Useful Fools

To my regular readers,

Thank you for reading ths blog.

My blogging will be dramatically reduced for the next 10 days or so.

But then, blogging will return.

John Moore

There is an active discussion in blogspace, including at Roger Simon’s excellent blog on the subject of partitioning Iraq. The idea of a “rolling partition,” where the partitions evolve as smaller units join voluntarily together seems especially popular.

Half of this idea seems very good: democracy from the bottom up. But the other half is very wrong and impractical. It’s proponents also may have temporarily forgotten that we didn’t expend blood and vast amounts of treasure just to give the Iraqis a better life. We did it to get rid of a serious international threat, and to replace Saddam’s fascism with a “model” civilization in order to get at “root causes” of terrorism, partly by driving a wedge between authoritarian Muslim nations and their populations.
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A new group of Vietnam Veterans opposed to John Kerry, Vietnam Veterans For The Truth is planning a large rally against John Kerry on the Capitol Steps in September. Their slogan is:
Kerry Lied While good men died

Their press release is here - Acrobat Reader is required.

A Microsoft Word version, often more useful to journalists, is here.

Their web site is kerrylied.com

You can download the reader from HERE.

If you oppose John Kerry, please spread the word and their press release

PART of the press release is shown here:

Please download and read the entire press release.

I originally posted this as a comment on Professor Jay Rosen’s PRESSthink blog in response to this article.
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Military Historian John B. Dwyer interviewed Commander Wright, one of Kerry’s Commanding Officers on the Swift Boats. His article at The American Thinker is revealing. Some excerpts :

Thomas Wright was one of John F. Kerry’s fellow Swift boat officers in Vietnam. Since Wright outranked Kerry, he was Kerry’s sometime boat group Officer-in-Charge, so Wright had occasion to observe Kerry’s behavior and attitudes, and the circumstances surrounding his early departure from the war zone. The intervening years have not dimmed his memories.

…

boat captains adopted distinctive, often humorous call signs for identification purposes. Eldon Thompson was “Mary Poppins,” William Schachte was “Baccardi Charlie,” James T. Grace was “Twiggy,” and Tom Wright was “Dudley Do-Right.” When John Kerry radioed another Swift boat, he used the call sign, “Boston Strangler.”

…

Working with call sign “Boston Strangler” became problematical. “I had a lot of trouble getting him to follow orders,” recalls Wright. “He had a different view of leadership and operations. Those of us with direct experience working with Kerry found him difficult and oriented towards his personal, rather than unit goals and objectives. I believed that overall responsibility rested squarely on the shoulders of the OIC or OTC in a free-fire zone. You had to be right (before opening fire). Kerry seemed to believe there were no rules in a free-fire zone and you were supposed to kill anyone. I didn’t see it that way.”

…

It got to a point where Wright told his divisional commander he no longer wanted Kerry in his boat group, so he was re-assigned to another one. “I had an idea of his actions but didn’t have to be responsible for him.” Then Wright and like-minded boat officers took matters into their own hands. “When he got his third Purple Heart, three of us told him to leave. We knew how the system worked and we didn’t want him in Coastal Division 11. Kerry didn’t manipulate the system, we did.”

Totally disgusted with the thinly disguised attacks on Bush from the leftist media, via their orgy of pontificating about the few cases where we mistreat prisoners, I thought a little perspective was needed, especially since the press has already forgoten about the beheading of Mr. Berg. For those who breathlessley read the “torture” techniques used by the CIA, as “revealed” by the New York Times today, you should know that the techniques are used against our own servicemen in Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training (which I have been through). But somehow when we do it to those who are planning to kill a few million innocent Americans, the New York Times get’s all hot and bothered.

Perhaps they should find out what kind of people were are subjecting this terrible action.
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The Society of Professional Journalist maintains a Code of Ethics (previously Fisked).

There is a glaring omission from that document. I wonder how many Americans realize that the it has nothing requiring journalists to even consider damage to their country in making editorial decisions (what to investigate, what to report, when and how to report it).

I suggest that my readers look at the document. It is very “Politically Correct” and contains some important values (some of which are often ignored). If you can find a clause about damage to country, please email or post a comment. I couldn’t find one.

