Lookin' like a fool with your boots on the ground...

Once upon a time there was a leftist liberal with no qualifications or experience. In an act of sheer stupidity, the American people actually elected this clown to lead them, and lead them he did, right over the cliffs with his lemmings in tow, and dragging the rest of us kicking & screaming along with them to the precipice.

He made airy promises that he soon found he could not possibly keep (if ever he truly did in the first place) once faced with a harsh word called REALITY. Those pesky little security briefings that one gets when elected to be Commander In Chief showed the Dear Leader that there was no way he could close Gitmo in 30 days. There was no way to bring everyone home from Iraq inside of a year. There was no way to bring everyone home from Afghanistan in a few months.

And while listening not one iota to the people around him who called for him to do the right things, the intelligent things, as he dragged our country deeper into debt and ruination, The Anointed One told the leaders of other nations who had been in power for decades to step aside and acquiesce to the demands of their subjects.....calling for leaders in Egypt, Libya, and Syria to step down.

Nearly three years into his disastrous reign of Pharaoh Obama The Magnificent, Gitmo is still open but trickling dangerous enemies of America back out into the world to continue waging Jihad against us. Thousands of US troops are indeed gone from Iraq without that country being truly stable or safe (leaving a further several thousand still there on a rotating basis and still occasionally getting killed). Instead of staying at home these troops are now available to be funneled into Afghanistan, which has become longer than World War Two and seems to be on a course to beat Vietnam for length of conflict. I pray that the casualties don't rival those of Vietnam.

The Great Man takes credit for things that happened under his watch that were continuations of policies and actions set in place by his predecessor, a man he generally mocks and blames at every turn, taking credit for the terminations of Bin Laden, Anwar al Awlaki, and Awlaki's son. His zombie followers hand him credit for toppling Muammar Khadaffi, a man still at large & waging war against his enemies.

And all the while, he claims to have no "boots on the ground", leading me to the actual point of today's discussion. This little fracas we're involved in over Libya was supposed to take a few days. A few months & a few million dollars later we're still involved. Oh, lookie, another psuedo-war we're involved with directed by our Nobel Peace Prize Winner. The original claims were that we'd help out for a bit but that NATO was gonna need to shoulder the burden, and yeah, we did step back and the Leftist Blamestream Media stopped covering the fact that the other NATO countries soon ran out of essentials like, oh, BOMBS for the planes and asked us for more, and, um, EXPERTISE, and called on us for more help.

Now, allegedly we only have a couple people they'll admit to being actually on the ground, four in fact, working under the State Department's chief of mission to assist in rebuilding the U.S. Embassy. Two of the military personnel are explosive-ordnance experts who will be used to disable any explosive traps left in the embassy. The other two are "general security," according to a spokes-weasel. To me, "general security" means Special Operations guys fluent in Arabic and skilled in intelligence gathering as well as being able to shoot their way out of Tripoli if need be. You don't send a couple of 19-year old privates to do a job like this. And I don't care what the White House says; if our planes were there for a number of missions dropping precision guided munitions (that's fancy speak for Smart Bombs) you can be damned sure we had more Special Operations guys on the ground with laser target designators to illuminate the intended targets for the bombs to hit and to do intel gathering & bomb damage assessments. It's only "boots on the ground" if the media says something about it, I guess.

And now we have a hundred or so guys headed to yet another Third World Unstable Turdpile. Welcome to Uganda, boys. You're supposed to just advise and observe, but you'll be fully combat-capable, just like our advisors were in Vietnam and every other bush war in the past 60 years. Read all about it directly from Uganda's online newspaper. They could be sending you to several unfriendly countries in search of Evil Doers.

So, Mister Nobel Peace Prize....you have troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Uganda, and are we still helping them find rebels in the Philippines or did you stop that since the rebels are fellow communists? How's that Gitmo closing going? Not that it should be closed, mind you, unless we stand them all up against a wall with a blindfold & a smoke first.

Perhaps you should instead be preparing for an upcoming war with IRAN......

Memorial Day 2008

Ah, here we are on another beautiful, sunny Memorial Day Weekend. It’s the traditional start now to the summer season, and the weather here in the Lowcountry couldn’t have been better. Sunny, warm, with a deliciously refreshing cool breeze; it’s pretty much my favorite time of year. Time to eat & drink ourselves into oblivion, fry like bacon at the beach, and spend whatever money we have left after filling the gas tank at all the myriad sales because to corporate America, Memorial Day Weekend is just another reason to have an alleged sale, from jeans to cars to hot tubs.

