Category Archives: Scribbles

The dead who guard Mount Everest

It’s always interesting the stuff journalists either deliberately cover up or simply choose not to report because it conflicts with the theme or some other aspect of the tale they’ve been assigned to write.

So that when one chooses to focus on those things that are rarely mentioned about a well-known place and also to photograph them, the shock can be profound. As it is here, with the dead mountain climbers whose colorfully-clothed corpses litter the summit and near-summit of Mount Everest.

Who knew? Very few.

Via Instapundit.

The American Trinity

Another good idea from radio talk show host Dennis Prager:

“We should missionize for the American Trinity (Liberty, In God We Trust, E Pluribus Unum) as least as passionately as the left has missionized for its antithesis — Egalitarianism, Secularism and Multiculturalism. Or we will lose America as we have always known it.”

Surely we can defeat this latest collection of isms. It’s that or become the Peoples Republic of Minority Interests, in addition to being a high-tax, high-unemployment welfare state with intrusive bureaucrats at every turn.

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What the Democrat media needs to investigate

Ash to ashes, along with the Horns offense and defense

Another sorry Texas loss last night, on a national stage, supposedly, for those who couldn’t find a better game to watch than the kiddie beat-down Texas suffered, losing to TCU 20-13. It was, well, embarrassing just to watch it. More painful even than the OU slaughter back in October.

Mr. B. watched Ash drive them the length of the field before he threw an interception in the Red Zone. No. 1 son then wisely opted for a video game.  I took several breaks outside in the moonlight because I just knew Ash would throw another one. I never expected McCoy to throw one, too. Sigh.

Barry’s double game with Israel

He’s got their back. Publicly. Privately, he’s intent on making sure Hamas lives to shoot rockets another day. And the easiest way to do that is block any Israeli move to send troops into Gaza to clean out the rat’s nest and the rocket arsenals the air strikes have missed. Probably a lot.

No military campaign in history was won from the air—except the nuke dropped on Japan and that still took a second one. Nukes, we can hope, are off the table here. But when Iran, which already is sending more rockets to Hamas, gets its nukes, well… Now is the time to put Hamas out of the rocket business.

But Barry is making sure Bibi doesn’t do that. So far, Bibi is obeying. I wonder what sword Barry’s holding over Bibi’s neck? And how long it will be before Bibi dodges out of the way?

In World War II, the allies also used the phrase “pinpoint bombing” as the IAF does now. But that’s just public relations. There is no such thing. The only way to get all those rocket arsenals is to go in, preferably on foot, find them and blow them up.

Otherwise, this whole thing will have been essentially for nothing. The Hamas are religious fanatics. What do they care for demolished buildings? The IAF could level the whole city and still not hit all the rocket caches. They have to be rooted out by infantry, with the inevitable deaths and cripplings.

And Jerusalem must be willing to defy Barry and the international screamers to honor their IDF casualties by not stopping until the job is done.

Petraeus: A useful fool

He went to Congress and repeated the lie about the nasty anti-Muslim video being the cause of the Benghazi attacks and murders. His usefulness done, he fell under the infidelity sword Barry’s AG had hanging over his head since before election day.

To at least one observer, retired Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor—a Desert Storm combat veteran whose caustic battle book Warrior’s Rage rants against careerist, non-combat generals like Petraeus—he had it coming.

“Petraeus is a remarkable piece of fiction created and promoted by neocons in government, the media and academia…Petraeus was always a useful fool in the Leninist sense for his political superiors….”

And when the fool was no longer useful, Barry exiled him in permanent shame. Now he seems to be telling a new story in Congressional hearings, setting Democrats and Republicans to arguing about what it means.

There’s a clue to the reason behind Gen. P.’s downfall in old photographs of him in uniform: the “chest candy” (once called “fruit salad” in a more modest epoch) that precedes his smile. He wears every ribbon for every paper-pusher medal he ever received as a staff officer and aide to generals, plus more shiny badges than even Colonel Qaddafi used to wear, if not as large. He did dispense with Daffy Duck’s sash. Who knows, in the egotistical, banana-republic style of today’s generals and admirals, he may have one.

Makes you think he wasn’t really very sure of himself, which may explain why he threw his marriage and his children to the winds for a fling with his nubile biographer. He may well have done it before but wasn’t caught.

Another nice loser pushes us into the fire this time

My mother-in-law said it best, if somewhat sheepishly at using the phrase. Williard, she said, had no balls. No kidding.

That was back in August. I knew she had him pegged after his “me too” approach to Barry’s foreign policy assertions in the third debate. He was just another nice loser, as Thomas Sowell says.

Aided and abetted by obvious Democrat fraud in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago—and possibly Florida’s Gold Coast, as well—which the Republican Party curiously is not protesting. Almost makes you think they  like to lose, they do it so often.

But Sowell, a conservative black economics professor and disciple in his youth of free marketeer Milton Friedman, says their 2012 loss could be disastrous:

“Quite aside from the immediate effects of particular policies, Barack Obama has repeatedly circumvented the laws, including the Constitution of the United States, in ways and on a scale that pushes this nation in the direction of arbitrary one-man rule….

“Obama will now also have more ‘flexibility,’ as he told Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, to transform the international order, where he has long shown that he thinks America has too much power and influence. A nuclear Iran can change that. Forever.

“Have you noticed how many of our enemies in other countries have been rooting for Obama? You or your children may yet have reason to recall that as a bitter memory of a warning sign ignored on Election Day in 2012.”

Let’s hope Sowell is too cynical by half. Hope may be all we have left.

UPDATE:  So much for hope. Barry said he had Israel’s back. He lied. His support for Israel’s self-defense lasted just 48 hours. His public support, that is.

By my reading of the journo tea leaves, he set private guidelines on the first day of U.S. Senate support: i.e. he wants no ground invasion of Gaza to clean out the Hamas rat’s nest and says, BTW, don’t bomb too long, Bibi, ’cause it might endanger the “two-state solution.”

Even W (a veteran who knows military campaigns are not won from the air) waited for a week or two of Gaza ground scouring by the IDF before asking for withdrawal.

UPDATE:  Sure enough, Barry and the Hildabeast pushed Bibi into accepting a ceasefire in which the Brotherhood will decide who the violators are and when. I wonder how much of our tax money Egypt has been promised, not to mention Hamas. Hardly matters. It won’t last a week, if that long, and Bibi’s government may collapse before then.