Retired General Wesley Clark, a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party and in particular Barack Obama, has questioned John McCain’s military credentials. Clark stated that McCain has not held a position with executive responsibility and stated that John McCain never led troops into combat. John McCain has stated that he led the largest fighter squadron in the US Navy but Clark asserts that is not enough to serve as Commander in Chief. Clark stated that McCain never ordered the bombs to drop and that flying in a fighter jet and getting shot down does not qualify him to be president.
Fair enough, but then the question would have to go to what qualifications Barack Obama has to lead the country as the President. Clark answered that Obama had been a community organizer in Chicago (and all those communities are boarded up) and that he also served eight years in the Ilinois Legislature and that Barry was running on strength and character.
Notice nowhere in there did Clark state that Obama had any military service. If Clark wants to discuss the quality of military service and whether or not it qualifies one to lead the country then certainly he needs to look at a person who has NO military experience and acknowledge that since Obama never served he is even less qualified than than McCain to serve as Commander in Chief. The quality of McCain’s service is being assailed by Clark but McCain has the military service and has forgotten more about the military than Obama will ever know. I really don’t think this is a battle that Clark and the Obama campaign wants to pick since McCain has more military knowledge in his little finger than Obama has in his entire body. If they want to contrast qualities to serve as Commander in Chief then I think Obama is going to lose. Perhaps John McCain never led troops is some fashion that satisfies Clark but Obama never led troops period.
As for the idea that serving as a community organizer somehow qualifies as executive experience, Clark needs to take a drug test because only a drug addled brain could make such a claim. It is absolutely outrageous that Wesley Clark could dismiss John McCain’s military service and all his years of public service as insufficient experience to run this country but in the same breath claim that serving as a community organizer and spending eight years in a state legislature qualifies Obama. What is even more amazing is that Clark said that Obama is running on his strength of character and his good judgment.
Well hell, I feel a lot better now. Obama is running on strength of character and good judgment. Whew, for a minute I was worried he might not have actual experience that would qualify him to lead the country.
I guess this good judgment is all relative. I mean, was it good judgment for Obama to attend a church that espoused hatred for America and blamed white people for all the ills of society and to stay there for twenty years? Was it good judgment for Obama to work a shady deal with Tony Rezko (which Obama admitted was bad judgment), and to keep company with a known domestic terrorist? Obama has said “[fill in name] is not the person I knew so many times it is a soundbite by itself. If good judgment is the standard by which we establish executive experience then it seems as if Barry Obama fails miserably.
Obama has some very shady associations and some of the tactics he has used to gain political office (at all levels) are suspect and they leave one to question this strength of character Clark claims qualifies him to be president.
Wesley Clark served honorably in Vietnam and was wounded in the line of duty. I would never disparage his service to this country because I have more tact and honor than he does (though I have questioned some of the things he has done while in the service and on the campaign trail). His service gives him great insight but he is not qualified to judge the quality and character of John McCain’s service. It is tactless and dishonorable to do so. I would venture to say that McCain’s time in a POW camp allowed him to demonstrate more character and sound judgment than Obama ever has.
General Clark, you certainly have a right to bring up McCain’s military service and to claim it does not pass your muster as qualification to serve as Commander in Chief but when you are doing that please keep in mind that Obama has NO military experience and that fact, by default, makes him less qualified than McCain to serve as Commander in Chief.
The empty suit has surrogates using an empty resume to show experience. Well, at least he still has good judgment and strength of character….Not.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.
In the gunner’s hatch of a Humvee driving through Baghdad on December 4, 2006, Private McGinnis saw a grenade fly through the hatch, rolling to where it could have injured the four other soldiers inside. In easy position to leap and save himself, McGinnis instead jumped to cover the grenade with his body to shield his comrades.