However, while I’m all in favor of spending time with the family, relaxing, and the conduct of commerce, we also like to forget what Memorial Day symbolizes. Formerly known as Decoration Day, it commemorates U.S. men and women who perished while in military service to our nation.

Following the end of the Civil War, many communities set aside a day to mark the end of the war or as a memorial to those who had died. Some of the places creating an early memorial day include Charleston, SC; Boalsburg, PA; Richmond, VA; Carbondale, IL; Columbus, MS; many communities in Vermont; and some two dozen other cities and towns. These observances eventually coalesced around Decoration Day, honoring the Union dead, and the several Confederate Memorial Days. (Confederate Memorial Day is still observed in the former Confederate states on several different dates. Here in South Carolina it’s May 10th.)

According to Professor David Blight of Yale University, the first Memorial Day was observed in 1865 by liberated slaves at the Planter’s Race Course horse race track in Charleston, near the Citadel. Now known as Hampton Park, the site was a former Confederate prison camp as well as a mass grave for Union soldiers who had died while captive. A parade with thousands of freed slaves and Union soldiers was followed by patriotic singing and a picnic.

It later evolved into Decoration Day, by where graves of soldiers were decorated with laurel wreaths, an ancient Greek tradition resurrected by a retired general in Waterloo, NY. Many Southern states refused to celebrate Decoration Day, due to lingering hostility towards the Union Army and also because there were very few veterans of the Union Army who lived in the South. A notable exception was Columbus, Mississippi, which on April 25, 1866 at its Decoration Day commemorated both the Union and Confederate casualties buried in its cemetery.

The alternative name of "Memorial Day" was first used in 1882, but did not become more common until after World War II, and was not declared the official name by Federal law until 1967. In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Bill, which moved three holidays from their traditional dates to a specified Monday in order to create a convenient three-day weekend. The change moved Memorial Day from its traditional May 30 date to the last Monday in May. The law took effect at the federal level in 1971. After some initial confusion and unwillingness to comply at the state level, all fifty states adopted the measure within a few years.

This Memorial Day, I wish to salute a fallen American soldier whose remains were finally repatriated and returned to his family for burial. Staff Sergeant Matt Maupin, an Army Reservist from Batavia, OH, was captured by insurgents on April 4, 2004 when his convoy came under attack. A tip from an Iraqi civilian led to the discovery and recovery of Matt’s body on March 20th, 2008, north of Baghdad. By then, Matt had been missing in action for nearly four years. His memorial service was attended by thousands, filling a local stadium. Welcome home, brother.

SSG Matt Maupin, from Batavia, Ohio

I also wish to call attention to three other US soldiers still listed as Missing In Action in Iraq, missing but certainly not forgotten. On May 12, 2007 insurgents attacked an outpost in Amariyah, a suburb of Baghdad, killing four American soldiers and an Iraqi translator before capturing SPC Alex Jiminez, PFC Joseph Anzack, and PVT Byron Fouty.

On May 23, officials informed the family of Joseph Anzack that the Army had visually identified his body as being one pulled from the Euphrates River by Iraqi patrol boats. The body had two bullet holes in the head and one in the chest.

On June 4, an insurgent group called The Islamic State of Iraq declared in a video posted on the internet that Fouty and Jimenez were killed because the U.S refused to stop searching for them. They also claimed that they will not give the bodies of the two soldiers to their families and that the two men are buried. As evidence, they released photos of both soldiers’ military ID cards. Since the bodies have never been recovered, their status is still clouded with the possibility that they are still being held. They were at first declared DUSTWUN (Duty Status Whereabouts Unknown), and are now listed as Missing/Captured.

SPC Alex Jimenez,from Lawrence, MA and PVT Byron Fouty, from Waterford, MI

Also Missing In Action is Army Reservist SPC Ahmed Qusai al-Tayie, an Iraqi-American linguist who was captured on October 23, 2006 while visiting members of his wife’s family in a Baghdad neighborhood. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since February of 2007, when a militant website showed what appeared to be a short video clip of al-Tayie. The Army still lists him as Missing/Captured.

SPC Ahmed al-Tayie, from Ann Arbor Michigan

More than 78,000 U.S. troops remain missing from World War II, according to Pentagon figures. More than 8,100 remain missing from the Korean War and 1,779 from Vietnam. Another 867 troops who were declared missing at some point during the Vietnam War were identified when their remains were found. And still listed as Missing/Captured is LCDR Scott Speicher, who was shot down on the first night of Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

This Memorial Day, we remember those who have fallen, and those whose status is still uncertain.

