It’s Tuesday, August 13th, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!
First up, courtesy of NRO and Balls Cotton, Mark Steyn offers a must-read, dead-on/balls accurate explanation of not only the failure of Team Tick-Tock’s “Overseas Contingency Operations”, but the steepening decline of America’s Military: namely, an adamant refusal to…
Know Thine Enemy
Major Hasan is honest about himself; why aren’t we?
On December 7, 1941, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor was attacked. Three years, eight months, and eight days later, the Japanese surrendered. These days, America’s military moves at a more leisurely pace. On November 5, 2009, another U.S. base, Fort Hood, was attacked — by one man standing on a table, screaming “Allahu akbar!” and opening fire. Three years, nine months, and one day later, his court-martial finally got under way.
The intervening third-of-a-decade-and-more has apparently been taken up by such vital legal questions as the fullness of beard Major Hasan is permitted to sport in court. This is not a joke: See “Judge Ousted in Fort Hood Shooting Case amid Beard Debacle” (CBS News). Army regulations require soldiers to be clean-shaven. The judge, Colonel Gregory Gross, ruled Hasan’s beard in contempt, fined him $1,000, and said he would be forcibly shaved if he showed up that hirsute next time. At which point Hasan went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, which ruled that Colonel Gross’s pogonophobia raised questions about his impartiality, and removed him. He’s the first judge in the history of American jurisprudence to be kicked off a trial because of a “beard debacle.” The new judge, Colonel Tara Osborn, agreed that Hasan’s beard was a violation of regulations, but “said she won’t hold it against him.”
The U.S. Army seems disinclined to hold anything against him, especially the 13 corpses plus an unborn baby. Major Hasan fired his lawyers, presumably because they were trying to get him off — on the grounds that he’d had a Twinkie beforehand, or his beard don’t fit so you must acquit, or some such. As a self-respecting jihadist, Major Hasan quite reasonably resented being portrayed as just another all-American loon gone postal. So he sacked his defense team, only to have the court appoint a standby defense team just in case there were any arcane precedents and obscure case law he needed clarification on. I know that’s the way your big-time F. Lee Bailey types would play it, but it doesn’t seem to be Major Hasan’s style. On the very first day of the trial, he stood up and told the jury that “the evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter.” Later, in one of his few courtroom interventions, he insisted that it be put on the record that “the alleged murder weapon” was, in fact, his. The trial then came to a halt when the standby defense team objected to the judge that Major Hasan’s defense strategy (yes, I did it; gimme a blindfold, cigarette, and tell the virgins here I come) would result in his conviction and execution.
Major Hasan is a Virginia-born army psychiatrist and a recipient of the Pentagon’s Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, which seems fair enough, since he certainly served in it, albeit for the other side. Most Americans think he’s nuts. He thinks Americans are nuts. It’s a closer call than you’d think. In the immediate aftermath of his attack, the U.S. media, following their iron-clad rule that “Allahu akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here,” did their best to pass off Major Hasan as the first known victim of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “It comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers,” fretted Andrew Bast in a report the now defunct Newsweek headlined, “A Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”
Major Hasan has never been in combat. He is not, in fact, a soldier. He is a shrink. The soldiers in this story are the victims, some 45 of them. And the only reason a doctor can gun down nearly four dozen trained warriors (he was eventually interrupted by a civilian police officer, Sergeant Kimberly Munley, with a 9mm Beretta) is that soldiers on base are forbidden from carrying weapons. That’s to say, under a 1993 directive a U.S. military base is effectively a gun-free zone, just like a Connecticut grade school. That’s a useful tip: If you’re mentally ill and looking to shoot up a movie theater at the next Batman premiere, try the local barracks — there’s less chance of anyone firing back.
Maybe this Clinton-era directive merits reconsideration in the wake of Fort Hood? Don’t be ridiculous. Instead, nine months after Major Hasan’s killing spree, the Department of Defense put into place “a series of procedural and policy changes that focus on identifying, responding to, and preventing potential workplace violence.”
