The Coffeespy

IraqSlogger works some magic with its headline:

Well, that's interesting.  I suppose you could chalk it up to a bad source and pretend that fact checking is a mythical standard, but when you actually read the story at IraqSlogger you find no mention of failures on all benchmarks.  What you'll read is how they haven't been met, but as "Project Management for Dummies" will tell you, benchmarks are marks of progress, not pass/fail barriers.

I declare this a Joker level boner.  And the Jooker doesn't like it when others horn in on his boner territory…

I'm sure IraqSlogger is already looking into outdoing it's own boner.  I can't wait to see their "new adventure in crime!"

Update: LA Times calls measuring performance a "costly blunder."  The unspoken suggestion is to follow the Democratic congress' policy of not measuring anything and simply speaking out of one's ass on any given subject.  Don't worry, if we just leave Iraq and forget about this whole terrorism thing, it'll go away.  Lord knows we shouldn't be checking our work.

Stan "the Man" Lee responds to the LA Times:

Thank you, Stan, for that sparkling commentary.

In a ridiculously worded story from the LA Times (go figure), the call for John Walker Lindh’s sentence to be reduced has gone out.  The preference is to reduce his 20 year term to a pardon.  I’m sure, if pardoned, there won’t be any law suits using the pardon as “proof” of his “raw deal.”  From the LA Times:

The parents of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, who is serving a 20-year sentence in the country’s toughest federal prison, stepped up their request for his release Wednesday by noting that the first U.S. war crimes tribunal in Guantanamo Bay recently resulted in a sentence of nine months for an Australian detainee held in U.S. custody since late 2001.

“John has been in prison for more than five years,” said his mother, Marilyn Walker. “It’s time for him to come home.”

Sorry, it’s not time for him to come home.  It’s not that time for another 15 years.  Lindh is being billed as a ‘victim of the times.’  To use a British legal term: bollox.  Why?  Let’s take a look:

Lindh, who grew up in Marin County, left the United States when he was 18 to study Islam. In 2001 he was in Afghanistan, serving as a soldier for the Taliban army fighting the Northern Alliance.

Soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he was taken into custody by U.S. military forces and returned to the United States; the government contended that he had been trained at an Al Qaeda terrorist camp.

In a plea deal with federal prosecutors in 2002, all terrorism charges were dropped. In the end, Lindh pleaded guilty to being a soldier for the Taliban and carrying a rifle and hand grenades while doing so.

Hmm… American decides to join the Taliban, fight for Muslim fundamentalism, and gets captured by American forces in a war where the two groups are killing each other.  Lindh pleads guilty.  Could he have appealed?  Yes.  Did he have to plead guilty?  No.  Any legal question here?  No.  Just an ephemeral ‘feeling of the time’ and ‘American sentiment had turned’ garbage.

Want an example?  Back to the LA Times:

He was immediately branded the American Taliban by the tabloids, at a time when many Americans wanted revenge for the terrorist attacks.

He was American.  He was Taliban.  I don’t see where he was branded anything.  That’s what he was.  Only now, with the benefit of five years of constant liberal meme inundation, can a paper get away with saying poor Lindh is the victim.

He made the choice to travel across the globe.  He made the choice to become a Muslim fundamentalist.  He made the choice to not only be a man of that faith, but also pick up a rifle and head to war.  He made the choice to stay when his countrymen (no offense to my fellow Americans) arrived to kick in the door.  He made the choice to plead guilty.  The “I was naive” excuse doesn’t get criminals off the hook.  He should count his blessings he wasn’t shot as a traitor.

Army policy is designed largely by Army civilians, lifelong bureaucrats who learn the ins and outs of how to play their officers.  The policy is put before an officer who signs or sends it back for a rewrite.  Officers spend a year or two in any given position.

This isn’t a news flash, but the bureaucrats are failing the soldiers.  From an Early Birded story in the Los Angeles Times:

A sniper shot Sgt. Joe Baumann on a Baghdad street in April 2005. The AK-47 round ripped through his midsection, ricocheted off his Kevlar vest and shredded his abdomen.

The bullet also ignited tracer rounds in the magazine on his belt, setting Baumann on fire.