“I am afeared there are few die well that die in a battle”
William Shakespeare, King Henry V, act IV, scene I

You mourn your heroes and I'll mourn mine

Eight Belles goes down with two broken ankles


Admittedly, among my many addictions (hockey, electronic music, caffeine), I’m also a news junkie. As soon as I pry my eyes open at zero-dark-thirty for work, the news is on. I have 5-6 news feeds tied to my Google start page. On my drive to & from work, I’m either listening to ESPN or talk radio; music is for leisure driving. On my lunch break, I eat in my car to listen to the news.

That said, all I heard yesterday morning was Eight Belles this and Eight Belles that on a continual loop. Every few minutes I had to listen to the same soundbyte of how these horses put their lives on the line and that she was glad to do it, blah blah blah and how PETA wants the jockey publicly stoned and then burned at the stake, yadda yadda yadda. Sure, it’s a damn shame that such a magnificent animal, just three years old, had to be euthanized, but frankly I was getting a bit worn out on hearing about her freakish double-leg break and subsequent destruction in front of a hundred thousand people. I’m sure that there are now hundreds of bouquets of roses and wreaths and stuffed horses and hand-scrawled notes saying “We’ll miss you Eight Belles” piled up at the front gate to Churchill Downs in some grand makeshift memorial to what really was an overbred draft animal, and trust me when I guarantee that while the ownership of the animal is grieving the loss of their little four-legged money-maker, the animal was generously insured, likely for much more than you or I are. I believe I covered this before here:
http://mojosteve.blogspot.com/2007/05/ah-barbarowe-hardly-knew-ye.html

So, instead, allow me to refocus your sympathy and kind thoughts to another death last week, one that was overshadowed by the death of an expensive animal, sadly under-reported and generally overlooked by the drive-by media.

On April 30, four days before the Kentucky Derby, Staff Sergeant Chad A. Caldwell of Spokane, Washington was killed by an IED in Mosul, Iraq while conducting dismounted combat operations. SSG Caldwell was a squad leader assigned to Troop K, 3rd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Hood, Texas.

SSG Caldwell joined the Army in 2002 after graduating from high school in 2001. He and his wife, Raechel, met while they were high schoolers and working part-time at a telemarketing firm. They were married in 2002, just before Caldwell entered basic training. They have two boys; Trevor, age 4; and Coen, age 2.

At the time of his death, SSG Caldwell was on his third combat tour. He initially served in Iraq in 2003-4 and also previously completed a tour in Afghanistan in 2007. SSG Caldwell is also survived by his mother, Carol Caldwell of Spokane, his father, Mark Caldwell of Hayden Lake, and his brother and sister, Justin and Krista, both of Spokane. He had planned to make the military his career.

Caldwell was a heavily decorated soldier. He received two Army Commendation Medals--one for saving the life of a pregnant woman in Baghdad in 2003 and a second for saving the life of a lieutenant colonel who was caught in gunfire. He had been featured in news articles in both the USA Today and Stars and Stripes.

So worry all you want about a horse, and I’ll worry about a valiant hero who was somebody’s son, brother, husband, and father. Rest in Peace, Chad.


SSG Chad Caldwell in Iraq



The Caldwell Family before Chad deployed

Tell me why....again

Once again, dear readers, as I do every couple few months or so, I need to ask why…

Why do illegal aliens get in-state tuition in California, but I can’t? Oh wait; I'm an American citizen. If you’re going to let illegal non-Americans get in-state tuition, then you better do away with out of state tuition for American citizens.

Why is it the city council of San Francisco is looking to stifle the First Amendment rights to free speech for a private citizen, namely talk-radio host Michael Savage? When illegal aliens in San Francisco said they were going to fast in a hunger strike until they got special treatment, Savage said that they could go ahead & starve. So now all the liberal assclowns on the Left Coast are calling for the government to censor the free speech of a private citizen that they don’t agree with, calling it Hate Speech.

Why are any government officials even paying attention to these aforementioned illegals and granting them rights and privileges reserved for CITIZENS instead of declaring them persona non grata and deporting them?

