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

Category: VoteVets

  • VetVoice: “Horrendous” Palin steals “Memorial Day Thunder”

    If you read the top post at dicksmith’s VetVoice, you’d have thought that Sarah Palin claimed to lead the SEAL raid on Usama bin Spongepants instead of Captain Awesome or something, but really all she did was show up at Rolling Thunder;

    Sarah Palin is attempting to hijack the Rolling Thunder Memorial Day rally in DC for her own personal and political gain. Because that’s what she does best:

    I guess he’s angry because Captain Wonderful, commander of SEAL Team Six and all of the successful operations against our enemies (but not the poorly-executed ops), doesn’t ride motorcycles…heck, he can barely ride a bicycle. I think if there was an outrage on Memorial Day, it was Captain Smoldering Hotness’ trip to Fort Belvoir’s 18 holes after dropping off a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers like a sack of laundry at the drycleaners’.

    Besides, I don’t think it was Palin’s fault that she “stole Thunder” from any event – it was probably the media who did that. But I guess dicksmith was desperate for some outrage this weekend because after he leveled his keyboard at Sarah Palin, he took aim at Thor, apparently because the movie makers stole some of dicksmith’s valor. What a total dick.

  • From the War Room

    Our buddy Bev Perlson of the Band of Mothers sent us this picture yesterday;

    TSO captioned the picture “What Dicksmith sees in the war room picture….”

  • Who is Yoo?

    We welcome dicksmith back from his vacation, but apparently his time away from VetVoice hasn’t made him any brighter;

    First off, I’m not sure how John Yoo controls the ‘right wing”opinion. We’re not a monolithic voice like the MoveOn/VoteVets/George Soros crowd who are paid to have a certain position. It looks to me like Yoo expressed his opinion separately from the rest of us on the right. That’s the same kind of bullshit that influenced me to target VetVoice in the first place.

    Next, I challenge the smithy of dicks to find another right-side opinion writer who doesn’t think killing bin Laden was a good idea. I’m pretty sure that any intelligence we would have gleaned from an interrogation of bin Laden wouldn’t be worth the criticism we’d get from the anti-America crowd around the world for imprisoning the old guy. Including some of the writers at VetVoice.

    And, if we did take him alive, of course he would have gone to Guantanamo. Where else would we put him? In the Bradley Manning suite at the Leavenworth Hilton? Imagine the security considerations for imprisoning bin Laden in the continental US, to protect him as well as the surrounding communities. If he was still alive, cretins like Noam Chomsky, Media Benjamin and Jose Vasquez would be camped outside the prison waving a bloody shirt – only Guantanamo makes sense.

    And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave the right answer because he was threatened with further waterboarding, and he didn’t want to go through that one more time. Check your timeline, junior.

    And, oh, by the way, my sources tell me that bin Laden didn’t get 5.56mm bullets to his face – you even got that part wrong, dickie.

    All of that being said, this blog is glad that bin Laden is dead and we wouldn’t have it any other way. John Yoo doesn’t speak for this small band of right wingnuts.

    Maybe dicksmith would be better off criticizing his own side for complaining that we killed bin Laden. Folks like the brilliant strategist and national security expert, Rosie O’Donnell.

  • Obama is smarter warrior

    David Fredosso sends us this from the Washington Examiner;

    As if to lend credibility to the cartoonist, Ashwin Madia, Jon Soltz’ replacement motor pool queen at VoteVets plants this sloppy, wet kiss squarely on the presidential posterior;

    I’d like Madia to explain how he thinks that Obama has done anything differently than President Bush. He rambles on about not using torture, but the Bush Administration didn’t torture either – unless you count the mild discomfort caused by the water boarding of two terrorists. More hippies and journalists have volunteered to be water boarded than actual terrorists.

    Every American felt intense pain on 9/11. A desire for vengeance is understandable, and a picture of Osama bin Laden with a gaping bullet hole in his eye would undoubtedly bring some sense of satisfaction to many Americans. But, when we elect a president, we elect someone that we trust will not succumb to instincts like those. We elect someone who will be smart, who will be deliberate, and will do what is right for America’s security, and our troops’ well-being.

    When it comes to the war on terror, we certainly have that in President Barack Obama. It’s why Osama bin Laden is dead, and America is and continues to be made safer.

    Oh, yeah? What has Obama done differently than Bush, Ashwin?

    America continues to be safer because of the things Obama campaigned against but left in place from the Bush Administration when Obama was gob-smacked by reality.

  • Obama asks court to maintain DADT

    The Obama Administration has asked an appeals court to allow them to keep DADT in place until the end of the year according to Stars & Stripes;

    In a filing, the Justice Department asked the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to suspend legal proceedings while the government implements a federal law repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the 1993 statute barring military service by gays and lesbians who disclose their sexual orientation.

    Now I applaud the administration for waiting on the services to get ready to implement the new directions, but i don’t see any of the wailing from folks like Dicksmith who seems to have busied himself with cutting and pasting White House press announcements – which is what his posts are anyway. But, if it were a McCain Administration, Dicksmith would be spitting mad and calling names, but since it’s this administration, not a peep.

