Letters from the Porn Wars

 

War.

Is it just me, or do we seem to be having a lot of wars lately?

I mean just in the general sense.

It seems you can’t turn around nowadays without running into another charge of the right brigade.

Now we Americans, we love war. We do, don’t we? Right from the birth of the nation, Americans have loved war the way Brazilians love soccer.  We love war the way Canadians love beer and the English love misery and Australians love sheep. We love war the way the Japanese love a little girl in a sailor suit.  Sure, war, that’s our thing and we’ll die with our boots on, you bet. 

To paraphrase the late great George Carlin, we’re not much good anything else these days, but war, that we can do. From twelve O’clock high to the darkest hour, it’s our great escape.

We have a major one every twenty years or so.  And a couple of minor ones in between.

Heat of battle, cold war, police actions, bush wars and brushfire wars, from Algiers to Zulu and a dirty dozen in between, we love ‘em all. If it’s war and peace, we're not stopping midway we’re going for the glory.

And when we’re not at war elsewhere, well, we declare war at home just to stay in practice.

War on drugs, war on terror, war on poverty, war on guns, war on religion, war on science, war on Christmas, war on business, war on obesity, war on illegal immigration, war on saggy pants, war on crime, war on music, war on Wall Street, war on socialism, war on freedom, war on education, war on the homeless, war on this and war on that.

Hell, we once fought a war to end war, and we won!  

We just love war, we Americans. That’s why so many Americans drive Hummers and carry guns, we’re always looking for some war.  We don’t always need thirty seconds over Tokyo, but a quick skirmish in the Wal-Mart parking lot or a running fire fight on the I-5 would do nicely, anything to stay in practice for the next big one.

We’re open to suggestions, you just tell us what you want blown up and we’ll have the B-52s commence carpet bombing at dawn.

At the moment, seems we’re in the midst of a war on women with new fronts opening every day.   Frankly, I can’t get excited about this conflict.  Sooner or later, I’m probably going to get court martialed.  See, I’m far too inclined to fraternize with the enemy.  Listen, you guys stay here and guard the tree-fort, I’ll go over to the enemy lines and see if I can negotiate a cease fire. Soldier, hand me that bottle of wine.  If I’m not back by dawn, send room service and remember the fighting 69th!

War on women, how’s that going to play out?

I don’t want to sound like a defeatist, but, men, we’ve lost already.  Here’s why, women have all the vaginas. 

They didn’t tell you that when you signed up, did they?

It’s like nuclear weapons, they’ve got ‘em and we don’t and sooner or later they’re going to use ‘em.

It doesn’t matter how big your bunker buster is when the other side can totally go all Sargent York on your ass.

Oh sure, the war effort is pouring money and research into artificial vaginas, perhaps ones that could even fit into a pocket, and we’ve got fabulous kill squads of Log Cabin Republicans, but like a gaily painted V-2 rocket it’s too little, too late. 

A couple weeks back I read that the Left had declared war on babies.

Now see, I could get behind a war on babies.  I think we could totally win that.

Think about it, babies suck. I hate babies, they’re such selfish little bastards. They drool. They smell funny.  Babies never offer to pick up the tab.  They don’t drink, but do they ever volunteer to be the designated driver? No. I hate that. They’re everywhere too, they’ve totally infiltrated our society.  Illegal aliens? Gimme a break. You know how much babies cost us each year?  Talk about a drag on the economy.  So, yeah, war on babies, I’m hip. They’re either eating or sleeping or crapping, when are they going to train for war?  It’s hard to fight with a load in your nappy. They don’t cooperate worth a damn either. They’ll probably start crying at the sight of first blood. They’re easily startled by loud noises, one good artillery barrage will have them howling for their mommies. Babies are weak.  Old and lamed up as I am, I’m pretty sure I could take a dozen of them at the same time in close quarters combat, more if the rules of engagement let me steal their snotty little noses.  Babies have lousy hand-eye coordination, I bet they can’t shoot for shit.  Sign me up for this one, I hate babies. USA! USA!

And you know, it’s about time we got an easy one, we’ll totally put those babies in the hurt locker.

And then, this week, Rick Santorum declared war on porn.

Well, alright! Put on your green berets and follow me, men! We can lick these filthy immoral …

Wait. What?

War on what’s that you say? Porn?

Hey, now don’t get me wrong here. I’m not unpatriotic. I like a good war same as the next American, but when I first heard General Santorum’s declaration of war on the Kingdom of Porn I had some serious misgivings. I thought, you know, this might be a bridge too far, this could be an apocalypse right now.  Waging war on porn could be our Dunkirk, our Waterloo, our downfall (I know, I know, now I’m just being a pain in das boot, but hey, we were all soldiers once, weren’t we? And young?).

War on babies, that’s one thing. War on women, little more difficult but winnable unless they unleash the big red one, go all crimson tide. But war on porn? 

Does anybody really want that?

Porn is a lot like China, sure we say we don’t like them but they’re our biggest trading partner, aren’t they?

I just don’t want this to turn into another war on drugs. Remember that fiasco?  We thought it was just going to be a walk in the sun, but it sucked up the best years of our lives.  What if the war on porn turns out the same way?  People will be making illicit porn in their basements and bathtubs and the next thing you know stores will be keeping cameras and the KY behind the pharmacy counter with the pseudoephedrine. They’ll be smuggling it in from South America, you know they will, or maybe Thailand. When I was a kid, the potheads used to debate the merits of different kinds of Mary-Jane, from Baja Gold to Maui Wowie, will our kids end up arguing over the different flavors of illegal porn? Vatican Twink to Mormon MILF?

When Navy and Coast Guard ships are sent to the Eastern Pacific to hunt drug smugglers, the sailors call it a “crack pac” – the war on porn is going to give that term a whole new meaning.

You know some people need porn, right.  Hey, I’m not saying that they’re addicted, they just use it to unwind after a long hard day.  What about those people? Sure the priests and politicians will be able to get it, same as always, but what about the common man?  Will they have to seek out some back alley porn dealer?  Or will states make an exemption strictly for medicinal purposes?

Think of the cable companies! And hell, the internet will probably be out of business in a week.  I mean, seriously, without porn what the hell is the net good for? Email?

But then I thought a bit more about it and I said to myself, why Santorum, you inglorious basterd, you!

As long as it’s for America, I mean.

"America is suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography.  It contributes to misogyny and violence against women. It is a contributing factor to prostitution and sex trafficking."

A pandemic!

I had no idea it was a pandemic. 

I thought we declared war on pandemics a while back? No? Well Hell’s Angels, we’d better get to it then.  A pandemic. 

For America!

The war on porn will be long and hard and we’ll likely face stiff opposition, but we won’t take it laying down, will we?

Yes, yes! For America. 

