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

Category: Usual Suspects

  • Matthis at Tufts

    For some pointless reason, Tufts Daily, a student newspaper at Tufts University (which for some reason I thought was a conservative, traditional college), published an article by Alexa Sasanow entitled “Veteran Matthis Chiroux speaks out against the US military“. Notice it’s not wars he “speaks out against” anymore.

    You can read the whole article for yourself and you’ll recognize they newest Matthis line that it’s the military that’s the problem now, not the wars. Probably because he can’t speak to the war anymore, since it’s been proven that he’s never seen a war. But that doesn’t stop from making people believe he’s been to one without saying he has;

    Chiroux enlisted in the army soon after he graduated from high school, but not because he wanted to: He got into trouble with the police and was given the choice between being prosecuted as an adult in federal court or enlisting.

    “I always say, I’m living proof that we do not have an all?volunteer army,” he said.

    Yeah, he volunteered – he had a choice whether he should sell drugs at a grade school playground or not, and then he had a choice whether he wanted to take responsibility for selling drugs and go to jail, or volunteer to join the Army. A lot of kids his age (18 so how else would he have prosecuted if not as an adult?) don’t get the opportunity to choose.

    After his five years in the army, during which he served as an army strategic communicator and journalist, touring in Japan, Germany, Afghanistan and the Philippines, Chiroux returned to the United States in 2007. He got an apartment in Brooklyn with the one person he knew in New York, a fellow veteran. The two engaged mostly in reckless behavior after returning to civilian life, Chiroux said.

    “I was drinking excessively and being very physically impulsive,” he said. “One Sunday morning, I’d been up all night with a couple of women I was hanging out with — it was around 9 a.m. — and somehow we managed to get up on top of a skyscraper right next to Ground Zero. I was wasted and I remember standing on the edge of that building and looking down at the ground and seeing the wall stretch down from the tips of my toes to the sidewalk, 68 stories and the wind blowing. I went off like a rocket and it took me a while until I finally realized I may be having a good time, but there’s something wrong with me.”

    Such self?awareness is difficult for many veterans to manage, Chiroux said, particularly if they’re dealing with post?traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as a reported 319,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are. Chiroux’s New York apartment?mate is one of them.

    Yeah, PTSD put him on the roof edge. Even though he’d never witnessed a traumatic event that would cause PTSD. That’s why earlier he mentioned that everyone in the military has PTSD, so you could some sympathy for the ledge-balanced clown. Previously, he’s said that his PTSD was from interviewing real soldiers and hearing their stories. I guess he’s refined his condition.

    He continues on blaming TAH for IVAW booting his scrawney ass;

    While Chiroux had served for a year on the board of Iraq Veterans Against the War, he has since parted ways with the organization after receiving a lot of backlash from military communities for last March burning an American flag in Lafayette Park at an anti?war rally.

    Actually, he left because he’d succeeded in alienating a large number of IVAW members with his behavior for more than two years. I mean if you alienate guys like TJ Buonomo and Geoff “Stolen Valor” Millard, you’ve really pissed a lot of people off.

    “They buried my friends under the flag and that’s why I burned it. That flag killed my friends; soldiers had that flag on their arm when torturing people at Abu Ghraib,” he continued. “The military, they get to give you a symbol, tell you what it means and send you off to die with it. They’re going to wrap your story in that and burn the truth beneath it — why wouldn’t I burn it?”

    I’m sure Matthis had friends buried with the flag. And if he did, he’d know that’s no way to honor their memory. But it all so much more about Matthis and his Ward Reilly image.

  • Duff: China’s subs off the CA coast

    TSO sent me this link because I absolutely refuse to troll Veterans Today for Gordon Duff stories. But today, Duff warns us that the missile we were all so concerned about last week, was, indeed, Chinese and launched from a submarine off of our coast. Now, it’s entirely plausible and it was the first thing I thought of when I read the reports. However,, not for the reasons that Duff posits his crowd of lunatics. Duff reprints a “redacted” email he received;

    I am a retired U.S. Navy FireControl Technician, who is platform certified in missile systems XXXXXXXXX, I have also worked with the Navy’s Harpoon, Tomahawk and ASROC missile systems.

