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

Category: VoteVets

  • Scrubbing Duncan off of the internet

    Some of you may have noticed that the YouTube videos we linked in the below post about Rick DUncan, the escaped mental patient who found solace among his brother crazies at IVAW, have been rendered void. They included clips of Duncan talking about the plate in his noggin and reading crappy lunatic poetry – we should probably be grateful that we’re not subjected to that. As we pointed out with our screen shots, they started scrubbing their websites last night when we announced to IVAW through various channels how we had decided to proceed on the story. Of course we screen shot enough stuff before we contacted IVAW.

    The party line from them is that there was a tiny window when anyone could register online without proving their service, so one slipped through. That really can’t be true. Here’s a set of photos of former board member, Garret Repenhagen at a Tower Guard event in Colorado a few years back when Duncan attended.

    Do you mean to tell me that Reppenhagen didn’t spot this guy as a phony with all of his attendant lies? Like getting his pinkie shot off, yet having ten visible? An overtly gay captain commanding a battalion didn’t set off bells and whistles?

    Or maybe it didn’t matter because, like Jesse MacBeth, Duncan said everything they wanted to hear.

    Oh, VoteVets is busy scrubbing Duncan from their boards, too. His screen name over there was USMCinCO;

    They can scrub the internet, but they can’t scrub their souls.

  • Escaped Mental Patient stars in IVAW/VoteVets


    Greatest VIDEO EVEH. You’ll notice one of the Lieutenant Colonel’s supporters has a banner across his chest that says “Three Tours – Iraq” – that man is an escaped mental patient and, until yesterday, a powerhouse in the IVAW and Vote Vets, yet he’s never served a day in the Marines, as he has claimed:

    How many of you remember this post

    So, it came as no surprise today that I found one of the recommended diaries is by a guy named Rick Duncan, a wounded Marine Captain who served in Iraq. Now, I salute his service, as we all do, but this guy has been on my radar for quite a while for his deft (?) acrobatics on issues. For starters, it should come as no surprise that in addition to being a VoteVets guy, he’s also a member of IVAW…

    Well, I hereby take back that salute, and to my IVAW and VOTEVETS friends I once again ask, tell me how my ass tastes.

    The leader of a statewide veterans group who fought for homeless veterans in Colorado Springs is in jail in Denver today, unmasked as a former mental patient who posed as a wounded Marine officer and 9/11 survivor.

    The man who called himself Rick Duncan – purportedly a former Marine captain and 1997 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy – is in fact 31-year-old Richard Glen Strandlof, a former mental patient who never served in the military and falsely claimed that he was in the Pentagon during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to David Walsh of the Colorado Veterans Alliance (CVA), which Duncan founded.

    Walsh, who joined the board of CVA at Duncan’s request last year, said his colleagues in the organization grew suspicious of Duncan after discovering “significant inconsistencies” in his personal story.

    In a search of the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office records, for example, they found that the name Colorado Veterans Alliance had been reserved by “Rick Strandlof,” whom they had never met, Walsh said.

    While probing Duncan’s past, Walsh said, the group found evidence that he was a patient in a mental hospital in Washoe County, Nev., at the time of the roadside bombing in Fallujah, Iraq, that Duncan claimed left him severely wounded.

    The group contacted the FBI field office in Denver, which began investigating in early May and arrested Duncan Tuesday night in downtown Denver on a traffic warrant originating in El Paso County.

    I will be standing in the corner of my bedroom for a while doing the happy dance that YET ANOTHER phony of VoteVets and IVAW has gone down.

    Oh, and I have a call in to the guy responsible for the takedown, who as happenstance would have it, I know pretty well. Actually, my best friend is very close to him. Funny how small a world it is.

    This is Mr. Duncan/Strandlof’s biography at IVAW;

    UPDATE: “Rick Duncan” goes down the memory hole at IVAW. With no notice whatsoever. Well, good thing I have the screen shots, eh guys? The page above now looks like this in 4 hours;

    And here is an article he wrote at VoteVets blaming Bush and Cheney for the death of six of his Marines;

    Jesse MacBeth 2.0; A former mental patient rises to prominence in the Colorado anti-war movement. And notice that it’s in Denver so I’m pretty sure he had plenty to do with the IVAW theater there last summer at the DNC convention.