Remember how World World II kick-started the economy and ended the Great Depression? With the war on porn there’ll be jobs for everybody, hurrah!  Jobs and liberty, and tanks.  We'll secure our borders, end hunger, cure poverty, defeat homelessness!  The war on porn will end forever predatory lending and runaway healthcare costs!  Watch the gas prices fall as we advance on the smut masters who hold our economy in check, those filth mongers will finally get what’s coming to them.  No more porn subsides to the Midwest I say!  As the bastions of porn fall, so will taxes.  No more will we allow porn to spend our children’s future, with the final defeat of the porno dictators balance will be restored to the national budget and the trillions we spend on wanker material now can be diverted to more useful pursuits, like war.  Nothing will keep rogue nations in check like the war on porn, yessir, once they see what we do to porn they’ll be bending over to please us.  No porn, no gay marriage!  It’ll be traditional family values just like at President Santorum’s church, ok, that’s a bad example but I blame that entirely on porn. 

Uncle Samortorum needs you to help spank porn’s ass.

For America, for mom and warm apple pie!

So, don your chastity belts and put on your full metal jackets and remember loose lips may sink ships but the ships go down smiling.

Now, let’s get out there and beat porn.

For America.

Why I Talk to Loons

 

Over time, I have developed a particular habit here on Stonekettle Station.

In certain posts I tend to use comments from other websites and media to illustrate certain points of view.

Under the previous post, commenter Wez asked:

Just curious Jim, why respond to the insane posts by the fringe so often? I realize it helps to spotlight those A-holes who actually do think that way, but aren't you catering to the idiot element a little too much? The story of the lunatic in your office who made that comment was relevant, but were the multiple quotes of the ravings of those who can't even spell or construct a sentence a worthy use of your time?

That’s actually a couple of questions.

I’ll answer them in reverse order.

Why use quotes from Yahoo, Fox, RedState, WSJ, HuffPo, and so on? 

Because these comments often duplicate the tons of hate mail I get or the obnoxious comments that I won’t allow to post here on Stonekettle Station.  In some cases those comments are an exact match because commenters on Yahoo troll the web making the same type comments wherever their particular psychosis happens to lead them, sometimes they end up here. Take obnoxious Yahoo News regular “Tex Taylor” for example, who also showed up under my America Explained post, and then made himself a general nuisance around here for several months under a variety of pseudonyms. You can find some of his comments under this Yahoo article. Comments he makes on Yahoo and elsewhere are nearly identical to the ones he made here.  Now, if I only used quotes from my email and/or unpublished comments or if I quote a guy who made a verbal comment outside my door – as I do upon occasion – you just have to take my word that those people exist. And not only that they exist, but that they are exactly as lead-paint swilling ‘roid-rage crazy stupid as I make them out to be.  Since only I can see what’s in my moderation and email queues, you have to take my word for the veracity of any published examples I use from those sources. Some of you are perfectly willing to do that, and I appreciate your doe-eyed childlike trust.  However, inevitably what happens when my posts get shared (or just plain stolen) and published elsewhere, particularly on blogs with less restrictive commenting rules or on discussion forums, is that commenters immediately accuse me of making things up because, so they say, there simply isn’t anybody on their side (whichever side that happens to be) who is that stupid, hateful, ignorant, and/or illiterate. Then typically, they accuse me of being part of some grand media elite conspiracy to overthrow democracy, destroy freedom, kill Jesus, stir-fry babies, implement Sharia Law, and gayify Chuck Norris.  So, I commonly use comments from popular news sites to illustrate whatever point I’m trying to make, comments that are easily accessed by anybody with an internet connection.  If I want to you see the exact comment I’m quoting, I’ll include a link to that website and page.  If I want to you look it up for yourself so that you can see for yourself that the comments I’m quoting are a common trend and an easily determined one at that, such as in the previous post, then I’ll simply point you in the right direction and let you do the searching.  I leave clues in the text, as I did in the previous article, i.e. you “don’t have to look very far or very hard” under Yahoo News to find the comments I quoted – and thousands more exactly like them or worse, much worse.  I didn’t even have to give you a specific article yesterday, you can pick any post on the subject at hand and find thousands of comments similar to the ones I quoted.  I typically use Yahoo as a source for this kind of thing because a) it is unrestricted and unfiltered, b) it is a primarily a news aggregator and its articles come from a variety of sources, left and right, c) it is commented on equally by Liberals, Conservatives, sane and insane, male and female, Americans and non-American (though, granted, it does tend to the, um ,  less well educated portion of the spectrum), and d) because Yahoo articles typically have thousands of comments providing a very, very large sample range.

Are these raving loons worthy of my time? 

Yes. For a variety of reasons, the most important of which I’ll address further below. In the meantime rest assured that whatever effort I devote to these loons will in no way impact my Jonathan Goldsmith-like ability to discover heretofore unknown civilizations, memorize the timeless sagas of ancient Viking skelds in the original Icelandic, cure cancer through the power of Facebook coordinated group meditation, engineer free unlimited energy from the zero-point quantum foam, perfect the timeless art of erotic balloon animal sculpture, or work towards world peace through the magic of classic 60’s rock and roll.  Also, I read really, really fast.  I read a lot.  I read everything, from the back of milk cartons to a dozen science journals per week to any news source that will hold still long enough and from as many facets of the political spectrum as I can manage.  With acquisition of my internet enabled tablet, I read even more and from an even wider range of sources. I use a variety of data search and management tools. Information gathering, processing, and interpretation was my job for all of my adult life, I was highly trained in it and I helped to design some of the techniques used in modern military intelligence systems. I’m a generalist by training and inclination.  I’m an information junkie.  And I’m fascinated by crazy people, for a number of reasons.  From a “worthy” standpoint, I’d be reading the comments from these raving loons even if I wasn’t using them as cannon fodder.  If you’re in the information business, then all information is worthy.  

Why go digging for comments beyond the one guy outside your office?

Because you can’t plot a curve from a single point – well, ok, you can, but it’s generally considered a bad idea.  Under the previous article, a commenter suggested that I shouldn’t paint all members of a political ideology with the same brush. Point taken.  One loud mouthed guy in the hallway is one asshole engaged in ignorant jingoism.  One corpulent impotent pundit who calls a college student a whore is one asshole engaged in ignorant misogyny.  One governor who thinks he can make it rain through prayer is one asshole engaged in ignorant malarkey.  But, when tens of thousands of rain dancing fuzzy-wuzzies join the governor in his religiousity, when mindless millions join the pompous windbag in his slut shaming, and when millions more call a murderer a hero, well, then you’ve got more than enough data to plot a complex surface in three dimensions.  I use comments to illustrate points of view.  I use multiple comments to show that the illustrated point of view is not an isolated position. 

Yeah, but why do this at all?

