Tell It to This Marine
Mood:  special
An old high school buddy of mine named Jeff Laird dropped me a line the other day after having found out about this blog. He is a Marine and a Gulf War veteran. The following are his observations on the recent shooting of a terrorist by a Marine in Fallujah.

I think you're right about the impending "Abu Ghraib-like scandal" over the dispatch of the terrorist in the mosque by the Marine. I know the bleeding-heart freaks among us will lament the poor, unarmed victim, who, if he had been allowed to live, whould surely have gone on to win the Nobel Prize for his profound contributions to world peace. But alas, we will forever be without him.

It's far too easy for people in their living rooms to criticize our troops. It is simply nauseating that the beneficiaries of this Marine's bravery will sit in their recliners, see a video clip, and self-righteously judge the correctness of the decision made by one of the world's best fighting men after 6 brutal days of continuous combat. People who have never been in combat, never been shot at, never held a buddy as he died, and then re-lived the moment days later as you pause to wonder what the stain is on your clothes (you've somehow misplaced the knowlege that it was the warm blood of your friend), have not earned the right to judge the actions of our Marines.

No one except the Marines and terrorists in the mosque know what happened, but my understanding is that the mosque was being used as a fortification from which Marines were being fired upon. The Marines took the mosque, and left survivors inside to be cared for when it was practical. Later, Marines again took fire from the mosque, and upon re-entering, who should they find? Why, only a few, poor, injured and helpless citizens of Iraq. Give me a break. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the terrorists who were left behind waited until they had an opportunity to kill more Marines, and they took it. Although the terrorists were shown quarter, and they violated that by re-engaging the very people who had spared them. But maybe if they play dead when the Marines come back, no harm will come to them, and they can do it again, right? Or, at the very least, they can booby-trap their bodies so that they blow up those who return to check on them.

As a country, we laud the Marines, are proud of them, and even drop their name as a threat (remember the "Tell It To The Marines" posters of WWII?). We expect the Marines to be the "First to Fight," and celebrate their nickname "Devil Dogs," without thinking much about it. The Marines earned that name not here at home, but in WWI at the Battle of Belleau Wood in France (the first time we saved the French). Who gave them that name? The Germans they were fighting. Was it because the Marines fought a kinder, gentler war? Of course not. It was due to the ferocity with which the Marines fought and killed the Germans. War is not pretty, kind, or fun, but if you''re going to fight, you might as well be good at it.

We, as a country, expect the Marines to be the equivalent of a big, tough, snarling pit-bull and the end of Uncle Sam's leash, and then we are aghast when we see them bite. We demand that they are ready and able to protect us at a moment's notice, yet smiling and friendly every Christmas at the Toys for Tots barrel. In war, we can't have it both ways. Would we, as a nation, prefer to see footage of Marines running away, slipping into civilian clothing, and acting as cowards? It doesn't matter - it will never happen.

The Marine who shot the terrorist did his job. He did not torture the terrorist. He did not cause him pain. He did not put him in front of a camera and slowly saw his head off. He shot him one time in the head. The terrorist's brains were on the wall before the sound of the shot even reached him - he neither suffered nor knew it was coming. As far as battlefield death goes, this was as humane as one could hope for. Had the Marine been the vicious, torturous villain the press is making him out to be, believe me, he could have truly made the terrorist suffer. The Marine did his job and moved on. While ugly to see, that's war, and his actions probably saved the lives of other Marines.

Semper Fi

Thanks for this, Jeff. Thanks, too, for your service to our country.

Head Traumas
Mood:  suave
I found a link to this story over at Jeff Goldstein's blog and I must assume that it's not a joke. It's from the Boca Raton News website. Enjoy.

Mental health officials in South Florida blasted Rush Limbaugh on Monday, saying the conservative talk show host's offer of "free therapy" for traumatized John Kerry voters has made a mockery of a valid psychological problem.

