Saturday, April 21, 2012

Hangin’ Out In Jihadistan

Two items from the mainstream media this past week have turned me from my normal, placid, tolerant, loving self into a sputtering troglodyte (you do believe me, don’t you?). The first was the publication in the Los Angeles Times of some rather gruesome photos taken of US troops holding Taliban body parts (taken in 2010).

The other was the call for investigation of rocker and Second Amendment advocate Ted Nugent for “threatening” President Obama. Both items are proof positive that the MSM are in bed with the left wing of the Democratic party and are fully dedicated to skewing the “news” to fit their own agenda of painting the American military and angry conservatives as out-of-control mobs. The double standard is both palbable and obnoxiously left-loaded.

Let’s discuss the photo issue first. Despite ardent pleas from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta asking that the Times not print the photos, the paper did so anyway. Panetta did not demand anything, but simply pointed out that the photos were not newsworthy (they’re nearly two years old), would stir up more hatred and violence by the Taliban at a crucial juncture in Afghan-American discussions of exit strategy, and would further endanger already-endangered American lives.

The Times metaphorically shrugged its shoulders and asked “so what?” If it bleeds, it leads. And if it causes more unnecessary bloodshed, so much the better. If the incident had been unknown until now (which it was not), there might be some justification for publication of the photos. But it’s what the photos don’t show that makes the publication at this time so reprehensible. Like the My Lai massacre of the Vietnam War, this would be a major revelation of US troops behaving barbarously by murdering innocent civilians and then celebrating what they had done.

But that isn’t even close to the truth. What the photos show is young men, frustrated by a war they’re not allowed to win, holding body parts of Taliban terrorists blown up by their own people. Dumb, uncivilized, and perhaps repulsive. But unexpected given the surrounding circumstances? I think not. This sort of excess and unthinking behavior has occurred in every war in history. The Times has succeeded only in making a bad situation worse without having contributed a thing to the cause of peaceful withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. What they have succeeded in doing is handing Hamid Karzai and his friends in the Taliban another propaganda victory.

So where was the Times, and its willingness to print gruesome photos, from the beheading of Daniel Pearl, to the hanging of American workers on a bridge over the Euphrates River, to the burning-alive of Christian churchgoers in Egypt and Nigeria? The paper suffers from a very bad case of selective sensitivity. Worse still, the political generals played fellow-traveler by immediately denouncing the soldiers rather than the publication of the photos. They essentially convicted the soldiers of war crimes without trial and without context.

The soldiers didn’t kill the Taliban whose body parts were being handed around. They are at most guilty of bad behavior after the fact. But the Taliban and their jihadist friends throughout the Middle East do the barbaric killings then celebrate by displaying their “prizes.” There is simply no comparison between the two situations. The Times doesn’t care. The paper and TV news refused to show taped film of innocent civilians jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Centers rather than be burned alive because repetition of the live shots would be insensitive. But showing testosterone-fueled and frustrated soldiers holding dismembered body parts that they didn’t cause is somehow necessary and newsworthy. Aw, horse manure.

And then there’s the Secret Service’s rush to talk to Ted Nugent about “violent” remarks Nugent made about Barack Hussein Obama. Clearly, Nugent is planning on assassinating Obama because he made some over-the-top statements about what he would like to happen in the future. Here are the “threats”: “Obama is a piece of s***, and I told him to suck on my machine gun. We’ve got a president and attorney general who don’t even like the Constitution. We’ve got four Supreme Court Justices who don’t believe in the Constitution. If you can’t galvanize and promote and recruit people to vote for Mitt Romney, we’re done.”

And now for the money quote: “Our president and our attorney general, our vice-president, Hillary Clinton, they’re criminals. They’re criminals! We are Braveheart. We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November.” Aha! Got it. Nugent is planning on beheading the entire Obama administration. Well, even I haven’t gone that far, but somehow I wish I had. Because, like Nugent, I would have been making a metaphorical comment on what Americans should do at the ballot box in November. And by the way, have I mentioned that I hate Obama?