Aside from the fact that these silly buggers should be ridiculed publically, you mean? Because, I was trained as a intelligence officer. Because I was trained as a military leader.  Nothing drives you to disaster quicker than assumption.  You must know the battlespace, the failures of intelligence and assumption should be glaringly obvious to every single American in these post-911, post-Iraq days. You must know the adversary, how he thinks, how he sees the world, what matters to him.  There is no substitute for boots on the ground, i.e. direct observation. Comments like those I used in yesterday’s post convey layers of information beyond the obvious opinion expressed by the commenter. Taken as a whole they show trends, memes, the spread of viral concepts though the public mind. In the previous post I used the noxious example “the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.”  You’ll find that sentiment or similar expressed thousands, millions, of times across the internet.  Go look for yourself.  But, while you’re looking through the Yahoo and FoxNews and RedState forums, also look to see how many times that position is challenged – and not just challenged by people from the opposite side of the political spectrum, but from the same side.  Look at that statement in context. What do you see beyond just the obvious?  It’s bad enough that one person publically calls for genocide, but what does it tell you when tens of thousands do so routinely?  And they’re comfortable doing it. In a public forum.  And it is those who don’t agree with genocide who are embarrassed to object, or too intimidated, or just don’t care enough. What does it tell you when sixty percent of conservative voters in Mississippi publically believe, and aren’t embarrassed to say so out loud, that their president is lying about his religious beliefs and birthplace?  What does it tell you when a significant fraction of Americans on the other side of the political spectrum still believe that George Bush actually bombed the World Trade Center? And they’re not embarrassed to do so in normal conversation? What does it tell you when  a significant fraction of Americans, a fraction numbering  in the millions, actually believes that they personally really heard Sandra Fluke demand that they pay for her sex life?

Why do this at all?

Why indeed.

Because far too many of us allow this kind of nonsense to go unchallenged.   Far too many allow the Rush Limbaughs and the Glenn Becks and the Oprahs and the Yahoo commenters to go unchallenged. We allow the Louis Farrakhans and the Reverend Wrights and the Billy Grahams and the Bill Donohues to go on without rebuttal.

We do this because while we may not agree with it, well, we sort of think these silly bastards have the right to say it anyway. 

And we shouldn’t.  Not, we shouldn’t allow them to speak, we shouldn’t allow their silly bullshit to go unchallenged.

Oh sure, freedom, right? Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of belief. 

Yes, of course.

We have a saying in the military, rank has its privileges.  This is a true statement.  What gets senior folks into trouble though is the unspoken portion of that statement.  The part that is implied.

Rank has its privileges, true, but it also has its responsibilities.  Forget that at your peril.

As an American, you have certain rights. But if you want to keep those rights, and freedom and liberty and a workable civilization, then rights must come with responsibilities. 

Folks, allowing this kind of nonsense to go unchallenged has very real consequences.

For example: today, Arizona legislators have advanced a bill that would allow an employer to fire a woman who doesn’t want to have a baby.

Yes, you read that correctly. 

Arizona House Bill 2625, passed by the state House two weeks ago and endorsed by the state Senate Judiciary Committee last Monday and advanced to the full Senate today would require that any woman who wants the cost of her birth control pills covered by insurance (any insurance, not just that provided by religious organizations, and not to mention insurance that she herself must pay for) must submit a claim to her employer providing evidence that it’s not for contraception.  Now, if that wasn’t bad enough, the law would allow an employer to fire a woman for taking birth control pills to prevent pregnancy.  This in order to, and stick with me here, protect the religious freedom of the employer. The woman’s religious freedom shall be protected only so long as it agrees with the religious doctrine of the crazy religious loons in the Arizona state government. This bill is different from other similar legislation at both the state and federal levels in two ways, 1) it specifically differentiates between birth control used for contraception and that used for medical reasons, and 2) it requires a woman to disclose that reason to her employer – not doctor, not insurer, her employer.  I want you to take a minute here and think about that, think about a woman being required to discuss in detail her reproductive medical decisions with her boss – including her intentions to have, or not have children.  Remember, her boss can then use that conversation to fire her.   No. Stop reading for a minute and think about that in detail, think about all the vindictive small-minded pointy-haired religious freaks you’ve ever worked for.  Think about a woman having to discuss her period with a boss like, oh, let’s just say Rush Limbaugh, or her sex life with Bill Clinton, or the results of her last OBG/YN exam with Newt Gingrich. Think about it.

No, really think about it. 

Now, flip the coin and think about being that boss. Of having to screen the women under your authority, even if you don’t want to, because otherwise you could be fired for not enforcing company policy with regards to her reproductive system.  Bad enough if you’re a man, but what if you’re a woman?  If you’re the boss, and a woman, wouldn’t you always be under suspicion for any medical procedure you approved for other women? Would your company ever really trust you to make unbiased decisions when it comes to enforcing their reproductive health policies?

But, of course, nothing like that would happen where you work, right?  No chance of, say, your company being bought out by a Christian investor?  How about an Arab? 

This entire thing is contrived.  It’s the result of mass hysteria, of mass insanity. Laws like this weren’t even on the radar screen six months ago.  And now?  Now Arizona House Bill 2625 is likely to pass and be signed into law by governor Jan Brewer.

It’s the result of a political party gone mad with rage and fear and bizarre hatred. 

It’s the result of religion gone insane with lust for power and control.

It’s the result of pundits and politicians and professional fear mongers who serve only themselves.

It’s the result of illiterates, and the righteously ignorant, and the vitriolic haters who call for genocide and the enslavement of women and are let off the hook unchallenged.

 

That, right there, is why I write what I write. 

And why I do it the way I do.

And why I will continue to do so.

Afghanistan: The Punch Line

What do you call sixteen dead Afghanis?

This morning an article entitled “Multiple combat tours linked to mental strain, disease” written by somebody named Liz Goodwin appeared on The Lookout.

The article begins with this paragraph:

“The Army sergeant accused of murdering 16 Afghan men, women and children on Sunday was reportedly on his fourth combat tour and suffered a traumatic brain injury when his vehicle rolled over in 2010. He served three deployments in Iraq and was currently on his fourth tour of duty, this time in Afghanistan.”

Then Goodwin says:

“There is no way of knowing if the sergeant’s brain injury, multiple deployments, and brutal crime are related. But…”

But.

But.

But, why don’t we just go right ahead and assume that they are anyway?

Goodwin continues with this non-sequitur:

“But, the incident highlights the enormous strain the country's beleaguered all-volunteer military force is under.”

Right.

How exactly does the incident in Afghanistan highlight that again?

What?

Ah, hell, you know, never mind.

Personally, at this point, I’m having a hard time totaling up the number of logical fallacies Goodwin manages in less than two paragraphs, starting with how a crumbling US military manages to remain both “all-volunteer” and “beleaguered” and ending up with how the, as yet, unknown motivations of a man who is alleged to have committed an act that has barely begun to be investigated serves to highlight the supposed strain on anything other than himself.

