4 Mile Creek

About To Be Even Sorrier

I was watching Ray Suarez on Newshour this morning. He had two guests in the studio, talking about the upcoming elections. I was mildly surprised to find that his guests were well balanced; one thinks President Bush is a moron, the other thinks that President Bush is an evil genius. I recognized one guest, a shorter, pudgy guy with big BCG-type glasses, but didn’t recognize the other. They discussed the upcoming elections and I was quite surprised to find that one of the guests was actually predicting a huge landslide for the Dems. He stated flatly that not a single Dem seat in either chamber was at risk, and that several of the Repub seats were sure wins for the Dems. I guess that could be possible, mid-term elections generally go against a sitting president. But the reasons he gave for making such a statement were perfect examples of the dissonance between what the Dems want to believe about the general public in America, and how the general public generally votes. He was sure that the Republicans had been given a near-fatal blow by the NSA wiretapping scandal, followed by the torture scandal, followed by the Nat’l Intel Estimate scandal. All of the scandals that have been played on the front pages of major metropolitan newspapers. He didn’t mention that these same major newspapers are widely read in heavily Democratic areas that went for Democratic candidates in 2000, 2002, 2004, and will in 2006. He didn’t explain how stories that played very well to the far Left netroots base were changing votes in middle America. Time and again the polls show that a vast majority of Americans, something like 65%, are okay with the idea that the NSA is tapping the phones of terrorists. I haven’t seen any polls on the torture issue yet, but I’m not sure that it’s such a winning position for the Dems. Fighting for terrorists’ rights while we are at war with them, and while terrorists post video after video of them sawing the heads off of their captives, just doesn’t sound like a winning strategy. The latest “scandal”, the NIE, has already lost steam, and was clearly a bit lame even at its zenith. He failed to mention two other “scandals” that were sure to help the Dems this fall, that have come to naught, if not actual embarrassment. The Plame “scandal” turns out to be nothing more than a well-orchestrated effort by a washed-up ambassador to play the Dems like a fiddle in order to pad his ego and retirement. The “scandal” of President Bush ignoring a grieving mother turns out to be nothing more than a media savvy divorcee who likes getting free plane rides around the world, and who played the Dems even better than a the washed up ambassador did (how many times will the photo of Sheehan smooching Chavez be shown between now and Nov? I’m guessing in the thousands).

Although I’d like to see the Dems a bit stronger in Congress, based simply on my belief that this country is best served when at least two political parties are effectively serving the people of the United States, I don’t think this fall is going to see a huge upsurge in seats for the Dems. The talking heads and netroot folks are dreaming when they think that average American’s get excited about the same things that NYTs editors get excited about. Aren’t the netroot folks the same ones that proclaimed all of red-state America morons back in 2004 for not voting for Kerry? Uh yeah, I seem to remember a site dedicated to each and every moonbat apologizing to the rest of the world for the morons that lived between Boston and Berkeley. Now all of a sudden these same folks are going to rise up and put the Dems in power because they are knee-deep in the intricacies of wiretapping laws and Geneva Conventions, and ready to bring President Bush to task for…what? Making the ACLU mad? Pissing off Chavez? Yeah, right. 

Sorry, except for the nutroots and BDS suffering talking heads on PBS, it just ain’t there.

But Don't Let Me Stop Ya'

If you’ve ever wondered just how far off the political spectrum the Krazy Kos Kids will pull the Democratic Party, consider this. The netroots appears to be warming up to the idea of a Gore/Clinton ticket. We can only hope it comes to past. Apparently it’s lost on them that as an immensely popular vice-president under a president who was viewed as God-like (if they were to believe in a God), Gore was still unable to win the Presidency when pitted against a moronic ex-alcoholic frat boy who hid in the National Guard during the Viet Nam War and failed at every business he ever tried. And that was all before Gore became a stalking nanny, burning hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon-based fuels jetting around the world in an effort to spread the word that we should be ashamed of the twenty gallons we put in our gas tank every week to get to work. Al Gore 2006 has become a caricature of Al Gore 2000. For some reason, the Left thinks that he's now even more electable than he was back then.  It’s also lost on them that Senator Clinton consistently polls nationwide with a 47% disapproval rating. Sure she does fine in New York, and would do so in Massachusetts, and likely Washington, maybe even California. But that’s it, she would not be able to carry any other state.

Some people tend to extrapolate things they just shouldn’t. If a majority of the folks in your self-help/empowerment/peace drum/anti-globalism group think that a Gore/Clinton ticket is just the thing for a victory in 2008, it doesn’t follow that a majority of folks in America would feel the same way. It doesn’t even matter that a straw poll nationwide of the Associated Self-Help/Empowerment/Peace Drum/Anti-Globalism Groups of AmeriKKKa would put a Gore/Clinton ticket at 98% approval.

