Day: September 26, 2006

Is There a Pentagon Patsy in the Audience?

Buck Banks

Planting questions: A few days ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, chair of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, had a Q&A session with some lower-echelon staffers at the Pentagon. Now, it is entirely possible that it wasn’t staged and the questions weren’t planted, but … here, you be the judge. This is from the press release issued by the DoD today:

“Negativity in the press is absolutely detrimental to the morale of our forces and our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Cpl. John A. Stukins said to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a Sept. 22 town hall meeting.

“What are we doing to confront this problem and to better the morale of our forces over there — not only over there, but here as well?” asked Stukins, a 23-year-old administrative specialist from Lafayette, La., who works with the Marine Staff at the Pentagon.

Rumsfeld and Pace both congratulated Stukins for asking his question.

Fielding Stukins’ query, Pace said there was around-the-clock media coverage of the overseas exploits of the U.S. military early on during the global war on terrorism.

“We had television, newspapers, magazines,” Pace explained. “If you were interested, you could read as much as you wanted and you could watch as much as you wanted, and you could form your own opinions.”

‘I also have the right to respect your right to be wrong.’
— Cpl. John Stukins

However, as the conflict continued, other issues began to compete with military news for radio or television airtime or newspaper or magazine copy inches, Pace said.

“News is a business, and now the news cycle is such that only certain amounts (of coverage) of every day are allocated to coverage of the war,” Pace said. “And, unfortunately, the parts of the war that then become shown are the parts that capture people’s attentions.”

And, more often than not, Pace noted, today’s military news coverage in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to focus on “where the bombs are going off,” instead of “where the schools are being built and the like.”

So, the general said, it’s important that department leaders and rank-and-file military members tell the public about the good, as well as the not-so-good, military news from overseas.

So Stukins is like the Radar O’Riley character in M*A*S*H, a paper-pusher. He just happened to be able to string together his two-part question well enough to give his bosses a segue into politely telling the rest of the staff to keep their mouths shut about the negative stuff.

In an interview later with American Forces Press Service, Stukins used the term “reprehensible” to describe people who criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the media. And he left us this gem:

Stukins says he’s a firm believer in freedom of speech as guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights. “But, I also have the right to respect your right to be wrong,” he said.

Thanks, Corporal! And we respect your right to be a tool of the military-industrial complex.

House Set to Join Senate to Screw You Out of Another Right

Buck Banks

So sue me: The House of Representatives is set to vote today on a bill that is either ironically or sarcastically called the Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005, or HR 2679 IH. Nice-sounding title, eh? You’d think it’s intended to protect your right to religious expression, but you’d be wrong.

It’s designed to protect official yahoos who blurt Bible babble or religious hate language or manage to trample someone’s civil rights through some obnoxious conflation of church and state. Let’s say you’re offended by a yahoo acting in his official capacity who spouts a bunch of religious garbage. You can sue sue the yahoo for violating your civil rights underthe Civil Action for Deprivation of Rights, Section 1979 of the Revised Statutes of the United States (42 U.S.C. 1983). But with this new amendment, you can’t make him pay your legal fees and court costs. Here’s the actual language from the bill:

A Bill: To amend the Revised Statutes of the United States to eliminate the chilling effect on the constitutionally protected expression of religion by State and local officials that results from the threat that potential litigants may seek damages and attorney’s fees.

The bill is designed to protect official yahoos who blurt Bible babble or religious hate language

The amendment, which already has passed the Senate, and only needs to be ratified by the House and signed by the Worst President Ever to become law. Talk about deprivation of rights ….

You have to love the language and how they twisted it to make it sound like the amendment is actually protecting officials from the “chilling effect” of the “threat of litigation.” Said another way, it protects the official’s right to spout religious hate language while protecting your right to pay your attorney for suing the bastard. Beauty!

Want to complain to your representative about it? You can do it here.

Thanks to AK for the tip.

Poll: Only 42% of Americans Believe Gas Price Plunge Is Politically Motivated

Jon Ponder

How can 53 percent of us be so blind:

According to a new Gallup poll, 42 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that the Bush administration “deliberately manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this fall’s elections.” Fifty-three percent of those surveyed did not believe the conspiracy theory; 5 percent said they had no opinion.

Not surprising, almost two-thirds of those who suspect President Bush intervened to bring down energy prices before Election Day are registered Democrats, according to Gallup.

Young George Allen Alledgedly Stuffed Deer Head in Black Family’s Mailbox

Jon Ponder

Macaca:

The sickest part of the latest reporting is the claim by R. Kendall Shelton that Allen — who called Shelton the “Wizard,” because Shelton shared the surname of a former KKK imperial wizard — once cut the head off a deer and asked where the nearest black person lived, and promptly shoved that head into the person’s mailbox. This may be the episode on which Allen’s Senate career (I think his presidential career has gone the way of the deer’s head) may turn, for two reasons. First, because an incident like this, if true, is not only grotesque and craven, but reveals a general hatred rather than an anger directed at a specific individual. It’s not like Allen was miffed that some guy, who happened to be black, sold him a used car that turned out to be a lemon. If Shelton’s account is true, for Allen any black suffices for intimidation and ridicule.