Nom de guerre: Rivrdog

Memorial Day

*Salutes the fallen and departed*

It's hard to face Memorial Day now, knowing that there will be 365 more Memorial Days to come before the next official one.

So, as I search my blogroll for the many fine efforts that memorialize our veterans, I find none more succinct than Cap'n Jim, my blogfather's. In this post, he has pasted up Gen. George S. Patton's real speech to the Third Army before it deployed to Germany to give the Coup de Grace to Hitler.

Read it. This is what inspired leadership is all about.

Iran rattles an empty scabbard

According to this article, Iran now wants to fire missiles at 29 selected US and coalition targets as a means of slaying the Great Satan.

Iranian missiles, hmmm. Those would be Frogs, Scuds, Silkworms and other short-range stuff. They don't stack up well against our Peacekeepers and Minuteman 3e's and the array of sub-launched missiles we could fire back at them.

A suggestion for Mr. Bush, POTUS: supposedly, our ICBMs aren't currently targeted, and may not even be on hard alert. Put a patch or two of them back on alert, target them against Iranian military targets and targets of Iranian National Command Authority (mullahs), then make a simple anouncement to that effect.

We don't have to fire the missiles, just say that we're ready to. That'll get their attention.

From the ridiculous to the obvious

The preceding post on Brandon Mayfield got me to thinking about the FBI and their approach to keeping us safe from local Islamic Jihadists.

Mayfield is actually a pretty good example of a man making bad choices and what's wrong with the entire Islamic religion today, so I'll blog about both subjects in one post.

FBI victim blows big chance

Brandon Mayfield, the erstwhile-lawyer from Portland, OR who was held for two weeks by the FBI who thought they had captured a terrorist when in fact they had simply bungled basic fingerprint Classification 101, has blown his 15 minutes of fame, according to this article in the Oregonian.

Man commits suicide after sex with hen

I could edit for a year and wear out 3 gross of blue pencils, but I couldn't come up with a better headline for this story.

I link, you decide.

I told you so

In case you think the war is going swimmingly along, this is what happened when we left Fallujah to the local security forces.

This will happen again in every city where we don't maintain a permanent presence.

Tell me again why good American lives have been wasted so that we can give large chunks of Iraq back to Islamic extremists.

It's a fucked-up war.

I'm not against this war, I'm against losing it!

Peace in our time?

Peace in our time? Not many of the youngsters will remember the newsreel videos of the 1939 British Prime Minister, Sir Neville Chamberlain, getting off an aircraft from Germany, waving a folded peace treaty at the camera, and proclaiming that Europe would have "Peace in our time".

Events thereafter proved Chamberlain wrong.

Today, we can all go to a news service and read about how the US just signed a peace treaty with the Iraqi (Irani) Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Does this mean "Peace in our time" (by June 30th) in Iraq?

Or is it a colossal mistake to sign a peace treaty with an outlaw?

You decide.

Kerry's Fuel Plan

Some time ago on this blog, I said that $2.00 + fuel would be a problem for George Bush, and when Kerry got to the issue, he would make big points in the election contest.

Now I'm not so sure. Kerry could screw up a wet dream. He flew into PDX yesterday to make his "Fuel Speech", chose as his backdrop the school bus barn of the financially-challenged Parkrose School district, and let fly his newest stump speech. Today, the local (D)emocrat house organ, the Oregonian, gave him 48 column inches of newsprint to tout his "plan". Here's the plan:

1. Criticize Bush for not getting tougher with OPEC to pump more oil. Cheap shot: what would "Rambo" Kerry do, march the 3 ID into Riyahd and take the oil at gunpoint?

2. Offer car buyers a $4,000 tax credit for purchasing "fuel efficient" cars. He didn't say what level of fuel efficiency would be required to earn the tax bennie, but he's probably talking about the overpriced, underpowered, eggshell cars now known as "hybrids". These hybrid gas-electric vehicles cost about 40% more than a standard car, and $4,000 doesn't go very far in paying for them.

3. Stop refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This boneheaded idea was tried out by Clinton, who actually pumped the Reserve down, resulting in no cost reduction to the fuel user. The value of the Reserve is as a reserve against hostilities against the US which would interrupt the flow of oil, not as a buffer against price spikes in the marketplace. Since we face such hostility now, it makes sense to fill the Reserve faster. Also, doesn't this Bright Idea #3 conflict with Bright Idea #1?

I'm continuing this rant, changing it to reflect the SUV argument, in the space below.

Another coffin nail?

CBS' news department isn't the most fair and balanced one around, but on 60 Minutes last night, they did an interview with Gen. Anthony Zinni, former Commandant of the Marine Corps. He said, among other things, that the Iraq war was poorly planned from the start. He also said that the US should have concentrated on the many military objectives involved with the defeat of Al-Qaeda instead of the objective of toppling Saddam.

I was most interested in his analysis of the failure of planning. He said that we needed to have a big enough Army to put enough troops in theater to hold the cities after we ran off Saddam's troops, rather than bypassing them like we did. His estimate of enough troops was at least 300,000, twice as many as we used.

So, we now have a fairly impressive list of generals who think the job in Iraq was botched. Do you suppose that opens any more eyes at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave? I'm not holding my breath, personally.

Your First Gun

This series will attempt to advise those who have made the decision that they want to become familiar with shooting firearms for the first time.

Those readers of this blog who are already familiar with firearms may want to follow along, but this is going to be very basic, so you may get bored reading it. If you do, please critique generously for anything I have left out.

OK, you have not been a gun person, but, looking at the world through clear, not rose-colored, glasses, you have now decided that your life and the lives of your loved ones may just depend on you having shooting skills. You have made the decision to acquire those skills. Congratulations on your good judgment.

Where do you start?