baldilocks

A Commander-in-Chief Visits the Fort Hood Wounded

The only thing is that it isn't the current Commander-in-Chief.

FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) ― Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, visited wounded soldiers and their families near the site of the worst mass shooting on an Army post in the United States.

The Bushes made their private visit to Fort Hood's Darnall Army Medical Center on Friday night. Bush spokesman David Sherzer said in an e-mail that the couple thanked Fort Hood's military leaders and hospital staff for the "amazing care they are providing."

Instead of comforting his troops, President Obama decided to spend the weekend at Camp David.

11:25AM THE PRESIDENT addresses the House Democratic Caucus - Cannon House Office Building

2:30PM THE PRESIDENT makes a statement to the press on Health Care - Rose Garden

2:45PM THE PRESIDENT and THE FIRST LADY depart The White House en route Camp David - South Lawn

Even if one were inclined to give President Obama the benefit of the doubt and assume that he had asked Former President Bush and Mrs. Bush to visit the wounded soldiers because the Bushes live in Texas, why would he ask this of his predecessor and not get on Air Force One overnight to get down there himself? 

Why would he not go to be with those whom he is charged to send into battle and who were so horrifyingly betrayed by one of their own?

Because he doesn't give a rat's backside, that's why not.

I bet Former President Bush told him to get his narrow a** down there stat and he ignored it.  No awards were being given to him so he said "Screw all that blood and drama.  I'll be chillin at Camp David."

He. Does. Not. Care.

(Thanks to Hot Air and Riehl World)

Interview (UPDATED)

I'll be on The Ed Morrissey Show today at 12:15 PST to talk about Tale of the Tigers.  Go to Hot Air or to UStream.

UPDATE: (12:10) On in Five!

UPDATE: If you missed the show, you can listen here. Start at 18:40.

Backstabber (UPDATED)

Well.  I had planned to keep the Tale of the Tigers post at the top for a couple of days longer but yesterday’s Fort Hood, Texas murder spree perpetrated by Major Nidal Malik Hasan demands commentary—especially since I sort of predicted that such events would occur and are, in fact, being encouraged by the president’s vacillation regarding Afghanistan.

Hasan, 39 and a military psychiatrist whose medical education was paid for by the U.S. Army of which he is a member, is a native-born American and a Muslim.  According to reports today, he walked into a Readiness Center at the fort, got up on a table and began firing.  This Readiness Center is the place where soldiers who are about to deploy get counseling to assure that their home affairs are in order before they go to places like Afghanistan, or anywhere out of the country, for that matter.  Fort Hood’s Readiness Center has cubicles in it, so when Hasan was shooting, he was firing at the tops of heads.  The result:  12 dead yesterday, one more dead today and 30 wounded. Some of the dead and wounded were shot in the back.

One of the wounded is local civilian police officer Kimberly Munley, who exchanged fire with Hasan and stopped the increase of his body count.   Both survived, but Hasan is unconscious and on life support. According to reports this morning, Hasan yelled “Allah u Akbar” as he fired.

It’s difficult to fight the impulse to hatred and vengeance for this one.

More than that, this incident takes us back to when another Muslim called Hasan turned on his fellow soldiers.  Recalling that, I began to wonder how often U.S. military have turned their weapons on those who trusted them most.

I can’t recall any others but these two incidents but I would appreciate it if someone would point them out.

In the meantime, I hope that this particular Hasan lives to face those whom he has betrayed--those who survived, that is.

UPDATE:

Patterico:

[A retired colonel who worked with Hasan at the Fort Hood psyche ward] heard Hasan say that “maybe the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also heard Hasan comment that he was “almost sort of happy” about a shooting at a Little Rock recruitment center.

The colonel confirms that Hasan was about to be deployed but did not say whether it was to be to Iraq or Afghanistan.

UPDATE:  Sergeant Kimberly Munley, civilian police officer, Heroine.

Munley, who had been trained in active-response tactics, rushed into the building and confronted the shooter as he was turning a corner, [Lt. General Bob] Cone said.

"It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer," Cone said.

Munley was only a few feet from crazed Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan when she opened fire.

Wounded in the exchange of gunfire, Munley was reported in stable condition at a local hospital.