Almost two years later, the 22-year-old California National Guard soldier from Petaluma, walks with a cane, suffers from back problems and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder that keeps him from sleeping and holding a job.

…

The question pending before a military review board at this big Army post south of Tacoma is whether to grant Baumann a military disability pension and healthcare or simply cut him an $8,000 check for his troubles.

…

In a preliminary ruling last month, the three-officer Physical Evaluation Board that is reviewing Baumann’s case decided for the severance check, rating his disability at only 20% and characterizing his post-traumatic stress disorder as “anxiety disorder and depression.”

If he accepted the $8,000, Baumann still would be eligible to apply for Veterans Affairs disability benefits. But VA benefits do not include retirement pay, family healthcare, and military post exchange and commissary privileges. In what many soldiers regard as the ultimate Catch-22, if he were accepted by the VA, he would have to pay the Army’s $8,000 back.

Thanks for taking a bullet, here’s $8k.  Have a nice day.

Fire these people.  Fire all of them.  The reason the bureaucracy is allowed to be this corrupt and careless is because they are secure in their jobs.  It takes a crowbar to get these people out of their positions.  That needs to change.

Remember when they were called public servants?

The media will try to play this up as the administration failing the soldiers.  It’s not.  It’s the bureaucrats failing to alter poor policies and leaving the soldiers out in the cold.  By the way, these policy-making bureaucrats are based largely in DC, where registered Democrat(ic)s outnumber the Republicans 9 to 1.

Rosa Brooks, who could bludgeon a man to death with her stack of degrees, wrote a piece for the LA Times that the Early Bird covered this morning concerning the horrible situation of the military being more Republican than Democrat.  Unfortunately, it’s long on paranoia, obfuscated in seemingly-relevant-but-not statistics, and seeks to remove citizens’ rights from military members.

Says Ms. Brooks:

The drop in Republican Party identification among active-duty personnel is a sharp reversal of a 30-year trend toward the “Republicanization” of the U.S. military, and it could mark a sea change in the nature of the military — and the nature of public debates about national security issues.

Ms. Brooks goes on to support her “Republicanization” theory citing base closures and strategic realignment of training programs:

By the late 1990s, more than 40% of all ROTC programs were in the South — mainly at state universities — though the South is home to fewer than 30% of the nation’s college students. Similar patterns in base closures have meant that disproportionate numbers of military personnel are now stationed at bases in the South and Southwest.

Well crap, we better either ship in 10% more college students to the South or demand places that won’t allow ROTC, like San Francisco, restart their programs!  What Ms. Brooks fails to address are the number of people who were Democratic, Republican or undecided when they entered the service and how many of them changed after experiencing the service.  She assumes that the intake of military members has been shifted to Republican strongholds and then alleges that this has been done in order to convert the military to a Republican entity.  Allegations based on assumptions aren’t that great of a base to stand on.

But this last part is great:

The partial de-Republicanization of the military is a hopeful sign — and not just for Democrats. A politicized military presents a threat to democratic ideals of civilian control. Over the last 30 years, the Republicanization of the military also has had a deeply distorting effect on public debates about national security, making it almost impossible to question Republican national security policies without being labeled “anti-military.”

I entered the service as a liberal patriot from Michigan.  As I experienced the policies effecting the military, various peoples from around the world, and served in three different combat zones, I developed a decidedly different perception.  In my experience, which is much more first-hand than Ms. Brooks’ fact-finding tour of the web, people become more conservative once they realize that there are much more serious threats in the world than bad publicity.  In fact, if military service was a requirement there would be far more conservative citizens.  It’s hard to retain a liberal mindset in the face of a violent enemy that cares nothing of your higher ideals.

The hard truth is that military service will cause people to have similar experiences.  Similar experiences often lead to similar outlooks.  Since military folks, more than most, experience service to their nation and have a variety of interactions with foreign cultures, isn’t it telling that most are conservative in their views?  Even though declared Republicans may have decreased, I’d be surprised if there was a corresponding drop in those considering themselves conservative.  And I also notice what is glaringly omitted: a rise in declared Democrats.