    How about Congressman Jared Polis cavorting with a mental patient/phony veteran;

    And Polis scores the escaped mental patient/phony veteran endorsement;

    He may have been crazy, but he knew how to play the press. In fact we’ve been in contact with KKTV out in Colorado who called us about digging more dirt up on him because they have miles of footage of interviews with Duncan and they want to hang him by the balls. He did interviews like this one in the Colorado Springs Gazette;

    At this point, I don’t even know where to put updates. So I am putting them here, and will try to make sense of this nonsense tomorrow. But I was just thinking to myself, what this post needs is a connection to Michael Moore and MoveOn.org. OK, check and check.

    All of the videos have been removed so we moved them below the fold;
    (more…)

  • VoteVets is not a veterans’ organization

    Yeah, I’m pissed at VoteVets. Is it because I’m partisan? Nope it’s because I’m a veteran. I hate to see the troops and veterans get screwed by people who claim to want to help them. My feelings go back so far, that I remember running off Hari Krishnas in Atlanta airport in the 70s when they targeted GIs for “donations” to their cult.

    Today, the charlatans are veterans themselves. Veterans like those at VoteVets. Besides having a stupid name, they’re run by stupid people. They claim to protect veterans’ interests, but remember what happened when SGT David Aguina spoke up at the Yearly Kos two years back? Twink Jon Soltz charged him from the stage and got in the young sergeant’s face like so many other punk-ass LTs I’ve seen in my time. And what does VoteVets vice-chairman Brandon Friedman (also known previously as Angry Rakkasan) do? He writes a comment in the Daily Kos accusing SGT Aguina of being mentally ill;
    (more…)

  • Where does Vote Vets get these clowns?

    I chased a link from our stat counter today over to Vote Vets, you know those ass clowns who worship at the altar of Jon Soltz, the master truck dispatcher. It was a link from a Richard Smith (dicksmith?) article in which Mr. Smith quotes an obviously insane sports writer at CBS;

    CBS Sports golf analyst David Feherty has gone off the deep end, or at least he thinks American Soldiers have. Check out this quote from Feherty in the April issue of D Magazine:

    [I]f you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death.

    Somehow, the semi-literate Mr. Smith finds this an opportunity to call This Ain’t Hell “the right-wing attack machine” and wonders why we don’t get our dander up at Mr. Feherty. Well, here’s his explanation;

    Where were the Legion and the right-wing spin consortium on a prominent sportscaster slandering American Soldiers. The answer: AWOL. Why? Because the conservative smear establishment doesn’t actually care about Soldiers and Veterans. They use Veterans and Soldiers (including the Legion) as a prop, along side their lapel pins and car magnets, to protect their own desires, which is the destruction, by any means necessary, of those who have truly supported us in the past eight years. This is the modus operandi of the right-wing, radical, anti-troop, anti-veteran agenda.

    Here’s my explanation for the tone-deaf Mr. Smith; who the Hell cares what a golf analyst writes? Who the Hell reads D Magazine or Media Matters? Hell, I didn’t even know he wrote that article until you linked to our blog with your drivel (Dick didn’t have the guts to name the blog to which he was linking). I can’t even find the original article, so how do I know what the context was of Ferehty’s article?

    And last I checked, a CBS golf analyst doesn’t write policy which affects the troops and veterans – as opposed to a president and a DHS secretary. Numbnuts.

    If you had stopped for a moment before you hit “publish” and thought about it for a moment, you’d have noticed how ridiculous you sound. Smith drones on;

    Rumor has it, Feherty’s comments may make an appearance on tonight’s episode of Countdown with Keith Olbermann (MSNBC, 8PM EST).

    Rumor has it, my ass. Vote Vets have their collective head so far up Olbermann’s ass you probably know what’s scheduled for next year (since that’s where he pulls his programming from anyway).

    If Feherty still has a job by the time that show airs, after slandering the professionalism and mental capacity of American Soldiers and Veterans, he will have gone too long without being fired. Feherty needs to go. And every second he continues to be employed by CBS Sports is a second too long.