Last I checked, the US military continues to meet its recruiting and retention goals without significant effort – certainly nothing like the recruiting effort required in previous conflicts, and certainly without resorting to conscription (typically the first sign of actual beleaguerment). The vast majority of troops, including myself, have so far managed multiple deployments without resorting to mass murder – or murder singular for that matter. For the last ten years, the United States’ military has managed to achieve every single objective set before it, no matter how difficult, and continues to do so. Morale is certainly battered, but it remains high – otherwise we wouldn’t be meeting those recruiting and retention goals and we’d being seeing desertions, fragging, and a mass exodus of military-aged men to the northern countries. 

Certainly there are problems, but incidents like this one and others such as the horrible tragedy at Fort Hood last year remain few and far between, notable for their rarity and not for their regularity – unlike in a certain previous conflict.

Having started with a heap of logical fallacies, Goodwin doesn’t bother to mention the murder of Afghan civilians or the alleged shooter again.  Instead she doubles down on this week’s common thread, i.e. after multiple combat tours and ten years of war, us military folks are going murderously nuts.

Goodwin quotes a few vague statistics about how multiple deployments make soldiers more susceptible to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Really? Multiple tours in the meat grinder make you more likely to end up with PTSD? Who’d a thunk it?). But she doesn’t bother to break that statement down into deployment types, mission types, unit types, locations, casualty and injury counts, ranks, ages, education, personal experiences, or any of the dozen or so things that have a direct and measurable impact on the incidents of PTSD.  Instead she dredges up a somebody named Alejandro Villatoro, an army reservist and a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, who offers an anecdotal opinion that soldiers who volunteer for multiple deployments do so for financial reasons.  Villatoro also opines that the military routinely brushes incidents of PTSD under the rug in order to “keep a clean record.” 

The obvious conclusion to be drawn here is that we military folks are too damned stupid and downtrodden to get real jobs in the real world so we must volunteer to kill people in a foreign land so that we can feed our families. As result, we go all John Rambo. Because that hoary old Vietnam-era stereotype hasn’t been jolly well entrenched into the public mind enough, right? 

Folks, let me clear something up for you once and for all – some of us may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer, but believe me when I say that even the butt-dumbest knuckle-dragging grunt could find many other ways to feed his kids without signing up for the Army.  Flipping burgers pays better, so does scrubbing toilets. Hell so does welfare – and people rarely shoot at you, and you’re generally home at night.  Sure, maybe a certain percentage of folks join the ranks for a paycheck, once.  But the alleged shooter in this incident is supposedly 38 years old. He’s a sergeant. He’s been in for more than a decade.  He’s done four deployments. If you’re re-upping and volunteering for multiple combat tours over ten years it’s because you like what you do, it’s because you believe in what you do, it’s because that’s who you are. It sure isn’t because you don’t have a choice. 

I can see some ignorant twit of a reporter not getting this, but a veteran should damned well know better.

Now, that said, certainly the military could do a much better job of diagnosing and supporting those with PTSD.

And don’t get me wrong here, it is most certainly a fact that the military has routinely under-diagnosed PTSD and other combat stress related mental health problems, including traumatic brain injuries. 

But.

But, it’s also important to understand that they’ve done a reasonably decent job given the entire situation.

In most cases, the failure of the military to care for and repair those with mental illnesses is not due to malice aforethought on the part of the Brass.

Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, Airmen, Guardsmen, i.e. people, these are the military.  And to be coldly blunt about it, people are the most expensive and difficult part of the military, the hardest to replace, the hardest to train, to field, to equip, to motivate, to fix, to keep healthy.  People are the most expensive investment the military makes, believe me when I say that we want to keep them working in top form.

However, oh hell yes we could most certainly do a far better job of it. 

But it costs money.

A lot of money. 

And the military doesn’t get to decide what it spends money on.  Spending money on shiny brand new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters is sexy and keeps a lot of people employed – and those people vote for the folks who allocate the money.  Fixing broken soldiers isn’t sexy and doesn’t employ very many people or get you very many votes, one way or the other – especially when you can pass the blame for free on to “the military” or “the president” or “the government” or who the hell ever.  Both sides of the political spectrum are equally guilty of passing the buck on this. We can all lament the fact that the military and the VA haven’t done more for broken soldiers, that’s easy. But the real blame lies with those who pay for those fixes, or won’t pay for them rather, and those people are a ways up the hill from the Pentagon.

And it is important to remember that TBI is a relatively new issue for the military, especially in this volume.  

Just as the helicopter radically changed the survival rate for combat wounded troops on the battlefields of Vietnam by getting the injured into the operating room far faster and in far greater numbers than ever before, modern body armor and medical techniques have drastically increased the number of soldiers who survive what would have been fatal injuries just ten years ago – including TBI.  We’re just now learning how to deal with that.  Could we do better? Better as a military? Better as a government? Better as a nation? Better as a people?  Of course, and you’ll certainly get no argument from me there. But you have to look at it in perspective.

However, and here’s the thing so pay attention, none of that has anything whatsoever to do with the incident in question.

That’s right, none of it.

Goodwin, like far, far, far too many today has managed to make a connection without a single shred of evidence, with little or no information, without experience, and without having a damned clue as to what the hell she’s talking about.  Like other pundits, she’s managed to string together a bunch of non-sequiturs and logical fallacies in order to reach some unsupported nonsense position, i.e. the US military is full of broken people on the verge of their own homicidal rampage.

The simple truth of the matter is that we don’t actually know anything.

We don’t know what motivated this man to commit murder – if in fact that’s what actually happened.  Note that I am not attempting to claim, as others have, that this guy is a patsy for some greater conspiracy.  It’s quite likely that he did exactly what has been alleged, i.e. he walked out the gate of his base in the middle of the night and murdered sixteen people, most of them woman and children, all of them non-combatants, in cold blood. I am simply saying that at this point not one of us actually knows what happened. And we may never know.  The soldier may have been in the grip of uncontrolled rage brought on by the loss of comrades or war or impulse, he could have suffered a psychotic break and been operating under the influence of drugs, Zombie Jesus, or space aliens, or maybe he was just a an asshole, a sociopath.  I don’t know, my military experience gives me no special insight into his motivation.

What do I think should happen to this man? 

Again, I don’t know.  I guess it depends on why he did what he did. Ultimately, that will be up to his chain of command.  There are those in the popular press already speculating about the death sentence and pleas of insanity.   Those people are just as silly as the article quoted above, you don’t know enough to call for any outcome yet. 

What matters at this point is not what motivated this soldier or what his ultimate fate will be.

What matters are the consequences.

