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

Category: VoteVets

  • Lean intellectual times at VoteVets

    Now that Brandon “Beaker” Friedman has moved on, dicksmith seems to be all alone over at the VetVoice blog. They took on Matthew Alexander, the pseudonymous interrogator who also works as Batman in his spare time, but Alexander isn’t contributing much. That damned Batsignal keeps going off in the evening sky.

    Well, now they’re really scraping the bottom of the intellectual barrel. In keeping with their MoveOn overlords’ directions, they let another phony vet write for them on another non-vet related subject;

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  • Pretender now works at VetVoice

    In what was probably a difficult search to replace the gaping void at VetVoice left by the passing of Brandon Friedman, the Angry Rakkasan, (known at TAH as Beaker), the lightweights left behind have settled on Matthew Alexander;

    vetvoice

    Mark Alexander wrote a book a while back advocating for treating terrorists in more friendly manner. Taking them to Dairy Queen for a Blizzard, whispering sweet nothings in their mite-infested ears – stuff like that. It was supposedly based on his experiences as an Air Force Officer and interrogator. The only problem is, Matthew Alexander isn’t his name. We don’t know what his name is because he won’t tell us. We can’t verify if he was an Air Force Officer or some homeless guy off the street who had an idea for a book.

    Yeah, yeah, I know his name is supposed to sealed by court order to “protect” him – but you know what? No one in the military is an island.

    Think if Jesse MacBeth had used a fake name and announced it before he went public and told his tales. How would we have been able to bust him? Find people in his unit who could tell us those things never happened. Essentially, that’s what I’ve done (with the help of an anonymous mole).

    Apparently, no one in the Air Force has heard of this goofball or the cases he’s wrote about in his book. And the folks I’m getting this from are folks who would’ve worked with, trained with and known Alexander or whatever his name is today.

    Here’s a quote from my mole;

    One fact “Alexander” gives, in particular, would make him very well known in OSI – he claims to have been a Pave Low pilot prior to entering OSI… um, no. Not to say it couldn’t happen, but it would be VERY rare, and would be much remarked about.

    I did a search of the OSI Agents and couldn’t find a single one with a secondary AFSC of 11 (pilot). First of all – why would you transfer from the one field that is most likely to get you a star to one that is least likely?

    There is ONE OSI General. It’s just not done, you know what I mean?

    And no one has heard of someone with this background. He should have attended the OSI Reserve conventions/whatever they’re called with people I know. They should know who he is. They have no idea. And no one recognizes his picture.

    Uh-oh. The narrative begins to not fit. Good question, though – why would a guy in an organization called the AIR FORCE want to stop being a pilot?

    In his book, Alexander claims that he was in Saudi Arabia in 2003 (can’t place him there, still, and that even narrows things more). He recounts one episode of walking through the Saudi desert with over a million dollars (page 122). OSI NEVER has that much baksheesh cash. NEVER. And he would not have been walking through the desert alone with it. EVER. It didn’t happen.

    The single most important thing about Alexander’s claim to have been the one that “broke” the guy and got the information to find Zarqawi is this: Zarqawi WAS NOT LOCATED DUE TO INTERROGATIONS. Period. This is even mentioned on Wikipedia (even though they have this asshole’s name up there, too). It was a tip.

    What I can tell you about his Huachuca claims, and his other interrogation claims, is this: he claims that his approach of building rapport is new and novel. [redacted] went through Huachuca in 2002 – and that’s what they taught him then. Alexander is taking advantage of the fact that most people have no idea of what goes on there to claim credit for something that he didn’t start.

    So here’s a guy who arrives at the cutting edge of the politics of torture battle with just the right story to tell, as far as the Left is concerned. (And, oh, did I mention that besides working for Vote vets, Alexander works for George Soros?). We can’t check his story, we can’t even check his ID – for no good reason.

    How many faux veterans have told you in a bar that their records are top secret? That’s usually the first thing they begin their stories with – like our Spooky 8 clown.

    Can I be prove he’s lying? Nope…but all I need to do is plant a seed of doubt. You’ll remember that Rick Duncan/Strandlof was a diarist on VoteVets, so I guess this is a way to avoid that mistake again – hide your phony vet writers behind a court order and a name change.

    There may be more to come on this douche, depending on the heat I get from Vote Vets – given their record, they’ll try to ignore this instead. Like they ignored the Rick Duncan story.