    I guess it’s another example that the Obama Administration discovered that being the Anti-Bush Administration is harder than they thought it would be.

  • VoteVets endorses Sanchez for Texas Senate seat

    That nonpartisan organization, VoteVets, which routinely refers to Allen West as a “war criminal” has put aside it’s usually high and stringent moral standards to endorse retired Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez.

    “General Sanchez has such a compelling story, and already served this nation honorably and ably,” said Ashwin Madia, an Iraq War Veteran, and Interim Chairman of VoteVets.org. “We’re always happy to see veterans entering politics as a way to continue their public service, but it’s especially encouraging to see one of our military’s finest minds, like General Sanchez, considering a new life in public service. We could use more people like General Sanchez in public life.”

    Talking Points Memo, a notoriously far-right wing nut propaganda rag writes that Sanchez was responsible for the use of dogs during interrogations at Abu Gahraib

    The results of a Freedom Of Information Act request by the ACLU in 2005 showed Sanchez had ordered his troops to “exploit Arab fear of dogs”, as well as authorized other harsh interrogation techniques on prisoners. As the BBC reported in 2005, the ACLU said the FOIA’d documents found “the [interrogation] measures go beyond generally accepted practice and says Gen Sanchez should be made accountable.”

    The ACLU did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the possibility of a Sanchez run.

    Even the ACLU is suddenly silent? Really?

    But in Texas, Democrats are saying Sanchez’s positives outpace the negatives that might come with his connection to Abu Ghraib. Former Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, which McClatchy called “one of the state’s last high-profile Democrats,” said Sanchez is just the man Democrats are looking for.

    I guess there’s nothing that affiliating yourself with the Democrat Party won’t cure in some circles. I can’t wait for the Matthew Alexander/Tony Camarino endorsement.

  • Democrats recruit Gen Sanchez to run for the Senate

    Ben and Ponsdorf send us a link to Hot Air (see how I linked that, Hot Air?) in which Ed Morrissey reminds us of how the Democrats were upset that the chain-of-command of the pervs who staffed Abu Gharaib were not held responsible for the naked pyramids and junk-pointing antics of their subordinates.

    Now it seems that the very Democrats who made such a stink, have recruited their main target, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, to run for the seat of retiring Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson next year;

    Former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes confirmed that Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the head of the Democratic Senate campaign committee, was referring to Sanchez Thursday when she said that Democrats were very close to announcing a candidate in Texas.

    From Red State;

    When former President George Bush tapped then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to fill the nation’s top law enforcement post, Murray joined Senator Maria Cantwell in opposing the nomination over his green-lighting of Sanchez’s interrogation techniques.

    In a 2004 statement, Senator Patrick Leahy accused Sanchez of authorizing “the use of techniques that were contrary to both U.S. military manuals but also international law.” “Given this incredible overstepping of bounds, I find it incredible that the reports generated thus far have not recommended punishment of any kind for high-level officials,” he added.

    Dicksmith at VoteVets is fond of referring to Allen West as a “war criminal”, so I wonder what cute little reference he’ll have for the reconstituted and now-Democrat-endorsed Sanchez.

  • Dicksmith; What a decade of war looks like

    Dicksmith at VetVoice in an apparent and successful attempt at putting his inexperience in the military on display writes this about a “staff ride” he participated in recently;

    Last year, I had the opportunity to join a class from the Army’s Command and General Staff College on a staff ride to the Civil War battlefield at Chickamauga. Frankly, I was appalled. Most of the 30 or so field grade officers in the class behaved with less military bearing than the worst Privates I had led during my active duty time. My judgement was that these officers, who spend all their time in their home units as straight-laced examples of “squared away”, were just blowing off steam. The military historian who arranged our trip, a former Army grunt and current Naval Reserve intel officer, had a different judgement. “This is what an Army looks like after a decade of war.”

    The more I think about it, the more I think he was right.

    Funny, cuz, whenever I participated in an event that included a large number of officers and and relatively few NCOs, officers tended to act the fools. Even after a decade without war.

    But thanks for politicizing Every. Thing. You. Can.

    So how does this relate to discipline problems in the force? When this many mid-career Soldiers are popping smoke, you create a leadership vacuum. Sub-par or even poor Soldiers, who otherwise would not be trusted with much responsibility, become platoon sergeants or Sergeants Major, or are given command over some of the Army’s top units, like the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

    Yeah, funny how the Army survived after Vietnam despite the lack of support from the hippies and a large number of Americans. Somehow, there was a cadre of professional soldiers who built the Volunteer Army into the most effective force the world has ever seen. Yeah, we don’t need quitters and pussies like Dicksmith to rebuild our forces or set the example for us or to snipe at the active force from the sidelines – good riddance, dick.

    I still think the decision to go to war in Afghanistan in 2001 was the correct one, but the prosecution of that war has lacked any clear direction or stated metrics for victory for nearly a decade.

    As opposed to the clarity that the Obama Administration has provided? So we’re not sure if we’re in it for victory, or if we’re in it to just withdraw under fire. Dicksmith, you’re a real fucking rocket surgeon.

    Thanks to Blackfive who sent the above photo yesterday.