"Rush Limbaugh has a way of back-handedly slamming people," said Sheila Cooperman, a licensed clinician with the American Health Association (AHA) who listened Friday as Limbaugh offered to personally treat her patients. "He's trying to ridicule the emotional state this presidential election produced in many of us here in Palm Beach County. Who is he to offer therapy?"

The Boca Raton News reported last week that more than 30 distraught Kerry supporters in South Florida contacted the non-profit AHA following their candidate's Nov. 3 concession to President Bush. AHA officials have diagnosed the disorder as Post Election Selection Trauma (PEST) and have scheduled the first of several free group therapy sessions for just after Thanksgiving.

Oh, for fuck's sake! Grow up!

The Invisible Colossus
Wretchard at The Belmont Club has hipped me to this interview of Paul Wolfowitz at the Prospect magazine. It's very interesting throughout, but one thought in particular stands out:

One of the things about this moment in history is that nobody really thinks they can produce an army, a navy or an air force that can take on the US. That should channel human competitiveness into more productive and peaceful pursuits.

Read one way, these are the supremely confident words of a major mover in the world's "last superpower." Read another way, it is a somewhat arrogant observation. Ultimately, though, Wolfowitz is being simultaneously realistic and idealistic.

If, tomorrow, our country had to fight for its own survival against an onslaught from every corner of the world, we would prevail. The world would be bloodied and hundreds of millions would be dead or dying, but this country would survive somehow, even badly hurt. But the countries in the axis of evil? The countries that oppose us? The countries that look at us the wrong way? They would all be under glass if we chose to put them there. But we do not so choose and never would.

America is not an empire in any precedent sense that I know of. We are, as Lincoln said, "the last, best hope of Earth." We do more than represent the potential of liberation; we often realize it. We'd sooner have clients and creditors interested in their own prosperity ---and ours--- than a world full of an annihilated and irredeemable humanity. Thus, we facilitate the mental and material commerce that changes and improves the whole world on a daily basis because that is how we get ahead. There's nothing wrong with that. Someone has to be on top and it may as well, for the sake of all, be us. Better that we get ahead than the Islamofascists or the Nazis or the Communists, right?

But, maybe if you can't agree to that, you should submit yourself to their way of life and find out the difference for yourself. Go on. No one here will stop you.

The Washington Post Cans a Traitor
Mood:  a-ok
At long last, according to Editor & Publisher, the anti-American piece of shit Ted Rall has been dropped from the Washington Post's online site. Remember that this is the cartoonist who insulted the late Pat Tillman as a dumbass who deserved to die.

WashingtonPost.com is no longer running the cartoons of hard-hitting liberal Ted Rall.

Rall said he thinks the site dropped his work because of a Nov. 4 cartoon he did showing a drooling, mentally handicapped student taking over a classroom. "The idea was to draw an analogy to the electorate -- in essence, the idiots are now running the country," he told E&P.

"That cartoon certainly drew a significant amount of negative comment from our users," said WashingtonPost.com Executive Editor Doug Feaver when contacted by E&P. But he added that the decision to drop Rall was a "cumulative" one that had been building for a while.

Rall is garbage. "Hard-hitting liberal" garbage. Let him call it censorship all he wants. He got what was coming to him.

(Hat tip to Little Green Footballs.)

"Apologevents"
I didn't know Dallas Mavericks' owner Mark Cuban had a blog, but he does ---and has a great post on what a bunch of nonsense the FCC is. Cuban calls them a "marketing partner" to networks that broadcast the doings of sports franchises like his.

Ok newspapers, radio stations and shows, cable networks, any and all entertainment related news shows, listen up. Im with the PR department of the broadcast network. We all know that the FCC is getting persnickety (bet you havent used that word in a sentence recently), about nudity and language. Let us first say, we cant thank them enough.

The environment is perfect for both of us. We want as much media coverage of our programming as we can possibly get. You need things to cover. So here is the deal. From our end, we are going to create "Apologevents".