The four men he saved were all at the White House yesterday to pay their respects. They and his parents, Thomas and Romayne McGinnis, knew Ross as one who, at 137 pounds and six feet tall, had barely outgrown his boyhood when he joined the Army on his 17th birthday, the first day he was eligible to enlist. The Knox, Pennsylvania native was known not to take things too seriously, the soldiers said – and yet in an instant he displayed the self-sacrifice that defines heroism in battle across generations. Although he didn’t grow while he was in the Army, “he seemed to stand a lot taller,” his father said. “He was a man.”
President Bush just awarded McGinnis a posthumous Medal of Honor.
For more on my thoughts about those who willingly face certain death to save their comrades, go here.
In honor of Tom Harkin’s most recent attack on American troops, John Hawkins, at Right Wing News, has assembled a fine collection of quotations from the Statists, in which they express their deep, abiding feelings for those Americans who put their lives on the line daily to protect us. Some examples:
“Through every Abu aib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform….We pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?…[T]he recent NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary — oops sorry, volunteer — force that thinks it is doing the dirty work.” — Washington Post blogger, William Arkin
[snip]
“Real freedom will come when [U.S.] soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors.” — Warren County Community College adjunct English professor, John Daly
[snip]
“In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation. It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you, there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.” — Seymour Hersh
A teenager learned it is not a good idea to try to rob a former U.S. Marine at knifepoint, no matter how old he is.
Santa Rosa police Sgt. Steve Bair said an 84-year-old man was walking on Fourth Street with a grocery bag in each arm when the boy approached him with a large knife at about 2 p.m. Wednesday.
“Old man, give me your wallet or I’ll cut you,” the boy said.
The man said he was a former Marine who fought in three wars and had been threatened with knives and bayonets before.
The 84-year-old put his bags on the ground and told the boy that if he stepped closer he would be sorry. When the boy stepped closer, the man kicked him in the groin, knocking the youth to the sidewalk.
The ex-Marine picked up his grocery bags and walked home, leaving the teen doubled over.
Can’t you just see it in your mind — some weeny little punk approaching an apparently frail little old man, only to be completely destroyed?
Update: The astute readers at NewsBusters want to know how a 39 year old veteran managed to serve in the military under President Reagan. Good question.
Final Update: Another reader noted:
People, I don’t want to nit pick but the article is NOT saying he served under Reagan, every Pres “SINCE” Reagan, meaning not including, meaning all pres after Reagan.
I think this is exactly right. I don’t want this article to be something that takes exception with the training officer as I give him the benefit of the doubt. My issue is with the Sun Times. The officer may have served under Reagan in his first year or signed up under George H. Bush. Hard to tell.
In any event the focus on whether or not the soldier served under President Reagan takes away from my point. I believe the Sun Times injected bias into the article by using Vice President Cheney’s visit as an opportunity to paint him as a person who really couldn’t care less about the troops. They frame his visit as a pep rally using commonly repeated liberal talking points. All of that is completely out of place with reporting about the event.
The Sun Times article may as well have been written by MoveOn.org.
You seriously have to question why the mainstream media feels compelled to hire activists to pose as reporters in their precious newspapers.
I contemplated taking the higher road in this article and setting emotion aside. But I feel compelled to call it like it is. Why should I or anyone else sit idly by while feckless reporters such as Abdon M. Pallash of the [tag]Chicago Sun Times[tag] use the power of an irresponsible press to push their one sided agenda as if it was news?
Here’s how I see it. Vice President Cheney visited the Great Lakes Naval base last night to give a graduation speech to 4000 sailors who have decided that they wanted to be part of the greatest military in the world despite the fanatical antics of anti-war Berkeley types and their supporters in the press. Given that American soldiers have repeatedly been branded by the mainstream media in the false context of cold blooded killers, who are depressed and too stupid to get a real job you would imagine that these recruits decided the press was full of it and that a military career was the path they wanted to take anyway.