Major Hasan says he’s a soldier for the Taliban. Maybe if the Pentagon were to reclassify the entire Afghan theater as an unusually prolonged outburst of “workplace violence,” we wouldn’t have to worry about obsolescent concepts such as “victory” and “defeat.” The important thing is that the U.S. Army’s “workplace violence” is diverse. After Major Hasan’s pre-post-traumatic workplace wobbly, General George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, was at pains to assure us that it could have been a whole lot worse: “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.” And you can’t get much more diverse than letting your military personnel pick which side of the war they want to be on.
Like I said, we think he’s nuts; he thinks we’re nuts. Right now, there’s a petition on the Internet seeking to persuade the United States government to reclassify Hasan’s “workplace violence” as an act of terror. There are practical consequences to this: The victims, shot by an avowed enemy combatant in an act of war, are currently ineligible for Purple Hearts. The Pentagon insists the dead and wounded must be dishonored in death because to give them any awards for their sacrifice would prejudice Major Hasan’s trial and make it less likely that he could be convicted.
Hence, the Internet petition. Linking to it from their homepage, my colleagues at National Review Online promoted it with the tag: “Thirteen people lost their lives with dozens of others wounded. And now the man responsible wants to claim it was workplace violence.”
That’s not true — and actually it’s grossly unfair to Major Hasan. He’s admirably upfront about who and what he is — a “Soldier of Allah,” as he put on his business card. On Tuesday, he admitted he was a traitor who had crossed over from “the bad side” (America’s) to “the good side” (Islam’s). He has renounced his U.S. citizenship and its effete protections such as workplace-violence disability leave. He professes loyalty to America’s enemies. He says, “I am the shooter.” He helpfully informs us that that’s his gun. In this week’s one-minute statement, he spoke more honestly and made more sense than Obama, Gates, Casey, the Armed Forces Court of Appeals, two judges, the prosecution and defense lawyers, and mountains of bureaucratic reports and media coverage put together.
But poor old Hasan can say “Yup, I did it” all he wants; what does he know?
Unlike the Zimmerman trial, Major Hasan’s has not excited the attention of the media. Yet it is far more symbolic of the state of America than the Trayvon Martin case, in which superannuated race hucksters attempted to impose a half-century-old moth-eaten Klan hood on a guy who’s a virtual one-man melting pot. The response to Nidal Hasan helps explain why, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, this war is being lost — because it cannot be won because, increasingly, it cannot even be acknowledged. Which helps explain why it now takes the U.S. military longer to prosecute a case of “workplace violence” than it did to win World War Two.
The heart of the problem? Regardless of Bush’s faults (which were legion), when it comes to national defense, America replaced a fighter pilot with a…
…pussy. And the Powers-That-Be in the Pentagon, out of what we can only conclude is rank self-interest, appear fully committed to his suicidal policy of political correctness and social engineering trumping America’s security.
And since we’re on the subject of counter-productive Progressive protocols, in this forward from Jeff Foutch, Dave Carter, writing at Ricochet.com, wonders if when it comes to Blacks attacking those of any ethnicity, it’s…
Open Season?
Last Sunday, 16-year-old Joseph Brewer Jr., was out for a stroll in Chicago. Friends say he was on his way to visit his 5-month-old daughter. If Barack Obama had a son, he would look like Joseph. Joseph’s brother, 20-year-old Stenson later said, “I just heard some shots and I came running.” Joseph was shot multiple times. He wasn’t pounding anyone’s head into the pavement or punching them. He was shot in the back while going to see his daughter. Now he’s dead. I await Al Sharpton’s eruption.
Then again, perhaps there’s no report of a racial angle to young Joseph’s story and so the Reverend Sharpton has elected to conserve his outrage. How about this one then: Down in Georgia, Cobb County police have arrested four gang members for beating a 36-year-old-man and then pushing him into oncoming traffic where he was struck by a vehicle and killed. This murder had a racial angle to it, so I expect Eric Holder will try the case repeatedly until he gets some sort of conviction, no? No. The victim was white, his attackers black, and so the incident is greeted with the silence that passeth all understanding from those whose ostensible mission in this life is to foster racial harmony. Then again, maybe Nancy Grace is warming up in the wings.