Why is it a hate crime for the College Republicans at San Francisco State University to stomp on paper copies of flags from terrorist organizations but any asshole can burn an actual American flag and be protected under free speech & freedom of expression? At a small anti-terrorism rally in October 2006, several members of the College Republicans stomped on pieces of paper they had painted to look like flags of the radical Islamic organizations Hezbollah and Hamas (both known terrorism sponsors), copying the designs from images on the Internet. They weren’t even REAL flags. A few days later, a Muslim student filed a complaint, on the grounds that the Arabic script on the Hezbollah and Hamas flags contained the word “Allah.” The university pressed charges, accusing the "blasphemers" of “incivility” and creating “a hostile environment.” Perhaps Muslims ought to have a beef with terrorists who put Allah’s name on their flags, not with people who stomp on paper copies of those flags.

Why is it that my buddy and “adopted” little brother Steve is on his third combat tour in Iraq in 5 years when we seem no closer to resolving that fucking goat rope than we were a couple thousand casualties ago? The ‘war” in Iraq has now lasted longer than our involvement in World War Two; enough is enough.

Why do we venerate Al Gore as the official spokes-doofus for the environment when he’s not even a fucking climatologist? He’s not even a meteorologist, nor even a geologist. His degree from Harvard was in GOVERNMENT, and he dropped out of law school (and divinity school) at Vanderbilt before becoming a career politician. Real climatologists and geologists have been saying for years that Gore’s Global Warming Apocalyptic Armageddon Psychobabble is a crock of shit full of more flaws than the Titanic, but people like Oprah think he’s gonna drive us all to a greener tomorrow in the back seat of a Prius Hybrid. Eat me.

Why is it that suicide rates in the Army are at the highest rate in 26 years? Why are America’s best & brightest & bravest taking their own lives in combat zones and back at home after returning from these combat zones, and why is PTSD swept under the rug like some dirty little secret? A country that forgets its veterans will itself be forgotten.

Why are all the touchy-feely types claiming that America’s government separated a mother & child after the illegal alien mother was sent back to Mexico and left her American-born child here in the States? No one forced her to leave him behind. That was HER choice, amigos. She could just as easily have taken her kid back with her to Tijuana. This, after she holed up in a church for the past year claiming religious sanctuary. Elvira Arellano, 32, arrived in Washington state illegally in 1997. She was deported to Mexico shortly afterward, but returned and moved to Illinois in 2000, taking a job cleaning planes at O’Hare International Airport. She was arrested in 2002 at O’Hare and convicted of working under a false Social Security number. She was to surrender to authorities last August but instead sought refuge at the church on Aug. 15, 2006. So……WHY are background checks at one of America’s biggest & busiest airports so lax that an illegal immigrant had a job cleaning airplanes there?

And why, when I can’t seem to drum up more than a mere handful of people who actually read what I write, is Dog The Bounty Hunter on top of the New York Times best-seller list? I have nothing against Duane Chapman; he seems like a decent fellow. But #1, and I can't get more than 15 readers? That’s just wrong.

Good Riddance, O'Donnell

I hate Rosie. I mean absolutely despise her. Just thought you should know.

I don’t hate Rosie O’Donnell because she’s gay. I don’t hate her because she’s fat. I don’t hate for being rich & famous. I hate her because she’s a fucking ignorant twat.

I danced a merry jig when “Ro” decided to go cry in her tofu and not come back to The View after her hugely publicized snit with Elisabeth Hasselbeck a week or so ago. Finally, that bloated sack of protoplasm is off my TV screen, at least until some fucktard studio wonk gives her another show.

The argument between Hasselbeck and O’Donnell began over O’Donnell’s statement about the war: “655,000 Iraqi civilians had died. Who are the terrorists?” I guess she’s implying that everyone killed in Iraq died at the hands of our bloodthirsty soldiers, who slaughter babies and then dine on the marrow cracked from their bones.

Rosie is simply ignorant. She quotes inaccurate and highly exaggerated death figures and then blames the U.S. for those deaths when over 90% of Iraqi deaths have been caused by other Iraqis, and more would die with us leaving them in a vacuum than by us being there. Her figures are as bloated as her figure. Using her math, Iraq will be devoid of humans sometime in early fall 2009.

It seems another noted waste of skin who lost her own show, Ricki Lake, was on The View sucking Mama Rosie’s teat and sounding off against the troops. Ho’Donnell, who can’t have a debate without interrupting anyone, be it Donald Trump or her co-hosts, even interrupted her own crony:

O'DONNELL: Wait, can I just say something? Why do people enlist in the Army?

LAKE: To get an education, and they're poor-

O'DONNELL: Thank you.

LAKE: -and that's the only way to get one.

O'DONNELL: The vast majority- Yes, Elisabeth. It's true!