I’m sure that the Republicans are hoping just as much as the netroots are that a Gore/Clinton ticket is in the works. I’m just saying that as the netroots raise more money and swing more Democratic candidates to the far left, it will be easier for those on the right to move in towards the center (politics abhors a vacuum more than nature), making them more electable to the general public. The netroots are likely to end up costing many of the more moderate Dems their races. 

It was not always apparent to the general public what the Leftists represented as they sat around in their sad groups, memorizing passages from Mao’s Little Red Book, awaiting the rise of the proletariat and the inevitable revolution. But with the help of the many netroot websites, they have come out into the light. A light that won’t shine very favorably on them. A presidential ticket composed of a wooden enviro-evangelist and a politician whose disapproval numbers come close to 50% of the people she has never even met or represented could only come about through the netroot's mistaken belief that most of America is "like them".  Say what you will about the fat guys in the smoke-filled rooms making deals out of the view of the public, they were hardly a confederacy of dunces.

Applesauce

Recall the fable about the ten blind men trying to describe the elephant? 

Remember that when you read this:

The National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism is the most recent analysis of the nation's top intelligence analysts who work in 16 different spy agencies.

Rights As a Light Switch

The person who wrote this Letter to the Editor (first letter, The Expurgated Truth) in the Dallas Observer, complaining about censorship on milblogs, also wrote to me, asking me to self-censor my site. 

He happens to be the person who writes the most wildly acidic comments on this site (often ad hominem attacks on me), comments that I have never once censored, altered, or removed.  When I told him that I wouldn’t consider any form of censorship on my site, that I believe firmly and foremost in free speech, he called me a “motherfucker”. 

There you have it folks, Leftism in it’s most pure form.  A demand for free speech when he is censored on one milblog, then a demand for censorship on another milblog when he thinks he’s getting the pants beat off of him in a debate. 

Freedom of Speech to a Lefty means only that speech which they agree with.  Which is no freedom at all. 

There are no rights that have any meaning whatsoever if they can be turned on and off by man or government. 

(update - within the last few minutes he's also called me a "motherfucking phony", a "motherfucking asshole" and a "stupid asshole".  I'm guessing this might be why he's censored off of other sites.)

Against All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic

I see the Dems have once again rolled out the red carpet for the only military officers they can stand; Batiste, Hammes and Eaton.
Now of course the retired generals have every right to speak out on something they feel this strongly about, especially when it concerns the military, something to which they have devoted many years of their life.  Most of the comments made by these generals is standard Lefty boilerplate, nothing the public hasn't heard a hundred times over.  But there is one statement by retired Major General Batiste that needs to be looked at very closely, especially since it’s used over and over by the both the generals and the Dems.

He (Batiste-ed) said Rumsfeld at one point threatened to fire the next person who mentioned the need for a postwar plan in Iraq.

This is being used by the Dems, and the generals, as a good example of the kind of mindset that Rumsfeld had about the war.  And I have every reason to believe this observation is completely true.  Rumsfeld could have very well made such a threat.  General officers serve at the pleasure of the Commander in Chief, and I am sure that if the SecDef, any SecDef, told the President that he had lost confidence in the commanders he was about to send off to war and wanted them replaced, they would be replaced. 
So it shows Rumsfeld was not willing to listen to those officers who disagreed with him about post-war planning.  Maybe they had a great plan for post-war Iraq, maybe they didn’t.  They certainly don’t seem to be offering up any great plan now, even though they've had years to think of one, and have the media ready to record every utterance they make about such a plan in their head.  Still, no plan.  So take from that what you will. 
But let’s get back to that one statement, the one about the SecDef willing to fire anyone who mentioned the need for a postwar plan in Iraq. 
So….what exactly does that say about a general like Batiste, Hammes, and Eaton?  Well, let’s extend the sentence a bit, to bring it to a logical conclusion since we know these generals decided to stay quiet at the time, even though in their own words they say they disagreed strongly with the way the war was being planned. 

Rumsfeld at one point threatened to fire the next person who mentioned the need for a postwar plan in Iraq so I decided it was better for me to keep my job than to take a stand that would save the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of my soldiers.

Or how about

Rumsfeld at one point threatened to fire the next person who mentioned the need for a postwar plan in Iraq and since I was so close to retirement, I wasn’t about to screw that up, just to make sure that the nation had a good war plan. 

Or how about

Rumsfeld at one point threatened to fire the next person who mentioned the need for a postwar plan in Iraq so I decided right then and there that as soon as I was safely esconced in retirement, I wouldn’t hold back on my condemnation of such shoddy planning. 

I could go on, but you get the idea. 

Someone Paid to Patent This?

When you think of it, there's not many devices so efficient and simple as nail clippers.  Four pieces of metal, easily figured out, folds nicely when not in use, fairly safe. 

Then again, you could try to improve on it, and patent something like this. 

Daydreamin'

My wife says that Pike's Peak now has snow on it.  She sent a picture.  It's amazing what the power of the mind can do with visual cues.  Looking at the picture she sent, seeing snow, I almost felt cooler than the 105 degrees that it was here today.  My body may be in the cradle of civilization, but it's the wild Rocky Mountains that capture my thoughts. 