On the evening of July 1st, 18-year-old Lorenzo Young and 18-year-old Troy Stevenson were bored. They were both awaiting trial down in Walterboro, SC, on charges of everything from first degree burglary to assault and armed robbery. A circuit judge had let them out on bond though, and there wasn’t much to do. Thugs need adrenalin after all, and so they went to rob a bar, but the back door to the place wouldn’t open. In a nearby bakery, 33-year-old Kelly Hunnewell was preparing bagels. She became Plan B for our enterprising villains, who entered the kitchen where the mother of four was working, shooting her multiple times and killing her before realizing there was no money in the place. They, along with an unidentified 16 year old accomplice, fled. If Barack Obama had three sons, they would look like these young men. The deceased was white. I await Jesse Jackson’s sober admonishment, and his rhymes too.
During the trial of George Zimmerman, four children were shot to death in Chicago. Five-year-old Sterling Sims died in a murder that also killed his 31-year-old mother. Police think it was a robbery. On July 1st, 16-year-old Antonio Fenner was shot and killed, his body next to that of a man who had gang affiliations. Damani Henard, 14, died on July 3rd, his body next to a bicycle. On July 9, a man got out of a black van in a neighborhood park and opened fire at some boys. Ed Cooper, 15, was hit. He continued running to a vacant lot, where he collapsed and died, his civil rights eternally unquestioned by the NAACP, his visage never gracing the screens of MSNBC, CNN, or Barack Obama’s catalogue of lookalike sons.
But see what has happened since the verdict? A gang of black youths chased down an hispanic man in Baltimore, beating him and kicking him while yelling, “This is for Trayvon.” I hear the Department of Justice is in the market for hate crimes these days, so I hope this will stir their excitable curiosity. I hope it. But I doubt it. Meanwhile, in California, the forces of tolerance took a hammer to one man’s head, stormed a Wal-Mart in Los Angeles, punched people at random, briefly blocked Interstate 880 in Oakland, and otherwise engaged in behavior not seen since winning some sports championship.
Of course, the odds of President Obama or Eric Holder taking on these lawless, semi-literate goons are roughly the same as the odds of them standing up to the goons in the Muslim Brotherhood. But there does seem to be a synthesis of two things happening here:
First, the definition of Justice in Barack Obama’s America has been fundamentally transformed into a doctrine of comeuppance. America, in the view of the President, the Attorney General and their enthusiasts, has not sufficiently paid for her sins, and so a dose of revenge is in order. This is done chiefly through classifying certain criminal elements as untouchable. Members of the New Black Panthers for example, decked out in military regalia and wielding a club so as to intimidate voters at the election polls are, simply, untouchable. And you’ll die of old age before Messrs Obama, Holder, Sharpton, or Jackson hold a rally in support of Sherry West, whose 13-month-old baby was shot in the face and killed by a black teenager in Brunswick, Georgia.
Secondly, looking over these horrific murders, a certain trend emerges. In each of the incidents listed above, none of the victims fought back. They were unarmed, and so they died with their reputations intact, unmolested by charges of racism. It appears that only when someone declines to supinely submit to his beating that the hackles of the racial antagonists are raised. One deduces that it was the sacred duty of George Zimmerman, a member of a neighborhood watch program, not only to refrain from monitoring the activities of someone he did not recognize following a string of burglaries in the neighborhood, but to politely acquiesce in his own beating, blithely permitting a 5’11’ young man to pound his head on the pavement like a cantaloupe. Apparently, it is only in this way that one can show tolerance and diversity in a post-racial nation. In which case, you may count me as intolerant. I fight back.
There is much that is lamentable in our society. An education system that produces people incapable of reading their own diplomas or uttering a single sentence in comprehensible English has yielded little more than lethargic wards of the state. From young women who are abused by, and yet still swoon to, half-witted thugs, to a music and culture that affirms aberrant and evil behavior, something has gone terribly awry. After the Zimmerman verdict, one reporter remarked on Twitter that it is now open season on black children, breezily overlooking the fact that the season has been open ever since Margaret Sanger labored and brought forth Planned Parenthood whose abortionists have slaughtered black children by the millions.
