"Of what I did, nothing is wrong, so I didn't anticipate anything, of course," Manhart, 30, told The Associated Press. "I didn't do anything wrong, so I didn't think it would be a major issue."
-U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Michelle Manhart
In my previous blog I delineated a situation in which an individual of questionable real world expertise chastised me for my style of dress. That is only relevant because he happens to be an Air Force Veteran. I need not repeat my words here as to why his particular position borders on that certain lunacy specially reserved for people who spend their lives stuck on university campuses...you can read it just as easily in the last blog. But this week, the USAF, or rather a product of the USAF again gave me another reason to doubt the bearing and relevance of the entire service branch.
But before I do that I need to point out that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, Inc, gave his keynote address to some 4,000 packed fans in the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco last week. The Macworld conference is the pinnacle of all things Mac and Steve introduced what will eventually become THE telecommunications device the emulate, the iPhone...notwithstanding the absurd number of lawsuits now pending over the use of that name...and get this, he did it, as he always does, in blue jeans and a long sleeve black shirt. Apparantly the memo regarding dress code did not get to Steve. I'll make a point of emailing him to inform him that certain mid-level Air Force personnel believe that performance is entirely dependent upon what you wear.
But I diverge, this knucklehead, SSG Michelle Manhart, gave us the profound quote above. Now, I admit to having no experience with USAF NCO development, or lack thereof, but apparantly there is confusion in the ranks regarding dress code. In my experience, USAF officers think that shorts are evil; in SSG Manhart's case, any clothing in general appears to be the problem.
Now clearly, SSG Manhart is attractive in a homely-face-made-pretty-by-photoshop-and-make-up-combined-with-a-nice-body sort of way. She probably made a few bucks for taking off her clothes and maybe she needed the money. But at issue here is the concept that a mid-level NCO in the military, a military engaged in a war against militant Islam, can truly be possessed of the notion that there is nothing wrong with her posing semi-clothed in Playboy magazine.
Anyone who has fought in the Middle East knows that one of the grievances with the Western world that is held by Islam is the fact that we are steeped in depravity. Between bootlegged satelite derived episodes of Baywatch, any Arab muslim worth his salt will look away from the TV and freely tell you that the West is soiled by sex and degradation of women. Now largely, soldiers, as representatives of the United States, are held with at least some degree of respect because of their behavior. The typical Middle Eastern muslim sees the discipline and honor by which US troops carry out their duties and there is respect afforded.
Now, thanks to SSG Manhart and her apparant free-thinking understanding of what constitutes 'right' and 'wrong', the entire world now knows that one of the many extra-curricular activities of women in uniform is, in fact, taking off those uniforms. It is all the worse that the airman in question is a married mother. This will not play well in the real world of IEDs and AK-47s.
It might well be that SSG Manhart posed in order to demonstrate that we...the West...will not cave into some repressive notion of radical islamic decency. In some twisted way...her fee for posing aside...her actions might be viewed a 'patriotic'. Unfortunately, anyone with a shred of morals, understands a couple of things: Women...married women aside...posing nude for all the world to see, have some issues and they are not the kind usually conducive to raising healthy, well-balanced children and keeping a healthy home.
People in uniform serve the Constitution and People of the United States of America. That is a challanging mission and there is no room in that mission for degrading your nation's uniform by taking it off. Large breasts and belly-button jewelry has never been part of any essential equipment lists that I have seen and therefor, having such things is at best irrelevant. Displaying such things for some sort of public circus freak show is clearly in opposition to good order and discipline. REAL NCOs are all about order and discipline because in REAL military units, such things save lives and win wars.
If SSG Manhart really needs to truss herself up like an expensive prostitute and take her clothes off for a camera, she should perhaps consider work with another government agency because there is no room for such things in the military.
Now I have my problems with the USAF. I have never understood why we allowed them to leave the Army in the first place and frankly, in assymetric warfare, their relevance is questionable. Aside from some notable exceptions within their ranks, most Air Force personnel are a liability in combat. Take them from their air conditioned air bases and ask them to pull security and you will have generated a significant force protection problem for yourself. Make sure that you have the MEDEVAC frequency close at hand because casualties are coming.
Something is tragically wrong when a non-commissioned officer cannot see the second and third order effects of taking off her clothes. The very least of which will be the lost productivity from airman running down to the BX in order to catch a glimpse of their supervisor in all of her airbrushed glory. The decision to pose semi-nude or completely nude was one of selfishness and not selfless sacrifice. If I were to apply the Army Core Values I could probably assign several more violations as well.
The Army Core Values are;
Loyalty
Duty
Respect
Selfless-Service
Honor
Integrity
Personal Courage
Had Manhart been in the Army, any soldier from private to general would be able to clearly articulate why she would have violated the Army's Core Values and why she would be worthy of losing stripes.
Here are the Air Force's Core Values:
Integrity First
Service Before Self
Excellence in All We Do
Kind of vague, eh? Let's see, Manhart didn't lie about her actions and nothing says that you have to keep your clothes on when off duty. As long as she didn't screw the photographer or anyone not her husband (a violation of the UCMJ) she could probably maintain her integrity. Honor is a different thing, oddly not mentioned in the 3 items above.
Service before self? Manhart, likely never served with a ground combat unit in which it becomes very clear that the actions of one can have deadly consequences for the others. If never properly educated in the notion that once one chooses to serve in uniform, for the rest of one's life, one's actions will reflect upon their service and their nation. Service before self is a nice platitude, but in an air conditioned, 9-5 world, when the clock strikes 5:01, Duty, a concept not spoken of in the USAF values, is over.
Excellence in all we do? Well, as I mentioned, SSG Manhart is hot. She does look good, so in her mind, she maintained excellence in all she does.
All of this is very sad. Sad because in an effort to streamline their values, the USAF really has little room by which to discipline this woman. The people who will pay will be the junior airman looking for leadership.
The country needs to make certain that SSG Manhart understands that her decision reflects upon all women in the military. No Arab muslim will fault an American male for wanting to look at Manhart without her clothes; for heaven sakes, many Iraqi's I spoke too could tell me all about Baywatch. They understand that men like to look at women. The real price to be paid will be among female military members. God forbid you get captured as a woman over there because with people like Manhart, the perception that all American women are sluts will not only be reinforced, it will also be exploited before the poor girl is decapitated and dumped in a Baghdad landfill.
So kudos to SSG Manhart and to the USAF. To Manhart for being able to so callously avoid consideration of even the basic ramifications of her behavior on her fellow service personnel, especially those who are deployed; and to the USAF for implementing what is apparantly the most inept basic core values program that any military service has ever had. Such neglect takes real talent. That any NCO could come out of a military training program and think for one moment that appearing nude while associating themselves in ANY way with a United States military branch is okay, speaks volumes about the lack of effectiveness of USAF NCO training and values.
The USAF needs to worry less about irrelevant fighter planes and a lot more about intrinsic leadership training and military bearing. After that it can revisit the notion that it exists to support the Army, but in the short term perhaps we can be grateful if they can just convince their NCOs that leadership implies personal sacrifice and responsibility, that actions have consequences and that taking off your clothes for money is in stark opposition to any military mission.
I
20070103
Clothes make the man
One of the wealthiest people that I know…personally, as a friend that is…is a fellow who never wears anything but blue jeans and a mechanic’s shirt…you know, the kind that has your name on a patch above the pocket. This individual has built several large companies and employs a couple of hundred people. In many arenas he defines success as an American.
The other day I was working at a small sideline job helping to teach some medical students. The university in its zeal for Christmas vacation had failed to forward the instructional materials that I needed and so, after several failed attempts to retrieve these by email, I arrived at my class, headed to the administration floor and asked for the materials. With some elbows and backsides several people readily helped me get them. No errors, no faults. During the instruction I noticed that one of the student handout documents was in error, while my copy was correct. I informed them that I would need a few minutes and I headed to the copier to make copies for them.
While at the copier, I encountered a PhD who ostensibly has something to do with coordinating the teachers and their work requirements. This includes educational materials by the way. I happened to have nothing else to do after class so I arrived in true California fashion in dress shorts and a comfortable shirt, for what is a very casual learning environment. This individual said nothing to me but seemed disturbed over my request for 7…yes seven…copies of a single piece of paper. I didn’t quite understand his concerns until later in the day.
Any fool can make a rule/And any fool will mind it.
Later, while in my office, my own private office where I care for a few private patients, and yes, still wearing my shorts and shirt, I received an email from this individual, dressing me down for unprofessional dress. I was astounded. He relayed that I had a responsibility to present the proper image to the students and that in the future I should work to dress appropriately. No specific dress code was provided but instead some “suggestions” were offered that frankly, when adopted, strike me as exceedingly effeminate and most definitely impotent. Now mind you, I mean just for color here, what I was wearing, I have dined in during the summer at one of the fancier dining halls at West Point and several very nice country clubs over the years. I was not wearing boxers and a toga.
I avoided my natural inclination to reply that I would start wearing what he wanted me too when 1. He started doing his job by providing the educational materials that I needed to teach. 2. He stopped jumping to conclusions. 3. He could demonstrably prove that my dress had some bearing on the success or failure of physicians, and 4. When he learned to actually face me in person and not hide behind an email.
The reality is that this person is suffering from some very specific and deep-seated personal issues.