So rather than get a quote from any of the many recruiters that were probably honored to have Vice President Cheney at the ceremony Abdon M. Pallash of the Chicago Sun Times decided to find the one veteran that would give the paper its fill of Cheney Derangement Syndrome.
Marcus Perkins, 39, of Colorado Springs, a Naval training officer who has served five tours in Iraq, was not impressed.
"It took him eight years to get here … at the end of his tenure," Perkins said of Cheney. "This was more like a pep rally. He could have sent an e-mail for that."
Perkins, who has served under every president since Ronald Reagan, said he had doubts about the War in Iraq.
“We went to Iraq in ’03 looking for mass destruction,” he said. “We haven’t found them in five years, I’ve been all over that country, north, south, east and west looking under every rock, every tree and every bunker. We own the place and we still haven’t found them. The longer we stay in Iraq, the more training it gives to terrorists to learn how we fight. It’s a training ground: ‘You want to learn how to fight Americans? Go to Iraq. Learn how they fight. Learn their tactics. Then take that knowledge back to your camps.’”
This is one of those things that Ann Coulter spoke about. The left thinks we can’t be critical of their actions if only they commit them under the cover of soldiers that speak out against President Bush, Vice President Cheney or the War in Iraq.
Wrong.
I don’t take exception with what Perkins says; he has the right to speak his mind. I do however find it strange that these guys seem to pop up at the most opportune of moments for the liberal press.
I take exception with the well established fact that the opinions of the type as spoken by Marc Perkins are just about the only opinions that many outlets in the mainstream media care to reprint in their yellow tinged pages. When is the last time you opened up the New York Times and read a front page article that had any positive comments from anyone that reports from inside Iraq? Reporters such as Michael Yon who has covered this war on multiple fronts and been compared to the heroic journalist Ernie Pyle.
The lack of balance being practiced by previously reputable institutions in today’s media world shows an astounding deficit of professional conduct and journalistic leadership.
The Navy would not let ABC7 speak with the youngsters in light blue, and their discipline prevented any from stepping out of line to speak. But the officers responsible for their training reflected on the ceremony and what America’s newest sailors would be thinking.
"The biggest thing to understand is there is something bigger," said Tom Lestikow, Navy chief petty officer.
"To hear him speak is something that I’ll never another get, and I know the rest will not or the recruits," said Elita Hans, Navy chief petty officer.
At least they managed to get something positive in. But then again, the insinuation is "psss, the troops applauded but we all know they wanted to speak out against the war but the Navy wouldn’t let them."
Not all newspapers covered Vice President Cheney’s visit in the same light as the Chicago Sun Times. The Chicago Tribune reported it without opining as did the local Daily Herald. So there is hope.
Nonetheless the Sun Times article is already meandering its way through the left side of the internet. I imagine this was the point of Pallash’s article in the first place.
“Hey, you sank my battleship!” Okay, it wasn’t a battleship, it was a dead satellite that was going to fall to earth carrying frozen toxic fuel called hydrazine gas.
What is amazing about this is that the satellite was traveling at a speed of 17,000 miles per hour with a 1,000 pounds of hydrazine gas and the ballistic missile hit it…..on the first try. Even more amazing is officials claim that they are almost certain the missile hit the fuel tank. Check it out via the Reuters Video:
Of course, China and Russia are decrying “foul play” and accusing the United States of using the satellite as an excuse to flex her muscles. I say so what - the United States needs to flex that muscle, she’s been walked on for far too long now.
In a world where communists are aligning themselves with terrorists to get rid of the west, or more to the point, the freedom of the west, flexing a little muscle can’t hurt.
First, the NY Times announced that American troops were crazed killers. Next, it announced that they were crazed homeless people. The latest salvo the media has launched at the troops to counteract the Surge’s success is that they’re so crazy they are killing themselves in droves:
As many as 121 Army soldiers committed suicide in 2007, a jump of some 20 percent over the year before, officials said Thursday.
