Author: VD

Katherine Lopez writes on NRO: Sen. Mark Dayton says it was “antithetical to democracy” for General Meyers to have called CBS to ask them to delay the photo release in their news report (noting that much of the rest of the story was public info since January). Meyers said he had cause to worry their release could put our troops in danger. That’s antithetical to democracy?

I can’t believe that I’m defending Mark Dayton, but yes, K-Lo, having a military officer request that a free press not publicize something unfavorable to the military is absolutely antithetical to allowing the people who the military are serving have the information necessary to make their decisions. It’s not censorship – if the general forbade CBS, that would have been censorship – but the “cause to worry” bit is total nonsense. First, the story has already been delayed. Second, the fact that troops are still in Germany sixty years after the fact indicates that we may never see an end to the Iraqi occupation, so the general could plausibly use this logic to argue that the photos should not be released until all the parties involved are dead of old age. Not, of course, that we actually have a democracy, but that’s another issue altogether.

I have little sympathy for arguments that revolve around weasel words such as could, may, might and possibly. In free country, there must be a free flow of information. Americans are fine with our troops killing enemy combatants; most of us would rather see a thousand enemies perish instead of a single American soldier. But cover-ups, even in good causes, cannot be permitted. I note that no one, except for a few knee-jerks in the press, had any qualms about the officer who fired a gun next to the Iraqi in order to find out where an ambush had been laid. That’s not the sort of thing we’re dealing with here, and the administration’s defenders would be wise to accept that reality and deal with it.

If half your argument is based on bringing human decency to a place that lacks it, you shouldn’t be terribly surprised to find that this sort of degrading abuse blows a very large hole in your position.

The [Gallup] poll suggests that only 21 percent of Americans believe journalists have high ethical standards, ranking them below auto mechanics but tied with members of Congress. More precisely, the poll notes that only one in four people believe what they read in the newspapers. Chicago Tribune Editor Charles M. Madigan may have put it best when he offered this advice: “If you are a journalist, you should probably just assume that you come across as a liar.”

A 2004 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of Columbia University’s storied Graduate School of Journalism, underscores Madigan’s observation. “Since 1985, believability of the daily newspaper has fallen by a quarter, from 80 percent in 1985 to 59 percent in 2002,” notes the study, which includes data gathered by the Pew Research Center to form its conclusions. The study also points out that there has been a rapid decline in newspaper readership since the 1980s, with slightly more than half of Americans, 54 percent, reading a newspaper during the week. “The three television network news divisions and local news also saw significant drops from 1985, when they were all above 80 percent for believability,” the study reveals.

Why should anyone believe what they read in a newspaper or see in the news? I’ve been part of ten or twelve news stories at the local level, both television and newspaper, and on every single occasion, there were significant errors of fact. In the more recent cases, this happened in spite of my attempting to keep the details simple and straightforward. Once, I counted five errors in a little three sentence blurb.

Journalism too often combines ignorance with arrogance. It is a lethal combination, especially where the truth is concerned. If the details do not fit the reporter’s preconception’s, all too often he’ll simply ignore them or attempt to spin them in a manner that makes no sense. Journalism is not a profession, it is public relations for government and the two major political parties. The people I knew who wanted to pursue journalism as a career were far more interested in getting their faces on television than they were in any romantic notions of truth or world-saving. This is why I vehemently object to ever being described as a journalist instead of a writer. I consider it an insult.

I’m not a journalist and I never will be. As a technology entrepeneur, I work in the real world, more or less. Writing an opinions column is just something I do for pleasure. It’s not rocket science, and the fact that I’ve had any success at all only goes to show that Fred Reed was correct in stating that, for the most part, journalists are simply not all that bright.

Perhaps if newspapers would put the slightest attempt into making sure their journalists had even a vague clue regarding the subjects they’re covering, and removed people from writing about areas in which they’ve repeatedly demonstrated incompetence, those of us in the real world might take them more seriously. Don’t hold your breath.