It is horrendous and tragic that from Chicago to virtually every other major city where politicians conspire to restrict the right of law abiding citizens to defend themselves, every day is open season on black children. The sad and inexcusable truth is that if Trayvon Martin had been shot in Chicago, he would have died in obscurity, his death registering not so much as a moment’s distraction from a Presidential golf game, nor a blip on the radar screen of the peddlers of racial grievance.
We’ll let this tweet from one David Burge serve to sum up our thoughts on the subject:
Which provides the perfect lead-in for today’s “MSM Bias…WHAT Bias?!?” segment, courtesy of PowerlineBlog.com‘s John Hinderaker, who details the latest MSM effort to better the bias of Rathergate:
Better Late Than Never: NPR Admits It Slandered South Dakota
In October 2011, NPR aired a three-part series of programs on its investigation of foster care for Native American children in South Dakota. The series, reported by Laura Sullivan, made the sensational claim that South Dakota welfare agencies take (the word “kidnap” was used more than once) Indian children from their homes, and place them in foster care with white families so that they can collect money from the federal government. Using, among other sources, information that I received from South Dakota officials that was suppressed by NPR, I wrote a series of posts on NPR’s journalistic malfeasance: Slandering the Red States, Part 1; Slandering the Red States, Part II: An Astonishing Omission; Slandering the Red States, Part III: She Was Promised There Would Be No Math; Slandering the Red States, Part IV: The Lieutenant Governor; Slandering the Red States, Part V: Why Won’t NPR Tell the Real Story? Help Me Ask!; and Slandering the Red States, Part VI: Laura Sullivan Responds. I asked Ms. Sullivan a series of questions about her reporting via email. When she failed to respond, I asked our readers to email her, politely requesting that she respond to my questions. That worked: within a matter of hours, Ms. Sullivan sent me a set of thoroughly unsatisfactory answers, as I recorded in Part VI. I also forwarded that post to NPR’s ombudsman.
It turns out that the ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, has been working on an analysis of the NPR series ever since. His conclusions, explained at length, were published yesterday. They are remarkable, in my view, for their candor and fairness:
My finding is that the series was deeply flawed and should not have been aired as it was. The series committed five sins that violate NPR’s code of standards and ethics. They were:
1. No proof for its main allegations of wrongdoing;
2. Unfair tone in communicating these unproven allegations;
3. Factual errors, shaky anecdotes and misleading use of data by quietly switching what was being measured;
4. Incomplete reporting and lack of critical context;
5. No response from the state on many key points.
No doubt the investigative team was driven by the history of injustices suffered by Native Americans. There is much to be outraged about. But good intentions are not enough. Specifically, there is no whistleblower, no document — no smoking gun even — to support the unmistakable allegation that for nearly the last 15 years, state social workers have been so evil as to take Indian children from their families as a way to reap federal funds for the state government. The charge is so shocking and such a potential insult to many dedicated social workers that the burden of proof should have been especially high.
There is more that is wrong, too. The reported federal reimbursement numbers are badly inflated. That is a factual flaw. Perhaps more upsetting to many of us is a moral one: concern for the centrally relevant matter of child neglect is simply dismissed. That many of the foster decisions, meanwhile, are in fact made by the tribes’ own independent judges goes unreported altogether. The crucial context of social ills and a crisis of Indian family breakdowns on the state’s reservations are also all but missing.
There is much, much more, but you get the drift. I don’t believe I have ever seen a representative of a media outlet take apart his own outlet’s story with the care and thoroughness displayed by Mr. Schumacher-Matos. The one thing he doesn’t do is address the motivations of those who reported and produced the false and misleading series, but it is easy to fill in that blank. The reporter and editors spoke from the liberal perspective that is taken for granted by pretty much everyone at NPR. They had a narrative that they wanted to push for political reasons.