    Well, that’s all I need to know about his credentials – the fact that Duff redacted the credentials makes me much more comfortable with his opinions. The number of Xs are the same count as “mopbucket”.

    I’m fairly confident its not one of ours, as the vapor trail appears “dirty” it looks brownish.

    Yeah, the vapor trail appears brownish…like the rest of the sky around it.

    Brownish

    So Duff can’t help jumping to conclusions based on this evidence from a random “expert” and his unsolicited email;

    A submarine comes approaches America’s heavily guarded coast, through a network of defenses costing billions, and launches an ICBM capable of carrying up to 10 hydrogen bombs, launches the missile 2 minutes from Los Angeles, and we are utterly unaware? This is the same military we trust our children’s lives to?

    This is the same military that spent a 9 years hunting for Osama bin Laden, knowing he was dead, hundreds of millions of dollars, endless lives lost, all over a lie. Keeping bin Laden’s death secret is a deception not unlike the phony Yemen bomb scare and the “crotch bomber” last Christmas, “third rate boogeyman” ploys to justify wasted money and airport passenger abuse.

    This is the same military that killed 5000 Americans in Iraq over more lies, always known to be lies. Behind the flag waving and patriotic blithering is a pack of greedy incompetents, many religious extremists, most up to their necks in right wing politics and too many willing to send us to war for their own personal reasons. A patriot wouldn’t last 5 minutes in Americas military.

    See that? That’s what Duff really wanted to say all along. He didn’t need an unexplained missile launch, he just needed an excuse to cuddle with his merry band of pseudo-intellectuals. He paints with a broad brush all of the people in the military as incompetent anti-Americans. Based on his eighteen months experience in the Marine Corps forty years ago.

    As always, the comments are even more weird than Duff.

  • Joe Klein: Empty vessel

    ROS sent me a link to Joe Klein’s review of George W. Bush’s book “Decision Points” and it shows what an empty head sits on Joe Klein’s shoulders. First you must remember that Joe Klein was the “Anonymous” who wrote “Primary Colors”, the vacant worship of Bill Clinton during his 1992 campaign. The Clinton administration was merely a bookmark in history. He accomplished nothing and the only challenges the President Clinton faced were those of his own failings.

    Klein writes in this supposed book review;

    I was surprised by how angry I didn’t become. For me, at least, weariness has replaced anger. Bush’s was an exhausting presidency that will, I suspect, be remembered more for its waste — of time, lives, money, moral standing and economic strength — than for anything else. We have survived nearly a decade now since Sept. 11, and the cataclysmic events of that day have receded, not just in memory but in importance, compared with the global economic changes and Wall Street sociopathy that together challenge America’s future pre-eminence. We have not been successfully attacked since, a matter of luck and skill. We do have Bush to thank, in part, for that — but far too much testosterone was spent kicking irrelevant butts and landing, breathless with self-regard, on carrier decks to celebrate victories that were Pyrrhic at best. We struggle to recover from the thoughtless carnage of his tenure.

    The only reason it was exhausting was because people like Klein wouldn’t give a moments credit to the accomplishments of that administration. It’s as if Hussein was just another poor victim of the Bush machine. As if Desert Storm never happened, as if we didn’t deploy US troops to Kuwait border no less than three times in response to Hussein’s saber rattling during the ’90s. As if Iraq’s air defense facilities hadn’t fired on our pilots flying to enforce the UN mandate. As if Iraq had complied completely with the UN weapons inspectors. As if Iraq hadn’t attempted to assassinate a former US president. As if Bush hadn’t given Hussein countless chances to avoid war for more than a year before the invasion of Hussein’s Iraq.

    It’s as if the Left spent eight years blinded by their own partisan hatred to have noticed what was going on around them.