Someone at Ace's mentioned that it's a bit of poetic justice that this particular Islamist (yes) was taken down by a woman.  I concur.

Tale of The Tigers

Leftists say that we on the right make things up.  Well, some of us do.

My new novel is entitled Tale of the Tigers!

 

(Click the Image)

I'm taking pre-orders at discount price of $20.00 for the moment--available in 4 to 6 weeks--and I will autograph the first one hundred copies ordered.  It should be available at Amazon by mid November.

Yes, this is the project that has been in the works for longer than I've let on.   But, yanno? There's no time like the present to live one's dreams.

(Thanks to Lamar Powell, author of Bad and Worse: A Tale of Men)

UPDATE:

Thanks for the link, Don Surber.

A Little Family Competition

If you have noticed the right-most, uppermost corner of this blog, you've seen that it is Project VALOUR-IT time.  VALOUR-IT is the Soldier's Angels project formed to raise money to purchase special voice-operated laptops, Wii Video Game Systems and personal GPS devices for our heroes who have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the program's fourth year.

Four of the services—the Air Force, the Army, the Navy and the Marines—have, as is usual, split into fund-raising teams and of course that knuckle-dragging Army team, lead by Blackfive, is taunting the Air Force.

That the Air Force can raise plenty of money for the heroes without getting our hands dirty isn't a bug--it's a feature!

(It's all love!) Donate on behalf of the United State Air Force Team here.

You can also donate by snail-mail:

Soldiers' Angels
Project Valour-IT Fund
1792 E. Washington Blvd
Pasadena, CA 91104

Inciting Attack

This is what he has planned for all those who love and protect America and, ultimately, for America itself:  failure…

KABUL – Eight American troops were killed in two separate bomb attacks Tuesday in southern Afghanistan, making October the deadliest month of the war for U.S. forces since the 2001 invasion to oust the Taliban.

In one of the insurgent assaults, seven Americans were killed while patrolling in armored vehicles, U.S. forces spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Vician said. He said an Afghan civilian died in the same attack. The eighth American was killed in a separate bombing elsewhere in the south, also while patrolling in a military vehicle, he said.

…and demoralization.

[L]ast month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, [Foreign Service Officer Matthew] Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter [pdf] to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

Mr. Hoh is also a former Marine captain who served in Iraq.

When President Obama stated that he would continue until November to dither about General McCrystal’s request for an additional 40,000 troops, a child could have predicted that such an announcement would embolden both the Taliban and al Qaeda. 

Does anyone remember that we went into Afghanistan to clean out the nests of terrorists who perpetrated the attacks of 9/11?

It’s easy to see that the president is trying to lose Afghanistan.  But the loss would simply be another stab at the old America that the president wants to smother and would assist in making way for the America he wants to shape in his own image.

Will this wake America up?

President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.

Helmeted, body-armored feds knocking on American doors—would that do it?

How much more foreign policy leg-spreading and domestic forging of tyranny does the president have to perpetrate before we see that we’ve been had?

Wait a minute.

If we flake out in Afghanistan, it won’t just embolden Islamists overseas…it will embolden those living here.

When the Mumbai terrrorist attacks happened, most observers concluded that such a thing would never occur here because too many American citizens go about armed—even in leftist utopias like my home state.  In Mumbai, armed Islamists ran wild for days.  Here, the duration would be roughly eight hours, max (about two in places like Oklahoma).

But what if Islamist did try a Mumbai-style attack here?  Would that give President Obama the excuse to create his SA…er…National Police Force? (Godwin can bite me.)

Is this what Vice President Biden was talking about last October?

Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. And he's gonna have to make some really tough - I don't know what the decision's gonna be, but I promise you it will occur. [snip]

[I]t's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right. Because all these decisions, all these decisions, once they're made if they work, then they weren't viewed as a crisis. If they don't work, it's viewed as you didn't make the right decision...

(Maybe it's what the then vice president-elect only thought he was talking about.)

Pretty soon all such questions will have their answers.  I think that most of them do already.

(Thanks to the Drudge Report and to Instapundit)

PREVIOUSLY:  Told Ya So

UPDATE: One supposes that this is mere coincidence:

KABUL – Gunmen with automatic weapons and suicide vests stormed a guest house used by U.N. staff in the heart of the Afghan capital early Wednesday, killing at least seven people including three U.N. staff, officials said. A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility, saying it was meant as an assault on the upcoming presidential election.