Thanks.

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If you, like me, get much of your information from the mainstream (or in my case, Fox) news, this may come as a surprise (although Fox has an embed in the battle who is giving us the tactical picture).

Here you can read the true strategic situation, from a military leader in the midst of the fighting. This the power of blogging.

And as you read this, raw intelligence from the field combined with analysis, you can see how wrong many of the criticisms have been and still are, because it includes the background and the planning to defeat Sadr, which has been going on for a long time, ver quietly and quite subtly.

I am angry tonight. I hope other Americans are also.

Some of us have long understood the depths of the barbarian evil confronting us. Too many others refuse to understand, even after today’s beheading of an innocent American civilian.

At a meeting today with a nice, intelligent businessman of South Asian descent, the subject of the war came up. In his part of the world, he said, all the butchery of war is shown. He was sure that we would never have completed our Iraq invasion if our media showed the all the gore.

Although he lives at least part time in the United States, he believes our media hid those pictures to promote for the war. He doesn’t realize that the majority of our news media personnel were and are against the Battle of Iraq. He doesn’t understand that they hide the gore because they think we cannot handle it.

Our media has decided to act in loco parenti. They don’t want to show mere citizens the full bloody truth. Of course, this hasn’t stopped them from bombarding us with degrading and prurient images from Abu Ghraib. It hasn’t stopped them from bombarding us over and over again with pictures of Americans, not representative of America or our military, badly abusing suspected killers.

This gentleman had a point, although his inference was far from the mark.

Stop the censorship!

Let Americans see the whole picture.

Show the video of the jumpers of 9-11 - all the way to the ground, as often as we had to see the prison photos.

Show the full video of today’s beheading.

Show American civilians risking their lives to rebuild the Iraqi power system.

Show the videos of Iraqi professionals murdered by Ba’athist terrorists in order to derail the rebuilding.

Show the videos of Iraqi tanks destroyed by bombs filled with concrete instead of explosive, to avoid killing the innocent people in the houses near the tanks.

Show the full videos of the Fallujians desecrating the remains of the American civilians they had just killed; show the joy they express in stabbing and cutting and then hanging the remains from a bridge.

Show how little damage was done in order to pacify Fallujiah and show the civilians allowed to flee to safety before that opation.

Show the full video of our wounded soldiers as they fall, suffer or die while fighting those who would rule Iraq by violence.

Show our soldiers risking their lives in combat to avoid unnecessarily killing innocent Iraqis. Show what our firepower could do if we chose to save our soldier’s lives instead of the innocent Iraqis.

Show Saddam’s videos. Make the entire world watch them. Show them as often as the prison videos are shown.

Show the pictures of the Israeli children after they have been murdered by Palestinians.

Show the video of Palestinians dancing with the bloody body parts of Israeli soldiers they have killed. Make sure our multi-culturalists see how those Palestinians respect the Jewish cultural need to bury all parts of their dead.

War is hell. Post 9-11, so is the alternative.

Show us all of the truth!

Let’s see how our citizens balance the events and necessities of this war against the death cult of radical Islam.

I trust our citizens to come to the right conclusions.

Our Censors do not.

Stop the Censorship!

[Also published at The Command Post Op-Ed Page]

I hope you’re satisfied….

You, who mistreated the Iraqi prisoners

I hope you’re satisified….

You, who took the pictures of that mistreatment

I hope you’re satisified….

You, who released those highly classified pictures to the irresponsible media

I hope you’re satisified…

You at CBS who showed the pictures and made them available to the world

I hope you’re satisifed

You who defended sixty minutes for their irresponsible actions

I hope you’re satisified

You, who sawed off the head of Nick Berg for the crime of being an American trying to rebuild Iraq, as retaliation those pictures

I hope you’re satisifed

You, who are holding hostage body parts of Israeli soldiers whom you killed in Gaza.

I hope you’re satisfied

You, who use the war any way you can for political gain, even if it costs American lives.

I hope you’re satisfied

You, who still don’t understand that we are at war with evil in its purest form - the monsters who commit these crimes.

I hope you’re satisifed.

Because there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between any of you.