As the show’s token conservative, Hasselbeck responded harshly and Rosie continued to smear volunteer soldiers before she claimed that she does actually support the troops.

HASSELBECK: First of all, in the past year, the testing scores of our armed services have been higher than ever, so the education level-

O'DONNELL: You are wrong. We have more convicted felons in the Army because we're allowing them to get through.

HASSELBECK: So they're awful? They're awful then?

O'DONNELL: Elisabeth, I do everything I can to support the troops financially and emotionally. I love them as much as you do. I'm as much of a patriot. I want them home.


Oh, horse shit. Financially? Emotionally? Saying the war is wrong and that American fighting men and women are poor, uneducated babykillers isn’t exactly emotional support, “RoHo”. And going back to your big Hollywood home full of babies you bought on EBay because you’re rich enough to adopt a brood of kids while a sickening number of American soldiers’ families qualify for food stamps and have to take second jobs to make ends meet isn’t exactly financial support either.

Talk-show critics accused O’Donnell of calling U.S. troops terrorists. She called Hasselbeck “cowardly” for not saying anything in response to the critics, which set off their lengthy argument.

According to a recent study by the Heritage Foundation, military enlistees are "better educated, wealthier, and more rural on average than their civilian peers." Additionally, "recruits have a higher percentage of high school graduates" and "the distribution of household income of recruits is noticeably higher than the entire youth population."

As a former soldier, I am patently offended by her callous remarks. I may not have finished my degree, but my reasons are my own, and since I was carrying a 3.67 GPA when I left, it’s not like I was too stupid for college. I’d like to think I’m articulate and almost erudite, despite my penchant for the F-word. If I look back 20 years to my recruit class at Fort McClellan, we had several guys in my platoon with college educations, and every swingin’ Richard was a high school graduate. Last I checked, they’ve never been too keen on allowing convicted felons into any branch of the military, and most misdemeanors disqualify you as well. I know of a guy right now who’s been trying to re-enlist for awhile, an experienced non-commissioned officer and combat veteran who would be a huge asset to the Army right now, but has so far been denied because of a DUI conviction. The Pentagon is not clearing out America’s prison cells just yet looking for soldiers, because America’s best and brightest are still enlisting to serve their country.


Seems that every time Rosie opens up her Clam Rest as of late, she’s saying something stupid. Her fight with Donald Trump started when Trump decided to give a second chance to former Miss USA Tara Conner after she got busted on various alcohol charges. Big deal; it’s HIS pageant. He owns it. If he wants to be magnanimous and give a fucked- up kid a second chance, it’s his prerogative.

Then she outed Clay Aiken on national TV like she’s the self-appointed Gay Crusader. When Aiken, who has never once anywhere said whether he’s gay or not, was hosting Live With Regis & Kelly, he put his hand over Kelly Ripa’s mouth, and Ripa jokingly said that she didn’t know where his hand had been. She was referring to the fact it was cold & flu season and didn’t want to take any errant germs home to her kids. And Rosie The Gay Crusader waddled into action to say Ripa was being homophobic. So are you outing Clay Aiken? The dude has never said he’s gay, so he’s got every right to sue her ample ass for libel.

Y’know, it’s funny. I never thought Ellen Degeneres was funny till she came out of the closet. Her sitcom was okay, but was lacking something. She came out as gay and suddenly she was hilarious. It’s like the funny switch was turned on because she was no longer living a lie. She was comfortable enough & free enough to be who she was, and who she was turned out to be funny. It’s a damned shame her show got shitcanned a few weeks after she came out. Now Rosie on the other hand, was moderately funny on her show. I even gave her serious kudos for promoting one of my favorite bands, Erasure. Then she came out, and became a total absolute bitch. Maybe coming out freed her up to be who she really is? Queen of Nice, my ass. I have gay friends who are embarrassed to the core because of her actions, in the same way many Southerners are embarrassed by trailer trash on the Jerry Springer Show. It’s not an accurate representation of a segment of society, but it leaves a lasting impression.

So now O’Donnell has opted not to come back for her final 3 weeks on The View. Good fucking riddance. Just stay out of rural Alabama. The local 11-year olds carry guns and are out to bag the next Hogzilla.

Thanks, NBC News

It’s not often that I feel the need to go back and offer up to eat crow for something I’ve said. However, when I wrongly malign someone, I’ll retract what I’ve said & dine on my just desserts. Today I must actually THANK the people at NBC, after having just bashed them the other day.