    It’d be nice if you got this upset about someone who is dealing dirt to the troops who isn’t a CBS golf editor – someone like John Murtha or Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or Rahm Emanuel. Someone who matters.

    I’m waiting for one of your dorks over at the Jon Soltz Hate Machine Motor Pool to prove me wrong on anything that I’ve “attacked” the President on, by the way.

    Nice commie patrol cap, dick;

  • More on the Medal of Honor Ceremony

    You may remember my post yesterday about Brandon Friedman piteous BOFO (that’s Bend Over For Obama for those unfamiliar with the lexicon here) performance when the president actually attended an event for honoring Medal of Honor winners.

    Well, Greyfox at Mudville Gazette noticed that the entire media BOFO’d for the story;

    Resulting in national (AP) coverage – with the story morphed into an Obama praise piece:

    WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama made an unannounced stop at Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday to pay respects to recipients of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award.

    Obama laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns. He was joined by several living recipients of the medal, which was first awarded during the Civil War.

    …without a word about why the Medal of Honor recipients had gathered there.

    This is clearly about making amends for missing the Salute to Heroes Inaugural Ball – the story that we broke here. That’s why Friedman made a point of posting it – probably on marching orders from the Oval Office.

    But go read Greyhawk’s entire post and you’ll see why I’m so convinced it’s a slobbery kiss to vets. Greyhawk did an excellent job of pulling all of the pieces together. And he does it without the use of Muppet characters.

  • Today’s shocking headline

    Well, it’s not so shocking as it is completely expected. Not to mention nauseating and completely unnecessary. Jon Soltz spends nearly 600 words telling us what we already knew – he prays at the alter of Barack Obama, loves the smell of Barack Obama’s feet, and wishes he could be Michelle Obama and bear Barack’s children.

    The Motor Pool Queen who dispatched trucks and drivers from the safety of Kuwait to Iraq for four months has the nerve to write;

    For those of us who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq….

    Fought what? Gerbil and dung beetle invasions? Boredom? The overwhelming sense of self satisfaction at being an insufferable prick?

    Oh, and to show the types of people who pray at the altar of Jon Soltz, this bonehead, Jim Staro, (a VFP loudmouth, by the way – more evidence of the incestuous relationship between IVAW, VFP, VoteVets, etc…) in the comments quotes one of the biggest military failures of recent history;

    Yes, Lyndon Johnson is in vogue again as a military philosopher. That’s how I got this red mark on my forehead.

    Now, I’m not saying that I disagree with the President, I don’t on this particular issue – I told Kokesh that on video last week. But coming from Soltz – it just sounds like “Duh”.

  • VetVoice makes it a point to tell us that Obama actually attended an MOH event

    The above pictured dork wants to start a blog war with This Ain’t Hell, and I’m up for it. Really. I am.
    Brandon Friedman writes at VetVoice, the blog of VoteVets, the Democrat Party’s koolaid-drinking veteran “organization” of Jon “Motorpool Queen” Soltz. Friedman wrote this in today’s snot-blower;

    President Obama attended the wreath-laying for Medal of Honor recipients at Arlington yesterday. And not only did he not blow off the event, but he even placed his hand on his heart. Uh oh. Looks like our anti-Obama friends will have to find something else to complain about now.

    Of course the “anti-Obama friends” was linked to our report of Obama not attending the Salute to Heroes Inaugural Ball. This is the third time in three weeks Friedman has mischaracterized my posts in regards to the President.

    First of all, Friedman, I have a long standing rule that I don’t have any friends that look like the Muppets’ Beaker so you don’t qualify.

    Secondly, all I did was report that the President didn’t attend the event. I dare you to find one judgmental comment in that post. Thirdly, every time Obama actually does something to prove to vets that he likes us, are you going to write about it? It’s going to be a long four years for both of us in that case. Dingus.

