Gaming History

I know I have some readers who are current or former members of the military. I also know I have readers who share my love of history. I hope all of them will forgive me for posting about this.

The History Channel has released a video game that is tied to their series Shootout! the game, available as a free download, is purposely made to look and feel just like the television series.

The second season of Shootout! premiers on Friday, and along with it, a new online video game, also called Shootout!, launches on www.History.com. The game is available as a free download.

Shootout! examines and re-creates some of the most famous gun battles in history. The History Channel executives figured that their audience had plenty of overlap with the gaming community, so they might as well try to get a piece of the gaming pie.

"The gaming audience is a huge, educated audience and it is growing," said Dolores Gavin, executive producer of Shootout! and director of programming for The History Channel. "That audience actually matches our demographic. They like to be in the thick of the action and that is what The History Channel is, we're all action. So we thought this was a perfect way to take it beyond the TV outlet."

The game was designed by Kuma, a game development company based in New York. It uses 3D CGI animation sequences where players can participate in the battles as a soldier or fighter. This season, episodes of the game are directly based on three key historical events featured in the series: Iwo Jima, Battle of the Bulge, and the Tet Offensive.

The game can be downloaded here. Sorry folks.

UPDATE: I have been chastised by the Crabitat's editor in chief. My wife tells me that my apologies should be directed to the spouse/significant other of any of my readers who download the game because of this post. She is, as always, completely correct.

Maybe The Best Analysis….

… Of the Virginia Senate race that I have seen yet comes from the Financial Times of all places. It looks at what is arguably the dirtiest campaign in the dirtiest year ever and reaches the conclusion:

Regardless of whether Mr Allen holds on to his seat, two conclusions are already apparent. First, the man who was once seen as the best hope among conservative Republicans of defeating the more moderate John McCain as its 2008 presidential nominee is almost certainly out of the running. Second, Virginia’s voters may now be aware of what is least attractive about their senatorial candidates but they are unlikely to be any the wiser about the momentous decisions before their nation. (Emphasis added.)

That about sums up Virginia Senate and the rest of this sideshow dominated election.

Unintended Consequences

Sometimes political attacks backfire. I warned that there might be a backlash over the politically timed disclosure by a gay hooker of lurid charges against Ted Haggard (now fired from his position). That backlash, I argued, would not be the one the perpetrators of the attacks intended. That does indeed appear to be happening and even the Associated Press is noticing.

For instance, Vice President Dick Cheney visited Colorado Springs on Friday to campaign for Doug Lamborn, who is running a tight race against Democrat Jay Fawcett for a seat in Haggard's reliably Republican district. Rep. Joel Hefley is retiring.

A Denver man named Mike Jones last week publicly accused Haggard — who has now left the New Life Church and the National Association of Evangelicals — of paying him for sex, saying he was motivated by what he saw as hypocrisy.

Haggard has been a leading proponent of a measure to amend Colorado's Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman, and has denounced homosexuality.

Lamborn draws heavy support from religious conservatives. Bob Loevy, a political science professor at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, said the disclosure's timing has all the earmarks of a last-minute political attack.

Religious conservatives, outraged by the way the accusations were made, could give Lamborn the edge he needs in his battle with Fawcett, a former Air Force officer trying to become the first Democrat to win the seat, Loevy said.

"I think there's a very good chance it may galvanize socially conservative voters to come out and vote for Doug Lamborn," Loevy said.

Said Kenneth Bickers, a political science professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder: "If it's going to have a big effect anywhere, its going to have an effect on the Lamborn race."

Bickers said the extent of the fallout would hinge on how many voters sent in absentee ballots or voted early before the news broke.

Lamborn's campaign didn't return a call Saturday.

Fawcett campaign spokeswoman Wanda James, while saying Haggard's ordeal wasn't a cause for joy, said it is just one more blow to Lamborn's party.

"You start to see clearly that (Fawcett) has been on the top of the pulse of the people," James said.

A recent poll showed Lamborn with support from 47 percent of voters and Fawcett with 40 percent. The survey of 400 likely voters was conducted last week by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. and had an error margin of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

If that turns into a blowout for the Republican candidate, not only did it backfire, but it may have ruined the Dems chances to make gains in more than just Colorado.

UPDATE: For a clue as to why this is an extraordinarily bad tactic see Hyscience. Try really hard to understand why this is a bad move. Because people do not react in the cartoonish way some people think they do.