I have lost my patience for ignorance. The fact is that I have saved human lives and cared for suffering people while wearing gym shorts. My goodness! On one occasion I actually left the gate of my forward operating base and cared for a soldier who had been shot…while wearing nothing by flip flops and a pair of cargo shorts. When I arrived, the fashionably dressed medic was so shaken…al beit he had done a terrific job…that he couldn’t get an IV started. I started it just fine in spite of my shorts and flip flops.
Now you might detect a hint of cynicism in my voice. Well, it is there. I have absolutely no tolerance for stupidity and frankly, this PhD is delving into that realm. For whatever reason, he finds himself in a position where he thinks he knows a lot about what he is talking about, because, likely he read somewhere that if you wear a suit and tie people tend to listen to you and if you work out of a little office with a fancy sign on the door, people are somehow intimidated by that and will cower at your presence…
News Flash! I have been rocketed and mortared. Nobody with a PhD or degree short of GOD is ever going to intimidate me again. Especially some administrative apparatchik that has never come close to saving another human being’s life. This little nitwit actually had the gaul to tell me that he found dress to be very important in getting people to listen to you. Shazam! You know what I find is important in getting people to listen to me? Competence. The other day I spent about $15,000 launching a helicopter to save a person’s life and nobody asked me what I was wearing before they agreed to fly. Amazing isn’t it? My buddy with the mechanic’s shirt finds that his work speaks for itself as well.
Unfortunately, in the world of politics the reality of what I would like to say and what I actually say is quite different. Any kid raised on Wild Kingdom in the 70s will tell you that a good Wildebeest…Wildebeest rank right up there as one of the ugliest animals in the world, hence the analogy with my apparent fashion faux paus. I think that it is a good one…NEVER EVER strays from the heard. My goodness, if you didn’t figure that out after one season, be damn glad you live in the USA where stupidity is protected, because in any other part of the world, you would be a Darwin Award winner.
Little offices with signs on the wall protect the toothless lions of humanity who would have a hard time actually chasing down a Wildebeest, let alone killing one for real. But they are still a lion in appearance and even a Wildebeest packing heat, if he is a smart one, knows better to size up any lion long and hard before taking one on…even if the end result is a thorough session of kicking the shit out of that lion some day.
Did I just write that? For the record, “kicking the shit out of anyone” for this Wildebeest, while in the USA, means that I will find a way to put that lion in his place in a lawful and non-violent manner. If I meet the lion in Afghanistan, where the ROE is different, well then kicking the shit out of him will mean just that, but here it will mean something different. Let me illustrate.
Years ago, while I was just a heavily indebted medical student, and as such quite worried about ever being able to repay all that debt should I fail out of med school, I took a lot of verbal thrashing. More senior doctors seemed to relish the idea of giving me a hard time for the sake of just busting my chops. I am by nature very much like a well made nuke…you can hit me with a hammer, push me around, roll me all over the floor and drop me into the Mediterranean from 25,000 feet and I won’t go off, but at some point you will find the subtlety of my trigger and then, BOOOM!
Well this group of suit-wearing, Lexus driving morons up in Cleveland decided that I was their special project and in spite of the fact I had never failed anything in medical school, took a particular interest in the fact that I dress somewhat eccentrically. I admit that I would wear sweats and go sock-less to get to work, but that I would always change into appropriate scrubs as soon as I arrived. Well, to make too long a story, thankfully shorter, I was about a basket case by the end of a month of surgery rotations and could take no more. One day, within 2 days of being finished, the megalomaniac surgical resident decided to administer another verbal beating. I threw down my scrub brush, I walked right up to him and backed him into a wall and told him to get it all out because I was done. I had had my fill and if he didn’t want to get an ass-kicking, this had bettered be the end of the story.
It wasn’t two hours later that I was in the dean’s office, himself a portly, self-absorbed prig of a man…I won’t delve into my suspicions about the size of his genitals…being told what a screw-up I was and how he was basically going to personally see to it that I was remmediated or thrown out. Nice. No concern over abuse, no concern over mental duress, nothing, just that I was a screw up and he was going to wash me out.
Darkness fell over me. I was doomed. I was Linus in the Pumpkin Patch waiting in vain for the Great Pumpkin who would never come…
But then, providence arrived in the form of a very dear, if not curmudgeonly, surgeon who for whatever reason had a few years earlier asked me to assist him in surgery. I passed instruments in the middle of the night and he learned that I was competent and that in spite of an absolute hatred of neck ties and stupid suits, I had some marginal promise as a physician. It turns out that not only did he write all the final exams…which I might add that I passed without difficulty in spite of nobody else every having done so…but that he also sat on the selection board for fellowships, one of which was sought after by the little dipshit surgical resident that wanted to do some Marquis d’ Sade act on my backside.
In the end, the dear, now deceased, surgeon ‘took care of my problem’ and the resident got his and the dean was forced to choke out an apology for being and ignorant idiot. Actually, that is not true, he was forced to choke out an apology for not addressing some fundamental abuse issues. Like many unjust situations he ended up being the president of my professional society and continued having those absurdly self-indulgent photos taken at national meetings that speak volumes about the psychological overlays of the people in them.
Note to high profile people, the less photos the better; it makes you less of a target and if you are corpulent and suffer from shortness of breath, the last thing you need is to be an easily identifiable target.
Okay, so where was I?
I have been extremely blessed with a good mind. I have a doctoral degree. I have consistently earned and performed in the top of my peer group. I have been honored by the people who have entrusted their care to my hands. I have benefited from a tremendous education and I have been served well by my nation. I have risen at a young age to a high rank in the military and I am eternally indebted to my nation for the confidence that it has shown me in my small part defending our Constitution and land. I am by nature a man who is very humble and in full reality check about where I came from and who I am.
However, I have absolutely no tolerance, and with age I lose ever more, for stupidity and marginal idiots who think that they know something about reality because they read it in a book or wrote a thesis about it as a graduate student. Reality is reality. Reality is being covered in the blood of a young man in the middle of fucking nowhere in Iraq, knowing that he might well die and you are the only man who is going to get him back to his Grandma…I was wearing a dirty T-shirt when I saved his life…Reality is working faster than you ever have had too when a little kid comes in not breathing or some fellow arrives crumpled up in a ball in the back of a pickup truck with a broken neck...again I was covered in grime…
Reality is not some little office where one sits and looks at a wall full of I love me bullshit thinking that they know something about anything. Reality is dialogue with another person and getting to know them and not hiding behind some electronic firewall while you pull the strings of your empire. Robert the Bruce tried to do that and one night, and if one is to believe the movie Braveheart, he unfortunately awoke just in time to see William Wallace dropping a flail which smashed his head in like a 2 month old Pumpkin. That’s how it usually ends. Unfortunately, these toothless lions, don’t read the history and continue to live in little offices and laud their initials over wine and cheese in effete little soires filled with self-addulation. Sad, very sad.
Plato…likely Socrates, who was of course the first operational ‘PhD’ and lived reality right up to the point where Greek mid-level idiots forced him to put the hemlock to his lips…said that, “The life which is not examined is not worth living.” Plato didn’t live in a little office.
The doctors that have taught me the most about caring for patients and saving lives have actually been the most disenfranchised of the bunch. They are the ones who cared little about appearance and focused their energies on listening and reading and learning more about how to help people. At the end of the day, I find that there is an inverse relationship between how trussed up you are in terms of suits and ties and how well you can roll up your sleeves and get busy in the trenches. My students will learn and heaven help me that I teach them, not to channel some irrelevant bullshit about clothes into their students at the expense of solid medicine.
What’s the bottom line? I am a big f-ing Wildebeest but I know my place in the food chain. I will continue to graze dutifully and not get too far from the heard but in the midst of that grazing I am watching and learning. At some point, I might just find the right rhinocerous, another grazer, to strike up a chat with and that rhino might just decide that in spite of my wardrobe, I am a good ally. We’ll keep grazing, we’ll keep watching and learning and maybe never another issue will arise. But perhaps one day the toothless lion will stray from his little cave to try and hassle a little Wildebeest or something vulnerable. You know, try to strut his stuff. He will quickly learn that in a 360 degree world, a big roar and a lot of fur does little to defend against a pissed-off tank with a giant horn on his nose and a steamroller of an herbivore with razor sharp hooves.
I love a good and righteous fight.
In the end, it might just be that I am not suited for the academic world. Like most bureaucracies, the ones that regulate the private industry that pays the taxes to pay the wages of the idiots in offices that regulate the industries, these people may well have no room for me in their inn. My wife is sober in her suggestion that I just suck it up. The university is a good job, with good benefits and blah blah blah.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still inside them.
How can a man, a real man, live a life of sucking it up from a group of theoretical pencil necks who learn from someone else’s theoretical nonsense and in the end still feel that he led a full life…all for the sake of a medical insurance package? I would feel disingenuous if I had to spend a lifetime in a little office cubicle surrounded by other little apparatchiks who never accomplish anything other than printing out yet another colored paper memo about some bullshit dress code. Where is the glory…where is the honor in that? It is not what made America great and it is not what cares for the future.
So I will watch and wait. Find some low profile compromise that doesn’t make me look like some mid-level manager with cross-dressing tendencies but still satisfies the “slacks and air conditioning” crowd, and wait. If I get hired full time by the university then I have a little more power and a little less vulnerability, if I don’t, well, then I will send a carefully written letter to the head of the medical school, whom I respect very much, by the way, about why he has problems in his university and how some people are a little closed in their thinking.