An Apologevent is where we plan an event that we know we will have to apologize for. The Apologevent will be designed to entice all the "Im shocked by anything" viewers to call their local stations, their newspapers and of course Inside Edition, The Insider, etc to remind them of how inappropriate the Apologevent was and how shocked they are.

Read the whole thing. It's pretty clever. And plenty cynical.

Championing the Muj
In the "Middle East Editorial Weblog" of The New Standard, Brian Dominick is doing his part to defend the murderers and Islamofascists of Fallujah against the Amerikkkans. On the question of the incident in which the young Marine shot the half-dead terrorist in a mosque last Saturday, Dominick says:

Advocates of looser rules of engagement have argued all day that one must leave open the possibility that the Marine thought the wounded man was actually a booby-trapped corpse, as this same unit reportedly discovered the previous day (the hard way). The rigging of corpses is a fairly common guerilla warfare tactic, and [NBC reporter Kevin] Sites dutifully reported that "possibility" in order to cast doubt on what his videotape actually shows.

But, if that were the fear, seeing that the prone man was in fact alive would, in such a case, have been cause for relief, not urgent suspicion. I haven't seen that logic employed in any commentary on the situation, though it seems self-evident. I just searched somewhat extensively and could find no accounts of a living mujahideen booby-trapping his own body in Fallujah.

Well, then, it's settled. So long as this dhimmi can't find another such example in Fallujah, there must be no cause for alarm. Never mind that the one thing we know about these jihadi psychopaths is that they look upon their own suicide as a certain path to paradise. Never mind that the rat the young Marine shot was slumped against a wall where an IED or a grenade might very easily have been concealed behind its back or nestled in the robes or under the corpse next to it. What really matters is that the anti-war Left desperately needs to manufacture another Abu Ghraib-caliber scandal to undermine our military's work in Iraq.

But don't let them do it. If you hate this war and want to see it end, the best thing to do would be to grit your teeth and see it through. A little unity in the face of these battles would go a long way, but the war will drag on beyond its time if the Left keeps giving the enemy the benefit of its disapproval of our own military.

70,000
Have you been enjoying, as I have, the Dhimmicrats' claim that the President doesn't have a mandate because, if 70,000 votes in Ohio had gone the other way, we'd now be talking about President Kerry?

Sure. This is the same party that insists that Bush was never the legitimate winner of the 2000 Election because the Gorebot won the popular vote by half a million. Not only does this reveal the Dhimms' ignorance of the Electoral College, but it also proves their hypocrisy. Using their own logic from before, Kerry didn't lose by 70,000 Ohioans' votes; he lost by some three and a half million popular votes nationwide.

As it is, Kerry lost both ways, as he deserved.

Let's review:

John Kerry lost the popular vote.

John Kerry lost the Electoral College vote.

John Kerry's party lost even more seats in both chambers of the Congress, including that of its own Senate Minority Leader.

By the same measures, the President won everything, including a majority ---not a plurality, which twice put Clinton in office--- but a majority of the popular vote. That hasn't happened in 16 years.

Call it a mandate, ladies, and get over it.

For God's Sake, Please Don't Moan
I can never remember (honest!) which channel or what time Nigella Lawson's cooking program comes on, but I happened to stumble across it again this weekend (honest!) ---and I have to say I just can't take it anymore.

How can a woman eroticize the preparation of a shepherd's pie? Good God Almighty ---this one can! It just isn't right. Lawson is an audiovisual narcotic to poor saps like me, with the sexy English accent and the dark eyes and the hooters. And, then, of course, there are the hooters to consider. Oh, man. I feel like I need a cigarette after watching her make a mess of porridge.

And for God's sake, woman, please don't moan like that when you take a taste of the brownies you're whipping up. It's just food. Probably. Although I get to thinking that there's some sort of hidden message that's pinging my lizard brain.

Insanity.

Lightening the Load
According to a report in the Boston Globe (emphasis added):

FALLUJAH -- US forces dropped a pair of 2,000-pound bombs early yesterday morning on a bunker complex believed to be an insurgent training facility on the southern edge of this city, where the most dedicated and best trained rebel fighters are making a last stand.