When a jihadist says he wants to behead you, you had better be wearing a thick metal collar. But that’s another story altogether. The MSM now have a double-shot of pro-Obama vitriol to work with. They can now point to a potential mass murderer and tie him to Mitt Romney. Prior to Romney appearing to have sewed-up the Republican nomination, he was their favorite moderate. Now he’s a fascist and close friend of a dangerous wild man who wants to kill the president and his entire administration.

Somehow these alleged news outlets can tie Nugent’s statements directly to the Romney campaign, but see no connection between the vile and misogynist comments of million dollar contributor Bill Maher and Barack Obama. They can’t see the Nugent comments as angry but metaphorical remarks about getting Obama out of office, but they can entirely ignore MSNBC’s Ed Schultz saying that he’d like to rip Dick Cheney’s heart out. When they did mention it at all, they called it simple rhetorical zeal, missing the exact words: “Dick Cheney’s heart is a political football. We ought to kick it around and stuff it back in him.”

The Schultz venom was spat out nearly two years ago, but according to the L.A. Times standard, that’s newsworthy today. Still, as vile as those remarks were, I didn’t seen the Secret Service rushing to the MSNBC studios to question Schultz about his threat to a former US vice-president who still has Secret Service protection. Quite simply put, a threat that can’t be carried out is no threat at all. A thousand years of Anglo-American jurisprudence firmly establishes that. In the case of first instance, an English knight, angered at what another man had said, shouted “were it not for Assize time, I would lop your head from off your shoulders.” The ancient English court called it a “conditional” threat, dismissed the charges, and that has remained the law ever since.

Could any sane person honestly believe for a second that Ted Nugent is planning on donning a kilt, painting his face with blue stripes, mounting a horse, adopting a bad Scottish accent and charging into the White House to lop off Barack Obama’s head? Apparently, the MSM and the Secret Service think so. I do have to wonder if the Secret Service will bring Colombian prostitutes with them to the Nugent meeting. “We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November,” sounds a lot like “Were it not for Assize time,” in other words a conditional threat which is no real threat at all.

Furthermore, we have gone England a step farther. It’s a thing called the First Amendment. It protects Schultz and Nugent equally. Most significantly it requires that if a threat actually has been made, it must also be a clear and present danger. By precedent, and even the standard of the questionable anti-terrorism statutes, neither Schultz nor Nugent poses a clear and present danger. More recently, on Thursday MSNBC “host” Martin Bashir used the Book of Mormon to condemn Mitt Romney to hell for “lying.” Good thing there are never more than twelve or thirteen viewers of MSNBC at any given time or we might have to take that as a serious threat.

Schultz concluded his diatribe with “I don’t want Cheney to go to hell, I just want him to get the hell out of here.” Allow me to up the ante. I want Obama and his entire gang of subversive crooks the hell out of here, and I want him and the whole left wing of the Democratic party to go to hell, the sooner the better. @#X$%F@#$%!

End of rant.

Note: Subsequent to the writing of this article, Nugent met with the Secret Service, and it appears this will go no farther. Nugent described the meeting as "solid and professional."

21 comments:

Joel Farnham said...

LawHawk,

The Secret Service was just asking Nugent directions to the nearest strip-club, for academic reasons of course.

Unknown said...

Joel: Or the location of the shop of the local kilt-maker. LOL

T-Rav said...

I really wonder whether the MSM/Democratic complex are aware of the double standard they employ, and just care about scoring political points, or if they've been spewing this crap long enough they actually believe it. It boggles my mind how anyone could think Ted Nugent is the real threat.

Joel Farnham said...

LawHawk,

From what I see, the MSM is complicit with the death of any body, whether they are journalist, military man or just plain civilian. It doesn't occur to these idiots that the Taliban is like the scorpion and a journalist is like a frog. You know what happened then, right? The scorpion convinces the frog to give him a ride across the river. He promises he won't sting the frog. The frog accepts and at the end, the scorpion stings the frog anyway. When asked why, the scorpion replied, "That is in my nature, silly frog."

Unknown said...

T-Rav: I think they know and they don't care. News has become editorialization, and editorialization has become a left wing propaganda machine. It boggles my mind that they think Al Sharpton is not a threat, but then he threatens the "right people" I suppose.

Unknown said...

Joel: There's the other parallel as well--they feed the beast in hopes it will eat them last.

K said...

Dude.