And finally, I think it is time that I sent an anonymous gift in the form of Henry David Thoreau…whose quotes appear above in single lines worthy of their unique stature…to a certain toothless lion. He might learn something, or not…so hard are the heads of the dogmatic middle managers of the world at times…from this gentle and most impressive of American philosophers. It will most certainly not be that a good life is found in pointless memos and theoretical ideas born from hiding in small offices and wine and cheese gatherings.
Whew! I feel better now.
The other day I was working at a small sideline job helping to teach some medical students. The university in its zeal for Christmas vacation had failed to forward the instructional materials that I needed and so, after several failed attempts to retrieve these by email, I arrived at my class, headed to the administration floor and asked for the materials. With some elbows and backsides several people readily helped me get them. No errors, no faults. During the instruction I noticed that one of the student handout documents was in error, while my copy was correct. I informed them that I would need a few minutes and I headed to the copier to make copies for them.
While at the copier, I encountered a PhD who ostensibly has something to do with coordinating the teachers and their work requirements. This includes educational materials by the way. I happened to have nothing else to do after class so I arrived in true California fashion in dress shorts and a comfortable shirt, for what is a very casual learning environment. This individual said nothing to me but seemed disturbed over my request for 7…yes seven…copies of a single piece of paper. I didn’t quite understand his concerns until later in the day.
Any fool can make a rule/And any fool will mind it.
Later, while in my office, my own private office where I care for a few private patients, and yes, still wearing my shorts and shirt, I received an email from this individual, dressing me down for unprofessional dress. I was astounded. He relayed that I had a responsibility to present the proper image to the students and that in the future I should work to dress appropriately. No specific dress code was provided but instead some “suggestions” were offered that frankly, when adopted, strike me as exceedingly effeminate and most definitely impotent. Now mind you, I mean just for color here, what I was wearing, I have dined in during the summer at one of the fancier dining halls at West Point and several very nice country clubs over the years. I was not wearing boxers and a toga.
I avoided my natural inclination to reply that I would start wearing what he wanted me too when 1. He started doing his job by providing the educational materials that I needed to teach. 2. He stopped jumping to conclusions. 3. He could demonstrably prove that my dress had some bearing on the success or failure of physicians, and 4. When he learned to actually face me in person and not hide behind an email.
The reality is that this person is suffering from some very specific and deep-seated personal issues.
I have lost my patience for ignorance. The fact is that I have saved human lives and cared for suffering people while wearing gym shorts. My goodness! On one occasion I actually left the gate of my forward operating base and cared for a soldier who had been shot…while wearing nothing by flip flops and a pair of cargo shorts. When I arrived, the fashionably dressed medic was so shaken…al beit he had done a terrific job…that he couldn’t get an IV started. I started it just fine in spite of my shorts and flip flops.
Now you might detect a hint of cynicism in my voice. Well, it is there. I have absolutely no tolerance for stupidity and frankly, this PhD is delving into that realm. For whatever reason, he finds himself in a position where he thinks he knows a lot about what he is talking about, because, likely he read somewhere that if you wear a suit and tie people tend to listen to you and if you work out of a little office with a fancy sign on the door, people are somehow intimidated by that and will cower at your presence…
News Flash! I have been rocketed and mortared. Nobody with a PhD or degree short of GOD is ever going to intimidate me again. Especially some administrative apparatchik that has never come close to saving another human being’s life. This little nitwit actually had the gaul to tell me that he found dress to be very important in getting people to listen to you. Shazam! You know what I find is important in getting people to listen to me? Competence. The other day I spent about $15,000 launching a helicopter to save a person’s life and nobody asked me what I was wearing before they agreed to fly. Amazing isn’t it? My buddy with the mechanic’s shirt finds that his work speaks for itself as well.
Unfortunately, in the world of politics the reality of what I would like to say and what I actually say is quite different. Any kid raised on Wild Kingdom in the 70s will tell you that a good Wildebeest…Wildebeest rank right up there as one of the ugliest animals in the world, hence the analogy with my apparent fashion faux paus. I think that it is a good one…NEVER EVER strays from the heard. My goodness, if you didn’t figure that out after one season, be damn glad you live in the USA where stupidity is protected, because in any other part of the world, you would be a Darwin Award winner.
Little offices with signs on the wall protect the toothless lions of humanity who would have a hard time actually chasing down a Wildebeest, let alone killing one for real. But they are still a lion in appearance and even a Wildebeest packing heat, if he is a smart one, knows better to size up any lion long and hard before taking one on…even if the end result is a thorough session of kicking the shit out of that lion some day.
Did I just write that? For the record, “kicking the shit out of anyone” for this Wildebeest, while in the USA, means that I will find a way to put that lion in his place in a lawful and non-violent manner. If I meet the lion in Afghanistan, where the ROE is different, well then kicking the shit out of him will mean just that, but here it will mean something different. Let me illustrate.
Years ago, while I was just a heavily indebted medical student, and as such quite worried about ever being able to repay all that debt should I fail out of med school, I took a lot of verbal thrashing. More senior doctors seemed to relish the idea of giving me a hard time for the sake of just busting my chops. I am by nature very much like a well made nuke…you can hit me with a hammer, push me around, roll me all over the floor and drop me into the Mediterranean from 25,000 feet and I won’t go off, but at some point you will find the subtlety of my trigger and then, BOOOM!
Well this group of suit-wearing, Lexus driving morons up in Cleveland decided that I was their special project and in spite of the fact I had never failed anything in medical school, took a particular interest in the fact that I dress somewhat eccentrically. I admit that I would wear sweats and go sock-less to get to work, but that I would always change into appropriate scrubs as soon as I arrived. Well, to make too long a story, thankfully shorter, I was about a basket case by the end of a month of surgery rotations and could take no more. One day, within 2 days of being finished, the megalomaniac surgical resident decided to administer another verbal beating. I threw down my scrub brush, I walked right up to him and backed him into a wall and told him to get it all out because I was done. I had had my fill and if he didn’t want to get an ass-kicking, this had bettered be the end of the story.
It wasn’t two hours later that I was in the dean’s office, himself a portly, self-absorbed prig of a man…I won’t delve into my suspicions about the size of his genitals…being told what a screw-up I was and how he was basically going to personally see to it that I was remmediated or thrown out. Nice. No concern over abuse, no concern over mental duress, nothing, just that I was a screw up and he was going to wash me out.
Darkness fell over me. I was doomed. I was Linus in the Pumpkin Patch waiting in vain for the Great Pumpkin who would never come…
But then, providence arrived in the form of a very dear, if not curmudgeonly, surgeon who for whatever reason had a few years earlier asked me to assist him in surgery. I passed instruments in the middle of the night and he learned that I was competent and that in spite of an absolute hatred of neck ties and stupid suits, I had some marginal promise as a physician. It turns out that not only did he write all the final exams…which I might add that I passed without difficulty in spite of nobody else every having done so…but that he also sat on the selection board for fellowships, one of which was sought after by the little dipshit surgical resident that wanted to do some Marquis d’ Sade act on my backside.
In the end, the dear, now deceased, surgeon ‘took care of my problem’ and the resident got his and the dean was forced to choke out an apology for being and ignorant idiot. Actually, that is not true, he was forced to choke out an apology for not addressing some fundamental abuse issues. Like many unjust situations he ended up being the president of my professional society and continued having those absurdly self-indulgent photos taken at national meetings that speak volumes about the psychological overlays of the people in them.
Note to high profile people, the less photos the better; it makes you less of a target and if you are corpulent and suffer from shortness of breath, the last thing you need is to be an easily identifiable target.
Okay, so where was I?
I have been extremely blessed with a good mind. I have a doctoral degree. I have consistently earned and performed in the top of my peer group. I have been honored by the people who have entrusted their care to my hands. I have benefited from a tremendous education and I have been served well by my nation. I have risen at a young age to a high rank in the military and I am eternally indebted to my nation for the confidence that it has shown me in my small part defending our Constitution and land. I am by nature a man who is very humble and in full reality check about where I came from and who I am.
However, I have absolutely no tolerance, and with age I lose ever more, for stupidity and marginal idiots who think that they know something about reality because they read it in a book or wrote a thesis about it as a graduate student. Reality is reality. Reality is being covered in the blood of a young man in the middle of fucking nowhere in Iraq, knowing that he might well die and you are the only man who is going to get him back to his Grandma…I was wearing a dirty T-shirt when I saved his life…Reality is working faster than you ever have had too when a little kid comes in not breathing or some fellow arrives crumpled up in a ball in the back of a pickup truck with a broken neck...again I was covered in grime…
Reality is not some little office where one sits and looks at a wall full of I love me bullshit thinking that they know something about anything. Reality is dialogue with another person and getting to know them and not hiding behind some electronic firewall while you pull the strings of your empire. Robert the Bruce tried to do that and one night, and if one is to believe the movie Braveheart, he unfortunately awoke just in time to see William Wallace dropping a flail which smashed his head in like a 2 month old Pumpkin. That’s how it usually ends. Unfortunately, these toothless lions, don’t read the history and continue to live in little offices and laud their initials over wine and cheese in effete little soires filled with self-addulation. Sad, very sad.
Plato…likely Socrates, who was of course the first operational ‘PhD’ and lived reality right up to the point where Greek mid-level idiots forced him to put the hemlock to his lips…said that, “The life which is not examined is not worth living.” Plato didn’t live in a little office.
The doctors that have taught me the most about caring for patients and saving lives have actually been the most disenfranchised of the bunch. They are the ones who cared little about appearance and focused their energies on listening and reading and learning more about how to help people. At the end of the day, I find that there is an inverse relationship between how trussed up you are in terms of suits and ties and how well you can roll up your sleeves and get busy in the trenches. My students will learn and heaven help me that I teach them, not to channel some irrelevant bullshit about clothes into their students at the expense of solid medicine.