  • Missing Brandon Friedman

    TSO sent me a link to this confusing missive by Mr. Batshit Crazy himself at VoteVets;

    staro-batshit-crazy

    A six-pack of Saranac Trail Mix to anyone who can decipher that shit. We don’t like Brandon Friedman, but at least he’s literate.

  • dicksmith is a’skeered of the boogeyman

    Our buddy dicksmith, the new senior editor of VetVoice, tells us how he’s been a’skeered of the boogeyman since George Bush was President. He begins his missive quoting John Brennan, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism advisor;

    “But describing our efforts as a ‘global war’ only plays into the warped narrative that Al-Qaeda propagates,” Brennan said in comments prepared for delivery to a think tank here.

    dicksmith applauds the Obama Administration’s name change;

    This is an extremely smart policy move. For eight years, we have sent our finest men and women to fight a war against an undefined enemy. Shifting a way from the “GWOT” nomenclature will give service members what they deserve: a defined mission with a defined enemy. No doubt, we’ll still see the “terrorism” boogey-man thrown into the debate, but at least now it won’t be official policy.

    An “extremely smart policy move”. Changing the name we call the war changes the whole mission, apparently. It gives us definition. Any of you guys fighting the old Global War On Terror remember needing the mission defined, or did you have any doubt who was the enemy? Well, dicksmith was a’skeered;

    For the record, I’m not saying terrorists and terrorism doesn’t exist. They are, however, extremely broad terms that have been used in the fear-mongering process of the past. Anything and everything we didn’t like was chalked up to “terrorists” or “terrorism”, but usually only when it applied to actions perpetrated by foreigners.

    Because we’re racists who only react negatively to terrorism committed by them ding-dang fur-ners. He’s upset that we didn’t call domestic crime “terrorism”. That’ll apparently all change now that we call it “The War Against Al Qaeda”.

    Now, hopefully, we can move away from the previously flawed practice of boogey-man fear mongering and set clear definitions for who our enemies are.

    Aside from the fact that the senior editor of VetsVoice ends his thought with a preposition, that sentence is the most bizarre that I’ve ever read. The Global War on Terror was supposed to be just that. It was a call to the world to pull together and stop the animals that were killing innocent people to make a political statement. We were fighting terrorists in the Middle East, Colombia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Africa, Europe – ya know – globally.

    Now we’ve put Al Qaeda on a pedestal and given them the recognition that they’ve wanted since the mid-nineties. During the Bush Administration we were fighting injustice everywhere, now we’re chasing some guys in manjammies around the mountains trying to kill them all.

    Not only is this a piss-poor policy decision, it’s playing right into the hands of Al Qaeda. So now we’re beefing up our forces in Colombia – do we have to give that war it’s own name, too? Fighting the Moros in the Phillipines will be a different war?

    The thought that dicksmith put into his little Obama tongue bath was pretty superficial. All he needed to hear was that it was not a Bush idea and he was all for it.

  • VV’s Friedman on smoking

    Brandon “Beaker” Friedman of Vote Vets is unhappy that soldiers will retain their choice whether to use tobacco or not after the Department of Defense rejected recommendations to curtail tobacco use in the military. Somehow he blames some nebulous “pro-tobacco opposition”;

    Even though no one suggested the government’s Morale Suppression Squad would immediately deploy agents to the front lines to confiscate Joe’s smokes, that’s exactly how the pro-tobacco opposition framed it. And you guys were successful. So well played, my tobacco-loving friends, well played.

    I don’t remember anyone except real soldiers who like to dip tobacco to fend off stress and fire up a stogy to celebrate when it’s over expressing their opinions. Somehow we did irreparable damage to future soldiers. But see, that’s not the end. How can anyone write a post at Vote Vets without pulling statistics out of their ass? Well they can’t. In defense of his post, Beaker wrote this;

    beaker-on-smoking

    Notice the first line; Military service is not more dangerous than smoking and drinking. I don’t have the data, but I guarantee you more veterans died of smoking- and drinking-related causes last year than died in combat. In fact, that’s a statistic I’d love to get my hands on.