The bombs shook the ground of the former insurgent stronghold and set off secondary explosions that went on for 45 minutes but could not be seen above ground, persuading officers of the Army's First Infantry Division that there were large stockpiles of weapons underground.

I know that the term "weapons of mass destruction" has a specific legal meaning, but when we're setting off that much ordnance, it seems to me that we are preventing some sort of mass destruction from happening further down the road.

Call this one an intelligence bonanza.

(Hat tip to Little Green Footballs.)

Jarheads and Craphounds
I hope I'm wrong, but we're probably on the verge of another fucking Abu Ghraib-like scandal in Iraq with the killing of a terrorist in Fallujah by a Marine this past Saturday. Why does this incident have that kind of potential? For the same reason Abu Ghraib did: someone's got it on tape.

I saw what little the networks would allow to be shown yesterday. It looks like the guy who gets shot is just about dead, anyway. But as the camera pans to him, you can see that he's breathing. The Marine doesn't care, though, and fires a round into the guy's head. Okay. One less terrorist in the world. What else do you want to know?

To look at what happened without knowing the full context is probably a whole lot like the infamous photo of the VC soldier taking a slug in the head from the South Vietnamese police chief. Which is to say that, as cold-blooded as it looks, it might help to know why this young Marine made the decision to shoot.

At the end of their report, CNN mentions, very briefly:

About a block away, a Marine was killed and five others wounded by a booby-trapped body they found in a house after a shootout with insurgents.

Yeah? These people are booby-trapping their own dead? That's not in the Koran, is it? Aren't they supposed to get the dead buried as soon as possible and not exploit corpses like that? Maybe after knowing that a buddy got killed and several others were injured by some "dead" terrorist, this young American didn't want to take any chances. And maybe he knew that a even a "dying" terrorist is fully capable of rigging a grenade or IED under his own sorry ass to go off when someone tries to move him.

I say bully for our guy.

It should also be noted that this happened in a mosque. Got that? These animals are using mosques as ammo dumps and redoubts and snipers' nests ---and the world is demanding that we respect their holy sites and apply the Geneva Conventions to these pieces of shit? Try again, comrades. These are unlawful combatants our boys are going up against. The only thing to do is exterminate them. Period.

Time to Shut the Fuck Up, Olbermann
Mood:  irritated
Looks like MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is flaking out with all this nonsense about voter fraud costing Kerry the election. Why doesn't he just shut the fuck up and get over it? Bill Steigerwald at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review would like to know, too.

[Olbermann] never directly charged that Republicans stole the election or demanded that Karl Rove should be picked up for questioning by the U.N. But for 15 minutes on Monday, Olbermann pointed to a "small but blood-curdling group of reports of voting irregularities and possible fraud" from across the country, topped it with some vague partisan innuendo from Democrat Congressman John Conyers, and acted like he deserved a Peabody Award for Civic Journalism.

On Tuesday I checked out some of Olbermann's claims. Using a high-tech personal communication device professional journalists refer to as a "telephone," I called an elections bureau person in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (greater Cleveland), where, as Olbermann pointed out, 93,000 extra votes had been inexplicably cast Nov. 2.

It turns out the votes were "a computer anomaly" that didn't affect or reflect the official vote count. And those 18,472 votes Olbermann said were counted in Fairview Park, a Cleveland suburb that had only 13,342 registered voters? Absentee ballots from many precincts had been grouped together by the computer and credited to Fairview Park, where 8,421 voted.

And so on and so forth.

Here's my deal for Olbermann and his Countdown guest hosts: every time they bring up these lies about voter fraud, I vow to continue being a dick about this election for one week more. Because the only thing that ever had the potential to defeat President Bush wasn't Hanoi John but the fucking Big Media machine with all its lies and distortions. Those bastards deserve to be ruined every hour on the hour.

Oh, and Courageous Dan? I haven't forgotten about you, either, you forgery-pushing sack of shit.