What’s the bottom line? I am a big f-ing Wildebeest but I know my place in the food chain. I will continue to graze dutifully and not get too far from the heard but in the midst of that grazing I am watching and learning. At some point, I might just find the right rhinocerous, another grazer, to strike up a chat with and that rhino might just decide that in spite of my wardrobe, I am a good ally. We’ll keep grazing, we’ll keep watching and learning and maybe never another issue will arise. But perhaps one day the toothless lion will stray from his little cave to try and hassle a little Wildebeest or something vulnerable. You know, try to strut his stuff. He will quickly learn that in a 360 degree world, a big roar and a lot of fur does little to defend against a pissed-off tank with a giant horn on his nose and a steamroller of an herbivore with razor sharp hooves.
I love a good and righteous fight.
In the end, it might just be that I am not suited for the academic world. Like most bureaucracies, the ones that regulate the private industry that pays the taxes to pay the wages of the idiots in offices that regulate the industries, these people may well have no room for me in their inn. My wife is sober in her suggestion that I just suck it up. The university is a good job, with good benefits and blah blah blah.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still inside them.
How can a man, a real man, live a life of sucking it up from a group of theoretical pencil necks who learn from someone else’s theoretical nonsense and in the end still feel that he led a full life…all for the sake of a medical insurance package? I would feel disingenuous if I had to spend a lifetime in a little office cubicle surrounded by other little apparatchiks who never accomplish anything other than printing out yet another colored paper memo about some bullshit dress code. Where is the glory…where is the honor in that? It is not what made America great and it is not what cares for the future.
So I will watch and wait. Find some low profile compromise that doesn’t make me look like some mid-level manager with cross-dressing tendencies but still satisfies the “slacks and air conditioning” crowd, and wait. If I get hired full time by the university then I have a little more power and a little less vulnerability, if I don’t, well, then I will send a carefully written letter to the head of the medical school, whom I respect very much, by the way, about why he has problems in his university and how some people are a little closed in their thinking.
And finally, I think it is time that I sent an anonymous gift in the form of Henry David Thoreau…whose quotes appear above in single lines worthy of their unique stature…to a certain toothless lion. He might learn something, or not…so hard are the heads of the dogmatic middle managers of the world at times…from this gentle and most impressive of American philosophers. It will most certainly not be that a good life is found in pointless memos and theoretical ideas born from hiding in small offices and wine and cheese gatherings.
Whew! I feel better now.
20061012
Profiles in Courage
In the midst of all of this rhetoric about the ills affecting the USA a shining star continues to beam brightly with the penetrating rays of duty, integrity and mission orientation.
Sheriff Joe Arpiao of Maricopa County, Arizona continues to redeem himself as a member of that ever shrinking club; “Patriotic Americans with common sense.”
If you don’t know whom Sheriff Arpiao well you have been missing some of the best press in the nation over the last decade. The good sheriff made a significant national name for himself when he started doing things like feeding bologna sandwiches to his inmates and issuing them pink underwear. When the inmates started to complain Sheriff Arpiao was ready for them; he’d had the new diet reviewed by a nutritionist to insure that it complied with requirements. Regarding the complaints about the underwear he offered, “If you don’t like in jail, don’t come back.”
In these, and many other efforts, he has demonstrated that he is a true servant of the people by demanding and maintaining the standards. The metrosexual (just what in the Sam hill is that anyway?!?) morons on the left and right coasts who suggest that Maricopa County is in “fly-over” country and irrelevant to the ‘greater’ dialogue would do very well to retain Sheriff Arpiao as the head of Homeland Security.
The latest triumph of reason over stupidity on the part of Arpiao is his recruitment of some 3000 (yes, that is thousand) members of the county posse. You see the sheriff doesn’t have the luxury of delving into hypotheticals couched in “position papers” generated in absurdly useless places like the Ivy League Schools of Government and Public Policy. No, Sheriff Arpiao has a major situation on his hands RIGHT NOW. His county is right at the front of the land invasion of the United States. Indeed, he probably understands the word “insurgency” as well or better than any other American.
As the chief lawman of the county he is sworn to protect and enforce the law. He doesn’t have time for muddle some appeals to pity like “We are just here to work, we are not breaking the law.” (A quote that I recently heard spewed from some nameless ‘Reconquista’ apologist). The fact is, and the sheriff understands this, that people who come over our borders illegally are either breaking the law or frankly intent on a violent act (invasion) of the United States. There is one exception and that is those individuals who are fleeing regimes that are frankly threatening to their lives, we call those people refugees and we call the process of them coming here ‘seeking asylum’. The problem is that Mexico is not one of those countries that we recognize as a nation from which people can come seeking asylum. Even if we did, the popular vote, as expressed above, by the ‘reconquistadors’ is that they are here not to escape persecution on the part of El Presidente; they are here for work, and that is not breaking the law.
Most sheriffs don’t have a lot of money to hire loads of deputies. Heaven knows that the INS with a federal budget cannot seem to do its job of stopping the hoards, what is a rural sheriff to do? When sheriffs can’t hire lots of people they can, in times of need, appoint private citizens as members of their “posse” to address situations when they simply need manpower to go after criminals. Understand, regardless of what you want to believe, people who enter the USA illegally, looking for work or not, are criminals. That’s truth. Have all your rallies or whatever, the bottom line is that every one of them is a criminal, PERIOD.
Sheriff Arpiao is going after criminals. Frankly a lot of them are more than just felons for entering the USA. A lot of them are criminals from Mexico, drug addicts, rapists and whatever else El Presidente can toss over the border. Arpiao is going after criminals just as his mandate tells him too. It would be really cool if the officials in Homeland Security would ruck up, arm up and head south. Unfortunately in the ‘enlightened’ halls of the pseudo-intelligencia of the East, actually doing your job and defending the borders of the USA causes such internal cognitive dissonance that… …”Mommy my head hurts please make it stop…”…
So we have to leave it to a sheriff in a relatively obscure little county down in the deep Southwestern United States to show us how we should do our duty. God Bless Sheriff Arpiao.
Let me point out a very simple fact. Our government has shut down on a couple of occasions. In fact, it shuts down every week. 2/7ths of the time, over a quarter of the time, our government is gone, out of touch, incommunicado. Every weekend, hundreds of thousands of local, state and federal employees head for the barn and yet life goes on. The 2% milk is still in the cooler at the local grocery and the ATMs still spit out cash if you put your pin in correctly. This is reality.
People have been talking and whining and crying that if we toss all of the illegals back over the border and enforce the laws, life as we know it and cheap tomatoes will cease to exist. That is complete balderdash. ROT. It is a philosophy propagated by individuals who either lack the balls to actually do something for their country and make a selfless decision or they are people who have a serious vested interest (read financial) in the continued use of illegal labor.
The United States of America is only going to fail if we destroy it from within. If we forget our laws and the importance of enforcing them, THEN and only then will we see the beginning of our end. It takes courage to say ‘no’, I know because as a parent I do it every day with the two little people I love more than anything in the world. I don’t cave into pressure because what they want to do isn’t hurting anyone and in fact it would make them “really happy”. If it is something that in the long term will not help them grow into healthy and moral adults, the answer is no. I cannot tell you how many useless adults I know that started out as indulged children whose parents tried to replace love and responsibility with indulgence. The result is not pretty and it certainly is not the essence of the greatest of American Heroes.
Neglecting out borders and giving a pass to those who are already here against the law, no matter how ‘happy’ it may be making them, is the equivalent of not being a responsible parent and caretaker of your blessings.
We can all give a big thanks to Sheriff Arpiao for having the strength to say “NO”.
Sheriff Joe Arpiao of Maricopa County, Arizona continues to redeem himself as a member of that ever shrinking club; “Patriotic Americans with common sense.”
If you don’t know whom Sheriff Arpiao well you have been missing some of the best press in the nation over the last decade. The good sheriff made a significant national name for himself when he started doing things like feeding bologna sandwiches to his inmates and issuing them pink underwear. When the inmates started to complain Sheriff Arpiao was ready for them; he’d had the new diet reviewed by a nutritionist to insure that it complied with requirements. Regarding the complaints about the underwear he offered, “If you don’t like in jail, don’t come back.”
In these, and many other efforts, he has demonstrated that he is a true servant of the people by demanding and maintaining the standards. The metrosexual (just what in the Sam hill is that anyway?!?) morons on the left and right coasts who suggest that Maricopa County is in “fly-over” country and irrelevant to the ‘greater’ dialogue would do very well to retain Sheriff Arpiao as the head of Homeland Security.
The latest triumph of reason over stupidity on the part of Arpiao is his recruitment of some 3000 (yes, that is thousand) members of the county posse. You see the sheriff doesn’t have the luxury of delving into hypotheticals couched in “position papers” generated in absurdly useless places like the Ivy League Schools of Government and Public Policy. No, Sheriff Arpiao has a major situation on his hands RIGHT NOW. His county is right at the front of the land invasion of the United States. Indeed, he probably understands the word “insurgency” as well or better than any other American.