Doesn't this actually hurt the Obama administration? Most particularly with their greatest supporters on the left?

BevfromNYC said...

Now let's put this all in its proper context. N.O.W. ran around with their collective panties in a huge wad and ranting over the horror of Limbaugh's rather indelicate use of the word "slut" in regards to some liberal woman-child. Yet, when Schultz uses that word to describe Bachmann or Palin or any other conservative women there's nary a peep. I won't even GO to what Bill Maher has called Palin because decent people do not use those kinds of descriptive words even in impolite company.

And Louis Farrakhan directly threatened President Obama when Obama sent troops to Libya to take it Louie's good friend and benefactor Gaddafi. No call for the SS to "interview" Rev. Farrakhan. (And yes, I mean "SS")

What do we expect. Let's call this what this is --- this is Obama's "War On Americans" and we can't afford to lose it...

Unknown said...

K: I don't see how. Obama and his leftist base hate the military because they are the foundation of American power overseas. While even many of us on the conservative end of the spectrum want to get out of Afghanistan because we're accomplishing nothing, handcuffing our military, and endangering their lives for no genuine purpose, still we believe that if we must withdraw, we should do so honorably. That would mean the military did its job well, but the politicians crippled their efforts with the enthusiastic assistance of the MSM.

Showing graphic photos of a few of our military men behaving badly serves their purpose. The left knows nothing about honor, so they can satisfy their desire to see America weakened by an ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan with the lie of blaming it on the barbaric, triumphalist military. It worked in ending the Vietnam war, but there at least some of the allegations were true.

Unknown said...

Bev: What a great slogan. The Republican candidate should use it. Instead of the pathetic leftist/feminazi cry of "the war one women" (which is phony as hell), the candidate could turn the tables and talk about the genuine Obama war on America and Americans.

For those who think that a Farrakhan would be no threat to Obama because they share many views, I would simply point out that Stalin and Trotsky shared many views, but that didn't stop Stalin from banishing then assassinating Trotsky anwyay. Closer to home, there are many very intelligent and knowledgeable people who believe that Malcolm X ran afoul of Farrakhan's lust for power. Yet as you say, the SS didn't even look at Farrakhan's dangerous statements about Obama and Libya or form the conclusion that Calypso Louie needed to have a visit from them.

Tennessee Jed said...

It's all such b.s. anymore, Hawk. In Knoxville paper, there was an article headlined "Extreme Voices rule, Analyst says: The analyst you ask? Why Mark Halperin of course. He was speaking at a law symposium at Lincoln Memorial Law Review symposium. Other speakers included Michael Steele, and Goldie Taylor. This was published as a "news" story.

Halperin decried the exteme voices as a "freak show" that is causing a gridlock in politics. As examples, he cites Michael Moore on the left vs. Ann Coulter on the right, and--get this; Huffpo on the left and Fox News on the right. Is he fricking kidding? Mark Halperin?? It's clear the underlying notion is to marginalize Fox news. This from someone who comments on MSNBC and in Time Magazine.

AndrewPrice said...

I'm a little surprised The Times did this. This is the sort of thing which is bad for the administration all around and they usually don't do things like that unless it's a Republican Administrations.

Unknown said...

Tennessee: I remember Halperin calling Obama a duck on the Joe Scarborough Morning Joe. At least I think it was duck. I'm sure the word had a "d," and a "c," and a "k" in it. LOL Of course one truth that was a slip of the tongue put Halperin into permanent apology mode for disrespecting the White House messiah.

Somehow I can't think of Halperin as an "analyst" in the way I thought of William F. Buckley as an analyst. In fact, I tend to think of him and the other MSNBC freaks as analysts more in the mode of the great World War II analyst, Tokyo Rose. Extreme voices, me arse.

Unknown said...

Andrew: The Times did it to promote the idea of our "barbaric military" ignoring the rules of war and civilization in direct contravention of their Commander-in-Chief's civilized war orders. That way, Obama's the good guy, and the military are the bad guys. It gives Obama more cover for an ill-planned and ignominious retreat from Afghanistan so that he can bring us "peace for our time." He no longer has to pretend that America should withdraw from Afghanistan with honor intact.

