Short Rant

Well, I made the big ol' update post over on Livejournal. Nothing much more to add to that, and if you read my blogroll, you know where my wife's Livejournal is, and you get more updates than that also.

I've stayed away from politics the past few weeks, with one notable exception, that being my reaction to a reaction from a particularly stupid breed of liberal on the whole "Rush Limbaugh says 'phony soldiers' flap." I've posted my commentary to the whole brou-haha in enough detail for me to consider the case closed. Short version: As usual, The Usual Liberal Suspects (including Harry Reid) have once again demonstrated that they either a) run off at the mouth without bothering like trivialities like facts, or b) are too stupid to read plain English.

This no longer surprises.

JD Johannes provides a different take on what he refers to as dissident Soldiers, those who either felt that invading Iraq was a bad idea or believe that the occupation of Iraq was done poorly. I know a lot of these Soldiers. Some of them have simply tired of the whole mess and wish the Administration would simply nuke the whole Middle East flat (ending the question of Islamic terror, and indeed Islam itself) Some disagree with trends large and small that can be seen at the warfighter's level, and which have little or nothing to do with the unending roll of crap that the Mass Media (post-nationalist and often pro-Jihadist) feeds the Home Front about how the war is "failing".

Yet we have a higher retention rate than we did in the 'good ol' days' of the 1980s. Interesting. . . Why is that? The dissident Soldiers generally don't work to undermine the mission on the way that the (lying, snivelling weasel of a piss-poor Soldier) Darling of the Left, Scotty Beauchamp, did. Why is that? And these Soldiers keep going out the wire, day after day, doing jobs nasty and dangerous and tedious and sometimes seemingly pointless.

Why?

First and foremost, we are an all-volunteer military. Robert Kaplan has a good piece up about that in OpinionJournal.

"As one battalion commander complained to me, in words repeated by other Soldiers and Marines: "Has anyone noticed that we now have a volunteer Army? I'm a warrior. It's my job to fight." Every journalist has a different network of military contacts. Mine come at me with the following theme: We want to be admired for our technical proficiency--for what we do, not for what we suffer. We are not victims. We are privileged."

Yeah, that's a bit beyond the scope of your average media puke, who just wants some pictures and quotes to sustain his preformed conclusions. That's a sentiment I've written about before. We do what we do because we are who we are. Soldiers and Professionals. Things that drive us are pretty much a mystery to a post-modern world which has embraced Positive Thinking and Self-Esteem and Transnational Progressivism and the idea that hurting someone's feelings is legally actionable. In a world where everyone is just a misunderstood unique snowflake (umm, except of course for those awful bad conservative throwbacks) we're about as out of place is as a turd in a punchbowl.

We fight.

The media is on the other side of this fight. Regarding Haditha, it has since come out that the Times reporter who broke the story did so according to an al-Qaeda planned script.

"McGirk received his video 'evidence' and contacts from two known Iraqi insurgent operatives already under observation by Marine Corps counter intelligence teams. One of the Iraqi witnesses McGirk relied on had just been released from almost six months captivity for insurgent activities and the other witness was considered a useful intelligence tool by Marines listening to him talk on his cell phone. McGirk never interviewed the Marines, who ironically had prepared a similar intelligence summary in anticipation of his canceled visit."

Of course, the Media shilling for terrorists is nothing new. Any wonder Republicans don't trust the Media, but sheep Democrats do.

I'd almost rather read al-Jazeera, if only because I know how to sort out their spin because it's blatant. For instance, when they talk about 'forming alliances' and insist loudly that no one is negotiating with the Americans, I can take that as evidence that the latter is blatantly false, and that US/ISF pressure is so bad that some groups are cutting deals with factions that despise in order to survive. This is a good thing.

In other news, the Israelis apparently admitted they bombed "something" in Syria, but aren't admitting that it was nuclear material from North Korea, even though that's what the entire non-Israeli world media is convinced of, and it is one of the few things I can imagine that would require Israel to strike a target in Syria.

In other news, Hillary Clinton is apparently listening to Sandy Berger on foreign policy. Like I need another reason to consider her a scary bitch whom I wouldn't vote for if the other candidate was Satan.

I've got another rant brewing, this will have to do for now.