As the chief lawman of the county he is sworn to protect and enforce the law. He doesn’t have time for muddle some appeals to pity like “We are just here to work, we are not breaking the law.” (A quote that I recently heard spewed from some nameless ‘Reconquista’ apologist). The fact is, and the sheriff understands this, that people who come over our borders illegally are either breaking the law or frankly intent on a violent act (invasion) of the United States. There is one exception and that is those individuals who are fleeing regimes that are frankly threatening to their lives, we call those people refugees and we call the process of them coming here ‘seeking asylum’. The problem is that Mexico is not one of those countries that we recognize as a nation from which people can come seeking asylum. Even if we did, the popular vote, as expressed above, by the ‘reconquistadors’ is that they are here not to escape persecution on the part of El Presidente; they are here for work, and that is not breaking the law.
Most sheriffs don’t have a lot of money to hire loads of deputies. Heaven knows that the INS with a federal budget cannot seem to do its job of stopping the hoards, what is a rural sheriff to do? When sheriffs can’t hire lots of people they can, in times of need, appoint private citizens as members of their “posse” to address situations when they simply need manpower to go after criminals. Understand, regardless of what you want to believe, people who enter the USA illegally, looking for work or not, are criminals. That’s truth. Have all your rallies or whatever, the bottom line is that every one of them is a criminal, PERIOD.
Sheriff Arpiao is going after criminals. Frankly a lot of them are more than just felons for entering the USA. A lot of them are criminals from Mexico, drug addicts, rapists and whatever else El Presidente can toss over the border. Arpiao is going after criminals just as his mandate tells him too. It would be really cool if the officials in Homeland Security would ruck up, arm up and head south. Unfortunately in the ‘enlightened’ halls of the pseudo-intelligencia of the East, actually doing your job and defending the borders of the USA causes such internal cognitive dissonance that… …”Mommy my head hurts please make it stop…”…
So we have to leave it to a sheriff in a relatively obscure little county down in the deep Southwestern United States to show us how we should do our duty. God Bless Sheriff Arpiao.
Let me point out a very simple fact. Our government has shut down on a couple of occasions. In fact, it shuts down every week. 2/7ths of the time, over a quarter of the time, our government is gone, out of touch, incommunicado. Every weekend, hundreds of thousands of local, state and federal employees head for the barn and yet life goes on. The 2% milk is still in the cooler at the local grocery and the ATMs still spit out cash if you put your pin in correctly. This is reality.
People have been talking and whining and crying that if we toss all of the illegals back over the border and enforce the laws, life as we know it and cheap tomatoes will cease to exist. That is complete balderdash. ROT. It is a philosophy propagated by individuals who either lack the balls to actually do something for their country and make a selfless decision or they are people who have a serious vested interest (read financial) in the continued use of illegal labor.
The United States of America is only going to fail if we destroy it from within. If we forget our laws and the importance of enforcing them, THEN and only then will we see the beginning of our end. It takes courage to say ‘no’, I know because as a parent I do it every day with the two little people I love more than anything in the world. I don’t cave into pressure because what they want to do isn’t hurting anyone and in fact it would make them “really happy”. If it is something that in the long term will not help them grow into healthy and moral adults, the answer is no. I cannot tell you how many useless adults I know that started out as indulged children whose parents tried to replace love and responsibility with indulgence. The result is not pretty and it certainly is not the essence of the greatest of American Heroes.
Neglecting out borders and giving a pass to those who are already here against the law, no matter how ‘happy’ it may be making them, is the equivalent of not being a responsible parent and caretaker of your blessings.
We can all give a big thanks to Sheriff Arpiao for having the strength to say “NO”.
20061006
Some guidance for election season
Can we clarify a few things?
And I know that this will be very difficult for many people to grasp because this is the season for obfuscation and muckraking. Yep, yes indeed, the TV commercials produced to get uninspired nitwits elected to office are filling the airways and if you pay attention to any of it, you will most likely find yourself steadily confused into a stupor most closely associated with the lobotomized.
So in an effort to cut through the crap and just lay it out like it is, I am going to tell you what the reality is.
1. Republicans have done a poor job at policing themselves. They have spent a considerable amount of time engaged in a lack of disclosure and a lack of frank dialogue, and in the end, it makes them look like dupes. Frankly like they have squandered the opportunity that was given to them by voters in 2004. Whether you like it or not, life was a lot better when Newt was running things. At least the man can articulate a concept and lay out a vision.
2. Democrats in the midst of having no salient compass other than the woefully tired and pathetic class warfare angle of the “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the solution is to tax the hell out of the wealthy…” have squandered their opportunity to raise the level of dialogue because frankly most of them are too chicken-you-know-what to ever leave the antiseptic confines of university campuses and actually pick up a weapon and do the dirty work of defending the Republic. Kennedy should be rolling in his grave over the joke that his party has become.
3. The slaves were freed by Lincoln, er um ahem, a Republican. Democrats were all too happy to see them continue to stay on the plantation. This is one of the principal reasons why I tend to lean toward the party of Lincoln.
4. Iraq is a very tough place.
5. Nitwits in charge, the sorts who have never left America other than on highly orchestrated junkets, read, “fact-finding tours”, have produced nothing in the way of solutions that are workable. No amount of ballyhooing can avoid the reality that none of the members of congress have said, “You know what? I am going to go volunteer for a month to embed myself with patrols and film everything I can and actually learn something about Iraq from the front.”
6. The military is and has been woefully ignorant of foreign cultures and has chosen to embrace a Tofflerian vision of technology as the panacea for all conflicts. They have chosen an easy and extraordinarily expensive approach that avoids the messy work of learning foreign languages and cultures. The people making these policy decisions have done this because they are woefully inept at understanding history, the nature of 4th generation warfare and how human beings work.
7. The HMMWV is perhaps the worst thing to ever enter the military.
8. It is incorrect to say that “We leave everything up to the commander on the ground.” and then go after washing one’s hands of everything that happens. Sorry, President Truman had a desktop sign that acknowledged his roll in the Unity of Command. A 5-Star lost his job because he failed to remember that little sign and upon whose desk it sat.
9. More troops would not have made a difference. That is like saying that more money would have saved the welfare system; aq familiar mantra of dispossessed and moronic liberals. We have spent more than any nation in history on welfare and we have the highest teen pregnancy rate in our history. These are tired and uninspired taunts raised by nitwits who think that a diploma from Georgetown makes them subject matter experts on everything. That said, an immediate installation of martial law and a shoot on sight curfew after the kinetics stopped, might have helped.
10. Putting a civilian in charge of Iraq, read CPA, was a very bad idea. Japan today owes a lot to the fact that a soldier ran the place after the war. A gringo, in a suit, in the middle of Baghdad, was not the authoritarian figure that Iraqi’s needed to see after the war. Any basic understanding of Middle Eastern culture would have made this clear. Oh and by the way, we should pass a law that says that any military officer who voices reservations about their command’s actions AFTER retirement, and cannot support that they held that position and conveyed it to higher command with an email or written memo trail created before they retired, will not receive any retirement benefits. The law should also say that any officer sanctioned for expressing internal written concerns over command’s policies will be compensated in retirement at a rate 1.5 times the standard rate, provided their reservations were made to their leadership and open for scrutiny. I for one am having a very difficult time reconciling my former division commander’s choice to criticize actions AFTER he retired. He was in charge of my life and if things were so damnably bad why didn’t stars get laid on the table to look out for us troops?
11. Saying I voted for the troops before I voted against them is a highly effective method of illustrating the profound lack of time that one has spent not being a soldier, not being outside of a comfort zone and not having any idea how foreign policy as the world’s sole superpower really works.
12. Lot’s of us qualified for purple hearts in the same manner that a certain Swift Boat veteran did for one of his and lots of us never claimed one. It would be a dishonor to all those kids in Walter Reed and Bethesda to do so, and again, it makes me glad that things went the way that they did.
13. Being the wife of a president is in no way a qualification for being the president. Certain people would be wise to remember that fact.
14. The United States needs to seriously look at the wasting of billions on contractors and realize that US Army cooks are a pretty good bargain. Contractors make sense if you plan on being someplace for 30 days or less. I ate out of an Army mess trailer and did just fine in Iraq. I shudder to think what my DFAC trips cost the US Taxpayers (including myself).
15. The United States needs to have a bottom up review of every weapon system and objectively determine what sucks and what works. Then toss the former and keep the latter. We also need to spend more than a few minutes in a bar in Maclean, VA, determining what soldiers ‘need’. The South Africans have 4 decades of countermine and IED warfare under their belt. What brain trust in acquisition failed to inquire of them just what kind of vehicle might be useful in a place like Iraq? What brain trust pushed the buying of HMMWVs instead of useful urban warfare vehicles? I cannot believe that 10 years AFTER the Soviets imploded that we still thought our wars would be fought in Fulda and procured based upon this notion. Rumsfield was right, “You go to war with the army you have…” Guess what? Rumsfield inherited his army from someone else and they had plenty of time to analyze and configure it for what we would face today. Let’s see, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo all happened under the previous watch and they bear a strikingly similar resemblance to Iraq. I guess blue dresses kept the serious business of configuring an order of battle for the future conflicts as a lower priority. You go to war with the Army you get, and if the people who give it to you are tactical and operational idiots, well, you do the math.
16. Politicians that can only criticize their opponents and avoid discussing ideas and the future of the nation need to be marginalized and encouraged to seek employment outside the government in the low level management positions for which they are obviously well-suited.
17. Politicians who have so much extra time on their hands that they can spend it emailing minors and discussing lewd sex acts, driving while intoxicated, verbally harassing a police officer, accepting free lunches and claiming ignorance of conflicts of interest or taking lavish trips to play golf in foreign countries need to be immediately identified and forced through overt shame into resignation.
