Category Archives: Military

Mitch (McConnell), Mark (Levin), And The Military Industrial Complex

Military, Republicans, The State, Welfare

In an effort to further marginalize those “Republican challengers further to the … right who have few qualms about trimming military budgets,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been rattling the defense industry with threats that “spending cuts” favored by tea party-aligned Republicans will come at the expense of “robust national-security spending.”

We can only hope so.

Writes Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Gerard Baker:

What he’s really saying is that he’s a big spending Republican [IM: is there any other kind?] who will take care of these special interests if they help him in the primary …’It’s, you scratch my back, I will scratch your back.’

What I don’t get is this: This story I got from an exercised Mark Levin. The broadcaster, an unwavering champion of the warfare state and the welfariate that mans it, was irate. Why? Isn’t Mitch, on this front, more aligned with Mark than “tea party-aligned candidates,” some of whom wish to cut military spending?

Overall, Tom Cruise Is Better Than A Soldier

Celebrity, Hollywood, Military, Psychiatry, War

There, I’ve said It: Tom Cruise is selling himself short by jokingly comparing his action-hero movie stunts to being “deployed overseas in Afghanistan.” The moron media is hyperventilating over Cruise’s alleged sacrilegious comment.

I’ve been meaning to come to the defense of the iconoclastic, embattled actor yet again.

Fact: Tom Cruise has created real value for all those hundreds of millions of film fans who’ve consumed his products over the decades. He makes movies people enjoy and want to see. He’s an industry unto himself.

Cruise makes peace, not war. He generates wealth; he doesn’t consume the wealth of taxpayers. He creates a product, rather than wreck property not his.

Enough aid.

American masses and media can’t stand a non-conformist. The actor’s heroic stand against the “psychiatric peanut gallery” drew vitriol, but failed to dampen America’s enthusiasm for Cruise’s product.

Cruise, you should know, is a principled devotee of the late (great) anti-psychiatry thinker, Thomas S. Szasz.

Military Deaths, Not Death Benefits, Are The Real Scandal

Family, Foreign Policy, Military, War

Watch this ceremony at the Dover Air Force Base. Soldiers receive the coffined body of a slain comrade on its arrival in Dover. They handle it with exquisite care, hands clad in white gloves. What a stark, pathos-filled, sad ceremony, every move so tender and respectful.

CNN has shown this dark side of the wars all mainstream media laud because the “survivor benefits to the families, which include a $100,000 payment made within days of the death,” were suspended, the president having refused to use his power to prioritize in the allocation of revenues.

The real scandal is not the death-benefit short-term lapse, but that American men and women are still dying (and killing) in these dumps for no good reason. What a wanton waste of promise-filled young lives.

A webcam ought to be installed permanently at Dover—a debt clock of sorts—to remind Americans of this G-d-awful grief and waste.

The Big Dog Wags The Dog

Barack Obama, Government, Military

In the course of the catalogue of Obaminations the president has inflicted on the country, the Big Dog has chosen to wag the dog at convenient times.

To ‘wag the dog’ means to purposely divert attention from what would otherwise be of greater importance, to something else of lesser significance. By doing so, the lesser-significant event is catapulted into the limelight, drowning proper attention to what was originally the more important issue.

(UsingEnglish.com)

The government has spent time and money barring Americans from accessing public places. At the same time, and during a government shutdown, Obama has given the go-ahead for a military operation in Libya and Somalia about which the targeted countries are unhappy.

The seizure in Tripoli of the alleged al-Qaida operative Abu Anas al-Liby prompted the Libyan government to issue an angry statement, questioning the US account that Liby had been detained with its full knowledge. The statement said: “As soon as it heard the reports, the Libyan government contacted the United States authorities to demand an explanation [for] the kidnapping of a Libyan citizen.”
US officials had briefed the media on Saturday that the mission had been conducted with the knowledge of the Libyan government, but on Sunday an official told the Guardian: “We consult regularly with the Libyan government on a range of issues. We do not get into the specifics of our communication.”

(The Guardian)

It’s hard to know what Americans think, if they do indeed think. Will Obama succeed in wooing a war-loving people, or have Americans wizened up to his ways?