Not to the shooter personally, but to the rest of us, to our nation, and most especially to all the US and allied soldiers who must continue their mission in a country far more hostile and deadly today than it was last week.  Many of those soldiers will die as a result of the actions of this one man.  It has already begun. 

Once again, the murderous actions of a single man may very well change the course of history, change the course of nations, change the course of the world. 

Afghanistan has been at war with itself for longer than most of us have been alive. The consequences of this are global, as the events of September 11^th, 2001 so brutally demonstrated.  Now, right now, today, for the first time in decades, centuries, there is a chance to change that. 

But, it requires the establishment of a functioning government in Afghanistan.

It requires the imposition of more than just order, it requires civilization.

It requires an orderly withdrawal of foreign forces. 

And it requires a sustained and dedicated effort by the rest of the world.

All of which is now imperiled.

This situation is so precarious, so fragile, so tenuous, that it can be jeopardized by the incomprehensible actions of one man. Likely that man is insane in one fashion or another, for one reason or another. But it’s not his insanity we should be concerned about at the moment. This man is no longer able to influence events.  What we should be concerned about right now is the raging madness that walks among us and purports to be reasonable:

The only good muslim is a dead muslim [sic]

How many times have you heard this or something similar in the last two days? Look in the comment forums under Yahoo, FoxNews, RedState, or other similar forum.

“What do you call sixteen dead Afghan kids?”

That’s what somebody I work with asked today in the hallway outside my office.

You know the punch line, don’t you?

Sure you do, it’s a good old racist joke dusted off and updated for today.

What do you call sixteen dead Afghanis?

A good start.

Yuk yuk. Funny.

I happen to know the guy who coined this little bit of hatred is a rabid right to lifer, a staunch conservative dead set against abortion and birth control, and a passionate defender of the unborn who wears evangelical Christianity like a thorny crown upon his fevered brow. As I passed him in the hall,  I asked what he thought Jesus would say about the murder of sixteen innocents. 

Fuck ‘em, an eye for an eye, he replied. 

Yes, of course. Christianity, the religion of peace and love.  How foolish of me.

I found the following comments under Yahoo and FoxNews forums, I didn’t have to look very hard or very far:

Obama put gen Petraous in charge over there and he attends communist bilderberg group meetings,makes you wonder how American military personel feels abotu that! But then we have to remember who Obama is and what he represents about tearing this nation down also!!! [sic]

Bilderbergs.  Birthers. Truthers.  Oh my.

What was that line from The Matrix? Boy oh boy, I sure wish I’d taken the blue pill.

Instead, we get to find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Turn the #@$!hole into a glass astray.  We wont b safe until all muzzies our dead! READ THE BIBLE!! [sic]

We should nuke the place clean!!!!!! [sic]

We should nuke it (get the little kids out first) and then clean it up and help the ones that we know are not crap start over... [sic]

Sure. Why don’t we just nuke ‘em? Right?  Sixteen dead isn’t enough, let’s murder millions – well, minus the kids, I guess.  I’m not quite sure how that selective nuking thing works, maybe we round up all the children first and put them somewhere for safekeeping and Jesusification while we burn their parents to glowing ash. Then what?  We put the orphaned kids back to start over in the middle of a radioactive wasteland I guess. 

Boy, that ought to earn us their undying gratitude and a special place in the history books.

The magic of raw naked force, kill ‘em all and let God sort it out.  Hitler Jesus would be so proud, I’m sure.

The Taliban is the ones who did the shooting of . And Burned Body's ???? [sic]

How do you know it was not terrorist dressed in US uniform. we need facts before making jugdement [sic]

The Taliban did it.  Yes, of course they did. Probably under command of the CIA with Predator drones and black helicopters piloted by Bigfoot.

What the hell do we call this batch of conspiracy nuts? Shooters?

Very sad...but I hate how our media is so anxious to make our boys look bad. [sic ]

What the hell is wrong with you media!! how many times will tell this story??? And raise more hate!!!! how many times did you run the story on our americans that were shot in the back of the head!! Excuted by those we trained!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! [sic]

Right. Obviously this isn’t news.  It’s the media trying to make the military look bad.  It wasn’t the guy who killed sixteen civilians in cold blood. No not that guy. He’s a red-blooded true-blue flag-waving Jesus-loving patriot.  It was the damned liberal media elite. Damn them for making the military look bad. The media is going to railroad this poor soldier – just like they railroaded poor old Lieutenant Bill Calley, right?

just my opinion, but maybe these 16, were families of the people who shot those American soldiers in the head, in protest.. thats what ill write it off as.. [sic ]

They killed our solders! Which part of that don’t you understand! [sic]

Give him a metal! [sic]

Well, then I guess that makes murder OK. 

Because that’s what we want in our military. That’s the military of American Exceptionalism. Sure.  Mavericks, right? Rogue warriors. Coup counters. Death squads. Rambos.  Maybe we should reward troops for each kill. Five bucks a scalp sounds fair.  Two dollars per ear, maybe. Ten bucks for a scrotum.  Maybe we should ride into villages like the old days and smash their babies’ heads against a tree. They killed our boys, so we’ll kill their kids. That’s right, we’ll kill ‘em all.Damned right, Horah! It’s war, man! Women, kids, old men, dogs, goats, kill ‘em. Kill ‘em all. Burn it to the ground. You know what we need? Camps. Sure camps and gas chambers.  Exterminate the bastards.  Give this guy a medal and a full belt of ammo and send him back out.  Hearts and minds? Fuck ‘em, let’s splatter their hearts and brains all over the walls, because, yeah, we’re the good guys, the favored of God. USA! USA!

What do you call sixteen dead Afghanis?

The papers and the forums are full to bursting with ignorant bile. 

One American committed murder and many of us rightly call that crazy.

But tens of thousands think he did the right thing.

Tens of thousands of supposedly civilized Americans think the senseless slaughter of sixteen men, women, and children was a good start.

Their comments fill the halls of America and litter the airwaves and the internet and they don’t even have the common decency to be ashamed.  The murderous clamor of the ignorant and foolish and the brutally stupid fouls our national discourse and stains our national soul. 

I’ll say in complete honesty that I truly hope that their God does indeed exist and that one day these fuckers will stand before His righteous wrath and be judged.

Ten years of war have taken a toll on those of us who fight, we are battered and sore used and hardfought, and yet – and yet – in large part we remain unbowed and unbroken.

But ten years of war have driven a significant fraction of our countrymen mad.

One man committed an act of barbarity, but these sons of bitches are the true savages.

 

What do you call sixteen dead Afghanis?

I’ll tell you.

You call it murder.

You call it an atrocity.

You call it a national disgrace.

And you hang your head in shame.

 

Then you stop making excuses for it.

Then you take responsibility for it.

And then you do whatever it takes to make it right.

