Hilton Hotels Don’t like American Soldiers

So, maybe it's time to stop staying at Hilton Hotels. Via The Real Ugly American and Mudville Gazette comes a real " are you f***ing kidding me" moment. A steakhouse in Washington that has offered free meals to wounded vets from Walter Reed every Friday night is being evicted. Liability issues, don't you know. Go read about this outrage.

I will never, ever stay in a Hilton Hotel if this does not change fast. I would guess no member of the armed forces or any veterans will either. Smooth move, Hilton.

UPDATE: Please spread the word, get any and all bloggers who support out troops to post about this and link. Show the folks at Hilton what a real blogstorm looks like.

Propaganda 101

It's kind of funny, in a sad way, how the media gets it wrong so many times. Lately, there have been more than a few attacks on "American Propaganda" being put out.

What's really sad is that the journalists who tout themselves as the "free press" that are "championing free speech" do not know real propaganda from their misconceptions of what propaganda should be.

Case in point: Today I posted a picture. It was from a photo essay freely available from the "Defend America" website. It is of a member of an engineering company working to rebuild a village. Not long after I put the picture up, this comment was made:

Of course you won’t see that in the corporate media. They and Bush have an understanding that there will be zero discussion of the permanent bases being built in Iraq for American troops.

Time stamp - 4 PM.

I found this a while ago (no time stamp - guess they don't want evidence) This is advice on "how to reframe the debate".

1. Iran presently has a strong, rational incentive to get nukes.

Bush is planting permanent military bases on Iran's doorstep in Iraq, and trying to proliferate nukes to nearby India. Iran's feeling the heat, and desperately wants to pull a North Korea: get a nuke to keep the neocons at bay.

That would be from here.

It's kind of funny - I had never once heard the "Bush is planting permanent bases" until today. I laughed when I read it. Now we know where this kind of stuff comes from.

The media will dutifully follow the real propaganda trail. And publish it to the rest of the country.

UPDATE: Made a few edits to clarify.

UPDATE: Cox and Forkum also noticed the propaganda primer.

What They Said

 Keep it up, media. You're doing a great job protecting us all. The New York Times jumps on the bandwagon. They don't actually understand the dangerous ground they are on, however:

No active duty officers have joined the call for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation. In interviews, some currently serving general officers expressed discomfort with the campaign against Mr. Rumsfeld, which has been spearheaded by, among others, Gen. Anthony Zinni, who headed the United States Central Command in the late 1990's before retiring. Some of the currently serving officers said they feared the debate risked politicizing the military and undercutting its professional ethos.

Some say privately they disagree with aspects of the Bush administration's handling of the war. But many currently serving officers, regardless of their views, say respect for civilian control of the military requires that they air differences of opinion in private and stay silent in public. (emphasis added)

Do you bother to think beyond today's byline?

That would be a "no".

Just A Few Questions

Well, CNN dug up another retired general who doesn't like the Secretary of Defense. Which leads to the logical questions:

What percentage of retired generals don't care for Rumsfeld's style of management?

How many of these retired generals who are speaking out were promoted to general's rank between 1992 and 2000?

How many people think retired generals should think of the troops first before they air their political beliefs? (you know, because showing disarray to the enemy makes the enemy think they're winning.)

How many people want the military to stay the %$^%$% out of politics?

Inquiring minds want to know.

In several of the reports, generals have been quoted saying they had no comment. I kind of think they care more about the troops than some others do.

Technorati Problems

Would appear to be fixed right now. My thanks to Janice at Technorati support for all her patient help in getting it all working properly.

Yale Coeds Circa 2029

Magic 8-Ball photography comes through, yet again.

(All joking aside, this is a picture of women having to hide the fact that they are getting an education. Because the Taliban, who Mr. Hashemi was a spokesman for, didn't allow women to get educations. So why is it that none of the feminists at Yale are screaming their heads off about a former representative of the Taliban walking among them? This is what he represented.)

A Different Picture

I'm guessing you'll never see this on CBS.

Barry Stuard, an engineer with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Multinational Division - Central South, Camp Echo, Diwaniyah, Iraq, measures a window at the new 8th Iraqi Army Division barracks in Diwaniyah, Iraq, March 27, 2006. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Jason T. Bailey

For more photos, why not go take a look at the Defend America site?