And they are sticking by their story, even though it has been thoroughly demolished, by me and by Mr. Schumacher-Matos. In a brief statement, Kinsey Wilson, NPR’s Executive Vice-President and Chief Content Officer, and Margaret Low Smith, NPR’s Senior Vice President for News, say that “NPR stands by the stories.” Which means that at NPR, commitment to leftist ideology trumps any fealty to the facts…
The best part?!? Because it’s NPR, this travesty was only possible through your tax dollars!
Speaking of travesties, courtesy of Commentary Magazine, John Steele Gordon catalogues…
Obama’s Political Incompetence
Obamacare, enacted more than three years ago, has been unraveling for over a year. And there’s a good reason for that: it was never intended to become law at all.
Ordinarily one house of Congress passes a bill and the other house then substantially amends that bill or writes its own from scratch. No one worries too much about the actual language in these bills because they eventually go to a conference committee made up of both senators and representatives. There, the differences are ironed out and legislative draftsmen put the conference bill into final shape. That’s when they worry about the exact language, cross the T’s, dot the I’s, and reconcile conflicting provisions. After both houses pass this final, cleaned up legislation, it goes to the president for signing and becomes law.
But that process was aborted in this case. The Senate passed its version, full of sloppy language, impossible mandates, and contradictory provisions, on Christmas Eve 2009. It could do so because the Democrats at that point had a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority.
But then, the people of Massachusetts stunned the political world by electing a Republican to Teddy Kennedy’s old Senate seat in January 2010. Bye-bye filibuster-proof majority. If the House didn’t pass the exact same bill the Senate had passed, the two bills would have to be reconciled and the final bill sent back to the Senate, where the Republicans now could—and certainly would—filibuster it.
There were only two choices: have the House—where the majority has total control—pass the Senate bill with all its sloppiness, or cut the Republicans in on the deal sufficiently to pick up a couple of Senate Republicans. This being Obama’s Washington, of course, they opted to pass a crudely drafted, legislative horror show into law.
Now these political chickens are coming home to roost. Some provisions have had to be dropped because they were manifestly unworkable and others have been suspended by executive fiat. The language was so sloppy and ill-considered that one provision actually cut Congress members and their staffs off from their very cushy health-care subsidies. Obama waved his hand and said that a provision of the law that clearly says X actually says Y, and subsidies will continue to flow to Capitol Hill, if not to anyone else making $175,000 a year.
None of this, of course, is Obama’s fault. It’s the fault of the Republicans who were told, almost in so many words, to drop dead while the legislation was being drafted.
At his news conference, when he was asked about his unilateral suspension of a provision of the law, the president said that:
Now, what’s true, Ed [Henry, of Fox News], is, is that in a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the Speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law — it has to do with, for example, are we able to simplify the attestation of employers as to whether they’re already providing health insurance or not — it looks like there may be some better ways to do this; let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do.
But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to “Obamacare.” We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.
As the Wall Street Journal pointed out on Saturday, that is nonsense. No president is going to ask for legislation, always fraught with politics, when he already has the executive authority to act on his own. (Particularly this one!)
But why is there not a normal, let’s-get-the-country’s-business-done political atmosphere in Washington these days? Could it have something to do with a president who says, in a scheduled press conference, such things as:
Now, I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail, their number-one priority. The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don’t have health care and, presumably, repealing all those benefits I just mentioned — kids staying on their parents’ plan; seniors getting discounts on their prescription drugs; I guess a return to lifetime limits on insurance; people with preexisting conditions continuing to be blocked from being able to get health insurance.
Republicans, of course, don’t oppose any of those provisions, except, perhaps, for 26-year-old “kids” on their parents’ health insurance. It is pure, unadulterated, unadorned, bald-faced political slander by the president of the United States against the party that controls one house of Congress. It is also political stupidity of a very high order.
Barack Obama is, by far, the most viciously partisan president in American history. Other presidents have been partisan, often deeply so, but were careful to take the high road so as to keep open lines of communication with the other party, without which governance cannot be successful in a democracy. Not Barack Obama. His incompetence in everything political except winning elections is now costing him (and, inevitably, us) big time.
History will not treat this man kindly.