Thanks NBC, for spearheading the drive to showcase Dragon Skin body armor for our troops. Thank you for showing that there existed a product better than the current Interceptor body armor, and thank you for getting Interceptor’s inventor to publicly say that Dragon Skin was better. Thank you for conducting an independent test of the armor side-by-side to expose for everyone how much better Dragon Skin is, and thank you for also admitting your test was abbreviated and not done under any extreme climate conditions. Your honesty was commendable, and your actions even more so. For once, the media is on the side of the poor grunt in the field, and hopefully lives can be saved by your having gotten the good word out.

TRANSCRIPT OF NBC’S REPORT:
For troops in the line of fire, body armor can spell the difference between life and death. Brig. Gen. Mark Brown, who oversees body armor for the Army, told NBC, “The body armor that we issue to our soldiers today is the best in the world. Bar none. It’s proven by live-fire testing, and it’s proven in combat.” But is it really the best?


An NBC News investigation — including independent ballistics tests — suggests there may be something better called Dragon Skin. Military families and soldiers have tried to buy Dragon Skin believing it offers better protection. But the Army banned the armor last year even before formally testing it.


The Army’s current body armor is called Interceptor. NBC News tracked down the man who designed Interceptor a decade ago, Jim Magee, a retired Marine colonel:
LISA MYERS: What is the best body armor available today in your view?
JIM MAGEE: Dragon Skin is the best out there, hands down. It's better than the Interceptor. It is state of the art. In some cases, it’s two steps ahead of anything I’ve ever seen.
MYERS: You developed the body armor that the Army is using today.
MAGEE: That's correct.
MYERS: And you say Dragon Skin is better?
MAGEE: Yes. And I think anybody in my industry would say the same thing were they to be perfectly honest about it.

Why? He says more stopping power and more coverage.

According to Magee, the Army’s Interceptor uses four rigid plates to stop the most lethal bullets, leaving some vital organs unprotected. Dragon Skin — with discs that interconnect like medieval chain-mail — can wrap most of a soldier’s torso, providing a greater area of maximum protection.

Magee, who has no financial stake whatsoever in Dragon Skin, told us, “If you would ask me today, ‘Jim we’re sending you to Iraq tomorrow. What would you wear?’ I would buy Dragon Skin and I would wear it.”

He’s not alone. NBC News has learned that the CIA bought Dragon Skin for elite operatives in Iraq, they say, after it passed CIA testing. But Brown says the Army conducted its own tests of Dragon Skin last year.

BRIG. GEN. BROWN: Thirteen of 48 shots that were taken at Dragon Skin were penetrating; full penetrating shots.
MYERS: So that’s a catastrophic
BROWN: Correct.
MYERS: So Dragon Skin failed?
BROWN: Dragon Skin failed miserably.

Brown suggested those tests led the Army to issue a “Safety of Use Message,” warning soldiers of “death or serious injury.” There’s just one problem: the Army banned Dragon Skin in March, almost two months before that testing began in May.

MYERS: General, the Army banned Dragon Skin before the Army even tested it.
BROWN: Lisa, I’m — I’m not aware of that… I don’t know that.

Nevin Rupert, a mechanical engineer and ballistics expert, was for seven years the Army’s leading authority on Dragon Skin. Now a whistleblower, he says the Army’s timing wasn’t coincidental.
RUPERT: I believe there are some Army officials at the lower levels that deliberately tried to sabotage it.
MYERS: What possible motive would Army officials have for blocking a technology that could save lives?
RUPERT: Their loyalty is to their organization and maintaining funds.

He says that because Dragon Skin was not developed by the Army, some officials considered it a threat to funding of Interceptor and other Army programs.

RUPERT: It wasn’t their program. It threatened their program and mission funding.
Rupert also says he was ordered not to attend the tests of Dragon Skin.

MYERS: You spent seven years evaluating Dragon Skin. And the Army goes to test it. And you're told not to attend?
RUPERT: Yes.
MYERS: They didn't want you there?
RUPERT: They didn't want a lot of people there.

Rupert was recently fired by the Army, he says, for supporting Dragon Skin. When questioned about Rupert by NBC News, the Army said in a statement:
“Mr. Nevin Rupert was employed by the Army Research Laboratory for more than 33 years as a mechanical engineer in the Weapons & Materials Research Directorate, located at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Md. Mr. Nevin left federal service on February 24, 2007. He has a June 2007 appeal before the Merit System Protection Board.”


