Monthly Archives: February 2007

Let Arkin pick on his peers

Not a 21-year-old soldier, says Don Surber, in this good rebuttal piece on why the WaPo’s Arkin is a mouse not a man.

"Arkin is a media bubble boy. He does not realize how wrong he was for dumping on a soldier in Iraq who dared — when asked directly — say, hey, you protesters are not helpful."

Arkin is no journalist, no Ernie Pyle, just a flaming lefty who likes nothing better than to sneer, call names ("mercenaries!") and tell other people what to do and think. People like him are one reason why the Left is so marginalized in America, even if they do have the big megaphone of the media, which, increasingly, is despised for providing it.

Instead of listening to the WaPo’s resident douchebag, help the troops do one nice thing for Afghanistan and Iraq.

UPDATE  Malarky Arkin is still at it, this time complaining that he’s being demonized. He, he maintains, is the true martyr here. Tough cookies, Malarky. Looking at his thumbnail picture, I realize that he really needs shave. Yeah, I know, it’s fashionable to look like a bum. 

The mind is a terrible thing…

…to waste, as they say, although I was thinking of another angle. How many gigabytes, etc., in there in that impossibly wet architecture? An idea I got here from Ligneus at Spiced Sass. I tried registering to leave a comment but the site won’t allow it, for some reason. Perhaps he has turned the function off. That would be nice, to turn the mind off. He calls his post Mental Bric A Brac. Reminds me of last night’s reading to Mr. Boy from the last third of "The Goblet of Fire." Dumbledore plucks his intrusive, older memories out of his temple on long, silvery threads with his wand and puts them in the Pensieve for storage–in 3-D, full-color with audio. Wish I could do that. One of the hard things about aging is that delightful current memories take a backseat to more problematical older ones which increasingly march forward as the years go by. Pity, really. Lots of clutter in there from growing up a military brat and moving about every two years, sometimes more often. Add in combat in a war, too many love relationships before, during and after, and it all gets very murky, stimulating odd night dreams and off-topic daydreams. As I say, the mind is a terrible thing…

Via Just Muttering by Myself 

Vince, Vince

There’s always next year (i.e. this year) for Diet Pepsi’s NFL Rookie of the Year. VY also won the AP’s Offensive Rookie of the Year last month. He’s already got more running yards (552) than the two QBs in Sunday’s Super Bowl combined (Manning, 36; Grossman, 2). If he stays healthy and the Titans grow, he could be there this time next year, says the daily’s Kirk Bohls. Oh, yeah.

Today’s pretty picture

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 Barred Spiral Galaxy. Just 70 million light years away. Why, you could make it a weekend/HST NASA

Nice review

More or less. Well, just four words, actually. But coming from Marc Leepson, arts editor of the Vietnam Veterans of America’s VVA Veteran magazine, they were aimed right at the target audience: Vietnam vets.

"…a first-rate collection…" he wrote in the January/February issue of my 16-story "Leaving the Alamo, Texas Stories After Vietnam," which is thumbnailed over on the sidebar, at the top, courtesy of Amazon.com. Hasn’t produced a sale yet, but after being ignored by POD-dy Mouth the print-on-demand world’s most famous reviewer, it was a lift, anyhow. Try it, you might like it. Professionally-edited and just a hair over $8. How can you miss?

UPDATE  Well, it was just over $8, then the print-on-demand house, Lulu, repriced it, so now it’s $10.78. Still a bargain, I think.

WaPo reporter drops mask

William M. Arkin is the WashPost’s homeland security writer. What a hoot. Then they gave him a blog and he decided to let loose his anti-American spleen on the troops: 

"Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order…[recent report troops are upset about opposition to the war is] an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary – oops sorry, volunteer – force that thinks it is doing the dirty work."

So the elite blogosphere went ballistic, here, here and especially these milblogs here and, for the profane version, here. Actually, I think we owe Billy a round of applause. He’s dropped the "oh-so-objective" pose he learned to do in journalism school, and told us what he and his media buds really think. And it’s ugly and sneering which, of course, fully explains their negative reporting on the war and the military itself. Something tells me your editors won’t like being exposed like this, Bill. Write when you find another job.

UPDATE  Arkin had already made a name as the Greenpeace alum, far left, anti-military activist  "military affairs" writer for the LATimes. So maybe his WaPo editors won’t care after all. They knew what they were getting when they hired him.

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We surrender

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