Gots Ta Maintain
Now Playing: "Something In The Air" by Thunderclap Newman
I just don't know why these young people can't get along:

U.S. forces fighting in Fallujah found the bodies of 20 foreign fighters Friday in the southern part of the city who had been killed execution-style.

The men were described as foot soldiers with Monotheism and Jihad, a guerrilla group headed by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that now calls itself al-Qaida in Iraq, the Washington Post reported Friday.

Please pay no attention to the new name of Zarqawi's group. See, the important thing is that there were no terrorists in Iraq before the Chimperor invaded.

But residents said the U.S-led offensive opened strains between the local insurgents and the foreigners. When a senior Zarqawi commander was found dead of a bullet to the head during the battle, many interpreted his death as the result of an insurgent execution.

Y'all won't need them fancy resumes in Paradise, you wretched animals. Not if the boss won't even give you a good recommendation.

The Auxiliary of the Abortion Industry
By way of the indispensible RealClearPolitics, here is a very interesting opinion piece in the Rocky Mountain News by Francis X. Maier, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Denver. Maier does a very good job of explaining the Democrats' recent losses from the perspective of Democratic Catholics everywhere. See if this resonates with you (emphases added):

I met my wife before I had returned to my childhood faith. One day I made the mistake of poking fun at those neanderthal Catholic views on abortion. What I got for my ignorance was a kindly but memorable tutoring on the sanctity of human life.

For my wife and her family, being a Catholic meant being a Democrat, and being a Democrat meant fighting for the little guy - literally. That included the poor, the homeless, racial and ethnic minorities, and the unemployed. It also meant defending the unborn child.

For my wife, arguing whether an unborn child was a "full human person" or a "developing human being" was irrelevant - or worse, a kind of lying. The dignity of the unborn life involved was exactly the same, whatever one called it.

Now, in virtually every respect, I disagree with the Catholic Church's view of human sexuality. I disagree with its notions of a celibate and marriageless clergy, contraception, when life begins, masturbation, homosexuality, abortion, and anything else you can think of. But what interests me in Maier's article is to see how far removed faithful and practicing Catholics are from political coherence in their support of the Democratic Party. This is especially true of Latinos, who seem to me to be poised between the conservatism of their Latin/Catholic culture and the expectation that they should support the Democratic platform by virtue of their socio-economic interests.

If the Democratic Party thinks that such a dilemma is tenable and resolvable in their favor, they are setting themselves up for disaster.

Maier goes on:

Robert P. Casey, governor of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1995, embodied the deepest ideals of the Democratic Party: pro-worker; pro-minority; pro-economic and social justice; and also thoroughly pro-life, from conception to natural death. In arguing for the rights of the unborn child, he worried that the Democratic Party was becoming "little more than an auxiliary" of the abortion industry.

For his candor, the Clinton machine publicly humiliated him at the 1992 Democratic Convention. Other prominent "Catholic" Democrats - including fellow governor and media darling Mario Cuomo - looked the other way.

In his 1996 autobiography, Casey warned that:

"Many people discount the power of the so-called 'cultural issues' - and especially the abortion issue. I see it the other way around. These issues are central to the resurgence of the Republicans, central to the national implosion of the Democrats, central to the question of whether there will be a third party . . . [The] Democrats' national decline - or, better, their national disintegration - will continue relentlessly and inexorably until they come to grips with these values issues, primarily abortion."

Read the whole thing. Although I disagree with Maier's Catholicism in a hundred different ways, I think his analysis is very shrewd and deserves to be understood by the nihilistic Left ---before they reduce themselves to permanent irrelevance.

The Pathetic Vessel
Here's a very enjoyable piece in the Wall Street Journal by Martin Peretz in which the Kerrion's asses are kicked nine ways to Sunday.

For what the electorate did on Nov. 2 was essentially (or maybe just merely) turn down John Kerry, a candidate who until very late in the Democratic primaries was almost no one's choice as the nominee, the party's last option because it could rally around no one else. What a pathetic vessel in which to have placed liberalism's hopes! A senator for two decades who had stood for nothing, really nothing.