Depends on who’s writing the history. And given what he and most Liberal historians would term his “accomplishments”…
…we’re far from certain either will care.
Then there’s yet Another Sign the Apocalypse is Upon Us, courtesy of Chris Wilson and FOX News:
California Gov. Brown signs transgender-student bill
Coming soon to a girls locker room near you, California!
California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a controversial bill into law Monday afternoon allowing the state’s transgender public school students to choose which bathrooms they use and whether they participate in boy or girl sports. The law would cover the state’s 6.2 million elementary and high school kids in public schools.
Supporters say the law will help cut down on bullying against transgender students. The families of transgender students have been waging local battles with school districts around the country over what restrooms and locker rooms their children can use. “Now, every transgender student in California will be able to get up in the morning knowing that when they go to school as their authentic self they will have the same fair chance at success as their classmates,” Masen Davis, Executive Director of Transgender Law Center said.
Not everyone is on board. Opponents of the bill say allowing students of one gender to use facilities intended for the other could invade the other students’ privacy. Randy Thomasson, of savecalifornia.com, says the law would “damage” kids. “This radical bill warps the gender expectations of children by forcing all California public schools to permit biological boys in girls restrooms, showers, clubs and on girls sports teams and biological girls in boys restrooms, showers, clubs and sports teams,” Thomasson said. “This is insanity.”
Romans 1:21-28, baby; Romans 1:21-28.
On the Lighter Side…
And in News of the Bizarre, this just in from the Volunteer State:
Tennessee judge rules infant’s name must be changed from ‘Messiah’
A judge in Tennessee changed a 7-month-old boy’s name to Martin from Messiah, saying the religious name was earned by one person and “that one person is Jesus Christ.” Child Support Magistrate Lu Ann Ballew ordered the name change last week, according to WBIR-TV. The boy’s parents were in court because they could not agree on the child’s last name, but when the judge heard the boy’s first name, she ordered it changed, too.
“It could put him at odds with a lot of people and at this point he has had no choice in what his name is,” Ballew said. It was the first time she ordered a first name change, the judge said. Messiah was No. 4 among the fastest-rising baby names in 2012, according to the Social Security Administration’s annual list of popular baby names.
…The boy’s mother, Jaleesa Martin, of Newport, said she will appeal. She says Messiah is unique and she liked how it sounded alongside the boy’s two siblings — Micah and Mason. “Everybody believes what they want so I think I should be able to name my child what I want to name him, not someone else,” Martin said.
Unfortunately, being an idiot doesn’t make Jaleesa wrong. And though we understand the judge’s point, there’s no doubt she’s overstepped the bounds of her judicial authority.
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with Fish Stories:
Testicle-biting fish invading Denmark, authorities warn
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, a cousin of the piranha reported to go after swimmer’s testicles has been found in coastal waters between Sweden and Denmark. And fish experts are warning locals to stay aware — in order to stay whole.
“Keep your swimwear on if you’re bathing in the Sound these days — maybe there are more out there!” Henrik Carl, a fish expert at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, told Swedish news site The Local. “They bite because they’re hungry, and testicles sit nicely in their mouth,” Carl added.
…The creature in question is a red-bellied pacu, and is native to the Amazon. Pictures of the freaky fish frequently make the rounds of inboxes because of its strangely human-looking teeth. Local fisherman Einar Lindgreen caught the exotic species on Aug. 4 in the Oresund, the strait between Denmark and Sweden, according to LiveScience.
“It’s the first time this species has been caught in the wild in Scandinavia,” fish expert Peter Rask Mller of the University of Copenhagen said in a statement. “Discovering whether this fish is a lone wanderer or a new invasive species will be very exciting. And a bit scary.” “It is not unlikely that someone has emptied their fish tank into a nearby stream just before a vacation and that the pacu then swam out into the brackish waters of Oresund,” Mller said.
We don’t pretend to possess any special knowledge of ichthyology; but given the rather drastic temperature differences betwixt the waters off Denmark and the Amazon Basin, we’re gonna go out on a limb and predict this is a lone wanderer.
Then again, it’s better to safe than sorry; let alone…
…sexless!
Magoo
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