18. It would behoove us all if every member of congress was barred from residence outside of their home state, forced to sleep on a military cot in their office while in session, forbidden from participating in any fund raising while congress is in session AND forbidden from the use of any personal funds for re-election AND subject to the exact same laws and penalties of the citizenry. I suspect that we might see more sobriety in the performance of government duties. As well, lobbyists should be banned from Washington, DC. Lobbyists should be forced to meet with congress members in the member’s district, in a public place, so that any discussion is open to observation by the public.
19. What part of “Mission Complete” was thought to be representative of operations in Iraq and what idiot put it on a banner on the superstructure of the Abe Lincoln? A lot of us in OIF II are wondering about that right now. Whoever it was needs to be publicly identified and fired immediately.
20. Finally, the healthiest way to approach the election is to turn off all televisions and simply Google both candidates and read what comes up. Pretty quickly you can get a good idea what you are getting into and frankly, no matter what the party, my recommendation is that you vote against the incumbent if they have served more 2 or more terms.
Just some thoughts after a long month of bad dreams.
And I know that this will be very difficult for many people to grasp because this is the season for obfuscation and muckraking. Yep, yes indeed, the TV commercials produced to get uninspired nitwits elected to office are filling the airways and if you pay attention to any of it, you will most likely find yourself steadily confused into a stupor most closely associated with the lobotomized.
So in an effort to cut through the crap and just lay it out like it is, I am going to tell you what the reality is.
1. Republicans have done a poor job at policing themselves. They have spent a considerable amount of time engaged in a lack of disclosure and a lack of frank dialogue, and in the end, it makes them look like dupes. Frankly like they have squandered the opportunity that was given to them by voters in 2004. Whether you like it or not, life was a lot better when Newt was running things. At least the man can articulate a concept and lay out a vision.
2. Democrats in the midst of having no salient compass other than the woefully tired and pathetic class warfare angle of the “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the solution is to tax the hell out of the wealthy…” have squandered their opportunity to raise the level of dialogue because frankly most of them are too chicken-you-know-what to ever leave the antiseptic confines of university campuses and actually pick up a weapon and do the dirty work of defending the Republic. Kennedy should be rolling in his grave over the joke that his party has become.
3. The slaves were freed by Lincoln, er um ahem, a Republican. Democrats were all too happy to see them continue to stay on the plantation. This is one of the principal reasons why I tend to lean toward the party of Lincoln.
4. Iraq is a very tough place.
5. Nitwits in charge, the sorts who have never left America other than on highly orchestrated junkets, read, “fact-finding tours”, have produced nothing in the way of solutions that are workable. No amount of ballyhooing can avoid the reality that none of the members of congress have said, “You know what? I am going to go volunteer for a month to embed myself with patrols and film everything I can and actually learn something about Iraq from the front.”
6. The military is and has been woefully ignorant of foreign cultures and has chosen to embrace a Tofflerian vision of technology as the panacea for all conflicts. They have chosen an easy and extraordinarily expensive approach that avoids the messy work of learning foreign languages and cultures. The people making these policy decisions have done this because they are woefully inept at understanding history, the nature of 4th generation warfare and how human beings work.
7. The HMMWV is perhaps the worst thing to ever enter the military.
8. It is incorrect to say that “We leave everything up to the commander on the ground.” and then go after washing one’s hands of everything that happens. Sorry, President Truman had a desktop sign that acknowledged his roll in the Unity of Command. A 5-Star lost his job because he failed to remember that little sign and upon whose desk it sat.
9. More troops would not have made a difference. That is like saying that more money would have saved the welfare system; aq familiar mantra of dispossessed and moronic liberals. We have spent more than any nation in history on welfare and we have the highest teen pregnancy rate in our history. These are tired and uninspired taunts raised by nitwits who think that a diploma from Georgetown makes them subject matter experts on everything. That said, an immediate installation of martial law and a shoot on sight curfew after the kinetics stopped, might have helped.
10. Putting a civilian in charge of Iraq, read CPA, was a very bad idea. Japan today owes a lot to the fact that a soldier ran the place after the war. A gringo, in a suit, in the middle of Baghdad, was not the authoritarian figure that Iraqi’s needed to see after the war. Any basic understanding of Middle Eastern culture would have made this clear. Oh and by the way, we should pass a law that says that any military officer who voices reservations about their command’s actions AFTER retirement, and cannot support that they held that position and conveyed it to higher command with an email or written memo trail created before they retired, will not receive any retirement benefits. The law should also say that any officer sanctioned for expressing internal written concerns over command’s policies will be compensated in retirement at a rate 1.5 times the standard rate, provided their reservations were made to their leadership and open for scrutiny. I for one am having a very difficult time reconciling my former division commander’s choice to criticize actions AFTER he retired. He was in charge of my life and if things were so damnably bad why didn’t stars get laid on the table to look out for us troops?
11. Saying I voted for the troops before I voted against them is a highly effective method of illustrating the profound lack of time that one has spent not being a soldier, not being outside of a comfort zone and not having any idea how foreign policy as the world’s sole superpower really works.
12. Lot’s of us qualified for purple hearts in the same manner that a certain Swift Boat veteran did for one of his and lots of us never claimed one. It would be a dishonor to all those kids in Walter Reed and Bethesda to do so, and again, it makes me glad that things went the way that they did.
13. Being the wife of a president is in no way a qualification for being the president. Certain people would be wise to remember that fact.
14. The United States needs to seriously look at the wasting of billions on contractors and realize that US Army cooks are a pretty good bargain. Contractors make sense if you plan on being someplace for 30 days or less. I ate out of an Army mess trailer and did just fine in Iraq. I shudder to think what my DFAC trips cost the US Taxpayers (including myself).
15. The United States needs to have a bottom up review of every weapon system and objectively determine what sucks and what works. Then toss the former and keep the latter. We also need to spend more than a few minutes in a bar in Maclean, VA, determining what soldiers ‘need’. The South Africans have 4 decades of countermine and IED warfare under their belt. What brain trust in acquisition failed to inquire of them just what kind of vehicle might be useful in a place like Iraq? What brain trust pushed the buying of HMMWVs instead of useful urban warfare vehicles? I cannot believe that 10 years AFTER the Soviets imploded that we still thought our wars would be fought in Fulda and procured based upon this notion. Rumsfield was right, “You go to war with the army you have…” Guess what? Rumsfield inherited his army from someone else and they had plenty of time to analyze and configure it for what we would face today. Let’s see, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo all happened under the previous watch and they bear a strikingly similar resemblance to Iraq. I guess blue dresses kept the serious business of configuring an order of battle for the future conflicts as a lower priority. You go to war with the Army you get, and if the people who give it to you are tactical and operational idiots, well, you do the math.
16. Politicians that can only criticize their opponents and avoid discussing ideas and the future of the nation need to be marginalized and encouraged to seek employment outside the government in the low level management positions for which they are obviously well-suited.
17. Politicians who have so much extra time on their hands that they can spend it emailing minors and discussing lewd sex acts, driving while intoxicated, verbally harassing a police officer, accepting free lunches and claiming ignorance of conflicts of interest or taking lavish trips to play golf in foreign countries need to be immediately identified and forced through overt shame into resignation.
18. It would behoove us all if every member of congress was barred from residence outside of their home state, forced to sleep on a military cot in their office while in session, forbidden from participating in any fund raising while congress is in session AND forbidden from the use of any personal funds for re-election AND subject to the exact same laws and penalties of the citizenry. I suspect that we might see more sobriety in the performance of government duties. As well, lobbyists should be banned from Washington, DC. Lobbyists should be forced to meet with congress members in the member’s district, in a public place, so that any discussion is open to observation by the public.
19. What part of “Mission Complete” was thought to be representative of operations in Iraq and what idiot put it on a banner on the superstructure of the Abe Lincoln? A lot of us in OIF II are wondering about that right now. Whoever it was needs to be publicly identified and fired immediately.
20. Finally, the healthiest way to approach the election is to turn off all televisions and simply Google both candidates and read what comes up. Pretty quickly you can get a good idea what you are getting into and frankly, no matter what the party, my recommendation is that you vote against the incumbent if they have served more 2 or more terms.
Just some thoughts after a long month of bad dreams.
20060831
Doldrums...
As I write the Israelis are continuing their operations in Lebanon. The ‘peaceful and delightfully social-conscious’ members of Hezbollah are actively trying to get surface to air missile from Iraq, who in turn will have most likely procured said missiles from either China or Russia and all is moving merrily toward Armageddon…
Oh, come on! You can’t believe that. Armageddon is not coming soon, at least not until the Israelis finally decide that enough is enough and drop a nuke on the nutjobs running Syria and Iran, but that is not likely to happen because the Israelis, being westerners and attuned to western morality, are not Muslims and therefore they don’t see homicidal- suicide actions as valiant and noble deeds.
So relax.
I am writing this while I wait in a wholly, a disconcertingly wholly, empty terminal ‘D’ at KCLE, otherwise known as Cleveland Hopkins International. CLE is an airport that I have never been too and much like my former local airport, KPKB, it looks as though the airport management has succeeded in completely screwing up the place. You see terminal D is the only part of the airport that is both lit up (because the 18 foot ceilings and glass all around), it is also the only terminal that doesn’t stink of mildew and some other funk that I have long learned to associate with a third world country. Parkersburg is only in the same league because of its sister airport to the east, KCKB, Clarksburg.