Responses From Military Personnel

Tom Bevan at the Real Clear Politics Blog asked military personnel what they thought of the Gannett Times editorial demanding Rumsfeld's removal. He got quite a few responses. The consensus: Who cares…..

I'm a Major with 18 years of service in the USAF. In the USAF, the AF Times is understood to be useful source of information, but we all know it's not a military publication and it doesn't speak for us. I just came from three years in the bowels of the Pentagon and the SECDEF is generally though of there as tough but fair. Have mistakes been made? Sure, they always are but the professional military learns from it's mistakes.

Rumsfeld should have probably committed more soldiers to the peacekeeping in Iraq. We didn't need more to win the battle but to pacify the country afterward. Problem is the services are so small after the Clinton years that there just aren't enough forces to go much above 140K on a continuing basis. And no one here wants a draft. It would have been nice to get further international support, but that didn't work out, especially after Madrid. I think everyone in the Pentagon, if not the entire DOD hoped the Iraqis would take more responsibility for themselves and not destroy their country's infrastructure and their countrymen. But unfortunately they are not.

The Army Times op-ed probably won't change a single mind in the services. We're all pretty hard-headed and don't generally take our cues from the press. We wouldn't be in the Service if we did.

———————————-

I enjoy and appreciate your web site, and visit it frequently (even when deployed in the Middle East). With respect to your question on the impact of the editorial from Military Times Media Group calling for Secretary Rumsfeld's resignation, I'd venture that it will be negligible.

Things are obviously not going well in the central region of Iraq, but that has little to do with any miscalculations made by the Secretary of Defense (which certainly occurred). As has so often been the case since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, a sizeable Muslim population is squandering yet another opportunity for integration into the modern world.

I just returned from a 6-month mobilization in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and I can't say that I'm overly optimistic about the near-term prospects for stability in the region. Lack of significant progress in that respect has more to do with the collective malevolence of the Iraqi people than anything else.

Bottom line on the editorial: no impact.

There are quite a lot more. I've already had to delete one unhinged comment on my earlier post on the editorial this morning. The left thinks this is monumental - they simply do not understand that the Times publications do not speak for the military. They are essentially trade rags.

A Slip Of The Quip

Mark Steyn positively skewers John "Topper" Kerry in the Chicago Sun-Times. More than that, he exposes the real problem that Kerry and those like him pose for the Democrats.

Whatever he may or may not have intended (and "I was making a joke about how stupid Bush is but I'm the only condescending liberal in America too stupid to tell a Bush-is-stupid joke without blowing it" must rank as one of the all-time lame excuses), what he said fits what too many upscale Dems believe: that America's soldiers are only there because they're too poor and too ill-educated to know any better. That's what they mean when they say "we support our troops." They support them as victims, as children, as potential welfare recipients, but they don't support them as warriors and they don't support the mission.

So their "support" is objectively worthless. The indignant protest that "of course" "we support our troops" isn't support, it's a straddle, and one that emphasizes the Democrats' frivolousness in the post-9/11 world. A serious party would have seen the jihad as a profound foreign-policy challenge they needed to address credibly. They could have found a Tony Blair — a big mushy-leftie pantywaist on health and education and all the other sissy stuff, but a man at ease with the projection of military force in the national interest. But we saw in Connecticut what happens to Democrats who run as Blairites: You get bounced from the ticket. In the 2004 election, instead of coming to terms with it as a national security question, the Democrats looked at the war on terror merely as a Bush wedge issue they needed to neutralize. And so they signed up with the weirdly incoherent narrative of John Kerry — a celebrated anti-war activist suddenly "reporting for duty" as a war hero and claiming that, even though the war was a mistake and his comrades were murderers and rapists, his four months in the Mekong rank as the most epic chapter in the annals of the Republic.

This one is a classic, definitely worth the read. Steyn sees the same thing many of us do: there is a condescension toward the military among those in the Democratic party. In those narratives that emerge from too many Dems, the troops are either dimwits, poor or children incapable of making good decisions. You can see it almost every day in the media somewhere. And people like Joe Lieberman, who do not act that way toward the troops, are not welcome in the Democratic party today. Or at least not in the party that the left fringe wants the Dems to be.

The Biggest News You (N)ever Heard

AJ Strata points to the latest Washington Post/ABC poll and the biggest news that the media isn't reporting. The poll shows a heavy swing to the Republicans on the generic ballot question. One that is well outside the margin of error for the poll. The generic Democrat is only showing a 6% lead among likely voters, not the 15% that has been the case for a while now.