NBC News also has learned that, well after the Army ban, select soldiers assigned to protect generals and VIPs in Iraq and Afghanistan wore Dragon Skin.
An active duty soldier, who asked us to conceal his identity, told NBC he wore Dragon Skin on certain missions, with the full knowledge of his commanders.
“I wore it and I saw other people wearing it… It conforms to your body, it gives you more mobility,” he said.

LISA MYERS: Does the ban on Dragon Skin apply equally to everyone in the Army?
BRIG. GEN. MARK BROWN: Lisa, yes it does.

However, sources and documents obtained by NBC News reveal that a top general’s security detail in Iraq bought and wore Dragon Skin.

MYERS: If Dragon Skin is good enough for a 3-star general, shouldn’t it be good enough for other soldiers?
BROWN: Lisa, even 3-star generals make mistakes.

A Pentagon spokesman says that Gen. Peter Chiarelli, once the top ground commander in Iraq, “had no knowledge that Dragon Skin was prohibited” and “never wore Dragon Skin,” though it’s possible his staff ordered it for him. The spokesman went on to say that Chiarelli acknowledges that his bodyguards ordered and received concealed body armor, but that Chiarelli “didn't know the armor was Dragon Skin.”

Given the controversy over body armor, NBC News commissioned an independent, side-by-side test of Dragon Skin and the Army’s Interceptor vest. In that testing, Dragon Skin outperformed the Army’s body armor in stopping the most lethal threats. Retired four-star Army Gen. Wayne Downing, now an NBC news analyst, observed the tests. “What we saw today, Lisa, and again it’s a limited number of trials, Dragon Skin was significantly better,” he said.

These independent, limited tests raise serious questions about the Army’s claim that Dragon Skin doesn’t work. NBC News will report on the specific results of that testing on Dateline NBC Sunday. Critics tell NBC they’d like to see the Army re-test and re-evaluate Dragon Skin.

The whole Walter Reed fiasco

Occasionally the public crucifixion of a senior public or military official is warranted. While they themselves may not necessarily have caused the event that people are questioning, they’re certainly responsible for setting the tone of their command climate. So long as the responsible parties are ALSO flogged for their fuckups, the commander should get some heat as well.

Shit rolls downhill, as they say, and all too often some poor fall guy enlisted schmuck is left sitting at the base of the mountain with his mouth wide agape awaiting a steaming open-faced shitwich, while the officers who promulgated the mess skip away unscathed and with another career ticket punched.

The controversy in question surrounds Building 18 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC, and the red tape of their outpatient center’s bureaucracy that troops get mired in. How the deplorable conditions endured by wounded warriors at Building 18 were unbeknownst to the commanding general of WRAMC, Major General George Weightman, are beyond me. This dude didn’t make a walkthrough of his command when he took over? And who’s the officer in charge of that ward? He’s gotta be a full-bird Colonel and a doctor to boot, and he/she didn’t notice the mold, rats, and leaks? The OIC needs to be shit-canned too. What about the ward’s doctors? The command sergeant major? Anybody? No one attached to that facility gave enough of a shit about the troops to speak up about this place. The troops themselves finally had to blow the whistle, and reporters brought it to the attention of newly-appointed Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

If you ask a volunteer soldier to sally forth into battle time & time again in some third-world shit hole for multiple tours with murky objectives & not enough equipment, that soldier is accepting on faith that he or she will be supported 100% by the wonks that sent them there. And when they get wounded & maimed, that support should be 200% at the very least.

When I think military medicine, I think of hospitals like Landstuhl in Germany, the Bethesda Naval Hospital, and especially Walter Reed. WRAMC is supposed to be the best of the best, our showcase facility in the DC area. Looking at the footage of the shoddy condition of the place these heroes have to recover & convalesce in, it looked like it hadn’t been touched since I was born at that same hospital almost 38 years ago. Yes, I was delivered at WRAMC (then called Walter Reed General Hospital) by an Army major.

You mean to tell me MG Weightman never toured that place? He didn’t make at least a weekly or monthly walk-through to speak with the soldiers under his care? And it seems his underlings were also not doing the same thing?

To this I say Fuck You, sir. Fuck You Very Much.

So, in the face of this public relations disaster, what does the Army do? They fire Weightman, effectively halting his career dead in the water, and they replace him with Lieutenant General Kevin Kiley, the former commander of WRAMC whom Weightman had replaced. LTG Kiley had been serving as the Army’s surgeon general. However, all evidence points to the fact that these shitty conditions existed under Kiley’s command, too, so this putting another fox back in the hen house. Why put him back in charge when it was falling to pieces on his watch too? The Secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey, fell on his sword and resigned when Gates asked him to, and rightly so. His ass should have been over there at that hospital seeing soldiers too, and he should have been sending people over to inspect the facility. Sure, most unit inspections are just dog & pony bullshit, but this is a hospital for shit’s sake. Standards must be upheld.

