Open Threads

Something I have not done before- The Friday Five:

1. What’s your favorite vacation spot?

My living room. I love travel but I hate getting there, wherever there is at the time.

2. Where do you consider to be the biggest hell-hole on earth?

Tie: Gary, Indiana or Newark, NJ

3. What would be your dream vacation?

A week at a Biergarten in Germany eating bratwurst and brotchen mit senf drinking 800 calorie beers, or a week-long tequila haze somewhere south of the border where the drinks are big and the bikinis are small.

4. If you could go on a road-trip with anyone, who would it be and why?

Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke. Only if I am driving, though.

5. What are your plans for this weekend?

Recovering from the flu and Robitussin detox.

Something I have not donePost + Comments

Something weird is going on in Washington. First, Ari Fleischer, who normally does a fantastic job, makes one of the dumbest statements in recent memory by a Press Secretary. No one enjoys kicking around Clinton more than me, but you can not blame this wave of violence on Clinton any more than you can blame the 9/11 attacks on poverty or on our Israel policy. Repeat after me, Ari:

Suicidal maniacs with no regard for life who strap explosives on their backs and blow up innocent jews in Sbarros are responsible for the violence.

Say it several times until it sticks, Ari. It takes talent to make Joe Lockhart look good, and this gaffe just did it. Go here for Ted Barlow’s take.

The second weird thing going on is all this Fritz Hollings mania. I am utterly convinced he has lost his damned mind, and he is just all OVER the news, whether it be about Enron, attacking Bush (usually about something regarding Enron), or playing patsy to corporate interests regarding copyrights. Steve den Beste beats up on Hollings a bit here. Instapundit has some links here. William Quick has some remarks here. There are more out there, but I need to head to the office.

At any rate, what is Hollings drinking? He comes out of seemingly nowhere, and now he is lead imbecile in almost every headline.

Something weird is going onPost + Comments

This is just great. Three days of being confined to bed with a deadly bout of the flu, and I finally feel better. I have even slowly crawled out of my robitussin haze. The problem? I slept so damned much that it is 3 am and I have insomnia. To make matters worse, I have read every blog, the WaPo, the NYT, NRO, the Opinion Journals links are not working, and the LA Times has not updated yet. Grumble. Thank goodness for satellite.

This is just great. ThreePost + Comments

I was just perusing Ben Domenech’s newly redesigned site, and my first comment is Thank You for a READABLE Font Size.

Then I noticed his links, and there I find yours truly, under the heading of The Wild Bunch, keeping company with those zanies at the Libertarian Samizadata, Dodgeblog, and Next Right. Little could Mr. Domenech have known how much I loved that movie….

I was just perusing BenPost + Comments

Robert Byrd, fiscal conservative, military expert:

On Wednesday, Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, told Defense Department officials that they should not expect “blank checks to be written” for expansion of the war effort without a clearer understanding of the administration’s goals beyond Afghanistan. He complained that “there’s no end in sight” to American involvement there.

Byrd, whose previous military experience was waging a covert ‘war on coloreds’ and ‘white niggers’ now finds it necessary to weigh in on the possibility of a long term engagement in Afghanistan. Take it from me, just tell that loony, hypocritical Klansman that they are building a Robert C. Byrd military base in Afghanistan and he will shut up.

*** Update ****

Photodude says it better than me and with noticeably less venom while still including the dripping sarcasm that is a must when discussing Robert Byrd.

Robert Byrd, fiscal conservative, militaryPost + Comments

Tomorrow, a new movie starring Mel Gibson will debut in theatres across the country. The name of the movie is We Were Soldiers, and I fully intend to go see it tomorrow evening. I am, however, a little nervous that it will be another case of Hollywood taking one of my favorite books and ruining it.

For those of you who do not know, the original novel is titled We Were Soldiers Once… And Young, written by General Harold G. Moore and his lifelong friend, reporter Joseph L. Galloway. The book was a gift to me from my mother in Christmas 1993, and it was and is the most disturbing description of battle in Vietnam that I have ever read. It made me physically disturbed and weak in the stomach, yet I could not put it down. Perhaps the most moving aspect of the novel was the prologue, which contained this paragraph:

We were the children of the 1950s and John F. Kennedy’s young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world that Americans would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship” in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John F. Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetary, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with our white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truly the future he had envisioned for us.

Several paragraphs later, they write about the individual leaders who fought that war, the young Lieutenants whose horrible yet noble job it was to lead terrified young men into that hell:

The Class of 1965 came out of the old America, a nation that disappeared forever in the smoke that billowed off the jungle battlegrounds where we fought and bled. The country that sent us off to war was not there to welcome us home. It no longer existed. We answered the call of one President who was now dead; we followed the orders of another who would be hounded from office, and haunted, by the war he mismanaged so badly.

Many of our countrymen came to hate the war we fought. Those who hated it the most-the professionally sensitive-were not, in the end, sensitive enough to differentiate between the war and the soldiers who had been ordered to fight it. They hated us as well, and we went to ground in the cross fire, as we had learned in the jungle.

In times our battles were forgotten, our sacrifices were discounted, and both our sanity and our suitability in polite American society were publicly questioned. Our young-old faces, chiseled and gaunt from the fever and the heat and the sleepless nights, now stare back at us, lost and damned strangers, frozen in yellowing snapshots packed away in cardboard boxes with our medals and our ribbons.

If you are going to see this movie, I would ask that you at first take a week and read this book. You will not be the same again, you will not view Vietnam Veterans the same way again, and you will finally understand why after the Liberation of Kuwait it made Gulf War veterans both proud and slightly embarassed to march side by side in parades with Vietnam Veterans. We were proud because we were able, with our antiseptic little war that the public favored, to finally bring some measure of respect to those who sacrificed so much in Vietnam. Embarassed because of the sheer enormity in the disparity of our sacrifices as compared to those who fought in that jungle hell and were spit on upon their return.

Tomorrow, a new movie starringPost + Comments

The California Patriot is seeking donations to reprint the edition that was swiped by the ‘free speech’ goons.

The whole story can be found here and here.

To donate via PAYPAL, GO HERE. I sent my 5 bucks.

Thanks to Damian Penny for the heads up.

The California Patriot is seekingPost + Comments