I Gotta Ask

Readers, tell me please.  Is WW for real, or do you think he (she) is really a conservative trying to make Lefties look bad by using poor reasoning and even poorer debating skills? 

I just don't know if someone could really be so far gone into BDS that they would call a soldier who writes about their support for the lifting of a ban on gay servicemembers a member of..let's see, what's his exact words..."evangelical wingnuts and whackos in the military"?  To use some of the more kind words. 

Is it possible to be that out of touch with reality that they forget which side of an issue they are on? 

When the Cheering Stops

I read that Democrats are jumping for joy over the recent report that the war in Iraq is making more jihadists than we can kill.  Of course I understand the joy of most Dems and all Leftists over this “news”, their knowledge of most things political and all things strategic is one headline deep, and this headline is quite promising. 
However, just as I warned nearly a year ago about the Dem’s losing strategy based on their bizarre fascination with the ghoulish hag Cindy Sheehan (who would have long ago dug up her son’s corpse and draped it over her shoulders if it weren’t illegal), this issue is clearly a loser for the Dems because it won’t play well to the moderate voters that they need desperately this fall and in 2008.  Sure, it’s a morale booster to the Left when they read this, but they are going to vote Dem anyway, if they bother to vote at all.  But to understand why this will not play well to the moderates you have to look beyond the simple headline, and move into territory that is very uncomfortable for the Left, and scares the shit out of Dems, National Security.    
First, you have to define the endstate you desire from “effective national security policy”.  For people like me (admittedly not many), it would be something like the retention of freedoms I’ve enjoyed, and want passed on to my children.  For the Dems and Leftists, at least as I can tell from their cheering of this report, the endstate they desire from effective national security policy appears to be fewer jihadists that want to attack America.  Now to someone who doesn’t like to work their braincells too hard, this might seem like the same thing.  But it is reports just like this, and their embrace by the Left, that clarify the differences between them and me. 
If your goal is to have fewer America-Hating Jihadis (AHJs), then you embrace this report and believe it shows we can do that by pulling out of Iraq.  Just as some Dems, and all Leftist, demand.  Whether this will reduce the number of AHJs is questionable, but I’ll grant that it will, for the sake of removing that from the argument.  Now, are we safer with the number of AHJs reduced from 10,000 to 8,000?  Not really, it only took a few tens of AHJs to kill nearly 3000 Americans in a matter of a few hours on 9-11.  And they did so long before the Iraq war started, so we know for sure that the Iraq war is not their only grievance against us.  Logically, pulling out of Iraq now has no chance of reducing the number of AHJs to zero.  So how do we get the number of AHJs down to a level that really represents a much safer America?  Easy, we convert to islam.  Each and every single American.  And we institute sharia as the legal code of the land.  That is the logical conclusion of the Dem’s tack on this.  If anyone can think of another way to reduce AHJs to near zero, let me know.  No, change that.  Let your Congressmen know, because they ain't got a clue of how to do it. 
My take on effective national security, retention of my and my family’s freedom, cannot be reached by the Dem’s tack.  I don’t think it matters one iota how many AHJs there are in the world, and I personally don’t believe we can ever get them down to a level where we can claim America is safe from AHJs for a very long time.  Islam itself, and muslims worldwide, need to move into the 21st Century before that will happen, as the reaction to the Pope's recent comments made clear.  Once again. My take on this is that we are at war with AHJs, and we need to kill those we can and render the rest ineffective.  I’m not alone in this belief.  The entire underpinning of the Department of Homeland Security is based on the latter, rendering them ineffective.  The entire underpinning of the war in Afghanistan was based on the former, killing those who mean us harm.  The Iraq war started out as the former (though now we know the intel was faulty on this), and has now evolved into a combo of the two.  There is no way that you can reach my definition of effective national security policy by reducing freedoms (mandatory 100% conversion to islam and institution of sharia), since my very definition of requires the maintenance of my freedom.  And I know what the costs are for my definition, my family and I have borne those costs now for 22 years. 

There are hundreds of other things that go into an effective national security policy, but this report was about AHJs, and so this post is in response to that alone to keep it simple, and understandable to Lefties. 
So there we have it.  One view of national security that logically leads to the Islamic Caliphate of America, and one view of national security that logically leads to maintenance of freedom through defeating our enemy no matter what the cost. 
Let the voting begin.

Safety Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

We have a lot of dangerous equipment, and we do a lot of dangerous things, so it is well and good that we have a Safety Officer, someone dedicated to making sure that as we work, we do it as safely as possible. 

However, our Safety Officer smokes like a chimney.  I'm guessing at least a pack a day. 

And I think I'm the only one who finds it ironic that our safety officer is voluntarily doing something that he knows will kill him, when he's in charge of making sure the soldiers do everything they can, mission dependent, to keep from getting hurt or killed.  Don't get me wrong, he's good at what he does.  Just ironic.  In a war zone, the ironies just seem to pile up.