  • Manning supporters under surveillance

    The folks who are supporting the traitor Private Bradley Manning, currently sitting in prison at Quantico, VA awaiting trial, the guy who turned over classified documents to the peace movement caricatures at Wikileaks are being watched by the FBI, they tell the media. From Associated Press;

    The Bradley Manning Support Network said Wednesday that David House of Cambridge, Mass., was detained Nov. 3 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and questioned extensively about his support for the Army private. Manning is being held at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Va., awaiting trial.

    According to Glen Greenwald, this is the second time it’s happened;

    In July of this year, U.S. citizen Jacob Appelbaum, a researcher and spokesman for WikiLeaks, was detained for several hours at the Newark airport after returning from a trip to Holland, and had his laptop, cellphones and other electronic products seized — all without a search warrant, without being charged with a crime, and without even being under investigation, at least to his knowledge.

    Yeah, well, the “at least to his knowledge” is shit we NCOs all heard from our privates right before they got their asses thrown in the lock up.

    He was interrogated at length about WikiLeaks, and was told by the detaining agents that he could expect to be subjected to the same treatment every time he left the country and attempted to return to the U.S.

    Of course, the anti-war Left disillusioned with the “Hope and Change” they got a long time ago, are convinced that they’re being intimidated by government forces. They don’t mention Obama’s name out of fear of being accused of being racists;

    The Federal Government has the authority to conduct border searches of people entering the country that are far broader than for those inside the country, and such searches require no search warrant. The Government has that power in order to prevent security threats from entering the country, but here, they are clearly exploiting and abusing it

    So it’s Bush-era policy that’s oppressing them. If it was me (and it wouldn’t be), I’d just behave myself. David House has visited Manning three times since Manning’s detention at Quantico – I guess it only makes sense to make sure House isn’t acting as a courier when he leaves the country.

    If you don’t like the heat, get out of the kitchen.

  • That Restore Fear Rally in DC yesterday

    P1050675

    I decided that taking my CCW training and then drive to Virginia to drink free beer and eat free food at Sniper’s house was more important than watching a bunch of Leftist buffoons trying to act like they’re moderate (people who are so smart that they’ll get their news from The Comedy Channel). But our buddy, Skye, went and took pictures while she waited to run the Marine Corp Marathon. You can see her pictures at her Flickr Photostream.

    Donald Douglas at American Power Blog assembled some links and pictures from the net and TV.

  • March Forward make pests of themselves in Hollywood

    Someone sent me a link to this “action” in Hollywood, where March Forward!, the veteran wing of ANSWER jammed up military recruiting in Hollywood for a couple of hours;

    Leading the gaggle was Mike Prysner, who I wrote about last year.

    After shutting down the recruiting station, Prysner said, “To our brothers and sisters in the military: it’s time we stopped fighting for the profits of a tiny group of billionaires; instead, we should struggle together for what’s in our interests. But we’re not going to fight alone—we’re going to fight with students who are getting their tuition raised, with teachers who are getting pink slips, with families who are suffering layoffs and scraping to get by—because when we unite together, that’s when we win.”

    Ah, don’t you love the sound of class warfare in the morning? Prysner is a true class warrior. Also a member of the IVAW (he ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the IVAW board in the last election in an attempt to radicalize the IVAW), Prysner is one of the co-founders of the Maoist-founded ANSWER.

    I’m not sure how ending the wars will stop teachers from getting fired or tuition’s rise, but it sure sounds nice, doesn’t it? Tuition was going up by more than 7% per year through the Clinton years when there were no wars – so blaming the current increases on war is pretty vacuous.

    And, oh, yeah, in case you thought that the 100 or so demonstrators (according to the article – there were really about 25 by looking at the pictures) were veterans, allow me to disabuse of that fallacy;

    The demonstration consisted mostly of young students, who have faced massive tuition hikes over the past year.

    Poor babies. I’ll betcha that there students all over the world who wish that was their only problem. So students, led by a veteran, blocked a recruiting station. What sense does it make to close down a recruiting station because tuition costs are rising? They might as well shut down a florist shop for the same reason.