Standards

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn't it? With it we can see exactly what was wrong with our thinking or actions in a given moment. How many times do we look back on someone's words to us and say, "I should have said…."? How many times have we looked at how we handled any given situation and tell ourselves that we could have or should have done something differently? everyone beats themselves up for a bit over some missed opportunity, or some omission or some action they wish later they had not taken. I call these "tinfoil moments" for the physical reaction I have when I think back on some of these things is almost identical to biting down on a piece of tinfoil - an involuntary cringe.

It's part of being human, it's part of being fallible, it is part of what we are. Nobody is perfect, right?

So why is it we try to hold out leaders to a higher standard? Oh - they should be, in general, better at certain things than we are, that's why we need them to lead. But are they infallible? Leaving the Pope out of this, since that is a matter of faith, are any of us , as human beings infallible? I'm not. I'll bet not one of the many bloggers out there are. In fact I'll submit that there is not one person on this earth of ours that is. So why do we insist in perfection in our leaders? They cannot meet that standard.

When Ulysses Grant sent his army in to the attack at Cold Harbor, he must have believed he was doing the right thing. Historians have for many years judged his actions in the bright light of hindsight and judged him lacking. But can anyone in good conscience say he did not believe that he was right at that moment? When Lincoln put McClellan in charge of the Union armies, does anyone really believe that he did so knowing that McClellan would so badly botch his assigned duties? Historians have again, with the perfect light of hindsight, said Lincoln should have seen the weakness in the man and acted to remove him sooner. 

I think reasonable people accept that nothing is ever perfect, and no person is perfect. We expect some people we select to lead to be better at some things than we are. We reasonably expect our leaders to group good people around themselves to help manage the burden of leading us. Yet some persist in holding our leaders to standards we could, ourselves, never meet. 

So in today's Washington Post Joby Warrick implies, again, that the President should somehow have been informed within one day of a minority field report of an obscure assessment team laboring as part of a huge effort to investigate numerous leads, hints and evidence simultaneously. The implication is that this team, reporting to a DIA group compiling results for a lot of different investigation teams should have done what? Drop everything they were doing, seize upon the one piece of dissenting evidence and rushed it over to the CIA to make them stop the issuance of a white paper that was undoubtedly under preparation for some time.

I don't know about any of you, but I don't think it could possibly have gotten to the President's desk unless everyone had been breathlessly waiting for it to arrive. Even then it would have been close.

Was Bush given bad intelligence - without a doubt. Did he intentionally lie - no he did not.

To maintain otherwise is to try to hold someone to an impossible standard. A standard that not one of his critics could meet.

Go read John Hughes in the Christian Science Monitor.

Criminal Mastermind Department

This guy is still quite young - only 17-years old - so we here at Blue Crab Boulevard expect to continue hearing of his hijinks for years to come.

It seems the young man was attempting to siphon gas from a car, (one that didn't actually belong to him) and made a small mistake. He spilled some of the gas on his pants. It was dark, so he couldn't see exactly how much gas he'd gotten on himself. This is when he made the big mistake. He used a lighter to check. The resulting fireball landed him in an emergency room, where he tried at first to claim someone had thrown gas on him. The truth emerged and the burned teenager and his 16-year old accomplice were both ticketed.

In the final twist of irony, the car the young man was trying to steal gas from belonged to a firefighter.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard strongly caution readers about using lighters to see how much flammable liquid you've spilled on yourselves.

Deafened By The Silence

It took me a while to get around to reading this article from The New Statesman. Entitled The Euston Manifesto, it is an attempt to redefine the left. (And a hat tip to my new blog friend, Brainster for the link).

This passage is illuminating:

We value the traditions and institutions of the liberal, pluralist democracies, and we decline to make excuses for, to indulgently "understand", reactionary regimes and movements for which democracy is a hated enemy. We hold the fundamental human rights codified in the Universal Declaration to be precisely universal. Equally, violations of these rights are to be condemned whoever is responsible for them and regardless of cultural context. The manifesto speaks of our attachment to egalitarianism in all domains.

We reject the anti-Americanism which is infecting so much left-liberal thinking. We support the right of both the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples to self-determination within the framework of a two-state solution. There are paragraphs opposing racism and identifying the resurgence of anti-Semitism; on terrorism and against the excuses made for it; on humanitarian intervention when states violate the common life of their peoples in appalling ways.

They call for the spread of democracy - which is what the word 'liberal' should stand for.

Too many on the left today openly support murderous thugs so long as they are anti-American. From the veneration of Che to the current genuflection to Chavez, the left of today is mostly against liberalism.