The rise comes despite numerous efforts to improve the mental health of a force stressed by a longer-than-expected war in Iraq and the most deadly year yet in the now six-year-old conflict in Afghanistan.
Internal briefing papers prepared by the Army’s psychiatry consultant early this month show there were 89 confirmed suicides last year and 32 deaths that are suspected suicides and still under investigation.
More than a quarter of those — about 34 — happened during deployments in Iraq, an increase from 27 in Iraq the previous year, according to the preliminary figures.
The report also shows an increase in the number of attempted suicides and self-injuries — some 2,100 in 2007 compared to less than 1,500 the previous year and less than 500 in 2002.
The total of 121 suicides last year, if all are confirmed, would be more than double the 52 reported in 2001, before the Sept. 11 attacks prompted the Bush administration to launch its counter-terror war. The toll was 87 by 2005 and 102 in 2006.
I’m not quarreling with the numbers for last year, which equal 121 individual tragedies. Nor do I challenge the fact that the number of suicides has been rising. However, I do have a problem with the absence of context. The story makes it appear as if there’s an ever escalating suicide epidemic in the military that sets it apart from the general American population. That is, the article forgot to compare these numbers to society at large. Significantly, it also doesn’t distinguish between active duty, guard and reserve (502,790, 346,288 and 189,975, all of which add up to 1,039,053). As always context makes things interesting.
Here are some statistics regarding suicide in America as of 2004:
* Total number of troops, active, guard and reserve: 1,039,053
* Total number of active and guard troops (not counting reserve): 849,078
* Total active duty was 502,790
* Men make up 86% of active duty soldiers (430,000).
* Whites made up 61.6 percent of active duty soldiers, or almost 310,000 troops.
I’m not able to find the average age for the Army (I don’t know why), but I’m willing to bet it hovers between 19-24, with the weight at about 20.
Okay, bear with me here, and correct me when I go wildly wrong, but I think one can make a few predictions about what the suicide rate probably would be in the military if it hewed to general American statistics. First of all, if there are an average of 11.05 suicides for every 100,000 people, out of the total army strength of 1,039,053, one would expect a little more than 110 suicides, which is remarkably close to the 121 committed last year. And given that the Army is disproportionately male and that the rate of suicides is disproportionately high amongst men, one would have to expect that the average of 11.05 suicides would have to skew upwards to account for both of these disproportionalities. You then have to add in the fact that the average male soldiers age also places him in one of the high risk suicide categories (youths 15-24). After doing all that, you’d have to slide the rate down a little to reflect the fact that some of these men are minorities, who have lower suicides rates, but that kind of math is utterly beyond me. Any of you who can do math should feel free to chime in here and tell me by how much the suicide rate increases when you have a mostly white, young, male demographic in the military, and mostly white, young, male suicides in the general population. Complicated math or not, my rule of thumb tells me that, compared to the general population, the rate of Army suicides is not out of the ordinary.
Even if one ratchets the numbers down from all troops and looks only at active duty and guard troops, the result isn’t that different. The total number of active and guard troops, as I noted above, is 849,078. That means that you could expect an average of 94 suicides per year. And then again, you’d have to do the higher math of factoring in all those young, white men and then factoring down slightly for minorities (who are 38.4$ of active duty troops and 25.5% of guard troops).
Things do get more tragic if one really rachets the numbers down to focus only on active duty suicides, because that would mean a base suicide rate that’s twice the national average. Even adjusting that for the young, white male military population probably wouldn’t offset the differential. I can’t find the report on which this news story is based, though, so I really don’t know which Army population is at issue.
In any event, as you think about all of this, consider that the report says that there are only 89 confirmed suicides, with 32 still being investigated. It’s certain that some of those being investigated will prove also to be suicides, but it’s anything but certain that all will.
