Category Archives: The War

Because everybody knows steel can’t melt

Just because, you know, they make steel by burning. Doesn’t mean, you known, they could melt it with burning. Nah.

New combat veterans deserve the attention

J.D. over at Mouth of the Brazos and I traded comments not long ago about how the whole Vietnam War, combat veterans like us, refugees and all, finally are on the shelf. It’s all mothballed news at best now.

I see it in the pitiful sales of my two books on the subject, which seem to have peaked at 164 for the Vietnam War short stories and 26 for the novel. Both have been outpaced by my Civil War novel (194) alone. And this year’s new Civil War history, now at 51 sales, has outrun the Vietnam novel and is on pace to eclipse the short stories as well. Not that my work is the best indicator of a trend, but it is one.

Neither J.D. or I created the political one-year combat tour of the Vietnam War. But neither of us would have liked to be in the position of the all-volunteer combat veterans now. Many of them already have served three or four years in combat assignments and the rise of ISIS suggests they have many more ahead of them. They already match the World War II generation which served for the duration.

All that occurred to me reading this WaPo piece about the 101st Airborne Division emplaning near their barracks at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for a recent flight to Afghanistan. The pundits are still trying to figure out what Wormtongue’s secretive administration intends to do with them. Whether they will guard facilities or patrol. If he even knows himself. He isn’t much of a planner.

It also occurred to me that nowadays when some sergeant addresses a group of soldiers as “ladies and gentlemen,” he’s not trying to be cute, as he was in our day when few women served and none were in combat. He means it quite literally. And both the ladies and the gentlemen deserve all of our attention now.

Rule 5: Joni Ernst

 

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Like her campaign posters said: Mother, Soldier, Former Farmer. Iowa Republican Sen. Elect Joni Ernst, a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard, could be the next Sarah Palin without Palin’s baggage.

Ernst wants to repeal Obamacare, cut taxes, reduce the size of government, restrict abortions, etc. Her election Nov. 9 also helped kill the War On Women meme, though the election took down four Democrat women senators with one more anticipated.

If you dare: the Har Nof butchery

Even the Democrat Progs at the New Republic finally get it:

“…the senselessness and brutality of the synagogue assault, and the otherworldliness of the victims, lays bare the inadequacy of rational political explanations for terror. No doubt the murderers had their grievances (and some perhaps were reasonable), but the butchery in Har Nof shows that any sense of strategy has been overwhelmed by hate. The murder of non-Zionist Torah scholars is an attack on Jews more than Israel, and explaining it requires an understanding of hatred, not of politics.”

Watch a video of aftermath pix to see the butchery of four middle-aged rabbis, ambushed at prayer by two young Arab terrorists, the pictures the news media does not want you to see. If you dare.

Via Israel Matsav

Palestinian terrorists kill four rabbis, one cop

Times of Israel editor David Horovitz reiterates: It’s not going to work.

“For this is the homeland of the Jewish nation, the only place we have ever been sovereign or sought sovereignty. And what needs writing and saying, most especially on a terrible day like today, is that we will not be driven from it.”

The two terrorists, who used knives, axes meat cleavers, and a pistol, were killed by Israeli police at the scene, a synagogue in Jerusalem. Hamas supporters in Gaza danced in the streets and handed out candy to celebrate the bloodshed. Bibi promised retribution.

Austin’s Congregation Agudas Achim held a prayer service at 6 p.m. to mourn the innocent, show solidarity with Israelis and pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

Via Simply Jews.

UPDATE:  Despicable CNN headlined the deaths of the two Palestinians. Then called the synagogue a mosque. Hours later they apologized.