All of you should write or call your duly elected Congressional Representatives and Senators and ask them when the last time was that they went to a military hospital to see the troops and check on their care, morale, and welfare.

Deploying soldiers from the South Carolina National Guard are stuck in Biloxi, Mississippi at Camp Shelby because neither the Army nor the state will pay for their bus fare (yeah, bus fare, not plane fare) to come home on pre-deployment leave before heading out to Third World Purgatory, yet Nancy freakin’ Pelosi, Speaker of the House, is bitching about how the military transport jet at her beck & call isn’t big enough to haul around all of her lackeys & lobbyist bootlickers (who shouldn’t even be on a military flight in the first fucking place) across the country without having to make a refueling stop. Unreal. Well now, Fuck You Very Much, Madame Speaker. Matter of fact, Double Fuck You. She acts like she has to deplane at a dirt field in Omaha and wait while terrorists pinpoint her with laser beams….the plane would stop for maybe 20 minutes at a secure military field and refuel and be on the way again before she can finish her Perrier.

I can think of nearly 3500 reasons that she should be thankful every day for her freedom and her very privileged position. And I can think of over 24,000 reasons for her and the other 534 members of the 110th Congress to get off the golf course, cut short the 3-martini power lunches, and get their elected asses over to 7100 Georgia Avenue in Northwest DC and 8901 Rockville Pike in Bethesda and personally thank everyone they see.

Note: as of the time I write this, the death toll in Iraq is listed as 3,190 in Iraq and 371 in Afghanistan, and the wounded in Iraq as 23, 785 and 1,062 in Afghanistan. By the time you read this, it will unfortunately be higher.

TELL ME WHY

Why is it that it's okay for these dustbunny scumbag insurgents (a polite term for organized terrorists) to behead Americans on live TV and the Internet, to kidnap American soldiers, kill them, and booby-trap the mutilated bodies, to kill civilian contractors & burn the mutilated corpses, and hang the remains from bridges so more of these assholes can beat them with sticks like a piñata, but if an American says something about the Koran or some Iraqi prisoners get embarrassing pictures taken of them, the media explodes like it's the second coming of Hitler?

Why is it that the media never shows images of US troops feeding starving villagers, or air-dropping thousands of food packets, or building schools, or giving inoculations for cholera to people who shit in their own water supply, or training police officers to take care of their own country, and instead only focuses on the rare occurrence of some dipshit who snaps and kills a civilian? Why is it only the bad things get hugely publicized while the good things get forgotten?

Why is it that most junior enlisted troops, who have to do the bulk of the shitty details the military gets tasked with, are so poorly paid that they qualify for FOOD STAMPS? Why do so many troops have to take second jobs delivering pizza and stocking shelves at night at Wal-Mart to make ends meet? Why is it that it took a Doctorate in Aeronautical Engineering to design a plane, a Master's to build it, a Bachelor's to fly it, and the millions of dollars of electronics, avionics, and weapons are maintained by a high school graduate who is paid less than the drive thru clown at Hardee's, and isn't old enough to even by a beer yet to toast the news that he's again getting deployed to some Third World shit hole where every day angry people will do their level best to kill him for trying to help them?

Why is it that troops have had to beg Rumsfeld for armor kits for their vehicles and in many cases have had to scrounge steel plates from trash piles to weld onto their vehicles for protection from people who strap explosives to pregnant women & send them into wedding parties to blow themselves up?

Why is it that we have Israel, Lebanon, the Hezbo's, and every other Jallallahoolabooladurkadurka jihad teetering on the edge of potential nuclear war, and the biggest story in the news is what Mel Gibson said about a Jewish cop during a DUI arrest? At this rate, Israel will get wind of the anti-Semite remarks of Gibson and start bombing Hollywood. No big loss….

Why is it that the average American has no clue that Venezuela, whom we import an assload of oil from, is on the verge of going communist, but knew that last night was the series premiere of Celebrity Fit Club and Flavor of Love?

Why is it that the average American will gladly tell you that he lives in the greatest country on earth because we're free and can vote for our leaders, but that they have no idea who their elected representatives to Congress are and didn't vote in the last election? Why is it that more Americans voted for American Idol than in any American presidential election, ever?

Yeah...can you tell me why?