Passport to Deceit

Somebody at the State Dept has been snooping into Obama's passport record. Tsk, tsk.

Obama's spokesman says:

"This is an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight years," Burton said. "Our government's duty is to protect the private information of the American people, not use it for political purposes."

Now the State Dept has never been an out-post of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, even after 7 years of the Bush Administration (That is right Obama spokesman guy, it has been 7 not 8 years. Do the math). So, the odds are better than even that these people might not vote Republican.

To make this even more interesting, Hillary's spokeswoman said:

"It's outrageous and the Bush administration has to get to the bottom of it."

Isn't that rich. If I learned one thing from the Clinton Presidency, it is that if they accused the Republicans of doing something untoward, you could be damn sure it something they were doing themselves. Classic misdirection....

And if Hillary is *really* concerned about this 'outrageous' breach of privacy, I guess she must have actually learned something from when her husband's Administration illegally gathered all those FBI files of former Bush White House staffers.

Or, given the odds noted above, perhaps not.....

Apples & Trigger Locks

Confederate Yankee and Instapundit point out a fun Reuters article about gun collectors. It includes this graph:

The American affinity for guns may puzzle foreigners who link high ownership rates and liberal gun ownership laws to the 84 gun deaths and 34 gun homicides that occur in the United States each day and wonder why gun control is not an issue in the U.S. presidential election.

The owners are not just urban criminals and drug dealers. There are hunters and home security advocates, and then there are the gun collectors.

Now Gun Control advocates *love* to mix Apples and Oranges. In other words, mixing the criminals in with the legitimate gun owners, so that they can tar & feather the entire issue with the crimes of the former to obscure the lack of crimes by the latter.

I am willing to assume that the phrase "owners are not just urban criminals and drug dealers" is due more to the reporter's ignorance than to any deliberate attempt to mix those apples and oranges. In that spirit, I would like to point out to said reporter that 99% of the time criminals and drug dealers are not "gun owners", they are "gun possessors". There is a difference.

Legitimate gun owners and collectors actually legally purchase their weapons, and are in an entirely different category than those who come by their weapons through illegal commerce or theft, and possess them for the express reason to assist in the commission of other crimes.

In the future, please do not lump them together.

It is kind of like mixing together Governors who go home to their families, and Governors who hire prostitutes.....

Apples and Oranges.

Call of Duty

Well, the time has come...just a bit quicker than expected.

Afghanistan, here I come....

I have known I would be deploying for some time now. However with a sudden change in training requirements, I am leaving home this week on only a few days notice.

It is always fun telling your spouse that you are leaving in a few days, and won't be home for 10 months.

As I said, the deployment was expected, but the training requirement that will end up lasting a full 50% of the actual deployment was not.

Like many others in service, particularly in the Army with their prolonged deployments, there will be things that I miss while I am gone. My 40th birthday with my family. My son's 2nd birthday. Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc.... But I cannot complain. It is part of my service to my nation. I have known this since the day I joined. Of course things are always easier when you are a single 20-something, not an almost-40 husband and father. Such is life....

So in a couple of days I will be off on another grand adventure that will start with several weeks of Air Force training, another few weeks of Army Huah training (where they will teach me to shoot bigger guns, drive Humvees, and sleep in barracks), and finish with my third trip to the sandbox.

I am not sure what the future holds on the blogging front. I intend to go on as normal as long as I have access. I will be taking along my intrepid, and recently revived Apple iBook. It has already been to Qatar and Iraq, so lets hope it will survive my summer vacation in the shadow of the Hindu Kush.

While it is always an honor to serve, no matter what your role, it does seem a little more relevant if you do it on the front lines. This war is the defining moment of my generation, and to crib a famous quote, "There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins"

So, away I go....

Obama's Primetime Gameshow?

Well it looks like Oprah has a new show coming to primetime next week....



The ads for "Oprah's Big Give" emphasize the word "HOPE", and the website is big on the word "CHANGE".

Now where have I heard those words recently????

Oh, yeah! Right here....


It is almost like Oprah and Barack have been talking or something.....

I wonder if Barry will be making an apearance? If so, will Johnny Mack get equal time?