No, I don't think so either.

Happy Autumn

Each year, as a result of the first LA rainstorm of the fall season, the good people of my neighborhood are treated to a power outage and last week's storm yielded no different outcome.  Well the power is back on but my land line remains dead, so there has been no broadband or wifi at the crib since Thursday.  (No text either since someone is playing games with my cell service.) And yes, I'm trying not to misbehave in reaction--especially since I have a lot of things to do on line in the next few weeks.

So it is that I have made a daily sojourn to the Starbuckses in the area, to one of the LA Public library branches and now I'm at Whole Foods.  And it's nice to feel as those I'm doing my duty for freedom and the free market by patronizing the latter.

Ha Ha! Try the lemon kale.  And the arugula. Heh.

BTW, I think that the world is about end too. Read this blog and ignore the punctuation.

Poor Baby

Last week I came perilously close to cursing at a friend of my great-aunt’s--a woman in her seventies who has known me all of my life and for whom I sometimes run errands.  (Both ladies had enough marbles and enough humility to give up their driver’s licenses when the time came to do so; therefore I am often the driver.)  I’ll call her Mrs. Sampson

Anyway the slip almost happened when Mrs. Sampson said that her church was praying for President Obama.  Now before you folks who are prone to jumping to conclusions make that leap, know that I pray for him also. I pray that he is called to repent of his sins and accepts the Lord Jesus Christ—the real one rather than the abomination--as his savior and that his decisions are guided by the Holy Spirit.  I presume that Mrs. Sampson and her church’s other congregants pray the same thing since Christians are exhorted to pray for their leaders.

However, Mrs. Sampson’s actual words regarding the reason her church was praying for the president got to me.  “Oh they’re criticizing him so.  It’s just horrible!”

I didn’t say what I was thinking, but those thoughts did contain the f-bomb.

After biting my tongue—almost literally—I pointed out that if he didn’t want to get criticized that he should not have run for president.  She agreed, then pointed out that Jesus had been criticized(!)

I quickly asserted that, contrary to some opinions, he was not Jesus, and then took the conversation to the place that had initiated my anger.

“President Obama is the Commander-in Chief of the Armed Forces.  There are many young men--teenagers some of them--who are sleeping on the ground, who haven’t had showers for weeks and they are doing so under his orders.  Many of these men have seen their friends blown to bits and some may have that happen to them or may come home minus a body part.  If they can put up with that, don’t you think that their Commander-in Chief can put up with a little criticism?”

“You’re right, he can.”

“Is your church praying for any of them?”

Why are all of these people treating the putative Leader of the Free World as if he’s a puling infant?  Oh wait.  He is.

The New Rules

Some folks are wondering what President Obama will do with the Nobel Prize Monetary Award--$1.4 million.  Judging by this president's past relationship with rule of law and conflict of interest issues, I predict that...

He'll keep it.  And what are you going to do about it anyway?  He's gonna...

Do things, do things, do things, bad things with it...

UPDATE:  Yikes!  Did somebody hide the Grecian formula? Perhaps that $1.4 mil will buy some good spa time.  The Obamas seem to like vacations.

Somebody needs to hide the Cancer sticks also.  GWB didn't look this aged until his last year in office.

UPDATE:  Even the French are all WTF over this Nobel coronation.  Oops did I say that?

"Peace" Before its Time (UPDATED)

So if President Obama wins the Nobel "Peace" Prize for 2009 but the decision was supposed to have been made only twelve days after the president's inauguration, what does that mean?

Wizbang:  "[O]ne of the most dramatic examples of the global elitist genuflection and obsequiousness before the presence of The One..."

WSJ Blog: "This is completely bizarre."

Via Jules Crittenden, this was the president's accomplishment:  “ … his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples...”  He did all that in the first twelve days of his presidency?  Who knew?

Times of London: "Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent."

Jennifer Loven:

For Nobel voters, though, the award could be as much about issuing a slap at Obama's predecessor as about lauding Obama. [snip]

The Nobel committee, it seems, had the audacity to hope that he'll eventually produce a record worthy of its prize.