    He had to say “veterans” because no one on active duty dies of tobacco use – it takes decades of use to die from tobacco usage. No one dies when they’re 19 from a year of a pinch between teeth and gums. But ya know, when you say “veterans” that means people who don’t go to combat – because they’re not in the military. They’re veterans. And they get to choose whether they use tobacco or not – irrespective of military policy.

    So, and I’m just guessin’ here, I think that 100% more veterans die of tobacco use than die in combat.

    Below the jump, Freidman sings “Ode to Joy” to repent for his anally-retrieved statistics;
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  • Soltz: Surge is a failure

    John Soltz, who sheepishly admits that he didn’t fight any Chinese in Iraq, is still clinging to the old MoveOn line that the surge is a failure. He’s written it twice in as many days this week and does it again on MSNBC, where he’s apparently living in a broom closet these days. Soltz comes in at about 4:30 in to this video;

    The first time he wrote it was at HuffPo;

    Now we see that, indeed, the surge meant nothing without political progress.

    Then he wrote it again yesterday to throw water on the Iraqi’s Sovereignty Day celebration;

    And so, if the U.S. pulls back, there’s a powder keg ready to explode, with an ill-equipped Iraqi military left to try to hold things together. In fact, we’ve already seen violence ramp up in Iraq, as surge troops have left and others began their pull back from cities.

    So, Soltz’ solution is a Vietnam-style withdrawal from Iraq – as violence increases, the pace of withdrawal should increase as well.

    So President Obama needs to make it clear—if they won’t settle their differences, we won’t be around to save them, because we’ll speed up our departure. Most importantly, he must make good on the promise if it comes to that.

    Failure at any price. We promised the South Vietnamese that we’d defend them if the North invaded, then we stood by with our hands in our pockets and watched T55 tanks roll into Saigon. Soltz would love nothing more than to hang a picture of the last chopper leaving the Green Zone behind his desk in his MSNBC broom closet.

    Although, it would seem on the surface that the surge may be proven a failure if violence increases, I submit that it’s the Democrat policy of the last five years that’s failed. President Bush warned that setting an arbitrary withdrawal date would result in increased violence – that seems more likely the cause than the surge, doesn’t it?

    In fact, the reason the surge worked to bring peace to Iraq is because when the insurgents expected Democrats to force a withdrawal from Iraq in 2006/7, President Bush instead increased the US presence there, proving that he was dedicated to seeing the war through during his term.

    Threatening to increase the pace of withdrawal isn’t the way to quell violence. Showing resolve is what wins in the Middle East, not showing our collective ass. But Soltz and MoveOn and the Democrats are more enamored with the idea of calling Iraq a failure than making the world a better place.

    As long as Democrats are frightened of dealing with the real enemy in the region, and instead prefer to pick on pockets of democracy, we won’t have any progress in the terror war or in the advancement of liberty and freedom.

    One question I’d ask Soltz; Why are you so sure the Iraqis will fail? Because they’re brown people?

  • Vote Vets: Peace at any cost

    The latest mind-drippings from Beaker Freidman at Vote Vets;

    baghdad-escalation

    So what if everything we’ve paid for with with blood and treasure is in danger of being wasted? Well, if it is wasted, it’ll clearly be the fault of the anti-war crowd (that includes Mr. “The War I Always Wanted”). Iraq was in the win column until this crowd got their grubby mitts on it.

    A loss would also vindicate the Bush policy of not establishing an arbitrary date for withdrawal that would allow an enemy to plan to fill the vacuum of displaced US forces. But that fact completely escapes Beaker – just so long as he can pay homage to his MoveOn masters and George Soros.

    By the way, I have it on good authority that the Vote Vet clowns read every word on This Ain’t Hell, so feel free to unload on them. They have an awful persecution complex.

  • Embracing the Phony and the Farcical: The VoteVets story

    If you have not read Part I of my VoteVets series which covers Jon Soltz, you should do so before reading this.

    As my esteemed coblogger is oft to say, VoteVets is not a veterans organization. For every 20 members they have, even VoteVets admits that only 1 is a veteran of OEF/OIF. While they masquarade as veterans advocates, the issues they champion rarely even deal with veteran or military issues, unless it happens to coincide with their actual mission of shilling for Democratic candidates.

    And a compliant media has allowed them to be fairly successful at it. My first run in with this band of degenerates was from the 2006 Virginia Senatorial campaign when they ran this disengenuous commercial against George Allen:
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