A Certain Point Of View

Warning: The following article contains excessive sarcasm, it should only be consumed with large amounts of strong whiskey.

---

The latest words of wisdom from Word Salad Sally:

Well, what we can gleam from this is an understanding of why we are all on the road that we are on and it's based on what went into his thinking being surrounded by radicals he is bringing us back Sean to days that you can harken back to days before the Civil War when unfortunately too many Americans mistakenly believed that not all men were created equal. And it was the Civil War that began the codification of the truth here in America yes we are equal and we all have equal opportunities not based on the color of your skin. You have equal opportunities to work hard and to succeed and to embrace the opportunities god given opportunities to develop resources and work extremely hard and as I say to succeed. Now it has taken all these years for many Americans to understand that that gravity that mistake took place before the Civil War and why the Civil War had to really start changing America. What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back to before those days when we were in different classes based on income based on color of skin.

I know, I know.

You want to say it, don’t you?

You want to use that word, don’t you?

Sure, you do, you’re liberals. I see you reaching for the c-word.

Don’t do it.

No, just don’t do it.  I’ve already spent the last week playing Whack-a-Mole with the Limbaugh defenders, I don’t need you calling Sarah Palin names on here on Stonekettle Station.  I think we can all agree that she’s been oppressed enough. 

Besides, she’s right you know.

Sure.

I think we’ve already established that Sarah Palin is an expert on both Barack Obama and American history. And now it turns out that she’s as much an expert on the Antebellum South as she is on the American Revolution.

When Sarah Palin talks about American history, well, Sir, it really makes you think. Doesn’t it?

What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back to before those days when we were in different classes based on income based on color of skin.

Sure, that’s exactly what Obama wants to do.  It’s so obvious when Professor Palin points it out, isn’t it?

And seriously, what black person wouldn’t?

What black person wouldn’t want to go back to the days of pre-Civil War America?

No wonder all black people support Barak Obama and his vision of Socialist Amerika.  They’re all in it together, you know.  Black people are all socialists at heart anyway. Sure they are. 

Of course they want to go back. Of course they do. The Antebellum South was a paradise for black people.

No really.

Think about it.

Think about it the way somebody much smarter than you obviously has.

What?  Oh, now you want to call me the c-word, do you? 

Your problem is that you’re looking at the past through the liberal colored (heh heh, see what I did there? I slipped in the word colored) glasses of the elitist media. You’ve been fed a pack of socialist lies by the communist feminazis of the public school system!

But, you’re not looking at this correctly.

No, really, this is about you, this isn’t about Sarah Palin. 

Remember in the second Star Wars movie where the radical domestic terrorist, Luke Skywalker, was wandering through that South Carolina swamp talking to the ghost of Old Bill Ayers? Sure and Old Bill says, “See, everything I told you was true … from a certain point of view.”  And Luke is all “WTF, Obi? A certain point of view?”  And everybody in the audience is like “Yeah, WTF? That wizard is just a crazy old man!” 

But then it turns out that Luke was just another robe wearing hippy Marxist who wanted to destroy the country in order to impose some kind of socialist totalitarianism?

It’s exactly like that.

Sarah Palin is the Obi Wan Kenobi of American politics.  Everybody thinks she’s crazy (oops, looks like I used the c-word after all. Oh well), but it’s because you’re not looking at history from the right angle.

Let’s review the facts unvarnished by the liberal lies, shall we?

Back before the Civil War:

Black people were taken care by White People from cradle to grave.  It’s true!

White People had to spend money taking care of black people. Sure. White People had to pay for black people’s food. White People paid for black people’s clothes. White People had to give black people free housing.  You talk about forced redistribution of wealth! That’s totally a fact and you can’t argue with facts.

But wait there’s more. 

White People had to pay for black people’s transportation and immigration. I know, I know, outrageous! White People had to actually pay for black people to come to America from Africa by cruise ships. No, really, what do you call it when black people didn’t even have to work for their passage, they just laid around below decks talking and hanging out with other black people – and White People had do do all the crewing and sailing and work? White People literally had to pay for the black invasion of America!

Back in those days before the Civil War, White People even had to pay for black people’s healthcare!  Black people were so socialist that they totally depended on the oppressed White People class to take care of their every healthcare need. Seriously, look it up – there weren’t any black people even working in healthcare in those days, not one single black doctor.  Black people didn’t even go to school! White People had to be the doctors and the scientists and the engineers! White People had to build America and black people just came along for the ride!

In fact, black people were so lazy, so socialist, that they even made White People decide which career fields black children would pursue.  It’s true, they just expected White People to take care of their little black children, actually pawning them off on other White People households and shit.  White People had to provide all the jobs for black people. Affirmative action was run amok back in those days, a White Person couldn’t even get a job in agriculture or textile manufacturing because black people totally dominated the workforce. 

White People had to serve in the military and defend the country which kept black people safe. 

White People had to run the government and all the businesses and keep capitalism going and black people just benefitted without having to do anything.

Black people didn’t even pay taxes. 

Look, you want to know how extreme the black socialism was before the Civil War set things straight?

You want to know how far the liberal black agenda had gone? 

Dig this: Black people didn’t even own any property. Hello, sounds like just like the communist Soviet Union, doesn’t it?

Back then, before the Civil War, black people had made White People totally their bitches.

…and it was the Civil War that began the codification of the truth here in America yes we are equal and we all have equal opportunities not based on the color of your skin.

Thankfully, the Civil War finally ended the black enslavement of White People.

Oh yes, only now, at the end, do you understand.

And you thought Sarah Palin was crazy, didn’t you?

Do you finally see it now?

 

Back in the days before the Civil War, America was a socialist paradise for Negroes!

No wonder Obama wants to go back to that time.

The Absurdity of Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh apologizes:

For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.

I think it is absolutely absurd that during these very serious political times, we are discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress. I personally do not agree that American citizens should pay for these social activities. What happened to personal responsibility and accountability? Where do we draw the line? If this is accepted as the norm, what will follow? Will we be debating if taxpayers should pay for new sneakers for all students that are interested in running to keep fit? In my monologue, I posited that it is not our business whatsoever to know what is going on in anyone's bedroom nor do I think it is a topic that should reach a Presidential level.

My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices."

Let’s leave aside for the moment the absurdity of Rush’s hypocritical non sequitur, i.e. that part about thinking discussions of both personal sexual activity and the business of knowing what’s going on in other people’s bedrooms being “absurd,” given that Limbaugh himself is one of the people most responsible for personally making such nonsense part and parcel of American politics. 

Let us also leave aside Limbaugh’s hilariously absurd lament about taking personal responsibility and personal accountability, and his foray into the slippery slope logical fallacy.  Oh noes! What will happen if we let loose college broads get birth control? Next thing you know we’ll be buying sneakers for liberal joggers and jockstraps for Muslim athletes and intimate lubrication for the homosexuals and Viagra for limp dicked radio hosts and, my God, where will it end? Woe! Woe!