Go read it - they have a good perspective on Iraq and on freedom in general.

I wish them all the luck in the world, people like this would be a joy to find common ground with. I notice that there are very few on the current left who are commenting on this article, though. The silence is deafening. And telling.

Another Clue For Mr. Cohen

I posted a couple of times about a column by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post. Mr. Cohen implied that only the retired generals speaking out against the war were telling the truth, and decrying the fact that more troops were not speaking out. I posted links to some active duty personnel that were, indeed, speaking out. I asked Mr. Cohen if he was happy. He hasn't replied, so I presume he isn't.

Today, there's a little thing in Mr. Cohen's own paper that he might actually see, if he actually reads the Post himself, of course. It's by Wade Zirkle who was wounded in Iraq. It pretty well puts paid to the The Army Is Broken™ meme that Mr. Cohen apparently believes. It's also rather hard on good old Representative John Murtha (who we at Blue Crab Boulevard have a very special title for that we can't print because of our policy).

In view of his distinguished military career, John Murtha has been the subject of much attention from the media and is a sought-after spokesman for opponents of the Iraq war. He has earned the right to speak. But his comments supposedly expressing the negative views of those who have and are now serving in the Middle East run counter to what I and others know and hear from our own colleagues — from junior officers to the enlisted backbone of our fighting force.

Murtha undoubtedly knows full well that the greatest single thing that drags on morale in war is the loss of a buddy. But second to that is politicians questioning, in amplified tones, the validity of that loss to our families, colleagues, the nation and the world.

While we don't question his motives, we do question his assumptions. When he called for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, there was a sense of respectful disagreement among most military personnel. But when he subsequently stated that he would not join today's military, he made clear to the majority of us that he is out of touch with the troops. Quite frankly, it was received as a slap in the face.

Sorry, Mr. Cohen. We here at the Boulevard really tend to take the word of a marine like Mr. Zirkle over almost anything an overly politicized retired general has to say. We're funny like that.

Happy yet, Mr. Cohen?

UPDATE: I missed this one from Mudville Gazette. Like he says. Sit down and shut up, general.

Lacking Scruples, Reporter Admits No Wrongdoing

The reporter who unleashed the misleading Washington Post story about the trailers found in Iraq has written another article defending his original report. As was pointed out yesterday, the article misleads by implying that somehow the president of the United States was supposed to be aware of a minority field report, produced for the DIA, before he spoke out about a CIA white paper. Mind you, the field report arrived in Washington the day before the white paper was released.

Joby Warrick neglects to mention that he was scooped on his great revelation by the New York Times, three years before Mr. Warrick gave us his spin on the matter. He also (factually) says the article never said that Bush lied.

After all, it was only implied by the way the article was structured.

Mr. Warrick mislead by misdirection yesterday, today he hides behind the statement that it was "unclear" if the White House was aware of the field report.

That the CIA got it wrong is undoubtedly a fact. That it is reasonable to expect the President of the United States to know about a minority, dissenting field report generated the day before a white paper is issued is quite obviously absurd. And I am quite sure Mr. Warrick knows that.

What's "unclear" here is if Mr. Warrick was aware that he was writing a hit piece or just that bad a writer.

Dire Warnings

John Stossel has a piece up at Real Clear Politics about exaggerating dire "scientific" warnings. It ties in directly with what I posted yesterday - which drew a few dissenting commenters.

Still, the misuse of science to make policy decisions has been going on for too long now. It really is time to stop allowing ourselves to be spun up by every scientific study that gets hyped as the new dire pending catastrophe™.

The Appearance Of Wrongdoing

As I keep saying, the "culture of corruption" meme the Democrats have been wont to use of late is a double edged sword. Recently, there have been Democrats getting caught in the spotlight. Representative Alan Mollohan for one. Now allegations are surfacing against John Conyers, the second longest sitting member of congress. Former staffers are saying that he made them act as babysitters and work on local election campaigns - including one to get his wife elected to the Detroit city council.

The ethics committee has not looked into the matter and shows no signs of stirring itself. Which is unsurprising since Mollohan refuses to stand down from his seat there.

I'm noticing a lot fewer references to the "culture of corruption" coming out of Democrats lately. Sort of exactly what I predicted. More than once.

Thirty Minutes

The transcript of the Flight 93 cockpit voice recorder has been made available. It covers about thirty minutes from the time the terrorists entered the cockpit until the passengers started to get the upper hand and the plane crashed.

Remember 9/11/2001, anyone?