Lurch and his magic hat

Is there a bigger clown in Wormtongue’s administration than John Kerry? Slow Joe Biden, who couldn’t pass an entrance exam for first grade, is a genius compared to Lurch who recently dropped his diplomatic mask to blame the rise of ISIS on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The way some yo-yos  blame Israel for fomenting 9/11 and the jihadi conflict ever since

Which the White House later claimed our Lord Nelson of the River Boats ((He still has the hat!) never said despite multiple reports of it from various news sources. But they always do that, back and fill that is, deny the undeniable. Someone’s got to protect Lurch from himself. And, for a supposed diplomat, he is mighty thin-skinned.

Israel’s defense minister Moshe Yaalon mocked him as “obsessive and messianic.” (He still has the hat!) Yaalon’s remark was made in private but leaked to the Israeli press. Yaalon apologized. What did Lurch do? Like the rest of the Worm’s JV administration, he’s still holding a grudge

Yaalon’s “meeting with Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon last week was all smiles. Asked by the Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth about the Kerry kerfuffle, he replied, ‘We overcame that.’ Or not.

“’Despite the fact that Yaalon’s requests to meet with [Kerry and Biden] were declined over a week ago, Washington waited until the visit ended before making the story public in order to humiliate the Israeli defense minister,’ Ha’aretz reported. Mr. Yaalon is now said to be under an Obama administration ‘quarantine’ until he performs additional penance…”

As Brett Stephens adds, “The good news here is that at least there’s one kind of quarantine this administration believes in. The bad news is that it seems to give more thought to pursuing personal vendettas against allies like Israel than it does to waging effective military campaigns against enemies like ISIS.”

Shockeroo. Bibi, for one, has had enough. After temporarily calling a halt to such things to appease the White House’s attempt to get the Pallies to talk peace, Bibi recently announced the construction of 1,000 more apartments in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital city, the one the State Department and Lurch (he still has the hat!) refuse to recognize as such. The U.S. embassy is in Tel Aviv.

“The French build in Paris, the English build in London, and the Israelis build in Jerusalem. Why come and tell the Jews not to live in Jerusalem? Because it will heat up the atmosphere?” [Bibi] said in an address to parliament. “We are building like we’ve built since the establishment of the state.…Violence is not the result of building in Jerusalem.”

The building will be in the part of the holy city that Kerry (He’s still lying about the hat.)  persists in referring to as East Jerusalem, as if the Jordanians were still occupying it. Which they did, in addition to the Old City, until 1967 when that little Arab misadventure referred to as the Six Day War went down. 1967 just happens to be the year and the borders the Worm wants Israel to return to “with swaps” to make the Pallies sign a peace treaty. They claim “East Jerusalem” as part of their future “state.” Dream on.

So Kerry reacted. He called Bibi. So far Bibi isn’t backing down and the State Department hasn’t released anything about what Lurch told him. Instead, the White House sent out a surrogate to slur Bibi as a “chickenshit.” And then denied doing it. Reminiscent of the way the adolescent Worm plays a middle-schooler in surreptitiously giving political opponents the finger and then denying he did it to the very few journos bold enough to ask.

Maybe Lurch told Bibi about his lucky hat. Nah. The State Department would have officially announced that one for sure.

Via WSJ, Politico & BeldarBlog.

UPDATE: Heh. Guess who got tasked with an additional denial?  Lurch is shocked, shocked, that any chickenshit in the administration would call Bibi names.

Iran on Texas executions: “Pathetic”

“President Hassan Rouhani initially voiced bewilderment at the level of vehement opposition to Texas’s execution of inmates, as his country has put to death nearly twenty times the number of people that Texas has executed since he assumed the presidency last August.

“During that time, Iran has hanged, beheaded, or otherwise killed 936 people for crimes ranging from homosexuality to insulting Muhammad the prophet, while Texas has put to death a total of 47 death row inmates, all by lethal injection. The Iranian president’s confusion gave way to open disdain as he dismissed Texas’s efforts to appear tough on criminals as less than impressive.”

So there, all you oh-so-progressive Texas capital-punishment protestors. Hie thee to Tehran for some sign carrying and slogan shouting. If you dare.

Satire from PreOccupied Territory.