During the course of this investigation I conducted a lengthy interview with Brig. Gen. Karpinski that lasted over four hours, and is included verbatim in the investigation annexes. Brig. Gen. Karpinski was extremely emotional during much of the general’s testimony. What I found particularly disturbing in the general’s testimony was the general’s complete unwillingness to either understand or accept that many of the problems inherent in the 800th MP Brigade were caused or exacerbated by poor leadership and the refusal of the command to both establish and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers.

Emotional and unable to accept responsibility. Shocker. Meanwhile, her lawyer has this to say: “Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski is the first and only female general officer to lead soldiers in combat. She is a hero to the men and women of the 800th Military Police Brigade.”

Yeah, that may well be true. And judging by their performance at the prison, it may be part of the problem. Now, it’s entirely possible that the whole affair is yet another intelligence debacle – or masterstroke of conspiracy, for that matter, depending on what the goal was. In either case, who better to play the patsy than an incompetent female general incapable of understanding that the whole point of treating prisoners decently and well is to encourage others to surrender instead of continuing to fight.

The Department of the] Interior alone is managing about 31,000 Web sites, presenting between 3 million and 5 million pages of information with maintenance costs approaching $220 million a year. “Now, AOL-Time Warner, who I believe is the largest Internet service provider in the world, manages in contrast about 50 sites, but the Interior Department manages 31,000 different Web sites,” the congressman says. “In an agency that employs 70,000, that means the Department of Interior has almost one Web site for every two employees.”

How anyone can read something like this and still expect positive results out of government, be it managing the debt, nation-building or welfare, I’ll never know.

The infamous Gargler was exploring the bitter roots of feminism, and while it’s undeniably true that many women are raised from birth to be bitches, the sad reality is that many men mistakenly believe that they are interested in subjecting themselves to this sort of punishment.

My blood ran cold when one of my friends described a girl he was seeing as “spunky” and how much fun they had “giving each other a hard time”. Because it was “all in fun” of course. Fortunately, he stopped seeing her before it became too serious, but what a disaster in the making that was! Think about it, guys. Sure, it may be fun crossing wits with a girl and hearing her snappy retorts for a while, but it’s not going to be that fun when she decides to up the ante. It will be even less fun when the barbs are laced with genuine venom. It won’t be fun at all when you are not allowed to respond in kind, or eventually, at all, without her going nuclear on you at the least hint of criticism.

Do NOT encourage this sort of behavior in a young girl, or in any woman either. Men, only you are responsible for the merde you elect to take. If a woman’s behavior is out of bounds, you must call them on it just as you would a man. Okay, perhaps not just as you would a man. Society tends to frown somewhat on the whole punch-in-the-mouth thing.

This tends to underline my point about how invading any one country, or even three countries, is not going to make the US any safer from jihadist terrorism. From Debka: “First arrest in US of suspect in Madrid train bombing. FBI takes US citizen Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim lawyer, into custody in Portland, Oregon after his fingerprints found on items used in attack.”

I did, briefly, post something about some aspersions cast publicly at Ms Rodham-Clinton. However, I elected to nuke that post as I prefer to keep my Clinton-hating pure, based solely on quantifiable, undeniable ideological issues and other matters that, like a continental watershed, separate her and me. Such as socialized health care, for example. And phylum.

Furthermore, I find it very, very hard to believe that the Lizard Queen has genuine interest in anything warm-blooded, except perhaps as lunch.

One measure of the Bush administration’s foreign policy incompetence that it has refused to do the obvious in the one area of Iraq where it has been successful. The Kurds are happy to be liberated from Baathite rule, delighted to be on friendly terms with the United States and would like nothing more than their own country. Why don’t we give it to them? Are the lines drawn by British colonial officials really sancrosanct? (If so, our Founding Fathers have a lot for which to apologize).