Ahem. Sorry.

Instead, let us concentrate for the moment on the part where Limbaugh absurdly claims he didn’t mean for his attack to be personal.

I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.

I did not mean a personal attack.

Which is, of course, why Limbaugh singled out a college student by name, then told twenty million of his slack-jawed listeners that she was a slut and a prostitute, then went on to completely mischaracterize Fluke’s testimony and fabricate statements that he directly attributed to her, then suggested she post sex videos on-line for Limbaugh himself to view, and if that wasn’t enough then Limbaugh spent the next two days engaged in ridicule and character assassination directed specifically at Sandra Fluke.

But he didn’t mean it personally.

Bullies never do. 

No of course not.  It’s never personal, is it?

Bullies are just looking for a laugh.  He meant it to be humorous he says.  Because calling a woman, an American citizen who wished to use her right to address Congress, a whore on national radio is just plain funny, man.

Limbaugh meant his so-called apology sincerely.  Sure he did. Except, today, this morning, he opened his radio show by blaming Liberals for the situation:

I descended to their [Liberals] level when I used those two words to describe Sandra Fluke. I've always tried to maintain a very high degree of integrity and independence on this program. Nevertheless, those two words were inappropriate. They were uncalled for. They distracted from the point that I was actually trying to make, and I again sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for using those two words to describe her. I do not think she is either of those two words. I did not think last week that she is either of those two words."

I don’t know what’s more absurd, the fact that Rush Limbaugh thinks that is actually some kind of apology or the fact that he actually used the word “integrity” in relation to what he does on the air.  But then, it’s never the bully’s fault, is it? It’s never the abuser’s fault. Of course it isn’t. 

Look what you made me do!

No, of course it wasn’t personal. Of course it wasn’t Rush’s fault. He’s the victim here. Of course he is.

Which immediately begs the question, if it’s the Left’s fault for this situation, if it’s Fluke’s fault, what the hell is Limbaugh apologizing for? 

Note that Limbaugh only “apologized” for calling Fluke a slut and a prostitute, not for lying about her testimony, not for engaging in character assassination, not for verbal assault or for demonizing her in front of twenty million listeners, not for putting words in her mouth, not for demanding that she post pornographic videos for him to enjoy, not for manipulating his listeners and fouling the political discourse. Not for the abuse she will now be forced to endure at the hands of his vicious and mindless minions.  No, of course, because she deserves that for having the gall to want to speak her mind before a Congressional inquiry on women’s health issues. The nerve of that uppity bitch. Really.

See? Look what you made me do! 

Limbaugh either doesn’t actually understand what the firestorm is really about or, like the standard issue abuser, he just doesn’t care. Frankly my money’s on the latter.  Limbaugh knows exactly what kind of people listen to his show, he knows exactly how they think. He knows how they will go after Fluke, he knows exactly the kind of email they’ll send, the threats they’ll make, the harassment they’ll engage in.  He knows exactly how to manipulate those people and he knows that they want to be manipulated. They’re simpleminded dupes who love nothing better than to be told how they think by Rush Limbaugh. 

Allow me an example:

[…] Rush is right and Obama was wrong in calling her [on the phone]. What decent woman would come forward telling their history on sex behavior. She said she had so much sex she had to stop. Why would a woman let the whole world know about her sex life. She is what Rush called her and who knows if she was prostituting. Her mother should be ashamed of her not proud of her as Obama put it. No insurance should cover birth control or contraceptive. Women should know themselves what to do and not do. If the advertisers pulled their ads from Rush who cares. He will pick up others that believe in what he said. Obama called her for political reasons. The women’s vote.

That was posted by somebody signing herself “Mariann Pepitone” on the ABC News forum (Note that Mariann is allegedly a woman, how’s that for cognitive dissonance? But I digress).   That comment, and the thousands of others just like it on ABC, Yahoo and elsewhere indicate that Limbaugh is very likely laughing into his sleeve.  See, Rush isn’t an idiot.  No, bear with me.  He may be an pompous gasbag caught up in his own bullshit, but he’s not an idiot – at least not when it comes to manipulating the weak-minded. When it comes to his audience, Limbaugh knows exactly what he’s doing. Note the part of his apology that says, “the point I was trying to make.” That’s the key, and he made his point, yes he did. Look back to that yahoo comment, listen to those who commonly quote Limbaugh even when they don’t realize they are doing it:

She [Fluke] said she had so much sex she had to stop.

She has so much sex she needs tax payers to pay for it.

Except of course, Fluke didn’t say any of that and, in fact, didn’t discuss her own sex life at all.  She didn’t ask for “free” contraception or any other medical procedure, she simply advocated for regulations that would require insurance (insurance that she is already paying for herself) to cover such things.

Also note that birth control pills cost exactly the same whether or not you have “lots and lots” of sex, or none at all.

But none of that matters, because:

Rush is right. Rush is always right. Always.

“Decent” women don’t discuss such things.  Ipso facto, any woman who does must be a whore.

Obviously any woman seeking access to contraception is probably “prostituting.”

She should be ashamed. Shame! Shame! Shaaaaame!

Insurance shouldn’t cover birth control or contraception anyway.

Women should know what to do and not do, with what not to do being the obvious and proper choice here.

Obama is pandering to the women’s vote.

See?

Limbaugh accomplished exactly what he set out to do. 

It doesn’t matter what the actual facts are. It doesn’t matter what Sandra Fluke actually said, or what she intended, or what in fact the actual provision in the Affordable Healthcare Law actually says.  Limbaugh successfully inserted what he wants his minions to think, and that was his intention all along. Among the angry simpletons who make up his audience, and a significant fraction of the conservative voting block, he has seeded exactly the false reality he intended and there will be no eradicating it. This is Limbaugh’s Death Panel moment.  This was his goal right from the very start.  He doesn’t care about Sandra Fluke, she was just a convenient target of opportunity, an unknown, a college student without voice or means to go toe to toe against a media giant like himself. Sandra Fluke is just a stupid smelly girl. 

With this attack, Limbaugh succeeded in turning the narrative back onto his own agenda, i.e. liberals are morally bankrupt, they are trying take America from real Americans, and so on. 

This is a perfect example of the practical application of Information Warfare. 

 

This morning the headlines are full of “Did Limbaugh go too far this time?” type headlines. 

Of course, it’s pure hyperbole, nothing but a rhetorical question.

Of course Limbaugh didn’t go too far. He can’t go too far.

This is what Rush Limbaugh does.

The further he goes, the more outrageous his is, the more his audience eats it up.

And they eat it up because they’re exactly the kind of people who get off on watching a bully beat up somebody smaller and weaker. Because to them, it is funny.