Bottom line: It’s all very complicated for a math-phobe like me but, unless one is sure that the numbers in the article apply only to active duty troops, I’m fairly confident that the numbers, while showing 121 personal tragedies, do not prove that our American troops are killing themselves like flies. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.) In other words, while the news report, to the extent it gives numbers directly from military sources, is informative, to the extent the report makes it appear that troops are dying in droves as compared to other Americans, it’s misleading.
A spate of bombings, including a suicide attack on Iraqi soldiers attending an Army Day ceremony, rocked Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 14 people and wounding 32, Iraqi officials said.
The suicide attack on the soldiers took place in Karrada neighbourhood as gifts were being handed out to troops by a civilian organisation on Army Day, an official holiday marking the 87th anniversary of the founding of the army.
:
US military spokesman Lieutenant Steven Stover said that according to eyewitnesses two Iraqi soldiers were killed when they flung themselves onto the attacker as he detonated his explosives.
“They absorbed some of the blast. They saved a lot of lives,” Stover told AFP.
“The selfless sacrifice of the two Iraqi (soldiers) should not be forgotten,” he said in a later statement. “These two Iraqi martyrs gave their lives so that others might live.”
I hope their sacrifice is remembered appropriately and with high honors. Not sure how…I just wouldn’t want it to be ignored altogether. That would send a pretty crappy message.
This entire situation occasionally privileges us to see the very worst humanity has to offer — at which time, I note, there is no shortage of politically agitated factions, here stateside, invested in making sure everyone knows about it. Well, equally often if not moreso, it also shows us the very best of human behavior as well. So guess what?
What say you New York Times. How about run this on the front page for an entire month in a row.
Editor & Publisher editor Greg Mitchell is hot on the trail with a year long E&P tribute to local newspapers that are covering “the shocking number of suicides among U.S. troops in Iraq or after they return home”. At first I figured this was a strange tribute to be making, especially considering that Mitchell didn’t bother to present any facts when implying that the war is to blame for such tragic deaths. Instead Mitchell follows it up with an AP story about the apparent suicide of Army veteran Tyler Curtis and presents this incident as further proof to bolster the claim.
NEW YORK For the past year, E&P has paid tribute to local newspapers, sometimes quite small ones, that have covered extremely sensitive and revealing stories that previously gained little attention: the shocking number of suicides among U.S. troops in Iraq or after they return home. Recent studies suggest the figure, once in the hundreds, is now in the thousands.
The tragic circumstances surrounding a suicide, whether it be in the military or in civilian life is one that must be discussed carefully and within context. Especially if that death is to be used to further a thesis or to infer that suicides among combat veterans is proportionally greater than that of the U.S. national average for civilians in the same age and gender group. Yet Editor & Publisher does anything but present the death of Tyler Ray Curtis outside the context of their predisposed notion, completely without supporting facts, anecdotal evidence or even the slightest amount of data that would support the claim. As such it appears that E&P is merely using the death of Mr. Curtis as an opportunistic political prop to fan the flames of anti-war emotions.
Even if Editor and Publisher were to publish numbers that showed an increase in the number of suicides among combat veterans it would lack one key statistic; causality. The liberal media loves to find blame that fits neatly into their predisposed and heavily jaundiced bias. Unfortunately that blame is all too often cast without any basis in fact other than the anecdotal musings of like minded interlopers. They want to believe their perspective so much that they haven’t even bothered to look at themselves for any culpability in attempting to demoralize the troops. Does Mitchell believe that his constant barrage of anti-war publications is some sort or morale booster? When pondering why a soldier might be depressed did Mitchell or any of his compatriots in the press think that perhaps they might have had something to do with that state of mind? Not likely.
Never has the mainstream media, the democrats in Congress or the liberal party base been able to convince the troops that they were appreciated for putting their lives on the line. They have been slandered with fabrications, attacked with lies and undermined with out of context anecdotes for years on end. Despite all of that Greg Mitchell and friends have now discovered an urgent need to tie the war to an increased level of suicide. After all, “it’s for the troops”. Spare me.