Of course, the Iraqi Kurds only make up part of the mythical Kurdistan. The other Kurds are in Iran and Turkey. But so what? Turkey hasn’t exactly been a staunch and loyal friend, and besides, a potential partition of Iraq is no business of theirs. Turkey is a second-tier power; it can handle itself. And any potential destabilization of Iran would be a good thing, even if we’re putting off WWIII for a rainy day.

Apparently George Delano and company aren’t really quite as interested in furthering democracy and self-determination as they pretend. Otherwise, we’d already have witnessed the triumphant declaration of a free Kurdish nation.

David Limbaugh demonstrates his military expertise: Liberal columnists are using this isolated case [Abu Ghairab] to validate their preformed opinion that our entire war effort has been mismanaged and a failure. Well, I’m not willing to concede that everything has gone bad for us in Iraq or that we are guilty of poor planning because we didn’t accurately predict every terrorist strike against our troops. Do the critics really believe it’s possible to fight a casualty-free war, especially against an enemy that has less respect for the rules of war than it does for life itself?

I just don’t understand the logic behind allegations that we are bungling the war because we sustain casualties or because a few of our soldiers get out of line. How easy it is for the armchair quarterbacks to condemn our whole military operation every time we experience setbacks while fighting an unpredictable urban war against an uncivilized, brutal, inhumane and evil enemy.

If you don’t understand it, David, let me explain it to you. We are not fighting an actual war; if we were Fallujah would have been flattened a month ago. As the German soldiers complained in WWII, Americans fight in a deadly and unfair manner, by advancing until they meet the enemy, engage him, then bury him with air strikes and artillery. Advance and repeat.

But, since we are not actually fighting a war, but instead playing deadly Israeli-style wargames with “terrorists”, (who aren’t terrorists for the most part, but guerilla militias), we are sending lightly armed troops into urban zones without armor, thus ensuring that we lose more troops in the occupation than in the conquest itself. Since this method did not work in Northern Ireland and has not worked in Israel, it will not work in Iraq either.

Even worse, the so-called battle for hearts and minds is a war of semiotics, of symbolism. In that sense, the images of American mistreatment of POWs is a major defeat for the administration’s cause. I’m not condemning our post-Baghdad military operations because of current setbacks, but because I never saw any way that they could possibly succeed in the first place. Three decades of Soviet failure in Afghanistan and Chechnya demonstrate that the only way to handle these countries is to kill the dangerous leaders and support the unaggressive, more or less harmless leaders from a distance.

We’re going to withdraw in the end. Cultures cannot be completely remade by external dictate. Germany was a civilized country that took a bad turn and was relieved to return to sanity. Japan simply followed the orders of the emperor and the ruling elite to follow MacArthur’s path, just as they had earlier followed them into imperialist war. In neither case were the anti-occupation forces, (the werewolves) still dangerous more than a year after the war ended. And since we’re going to withdraw, better to do it before we needlessly sacrifice another one or two hundred young American lives. We should have left as soon as we had Hussein in hand, when we had successfully achieved all that we could reasonably hope to accomplish.

Air traffic controllers who handled two of the hijacked flights on Sept. 11, 2001, recorded their experiences shortly after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, but a supervisor destroyed the tape, the government said Thursday. A report by Transportation Department Inspector General Kenneth Mead said the manager for the New York air traffic control center asked the controllers to record their experiences a few hours after the crashes, believing they would be important for law enforcement. Sometime between December 2001 and February 2002, an unidentified Federal Aviation Administration quality assurance manager crushed the cassette case in his hand, cut the tape into small pieces and threw them away in multiple trash cans, the report said.

The manager said he destroyed the tape because he felt it violated FAA policy calling for written statements from controllers who have handled a plane involved in an accident or other serious incident. He also said he felt the controllers weren’t in the right frame of mind to have consented to the taping, the report said.

Does that sound as utterly unbelievable to you as it does to me? Pretty thorough work for someone who is just worried about six other people’s frames of mind.