  • Obscuring the facts

    Wondering what I’d write to you about this morning, I opened my inbox and found this little nugget awaiting my attention;

    name = amerifag
    email = amerifag@osamaisgreat.com
    comments = dude you need to devote a homage to Osama on your site… 9/11 was FRICKIN SWEET… i was laughing the whole morning… fuckin americans jumping to their deaths…what could be sweeter (and funnier)???

    good times, good times…. cant wait for round 2

    have a nice day
    REMOTE_HOST: 38.103.144.42

    I shrugged and deleted it, because I often get little things like that in the morning from the meth-crazed freaks who can’t get to sleep. Then, I found more that had been sent to the spam folder – I deleted them as well, since it’s a fairly common occurrence, too. Then I saw jeffersonlives‘ comment. I wondered why the sudden surge, until I looked at incoming links, and I knew right away where the mental midgets were coming from.

    Yesterday, I referenced Brandon Friedman’s post at VetsVoice in one of my posts about the President’s attempt to charge vets for their service-connected treatment and Freidman tracked the link back here and wrote another Obama tongue bath and linked here. The Obama-bots and border-line psychopaths at VetVoice dutifully flocked over here to spam this blog with their immature and vile comments.

    But here’s a post TSO did on VoteVets in July which includes a debate he had with Friedman and here’s one I did on Soltz and Vote Vets after the election when Soltz emailed Melanie Morgan and called her a “stinky hag” keeping the debate civil. So now we’ve established a baseline on what I think about VoteVets, let’s look at Friedman’s post.

    Right in the title of his post, Friedman lies. “Administration Listens to Vets; Backs Off VA Insurance Plan”. Now if it was a timeline, it’s accurate because the Administration did back off after they listened to veterans – but they didn’t back off BECAUSE they they listened to the VSOs. Before the 1PM meeting yesterday, the last time the President had listened to VSOs, the meeting ended with him, in effect, telling the VSOs “pound sand, I’m doing it anyway”. He wasn’t even at the meeting yesterday, according to The Hill;

    Jim King, the national executive director for American Veterans (AMVETS), said that the meeting with Rahm Emanuel lasted all of 15 minutes and that the health insurance issue was the only topic discussed. The representatives of the 11 veterans organizations told Emanuel they were not willing to back down, and the chief of staff told them that he thought the issue was “off the table,” but that he needed to talk to Obama.

    Something that had happened between the end of the Monday meeting and the Wednesday meeting changed his mind. Nothing he “heard” from VSOs changed his mind – except that he was facing another Bonus March.

    The Administration was dictating to the VSOs what policy was going to be in regards to this issue. I have a theory as to why the Obama Adminsitration thought they could get away with it, and it’s related to the Salute to Heroes Ball dust up in January, but I can’t say anything about that. Yet.

    The only organization which took immediate action was the American Legion. The Legion had the good sense to make an issue of it, instead of taking the VoteVets approach of bending over for Obama (from here forward referred to as “BOFO”) and spreading their cheeks. While VoteVets was telling everyone to not worry, the American Legion mobilized the troops. That’s what changed minds. It wasn’t the media, either – it took two days for for the media to notice, well, except for McClatchy and no one reads them anyway.

    So Friedman is just wrong that we should just assume Obama has our best interests in his heart – the VSOs need to be vigilant, not BOFO like VoteVets.

    By the way, I have this picture so I’m using it;
    Perry Soltz
    It’s VV’s Jon Soltz meeting on a runway somewhere with VFP/VVAW member and IVAW advisor Bill Perry.
    And here they are inside the airport with more VFP/VVAW/IVAW members;
    VV IVAW VVAW VFP group hug

    Don’t tell me you have veterans’ interests in mind when you cavort with the mindless drones of IVAW who care about nothing except where they can score some pot and babe-age. VoteVets is a partisan organization that falls under aegis of MoveOn.org. Even John Bruhns, the former soldier – turned anti-war activist, left VoteVets because they were too much in the pocket of the Democrat party.

    And, Friedman, this isn’t an anti-Obama blog. I started this blog before Obama started running for President, so it can’t be an anti-Obama blog. I’m against his policies but mostly I’m against buffoons and charlatans who are climbing over the bodies of their former comrades using their motor pool dispatch credentials to lead this country down the road to ruin.

    I guess you can say I’m anti-dipshit.