                     Dem      Rep      Other     Neither     Will not      No
                     cand.    cand.      (vol.)    (vol.)      vote (vol.)   opin.
11/4/06  LV      51        45         1           1                *           2 

Now this could be an outlier, it could be caused by a methodological error or any number of other problems. Or it could be a real problem for the Democrats on Tuesday. AJ say this: 

What happened to the increasing generic ballot lead of the dems? I have seen numbers ranging from 11-15% for the Dems. But now comes out a Washington Post/ABC News poll showing only a 6% lead for the dems! It was 14% in the last poll. I would take that as a big turn for the Reps here in the last weekend of this election. The Dems may not losing as much as pollsters are fixing their turnout models - finally.

Update: The liberal media’s denial is almost embarrassing. From this devastating poll the WaPo writes that the Dems are poised to take over both houses of Congress!

Probably the most interesting analysis comes from TKS (Thanks for the pointer, AJ). This alone could spell trouble for the Democrats:

Oh, by the way, the Post was kind enough to give us a bit of history on their generic ballot preference question:

                      Dem      Rep      Other     Neither     Will not      No
                      cand.    cand.     (vol.)    (vol.)       vote (vol.)   opin.

11/6/94           47        42                      5            2             5
10/31/94         48        44                      4            1             3

Yes, on November 6, 1994, among registered voters, ABC News/Washington Post had the Democrats ahead on the generic ballot, 47 percent to 42. So we know just how valuable an indicator it is.

I hadn't known that about the 1994 elections until now. That is a very, very interesting piece of information indeed.

Saddam Hussein Gets Death Sentence

Unlike many of his victims, Saddam Hussein received a trial under the laws of Iraq and has been convicted and sentenced to be hanged. Two other co-defendants were also given death sentences.

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been convicted of crimes against humanity by a Baghdad court and sentenced to death by hanging.

He was found guilty over his role in the killing of 148 people in the mainly Shia town of Dujail in 1982.

His half brother Barzan al-Tikriti was also sentenced to death, as was Iraq's former chief judge Awad Hamed al-Bander

Former vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan got life in jail and three others received 15 year prison terms.

Another co-defendant, Baath party official Mohammed Azawi Ali, was acquitted.

When called to court, Saddam Hussein, dressed in his usual dark suit and white shirt and carrying a Koran, walked to his customary seat and sat down.

Judge Rauf Abdel Rahman ordered Saddam Hussein to stand while he read out the verdict, but the former president defiantly refused to do so and had to be moved from his seat by court attendants.

As the judge began reading the death sentence Saddam Hussein shouted out "Allahu Akbar!" (God is Greatest) and "Long live Iraq! Long live the Iraqi people! Down with the traitors!"

The former leader looked shocked and furious as the sentence was passed, and continued to shout, denouncing the court, the judge and the US-led occupation force in Iraq.

But the BBC's world affairs editor John Simpson said that after his tirade, as he was led away from the courtroom, Saddam Hussein seemed to have a small smile on his face.

According to the reporter, when Saddam left the court he had that little smirk on his face. So the feigned outrage was theater, it would appear.

UPDATE: Others (and there are a LOT of others):  Captain's Quarters, Gateway Pundit,  The Glittering Eye, The Indepundit, rightlinx.com, Tammy Bruce, Confederate Yankee, Power Line, The Mahablog, Patterico's Pontifications, Barking Moonbat Early …, Decision '08,  Peaktalk, The Moderate Voice, Outside The Beltway, The Coalition of the Swilling, Ankle Biting Pundits, Macsmind, Babalu Blog, Don Surber, Gates of Vienna, Squiggler, RightWinged.com, Michelle Malkin, Mensa Barbie Welcomes You, JunkYardBlog, The Dread Pundit Bluto, Chicago Boyz, Scared Monkeys, Instapundit.com, Wizbang,

UPDATE: This one from Gateway Pundit needs to be broken out: Ramsey Clark gets thrown out on his butt for insulting the tribunal.

Before the trial began, one of Saddam's lawyers, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, was ejected from the courtroom after handing the judge a memorandum in which he called the Saddam trial a 'travesty.' Abdul-Rahman pointed to Clark and said in English, 'Get out.'

He also said that Ramsey was the travesty. That pretty well covers it.