Selective Ignorance on Human Rights

A man is held in a military prison for decades and subjected to abuse, humiliation, and lack of needed medical care.

What do the great liberal newspapers of record (New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Boston Globe, and SF Chronicle) have to say about this to their readers who more than likely care greatly about human rights?

Zip, Zero, Nada, Niente, & ничего.

Why would they turn a selective blind eye to this? Because it happened on the wrong side of a fenceline in Cuba.

You can damn well bet that if this happened at Guantanamo Bay, this would have been above the fold....again. Instead, it puts their Caribbean Comandanté in a poor light.

Omar Pernet Hernández spent a total of 21 years as a 'guest of the state' in Fidel's Cuban prisons, and suffered untold abuses. Yet he gets ZERO column inches from the finest bleeding hearts in journalism.

Read about Hernández and 3 other thankfully former Cuban prisoners...in a European newspaper.

Four dissidents freed this week after five years in inhumane conditions in a Cuban prison have revealed the dark side of Fidel Castro’s regime.

The four - José Gabriel Ramón Castillo, Omar Pernet Hernández, Alejandro González and Pedro Pablo Álvarez - described regular beatings, humiliation and arbitrary punishment with long periods of solitary confinement in cramped cells with cement beds.

You would think that the aforementioned news organizations would want to trumpet these sorts of abuses.

Here is the sad gallery of their search results:











The shame...the shame.

(Hat tip: Powerline)

O Ché can you see?

Classic!

Obama meet the Milblogs...

Hat tip to Michael Graham in the Corner for pointing this out....

In tonight's debate, Obama charged that troops in Afghanistan actually have to [or had to] capture Taliban ammunition and weapons in order to fight, since they were sent improperly equipped:

OBAMA: And as a consequence, they didn't have enough ammunition, they didn't have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.

Now, we have heard some complaints from troops, even very public ones about armor to Don Rumsfeld in 2004, but I don't think I have ever heard any complaints from the field that our troops have to capture enemy weapons in order to fight.

I think this one deserves the BS flag.

Obama attributes this to "an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon", but given the fair number of pretend/faux soldiers who have been used by the left to hype imagined sins of the military in recent years, I think I might need some more evidence.

I invite other milbloggers with better knowledge to comment....

UPDATE: In comments Donald Sensing points out: "Lieutenants lead rifle platoons, not captains. Captains command companies." A great point that I neglected to add...

Intermittent Quote of the Day

John Derbyshire:

"Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy."

(Hat Tip: Michael Totten)

The Cult of Hope & Change

We all know that the Obama campaign seems to be running on the delicious nectar of 'change' and 'hope', especially amongst young voters.

This of course should be no surprise, since kids have always been drawn to change...especially liberal, feel-good change. Lets not forget the quote attributed to Churchill, "If you're not a liberal when you're 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative when you're 40, you have no head." The attribution may be apocryphal, but the words ring no less true.

During the first couple of hours of his show on Tuesday, Hugh Hewitt had young Obama supporters call in to try an get them to explain *why* he was such a draw. In the end there was not much substance to most of the answers, but gosh, there was a lot of hope!

Some of the reasons that were cited were that Obama was "inspirational", and "empowering people to believe". Exactly *what* he might be inspiring people to do, or empowering them to believe was not exactly clear. Hugh sugested that maybe this was akin to a "Pep Rally", to which the caller replied that that would imply that there was no substance to the inspiration. No, really??

Additionally, a caller suggested that she thought Obama could make change possible because "with a more positive outlook the country will move in a different direction...". Hugh lauded her for discovering the Norman Vincent Peale School of Public Policy... Heh.

Of course this reminds me of the peacenik lefties who have always maintained that if we just sent out enough positive thoughts and vibes then we could end war in the world.

In the end though, I think that the best way to illustrate this strange cult of hope and what it means to us is to bastardize a popular movie quotation:

Strange men, lying in wait, distributing hope, is no basis for running a government...

I Believe

I think that the Obama campaign has unwittingly handed the McCain campaign a great tag line.....

"FOR I HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED IN MY COUNTRY"



We have already seen them use it....