  • Matthis and the Revolutionary Communist Party

    Matthis showed up on the inter-tubes again last week when he signed World Can’t Wait’s “Crimes are crimes” petition. At least he’s stripped most of the deceit out of his bio.

    Yeah, well, ya know how your mom always told you that you’re judged by the company you keep? Carl Dix, the former head of the Revolutionary Communist Party (distinguished from the regular old Communist Party by their Revolutionary aims). Now you can call me a “red-baiter”, but since the dude calls himself a communist, i don’t know how I’m baiting any-damn-body.

    I wrote about Dix and his connections to IVAW over a year ago. He was the national leader of the RCP a few years back, now he’s just a spokesman.

    So what does the RCP believe? This is from the RCP, USA Constitution – which, as you can imagine, is very long and tedious;

    The first stage of this movement [Communism] included three epic revolutions: the Paris Commune; the Soviet Revolution; and the Chinese Revolution, which included the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as its high point. These revolutions effected unprecedented and amazing changes; their vision and accomplishments inspired people around the globe. But world imperialism remained dominant, and these were new and beginning efforts; despite heroic struggles, each in turn was finally defeated by the forces of reaction. In the wake of those defeats, these revolutions have been endlessly slandered, and the truth about them suppressed and distorted. In actual fact, these revolutions proved that a better world really is possible, and through these revolutions humanity has accumulated invaluable experience and a whole new point of departure.

    Checkout the webpage of the Revolutionary Communist party of Charlottesville – Soviet Union imagery, lamentations over China straying from the teachings of bloodthirsty tyrant Mao Zedong, or whatever they’ve changed his name to today.

    There’s a call to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution which brought the Soviet Union into being at the cost of millions of gallons of blood. If you refresh the page, the header banner changes to imagery of Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Marx along with some memorable passages from each.

    That’s quite different from what Victor Agosto told us a few weeks ago – that communists learned their lessons from China and the Soviet Union (and North Korea?) and that they won’t make the same mistakes next time. It looks to me that they don’t even realize that the Soviet Union split up under the weight of it’s own ideology.

    Of course, there were other lesser luminaries in the crowd who recorded their messages to the waiting masses like Cindy Shehan, Debra Sweet, David Swanson, Noam Chomsky and Ray McGovern.

    Nonetheless, it’s good to see Matthis keeping such good company over there at World Can’t Wait and the Veterans For Peace. Oh, by the way, he couldn’t make it to Washington, DC this past week end (that four hour bus ride was just too much for him) so he sent this message to his minions on Facebook;

    If anyone’s going to the ‘democrats can end the wars’ rally this weekend in D.C., please burn a flag! And roll a burning trashcan into the oval office, if ya get the chance!

    Peace out, ma brotha, peace out.

  • Sanchez’ racism

    Loretta Sanchez’ Hispanic extraction is a matter of convenience. When she lost her first run at a public office as a Republican and using her married name, Brixley, she lost. Two years later, she ran using her maiden name and as a Republican and won. Last week, on the Spanish language television network, she told voters in her district;

    The Vietnamese and the Republicans are — with intensity — trying to take away this seat, this seat for which we have already done so much for our community. [Taking] this seat from us and [giving] it to this Van Tran, who’s very anti-immigrant and very anti-Hispanic.

    She might as well have said the Viet Cong were attacking us.

    Everything boils down to race. This country has always been a melting pot and Loretta Sanchez, by making her election race about “us vs. them” is polarizing her district. I guess she hoped that if she said that on Spanish-language TV, no one would find out about her racism.

    Suppose John McCain had told the American public that the Blacks were trying to take over the White House in 2008. What kind of reaction would that have caused?

    Van Tran, her opponent said in the Los Angeles Times;

    “This is a mischaracterization that there is an alleged wedge between the Vietnamese and Latino community,” he said.

    Sanchez is a racist and doesn’t deserve her position in Congress.