This terminal should be bustling, as it is, jetways are serviced by EMB-135s and Beech 1900s. I myself flew in on a SAAB 340. But there should be some 737s in front of me and a few A321s thrown in for good measure. At KPKB, there should be an alternative to Continental Express, and there used to be.
Midwest, the commuter servicing US Air used to fly full Beech 1900s out of Parkersburg to KPIT several times a day. Then one day, poof! They were gone and some goofy white Swedish T-prop showed up. I should mention that the same goofy white T-prop flew out of PKB today only a third full. Somebody screwed up.
You see, Cleveland, City of Lights, City of Magic (COLCOM) (a thinly veiled reference to Gary Newman and his some of the same name; and a title that I always add every time I reference the same city on the shores of Lake Erie), Cleveland COLCOM is NOT the gateway hub that say Charlotte, Dulles or Atlanta, heck Cincinnati, is. Cleveland COLCOM, is, well, Cleveland, and frankly that says pretty much everything.
Now somebody, somebody, most a person who was from the same graduating class as the brain trusts that relegated the serious traffic to the dank and smelly A, B and C concourses here, while leaving the spacious and light-filled D concourse empty, save for silly little jungle jets and airplanes built in a country better known for socialism, buxom blue-eyed blondes and a really slick armored vehicle called a C-SU. The world is not right.
Back to CKB.
If you were to travel to Clarksburg (really the airport is in Bridgeport, but that is another aside) and look at that airport, you would see what airports should be; vital, busy, local engines of economic commerce. On the field at CKB resides Pratt and Witney, KCI aviation, the United States Army Fixed Wing Training Site, and a host of other concerns all producing a lot of jobs and work for the community. PKB, with its unobstructed approaches and strategic location on a plateau above the river valley, is, well, the largest empty ramp in the world. There is precisely one activity on the airfield of any significance and that is Mary’s Plane View Restaurant, which is an excellent place to eat.
Why is this?
Immediately, the answer is gross incompetence. Principally a failure to see an airport for what it is; open real estate that can be managed with a lithe mind into a vibrant economic exercise and value-added benefit for a community. Or, if one chooses to utilize a dullard as an airport manager, a blank piece of grass and asphalt just begging for real estate people to show up and turn it into a golf course community with homes starting at say $325,000.00. Less inspired ‘dirt’ people might choose strip mall or failing to utilize any creativity at all, a giant morass of tract homes…if you are really an idiot, you cut big “x”s into the runway at night and make a giant park for your wife. Only mayors of corrupt cities get that privilege so by the time you get there you have really crossed over to the dark side.
All of this starts with the person/persons placed in charge of the airport.
Now there are pressures on an airport manager. Communities of the modern age hate airports. They hate the noise. They fear that every airplane on approach is going to end up a pile of flaming wreckage in their living room, or worse, in the local elementary school yard. They have lost their sense of wonder at the magic of aviation because low cost carriers have turned the B737-7 into the most technologically advanced form of mass transit the world has ever seen. The B737 is just a bus to most people and frankly, a bus that takes them to their obliged business meetings in Sioux Falls, Crazy Aunt Millie’s in Philly every 10 years or to the dreaded 5 day Disney World nightmare when their children hit 5. So not only have people been desensitized to the magic of flight through low cost carriers, they have also been made even more annoyed by what that access opens up to them. I know I sound the cynic, but again, I am in an empty Concourse D.
The United States is unfortunately unable to remedy this problem. We are just a smidge too big. I have traveled this nation coast to coast on Amtrak. It takes about 56 hours. Well, I should qualify that; I have gone from Toledo to Sacramento and that is not quite coast to coast, but long enough. Long enough to understand that trains are not the answer. Even if we were to come up with something like the French TGV, it would still take something in excess of a day to go from NYC to San Francisco. The principal obstacle being the very un-French, but very American in a breathtaking sense, Rocky and Sierra Nevada Mountains. You can do the same trip in a silly little jungle jet in about 5 hours, and get this, it will cost LESS!
Nobody wants to take the train, because the trains smell like Concourses A and B at KCLE. People can take the smell for a couple of hours (as they must as they wait for their connecting flight) but not for 56 hours. That is a problem. You pay more, you smell more and in the end it costs you more time to get there. Trains are not the answer.
As I look around CLE I see a lot of excess capacity. Cleveland COLCOM is a city on a ventilator with serious heart failure. It now holds the distinction of having the highest unemployment rate in the entire state of Ohio; something over 30%. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame notwithstanding, this town is dying. It is dying because it was built on manufacturing and that is rapidly becoming a foreign concept to the people of the USA.
The USA is today a niche technology giant with a lot of services thrown in for support. Microsoft is a niche company in terms of manufacturing and even then, its products will be made in some sweatshop governed by Beijing and not in unused industrial space in Elyria, OH. Cleveland’s weather sucks. I mean that, there is just no better word. Frankly, Ohio’s weather sucks. If you are a car worker who has a high school education with little in the way of technology background, you will put up with weather that sucks because you have a good job at GM. When GM implodes, well you may not have many options. You technology savvy friends will have moved on to the Carolinas, which is where all Ohioans REALLY want to move too. That is why Raleigh-Durham has exploded in terms of growth; good weather, smart people, supportable industry.
The other reason why I know that Cleveland COLCOM is dying is the NASA hangar on the field at CLE.
Huh!?!
Yep, the NASA hangar.
The NASA hangar at CLE looks like a giant eyesore. The paint is faded, the hangar is a dump. The principal space agency of the US Government is maintaining a facility that looks like it should sit at Baikonur (Baikonur for those of you who are not aware, is the ramshackle ‘space city’ of the Russians. It is actually no longer in Russia so it makes it all the more poetic. Probably prophetic because at the rate Cleveland COLCOM is going, Canada, with its tar sands, might just try to buy Cleveland COLCOM and use it for storing oil field equipment). Cleveland COLCOM may someday no longer be part of the USA. When neither NASA nor the airport people at CLE feel it important enough to have a nice shiny hangar, it tells you something…and what it tells you is not good.
Parkersburg, for its part, just doesn’t build anything to get ugly. As you fly over PKB, you see space everywhere. Just sitting there, waiting for a maintenance base, long-term aircraft storage, simulator-training facilities…SOMETHING…other than grass to be mowed. It is so sad. Even sadder because last week at Oshkosh I got to fiddle with the disaster that Microsoft is called MSFS X. I pulled up KPKB and found my airplane sitting on an airport with taxiways to nowhere and incomplete runways. THIS at the debut of the software at the world’s largest general aviation air show/fly-in. Maybe Microsoft knows something about PKB that the rest of us only suspect?
So what is the solution?
I suppose we have to define which problem. I’ll save you the trouble and deal with one; incompetent airport managers. The simple issue is to fire them and find the youngest, most inspired airplane-loving freak kid that you can and tell them to dream big and make it work. PKB languishes because of a desire to live with the status quo. No flights, no noise, no complaints, no work, no marketing, no worries. Milquetoast existence for a manager that demonstrates that his or her top priority is to slip away with nothing but mediocrity in their path.
The strength of PKB, and CLE for that matter lies in what they do have. They have crappy weather. It is no secret that Ohio is the absolute best place in the nation to work on IFR ratings. An inspired manager would have Embry-Riddle based on the field to train their pilots. I have flown with a few E-R graduates and they didn’t do so well in Ohio weather. The Buckeye state should be selling itself as THE place to come if you want to be a proficient instrument pilot.
The second step is to focus on recurrency and maintenance. When you have a lot of empty real estate that does nothing except use gasoline to keep the lawn short, the answer is to find a way to get people on the field. After all, that is exactly what every airport-enemy, read “real estate” developer, wants to do. The idea is to make all that grass pay for itself. In the case of non-airport activities that means golf courses, condos or shopping malls. Airports can survive if they see the real estate in the same way. While it looks pretty to see all the grass, with the exception of those areas needed for regulation separation from active approaches and runways, every bit of the field needs to be occupied by paying folks.
The problem with this is that it takes an aggressive advocate to convince local leaders and business people that the field is the place where they want to be. This is not for the faint of heart. You can put a J3 up at 3000 feet. High enough that the engine will make less noise than a lawn mower on the ground and you will have the whiner that complains about the airport ‘noise’ and the treachery of these machines that could fall from the sky at any moment and kill innocent people. My personal opinion is that this group is both squeaky and small in number. Unfortunately these days it seems that they get the greatest ear. We need to change this and airport managers have to be willing to see the small number as the distractor from the greatest good.
So will it happen?
My feeling is that we are seeing the end of days for general aviation. Nobody save for a few people have a vision for the small airports of our country. The light sport aircraft movement is very interesting but in the absence of wonder on the part of young people, there is no motivation for increasing the numbers of pilots. The AOPA is concerned about this as well. People simply are not lining up to learn how to fly. Video games have a lot to do with this. People can experience much of flight by sitting at the computer. They miss out on the passion of the exercise and the feel of the wind and the sound of the air around you, but for many people, getting 80% of the experience is enough. Even if a kid gets past the video game and out to the airport, there are few flight schools left to bridge the distance between the fence and the sky.
A kid standing at an airport fence dreaming of flying will remain right there unless there is an instructor to lead him to the airplane. Some major things will have to change to reverse what has become the state of affairs in flight training. It is simply too expensive for most flight schools to remain in business.
The last impediment to flying among the masses is the discount airline. It is simply no longer novel for people to fly…well, at least ride…in an airplane. For $250.00 anybody can get a ticket to somewhere and experience a ride in an airplane. This is well within the means of most Americans. So you can’t find a school, you can sort of fly on a computer and if you really want to experience life in the clouds, $250.00 will do it for you.