The fix was definitely in.  The question many minds, however, is how long this has been planned and that question isn't just in reference to the Nobel.

I would say that Dr. King is turning in his grave but that probably started well before today.

 UPDATE:  Politico:

The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists - the Taliban and Hamas this morning - in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize," DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse told POLITICO. "Republicans cheered when America failed to land the Olympics and now they are criticizing the President of the United States for receiving the Nobel Peace prize - an award he did not seek but that is nonetheless an honor in which every American can take great pride - unless of course you are the Republican Party.

I can see the new narrative being built up and perfected--a narrative whose basis was started by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.  Can't you? 

So, Democrat Party, what are you going to do with this Lie Burrito, ridiculous and outrageous as it is?  Your party keeps trying to feed it to the public mindset.  What's the goal?

(Thanks to Hot Air)

UPDATE: Red Eye's Andy Levy:

Dear Nobel Committee, Thank you so, so much for all the [comedy] material. You guys are the best!

Steve Graham: "When nutty things happen, look for a spiritual reason."

What I'm Reading (October 8, 2009)

Airlift to America: How Barack Obama Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya and 800 East African Students Changed Their world and Ours by Tom Schachtman

To refresh your memories, the Tom Mboya Airlift is the endeavor that brought Barack Obama Senior and hundreds of other young Kenyans to America to be given Western higher education and to return to their home and be prepared to lead their nation in the wake of its independence from the United Kingdom.

Before you curse the day that fate brought Barack Obama Sr. to America, don't forget that if the Airlift hadn't occurred, I wouldn't exist either.

One of the many disconcerting facts that I've run across since discovering the existence of Barack Obama Jr. is how much the students of the Mboya airlift were nurtured and supported by prominent individuals of the hard Left of that era and this one--Cora Weiss of the Institute for Policy Studies and entertainer Harry Belafonte, to give a pair of seemingly divergent examples.

When I mentioned this to my mother, she said "oh yes, Roosevelt [University, Chicago where my parents met] was crawling with Communists back then."  Mom never quite saw the attraction of Leftism, lucky blessedly for me and my siblings.

However, one can't imagine how eerie it is to feel as though your existence was engineered by someone other than God and one's parents.

Read This

Let Them Fight or Bring Them Home

Read all of it--and tell every American you know to do so.

(Thanks to BMEWS)

UPDATE: The author of the above blog is John Bernard.  Bernard's son is the late Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard.  If the latter name rings a bell, it should. The Associated Press published a photo of Corporal Bernard as he bled to death after being mortally wounded by a Taliban rocket.

Real Reality Check

The White House government site used to be a dignified place.  Now it's merely just another host server for a blogger to go to "war" with a cable news station and one of its hosts, Glenn Beck.

Meanwhile, more of our tax dollars go down the tubes as the President and the First Lady (and Oprah Winfrey) go to Copenhagen for an unsuccessful strong-arm attempt at getting the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to award the 2012 2016 Olympics to Chicago.  The IOC: "not only no but hell no and we'd rather go to Rio."  (I've been to Chicago many times and I don't blame them--and that's just about summer weather.)

Don't you have something better to do, Mr. President?

Oh and you're giving a speech at 12 PM PDT.  What a novelty!

Working

Here is one of my blurbs for the Best of LA feature in LA Weekly.

Best Beauty Supply for Black Hair Care

You can find tons of others here--some mine, most not, almost all fun.  And we need some fun just now, don't we?

(Thanks to Jill)

The Fruit of Anger, Part One

Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools. --Ecclesiastes 7:9 (KJV)

Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord. --Romans 12:19 (NIV)

Black Cop: "If I told you once to take [poster with Obama-as-Joker] down and you put it back up then I can charge you with whatever I want to charge you with, okay?" [snip]

White Male Protester: "This used to be America."

Black Cop: "Well it ain't no mo', okay?"

When I asserted that the above-documented incident was evidence of racial discord that is being sown in the minds and spirits of Americans since the inauguration of President Barack Obama, some people didn’t believe me (and copped an attitude in their disbelief as well, which is always fun).