They didn't do it to wound the administration (which they probably did to a certain extent unintentionally). They did it to wound the military and America's place as the last best hope for protection from Islamist domination.

And there's an even bigger reason. They needed something to boost their circulation. The Los Angeles Times has gone so far to the left that their circulation is a mere shadow of its former glory. It's even closer to bankruptcy than its New York namesake. And it is already morally bankrupt.

The MSM (and Obama) are so tone deaf to the public will and American pride that they do things like this thinking everyone will agree with them. It simply never occurs to them that others might be highly offended by such blatant exploitation of an isolated misstep by a few soldiers two years ago. And it doesn't bother them that the photos will be widely publicized throughout Jihadistan, without context, and will encourage the belief among the cave-dwellers that the soldiers actually did the dismemberment. In fact, it was their own suicide bombers who blew up the bastards.

For propaganda purposes, the MSM never tie the military and this Commander-in-Chief's administration together the way they did with Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and Bush. The Messiah couldn't possibly be responsible for any wrongdoing. Military bad, Obama good. With Obama, "the buck stops here" has become "the evil military stole the buck." Except for the SEALs who helped Obama capture and kill Osama bin Laden.

Tehachapi Tom said...

Hawk
Dead is dead, blown up or shot and pissed on it changes nothing. Therefore it isn't real news which is in keeping with the Times.
This seeking sensationalism is shallow at best but then what is the Times if it is not shallow.
The Times isn't even good enough for my parrot's cage.

Unknown said...

Tehachapi Tom: We are generally a lot more civilized than that toward the dead. Even though I understand what they did and think it was wrong, the photos aren't aimed at people with real life experience. It's aimed at the Islamofascist supporters, the pinky-finger limousine liberals and the hardcore America-hating left.

Jen said...

LawHawk, great rant, and I'm with you on the last paragraph of who you want to go where!

Great gonzos, The Nuge strikes again! I guess he had them in a stranglehold, and they were paralyzed from the state of shock. And... if The Nuge wants to go stormtroopin', he can count me in. LOL!

Seriously, my experience with liberals is that they tend to take everything said literally. I will give an exact example. Someone I know once told me about having to go watch his son's soccer game, and that "He doesn't get to play much." I said "Oh, he's a benchwarmer then." "No, actually, they stand most of the time." I couldn't believe my ears.

Unknown said...

Jen: Thanks. I was afraid I might have gone a little overboard, and then I thought about it and realized I was actually being kind. LOL

Unknown said...

Tehachapi Tom: I forgot to mention that the three groups I listed in my reply are all subscribers to The Times. They are about the only subscribers left.

Patriot said...

I believe that the Times, MSNBC, and all the usual leftist media suspects, do this because they know how the Right will go into frothing excuse mode, thus accomplishing their original intent whenever they say or print something like this....the intent to stay relevant and be part of the larger narrative ongoing. They must have their publicity. That I believe is their main reason behind all this crap. How many members of the media, both leftist and Fox and bloggers, have been discussing the Times article? "See....we're still relevant and in the news! Buy our product as we are the ones who will keep you up to speed on current events better than anyone else!"

While I am firmly of the belief that this is one of the primary reasons for their publication of these type issues, I am also not naive enough to not think that they truly think they are part of the global movement to discredit America, and by association, any of it's traditional leanings and conservative thought. They truly are part of the one world vision of our planet. Embodied in the UN.....wise solons will rule over all mankind and all ugly human nature will be forbidden. Then we will all lve in a world where everyone has their fair share and war will be "banned" from our existence.

Anything that discredits war, soldiers, conservativism or the wrong way of thinking will be pushed onto the bitter clingers until they either come around to the right way of thinking or we remove their hate from our noble society we are trying to build.

Unknown said...

Pariot: That's a big part of the formula. As I mentioned in the article, The Times is on the verge of collapse, and it was going to do anything it could to stir up circulation. The paper used to have a huge international news staff. Today, it is barebones, getting most of its information from its parent corporation The Tribune Company, and AP.

MSNBC and its ilk, on the other hand, had little audience to start with, and now has even less. What's weird is that the tail has wagged the dog. The huge liberal NBC has been radicalized by the crazy staff at MSNBC and has moved to the left rather than acting as a somewhat moderating influence on its little sister on cable.

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