This narrative has been playing out in the press for a while now. Case in point is the recently published CBS News Investigation titled “Suicide Epidemic Among Veterans“.
(CBS) They are the casualties of wars you don’t often hear about - soldiers who die of self-inflicted wounds. Little is known about the true scope of suicides among those who have served in the military.
But a five-month CBS News investigation discovered data that shows a startling rate of suicide, what some call a hidden epidemic, Chief Investigative Reporter Armen Keteyian reports exclusively.
It took 5 months for CBS to compile and interpret the statistics that told the story from a predetermined perspective. Yet it took less than one day for others to point out that CBS misrepresented the numbers by using erroneous comparisons. (H/T Wired.com)
Danger Room links to a CBS story on an allegedly disproportional number of suicides by veterans. Supporting an anecdotal piece on veterans of the current war, CBS pulls up statistics showing that veterans committed suicide at twice the rate of the average population.
Shock! Horror!
No.
In the US, male veterans outnumber female veterans 13:1. Since four times as many males as women commit suicide in the general population, you’d expect the rate among veterans to be close to the rate among males - 17.6/100,000 per year in 2002 - and indeed it is, if the CBS raw numbers are correct.
CBS also makes an issue of the fact that suicide rates among younger veterans exceed that of the general population by an even bigger margin - but again, that’s what you’d expect, because in that age group, the male-to-female imbalance in suicide rates is greatest, almost six to one.
It would seem, that once the suicide rate is adjusted to reflect the demographics of the veterans population that the sucide rate among 20-24 year olds is statistically indistinguishable from that of the general population.
The story could end there but singular data points are rarely useful in analysis. One could argue that as suicides among 20-24 year olds in 2004 only totaled 2,607 then an “epidemic” of suicides among veterans in that age group could easily have skewed the data for males and white males making the veterans suicide rate look the same as the non-veteran rate of the same population.
If I am correct, then the suicide rate among the 20-24 year old male cohort, which I am using as a proxy for veterans, should remain similar over time. If CBS is correct, there should be a rise in that rate in 2004. If we go back about 30 years this is what we see:
Statistically, the suicide rate for this age cohort has remained unchanged since at least 1999.
But facts don’t seem to matter to the Greg Mitchell’s of the media world. They are continuing to plod along on their merry narrative even though the conclusions that they are continuing to peddle have been seriously questioned.
Rather than prey on the emotions of family members at a time of unimaginable grief perhaps these vampires in the press could start criticizing their own. Start with Franklin Foer’s false Baghdad Diarist series at The New Republic and work your way backward until you get to a point where you can make amends by adding objectivity to your stories. Better yet, do everyone a favor and take yourselves out of the picture completely. You can start by publishing the works of people who aren’t looking to find fault in everything the U.S. military is accomplishing such as Michael Yon and Jeff Emanuel.
When the mainstream media starts to actually cover both sides of the war I will become a convert in believing that the ship has righted itself. But that won’t happen, especially with an election on the horizon.
Every death is a tragedy. Losing those who fought so bravely to protect others is something that can not be brushed aside. But attempting to capitalize on these deaths for political points is beyond the pale; the lowest of all lows. These people never cared enough to help boost morale or honor their service when they were alive and it is wrong to pretend to care now that they are dead. Where is the shame?
As stated in my headline, the AP is reporting the Army’s desertion rate is higher now than it was in 1980.
The MSM salivates every time it gets a story like this. The reality is, as reported in the middle of the article, nine out of one thousand soldiers go AWOL. That is not that many and one must expect that some would go AWOL for a variety of reasons.
Once again, the MSM runs a non-story as a huge story. This is so typical and I for one have grown bored. When are they going to understand that people are more interested in the good news and that their saturation of negative news is beginning to fall on deaf ears.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
You seriously have to question why the mainstream media feels compelled to hire activists to pose as reporters in their precious newspapers. 