Much has changed in 20 years.
Airports and aviation need to change. Not just for the sake of general aviation but for the sake of the survival of commercial aviation. The fact of the matter is that the military cannot supply the number of commercial pilots that our nation needs. The pilot pool is aging rapidly and very shortly, within a few years, there is going to be a dramatic shortage of qualified pilots in the United States. 40 years ago, between the military, local flight schools and the odd foreign pilot that arrived at our shores, we could train what we need. Not today. The development of light jet air taxis is a novel idea, but if there are few pilots to fly them, the new jets mean nothing.
Airports need to change as well. The nation needs to start seeing the local general aviation airport as an integral part of this nation’s security and safety. One need only look at the number of small airplanes that supported Hurricane Katrina Relief to see that small airplanes were integral to national disaster relief. Those little airplanes reside at the nation’s small airports. But those same airports need revenue streams to keep them alive.
Airport/airplane lovers around the nation need to communicate with their city councils and airport managers. We need to tell them that airports need to be financial powerhouses if they are to remain viable and economically attractive to communities. At some point, if a community’s job base has a large share at the local airport the whiners who complain of the noise will become marginalized be people who see the airport as a significant source of income.
The last item in this change is the need for a real concern about the state of terminals and how airports look. One of the gripes that I have about CLE is that here in the beautiful terminal D I have a full view of the less-than-beautiful terminal C and even bigger eyesores known as A and B. As capacity shrinks, airport management needs to look long term at really making the terminals look good. One of the prettiest terminals in the country is, get this, KHLG, or Wheeling, Ohio County, WV. The airport management has taken a terminal that looks like it is suited to the age of the DC-3 and turned it into one of the finest museums and tributes to commercial aviation that I have every seen. You walk into a terminal that is filled with things that people want to look at. It is worth the trip to Wheeling just to take a look.
There is a lot to be done if our commercial aviation system is to remain healthy and viable. The generation coming up will have a lot to do with what remains of general aviation in the next 20 to 40 years. This generation is going to have to become vocal at an early age if they are going to salvage anything that resembles what those of us who are older remember fondly as the time of wonder for general aviation.
Fly Safe
20060723
The 609 mile adventure
In an effort to rebalance my postings toward the aviation vein, I am going to return in a week with what I hope are four or five postings on the epic that is the Airventure, "Oshkosh" by any other name. I have a couple of Army days to put in here, but then, on Tuesday, the trailer will be hitched and off we will go for the next round in the annual pilgramage to the center of all things that fly.
So while I am gone, I ask any of you that read my postings, to forward my blog address as widely through the aviation world as possible. I will try to return the favor by bringing pictures and impressions that will be more than worth your time hitting the 'forward' button. In the meantime, have a great week and wish us all good luck as we treck to the land of cheese and the greatest aviation spectacle in the world.
FF
So while I am gone, I ask any of you that read my postings, to forward my blog address as widely through the aviation world as possible. I will try to return the favor by bringing pictures and impressions that will be more than worth your time hitting the 'forward' button. In the meantime, have a great week and wish us all good luck as we treck to the land of cheese and the greatest aviation spectacle in the world.
FF
20060717
Standing up for the little guy
There once was a country, a little country, well not even a country, not really. More of a territory. The little land was owned and operated by a variety of interests, not the least of which was a king. The king was not particularly oppressive but that didn’t matter. The people of the land worked hard to create a place of prosperity and consistently other people, from other lands interfered and caused them grief.
Now, it should be noted that the people of the land were not the ones who were there first. In fact, long before they showed up, other people occupied the place and they also had homes and gardens and a way of life. But, as is often the case, there were problems.
The new people had come to the land trying to find a place to live freely and in peace. They had been brutalized and oppressed in their native lands and the opportunity to create a country where they could speak freely and live without fear was very powerful. So they arrived with dreams and ideas and hopes. And they built something great where little had existed before. Eventually, there were problems with the original people and there were wars and disputes, but eventually there developed a peace. Times had changed, life had changed and a new way was the path to be followed.
Nobody, in the end, complained or tried to change the fates of those involved.
I am not an apologist for the state of Israel, but the fact is that in a way very similar to the manner in which the United States came about, the Israelis arrived in a primitive land, fought their war of independence and built a nation. Nobody, save for some oddly ignorant wackos, is suggesting that we, the USA, revert back to the aboriginal method of living of the folks who were here before the Mayflower arrived. Heaven forbid! There would be no Bluetooth® enabled cell phones. What would we do?!?
Yet that is exactly what people have suggested that Israel do with regard to the Palestinians (I should note, the same people that think that it is perfectly cool to strap explosives to their daughters and make them human cruise missiles as in the photo above, nice eh? No prom for you, sis. Your fate is nested in heading for a shopping mall and wasting civilians on purpose). Well the Israelis tried it. They gave Gaza back and made it independent with a real international border. That’s what the rest of the world demanded. That is what the Arab world demanded. That is what everyone said would bring peace. Yassir Arafat said that giving land back would bring peace.
The Israelis, who actually live among the Palestinians, surrounded by people, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran and an individual who has openly called for the total annihilation of Israel, had other ideas. But the rest of the world suggested that the Israelis were just ignorant of the ‘real’, peaceable, intentions of the Arabs towards them. The Israelis, the perpetual recipients of the chagrin of the world, relented and gave back Gaza.
In return they have been bombed and rocketed by the people of Gaza. They have endured the assaults and kidnapping of their soldiers who were not in Gaza, but in Israel.
Let’s consider:
What would we do if the Canadians demanded Maine back?
What would we do if the Mexican army crossed into Laredo, kidnapped Americans and threatened to execute them in Mexico?
How would we react if the people of Ecuador were developing nuclear weapons and stated clearly that they intended to use them as soon as possible on targets in the United States? ( In the case of Venezuela and Bolivia, this might be a real concern.)
How long would the people of Bremerton, Washington stand by if the people of Vancouver were launching Katyusha rockets into their neighborhoods?
I want you to look at this map, courtesy of masada2000.org (look at their site, they have terrific maps, they are a little militant though so be prepared), which shows how big Israel actual is compared to the USA.
We have to face the reality that Israel is not an expeditionary power trying to take over real estate from the rest of the world. Israel was created after a serious civil war, exactly like our Revolution, and since then the ONLY thing that the Israelis have done is try to live in security while the rest of the world continuously demands that they give back everything that they fought for. Why doesn’t France give back Gaul to the Italians? Why doesn’t Jordan create a Palestinian state?
You really cannot write about this without coming off like an apologist for Israel…but then again, why shouldn’t we look out for Israel? When you get right down to it, why is everyone against them? Who do people hate them? Why does the Arab world, including the president of Iran, a guy with a master’s degree (presumably enough education not to be ignorant), say that the Holocaust is a fabrication? Did 250,000 Americans die fighting Germany over the ‘fabrication’ of the execution of 6 million Jews?
If you want to know how bizarre and widely held this notion is check out this Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust
It is the first time that I have ever seen a topic locked because of vandalism. This is very real. People, supposedly educated people, actually believe that 6,000,000 people were NOT executed and burned or buried by the Nazis. They vandalize the Wikipedia entry and laud Adolph Hitler.
The fact is, the reality is, that a country smaller than my battalion area of operations in Iraq (9,000 square miles, against Israel’s 8,000 square miles), with 13 million people, is facing 1.5 BILLION Muslims that include 300 million Arabs that seem to think that they, the Israelis, are the aggressors, the bullies and need to be not controlled, but oh my goodness, de ja vu, exterminated, and their country erased from the planet. Those of us who fail to consider the historical irony of this should be ashamed of ourselves.
The best thing any of us can do is allow Israel to do what it needs to do for its own security and tell the 300 million Arabs that hate them, that they would be wise to start reading some real history books and pay particular attention to the years 1967 and 1973. That is, if those 300 million Arab anti-Zionists themselves want to stay around to read any more books, fictitious or otherwise.
As a nation, the United States can ill-afford to continue to allow racists and bigots (read anti-zionist Arabs) to continue to voice their hatred without some response. We prosecute people in this country for “hate crimes” and we vilify people for “hate speech”. Why are we so late in going to the defense of 13 million people whose only crime is fleeing to the only forsaken piece of ground they could find to escape their own genocide at the hands of Europeans, and now, after working for 60 odd years to create the only Western democracy in the Middle East, face nut-jobs like the presidents of Iran and Syria who want to finish what Himmler couldn’t? Why are we not just lambasting these Hezbollah apologists when they spout hate speech on our airwaves? Have we learned nothing since 9/11?
Islam has one goal; the subversion of the world for the sake of Allah. That mission means no Israel and ultimately no Christians or Hindus or Buddists or anyone other than quivering Muslims cow-towing to turban clad Mullahs who claim to be the purveyors of Allah’s will through Fatwas.
“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”
This quote is from the famous Christian, Nazi-resistor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He paid with his life for trying to do what was right.
Make no mistake. The events of our time are our nation’s test. What we do with respect toward Israel will determine what happens to us, the USA, for some time. If we fail to speak for the jews, and the Muslims annihilate them, their next target (I would argue that for some Muslims, the CURRENT target) will be Christians and let’s be clear, the largest population of Christians in the world is in the Americas. The idea of Katyusha rockets in Bremerton may not be too far from the mark, eh? This is no dark fantasy. Just ask the residents of Haifa.
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