Peretz also adds, parenthetically, an observation on the President's Jewish support:

(The Jewish vote for George Bush rose nationally from 18% to at least 25%. But, in Florida's critical Broward and Palm Beach Counties and Ohio's defining Cuyahoga County, the president's Jewish total was much higher. And exit polls of Jewish voters are notoriously unreliable: Some Jews are still embarrassed to admit voting GOP. "S'iz a shande far di goyim," as my cousin would say. It's a disgrace before the gentiles.)

The increase in the Jewish vote for President Bush may be the only prediction I made before the election that has actually held up.

Well, that and who was going to win.

"A Thug's Life"
Andrew C. McCarthy has an indispensible article on Arafat over at NRO. It's certainly the best summation of the Thingfish's life I've read in the past few days.

As for Arafat's dying of AIDS, I think that's exactly the sort of factoid that needs to be disseminated as often and widely as possible.

Back of the Bus
I'm learning all about the Arafat funeral over at Charles Johnson's place. He notes that

When German foreign affairs minister Joschka Fischer travelled to Cairo to attend the dead terrorist's funeral, he was made to wait in line while guests from Islamic countries cut ahead of him; in the end, not a single European guest participated.

Be sure to read the translation of Der Spiegel article provided at LGF by "euroguy." It'll give you a good sense of what saps the "Euroweenies" are.

And LGF commenter ("Nickpicker") directs us to this excellent column by the late Michael Kelly, blasting Fischer as the commie radical terrorist he is.

What a bunch of losers.

Helping the Martyrs
Now Playing: "No Quarter" by Led Zeppelin
Over at Blackfive, there's an e-mail from a Marine major named Chris who is in Fallujah doing the Lord's work. Get some of this:

There is no negotiating or surrender for those guys. If we see the position and positively ID them as bad guys, we strike. When they run, we call it maneuver and we strike them too. Why? Yesterday the muj attacked an ambulance carrying our wounded. The attackers were hunted down and killed without quarter. These guys want to be martyrs...we're helping.

The only bad thing about men like this Marine is that, once they're home, guys like me will have only to pretend to be men by comparison.

Semper fi, mofo. Maybe six or seven hundred dead rats so far? Pile 'em to the sky!

Note to Olbermann
Say, Keith, if you weren't so goddamned glib and clever, you might realize that your candidate lost. Now stop being a paranoiac asshole and get over it. You're almost as bad as the Gorebot.

By the way, do the people at MSNBC know that Olbermann's program is turning into a boring Art Bell/UFO "best of" show?

Bury It in Kitty Litter
Do try to temper your great grief at the death of the Jew-killer Yasser Arafat. This thingfish was a murderer of the first order and a disaster for "his" people's political aspirations. There can be no question about that.

Why is he so widely regarded as some sort of hero? I don't know. Why was Jesse Jackson once considered a leader of Black America? Why do millions of North Koreans worship the misshapen alcoholic troll who daily leads their country into the pit of Hell? Why do asshole Hollywood actors revere Fidel Castro? Because people are basically ignorant and need to be smacked across the snout with a rolled-up newspaper.

Cargo Cults
I ran across something very interesting at the Red State blog about "cargo cults." I'd never heard of such a thing before, but check this out.

The vast amounts of war materiel that were air-dropped into these islands [i.e., New Guinea, Melanesia, et al.] during the Pacific campaign against the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of these islanders as manufactured clothing, canned food, tents, weapons and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers--and also the islanders who were their guides and hosts. When the war moved on, and ultimately when it ended, the airbases were abandoned and no new "cargo" was then being dropped.

In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders adopted a shallow version of the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood, and wore them while sitting in control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses.

The cultists thought that the foreigners have some special connection to the ancestors, who were the only beings powerful enough to spill such riches. By mimicking the foreigners, they hoped to bypass them.

Gotta love that anthropology, baby.