird — America is a great country.” Would you even enter the house of someone like that?

    The bookstore cancellation “never happened to me before. They were literally in tears when they called,” [Ayers] says. “I always feel bad for people who do the wrong thing.”
    […]
    “I don’t feel like I’m the aggrieved party,” he says. “I’ve got a day job and book deadlines I’ve got to work on. But it’s an attempt to shut down conversation and dialogue, which is the lifeblood of democracy. The real danger isn’t to me. But there’s a sense that if the mob gathers outside the gate with torches and pitchforks, people collapse.”

    Yeah, it always torches and pitchforks when it’s the Right who protests a speaker they don’t like. It’s “free speech” when the Left gets a speaker canceled. What’s Ayers’ excuse for Canada keeping him out? Apparently Americans aren’t the only ones with a McCarthy complex.

    In this case, I’m guess I’m proud I was on hand for the first anti-Ayers protest.

    Normally, I could give a rat’s furry ass about Bill Ayers, but I hate whiners.

    Hat tip to that network of emailers Bev Perlson has formed.

  • MacBeth continues exposing IVAW

    Our favorite IVAW member has brought out his third and fourth videos in a series in which he claims he’ll expose IVAW for the fake organization that it is. He claims it took so long to bring out this video because he’s been in the hospital with heart problems. In case you haven’t seen them, his other two videos along with our commentary are here and here.

    As I suspected, MacBeth points to Kelly Dougherty as one of the people to help him craft his phony stories. He also fingers Amadee Braxton (a civilian liason from IVAW to other organizations with the organizational expertise to keep them afloat) as the bagman who funded his charade. Braxton keeps a low profile because of her duties.

    MacBeth claims he had another faerie tale that was more believable than the one that went public, so I guess he blames IVAW for him being exposed as a liar and fake. He also claims that the IVAW tried to keep the video out of the hands of “pro-war” bloggers because they knew that it would be debunked in about two seconds.

    MacBeth also ties in Vets for Peace and Socialist Alternative to IVAW antics, which comes as no surprise to regular readers of this blog.

    In the second video, the real stunner – he claims that his stories were all lies. Shocked? Me neither. He does defend the troops and apologizes to them (but he’s still mad at his drill sergeant – so am I still mad at my drill sergeant. One of these days, SFC Jason Hurst, one of these days….). But he continues that IVAW knew he was lying from the start and manufactured the DD214 that they used to defend him. Since the first time I wrote about him, I’ve seen a few altered DD214s from IVAW, too, so I tend to believe it. For those of you who haven’t seen his fake DD214 here it is;

    And here’s his real DD 214;

    MacBeth also claims that he’s not a pro-war plant as some members of IVAW have suggested. He admits that IVAW knew he was a fake from the beginning. Honestly, I don’t know how they couldn’t know. But here’s the second video;

    Again, I caution the reader that Jesse MacBeth is a proven liar – vitually nothing he says can be accepted at face value. That’s why This Ain’t Hell is here – to bring you the documented proof. MacBeth’s videos only serve as a starting point. He claims his book is chugging along, too. That should be a laugh riot.

    As a point of reference, here’s his original videos. A year ago, there were still people who believed him (read the comments on the second video);

    Added Sunday, 9AM: MacBeth added a third video this weekend;