As the aphorism goes, there are some things that cannot be defined, but we know them when we see them. However, I will attempt to explain to my readers and guests why that incident was emblematic of the racial Sign of these Times. Fair warning: I’m thinking that this will take at least two posts.

Last year when those who were paying attention discovered the I-deology called “Black Liberation Theology,” many black Americans—including me--had the proverbial light bulb come on over our heads. You see, we had heard the rhetoric before. Not often in churches (though sometimes it is--as I’ll demonstrate below) and not holistically, but piecemeal--from various organizations within the communities in which we often live; organizations designed to “help” black people or “uplift” black/African heritage. (Side note: Often, the celebrators of this “African” heritage do not have the smarts or discipline to immerse themselves in the scholarship of any singular existing African culture. Knowing this to be a fact, a certain enterprising individual saw the value in fabricating a hybrid of African cultures and marketing that hybrid to a black populace who was mostly ignorant of what they were really embracing. Thus do we have Kwanzaa.)

Most black Americans have long been familiar with the Nation of Islam, their wacky theology, their assertion that the white race is Satan incarnate, etc. As a matter of fact, I’ve never hidden the fact that my immediate family--mother and stepfather--were members of the NOI when I was a teenager. (We’re all born-again Christians now.) But what most of us did not know  was that smaller, almost unknown organizations had sprung up in the 1960s with its messengers and its rhetoric, most of it similar to that of the NOI; revolving around hatred of white people and the innate supremacy of black Africans--a counter to the white supremacy under which most black Americans were subject prior to that time—and predicting that the superior African would ultimate triumph over his “natural” enemy, the European/Caucasian/white.

Most black Americans did not join these organizations; most didn’t even know that they existed and if they did know, they held them in contempt. However, if the formal structure was unknown, the rhetoric was not. “God-d*mn Amerika,” “US of KKKA” and much worse ersatz curses could be heard coming out of the mouths of every father, uncle, brother, grandfather, etc. who had ever been stopped for the sin of Driving While Black or whose progenitor had been formally if unjustly executed by the state…or had disappeared into the night, only to be found in a river…or buried in a shallow grave. Such curses were often heaped upon a country that once adhered to the separate-but-equal legal doctrine and once looked the other way as local government entities heaped oppression on American citizens of African descent. (Side note: not part of the Lynching Narrative were those black Americans known as “crazy n*ggers”--that is, black Americans in the South who took their right to bear arms seriously. Those white Southerners inclined to terrorize blacks wouldn’t bother such men. I’m told that my great-grandfather, Lucius Jenkins, was such a man. Dr. Condoleezza Rice says that her father was yet another.)

In the fifties and sixties, things began to change—not all at once, but gradually, as is typical of societal upheavals. (In reality, the “gradual” change happened pretty quickly.) But by that time the anger was already brewing and the impatience with the work of the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob had already caused many to abandon Him—as often happens when humans operate by their own time rather than God’s.

That’s an overview of why organizations like both the old and New Black Panthers exist. But there's something special about Black Liberation Theology: many if not most black Americans knew of its fabric but did not know that it existed as a coherent package of principles and tenets with a label. Black Liberation Theology has long walked covertly as underlying current snaking its way into the thinking of Americans who are black and who fail to keep up their spiritual guard. This previously unnamed ideology would pop up its head in various venues and unlikely sources. Example: several years ago, my great-aunt claimed that somewhere in the Bible there existed a prophecy predicting that “the black man would rule the earth.” Having read the Bible back and forth, I heatedly disputed this notion—not because I cared whether black people would rule the earth or not, but because I was disgusted that someone would lie to her about the Word of God. Of course, she couldn’t cite the quote.

Several years later—last year to be specific—after the name of Reverend Jeremiah Wright became infamous and the tenets of Black Liberation Theology became well-known, I asked my aunt to think about where she had heard about the notion of world-wide black rule. She didn’t have to think too long. She’s Catholic and the assertion had come from a priest who was visiting her church; a Liberation Theologian--one of Sowers of the currently and continuously sprouting sapling called Racial Discord.

So what does all this have to do with the incident that occurred on August 25, 2009? Hint: go back to the beginning.

To be continued...

(Thanks to bgates)

PREVIOUSLY:  What the Sowers of Discord Hath Wrought