This morning the headlines are full of sober proclamations, seven or eight advertisers have pulled their ads from Limbaugh’s show and more are considering it. Oh, well, boy howdy, he’s doomed now.  Limbaugh sure learned his lesson. Wow. Awesome. Way to take a stand, Advertisers. That will teach him.

Please.

Limbaugh has spent the last three years calling the president a traitor, a terrorist, non-American, a usurper, an African colonial despot, and every other bizarre and foul and insulting name in the book. His audience loves it.  He called the First Lady first “fat” and then “uppity” in an unabashed display of racism, which of course he denied actually was racism – and I might even have believed him if he wasn’t also the guy who said, “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals look like Jesse Jackson?”  or how about “Look, let me put it this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There I said it.”  And “The NAACP should have riot rehearsal, they should get a liquor store and practice robberies.”  Or “They’re 12% of the population, so who cares?”  How about when he said to a black female caller, “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.”  And his audience cheered.

Limbaugh knows his audience very well indeed. He wouldn’t be who he is, if he didn’t.

But, now?

Now Sleep Number Beds pulled its advertising from Limbaugh’s show? 

Now Legal Zoom and Quicken Loans think Limbaugh has gone too far?  Seriously?  That’s the cutoff, eh?

The Sleep Train, AOL, Tax Resolution Services Co. they were good with Limbaugh’s hate speech until last Friday, but now they’re drawing the line at calling some random law student a tart, is that right?

Limbaugh has repeatedly called the president every racist stereotype barely short of actually using the word “nigger” on the air, and we’re good with that. That’s OK, but calling Sandra Fluke a whore, well, boy, that by God is over the line. 

That’s rich.

That’s humorous.

And it means nothing.  A hundred other sponsors are clogging Limbaugh’s phone lines right now, clamoring for a chance to buy advertising time for reduced prices.   Sleep Number, AOL, Legal Zoom, Quicken Loans, they don’t give a good goddamn about Sandra Fluke or what Limbaugh called her, they just see an opportunity to get some free name recognition. 

If they were actually sincere, well, they’d have been offended a long, long time ago, wouldn’t they?

GOP presidential candidates have obsequiously pandered to Limbaugh for his endorsement since the start of the campaign season. They’ve attacked the left for exactly the same things Limbaugh has in language no less insulting or offensive. But now? Now they’re backing away. Well, sort of. That’s laughable. Gingrich (heh heh, Gingrich) called for Limbaugh to apologize, but then blamed the media for not focusing on the larger issues (heh heh Gingrich). Note, Gingrich didn’t blame Limbaugh for not focusing on the larger issues, just the “media.” When it comes to that personal responsibility Gingrich is so big on, well, you know, blame the media – hey, it’s worked for Gingrich so far, why not Limbaugh too? And just never mind that Limbaugh, by any definition, is the media “elite” (but I digress, again).  When asked about the controversy, Mitt Romney said, “Well, it’s not the language I would have used.”  Smooth, Mitt, smooth, way to forcefully support women’s rights. Well done. Very Presidential. Really.  In the spirit of takes one to know one, Rick Santorum said, “He’s being absurd.”  But, hey, continued Santorum, Limbaugh is an entertainer, so you know that’s OK because that’s what entertainers do.  Then Santorum (heh heh, Santorum) expressed concern that President Obama was “trying to impose his values on people“ (yeah, it’s OK if you throw up in your mouth a little bit over that last one. Jesus Haploid Christ, the hypocrisy could stun a charging RINO at fifty paces).

House Speaker John Boehner, in a rousing display of the iron courage he’s so well known for, managed to meekly denounce Limbaugh’s comments by calling them, well, sorry Mr. Limbaugh Sir please don’t take my balls, uh, “inappropriate.” 

John McCain was roused briefly from the thick yellow fog of his senile dementia and angrily shouted “pickles!” When pressed for clarification by Soledad O’Brien, McCain managed a moment of lucidity and said, “totally unacceptable. Totally and completely unacceptable and there’s no place for it.” Then McCain explained how Limbaugh is an “entertainer,” so um, well, you know, Pickles!

Meanwhile, this morning Michael Savage, he of the savage throbbing wiener, professional paranoid and a guy who thinks Limbaugh is too mamby pamby, accused the President of the United States of having Andrew Breitbart assassinated.  I know, I know, go on, make the facepalm (Yes, obviously a ridiculous accusation, if Obama had ordered the hit, he wouldn’t have given Randy Andy a heart attack courtesy of the NSA, he would have done it with a Hellfire missile dropped from a loitering Predator while Breitbart was attending a bar-mitzvah. Duh).  How many of the Savage Nation’s sponsors pulled out this morning? Ten? Five? One?  Yeah. Funny thing, didn’t Breitbart actually pretend to be a prostitute or a pimp or something a while back? 

Meanwhile, over on the Limbaugh Channel FoxNews, Bill O’Reilly puffed up like a poisonous toad and croaked in righteous rage, “Let me get this straight, Ms. Fluke, and I’m asking this with all due respect [all due respect being apparently none, but I digress], you want me to give you my hard-earned money so you can have sex?”  O’Reilly then went on to say that since Fluke wanted society to cover her “activities” (heh, heh, Bill said activities, huh huh huh), the government should have subsidized his college football uniforms, since an injury “might have cost society a lot.”  Bill seems to have completely missed that fact that any injuries incurred on the gridiron would have been covered under his college’s medical insurance.  And in fact sports related injuries cost school medical programs a hell of a lot more than the average monthly prescription for birth control pills. Funny thing, those “activities”  O’Reilly thinks he shouldn’t have to pay for (and which Fluke wasn’t in fact asking him to)?  Medical coverage for those sports injuries are completely avoidable, all we have to do is get rid of college sports.  Everybody wins, no sports related medical costs, no paying for coaches and stadiums and equipment or pedophilia court cases.  Where’s Bill’s outrage now?  Also, I notice that those same advertisers who quit Limbaugh are hanging tough with Fox. Why is that, do you suppose?

Meanwhile, down in the sun blistered desert of Crazyland, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has declared President Obama’s birth certificate a computer generated “forgery.”  Not only that, but he upped the ante by declaring that Obama’s Selective Service registration card may not be authentic either and he called on Congress to investigate the matter – because apparently while we don’t have money to take care of poor people, we’ve got money to investigate Birther claims. 

Sources close to Arpaio say that he was afraid Donald Trump was hogging the Obama hatin’ glory-hole.

And even more meanwhile, the State of Missouri has commissioned a bust of Rush Limbaugh for its statehouse (No, I’m not making that up).

You’ll note that Sleep Number, and Sleep Train Mattress, and Quicken Loans, AOL, and all the rest haven’t decided to pull out Arizona or Missouri. 

And when the smoke blows over, you can bet they’ll be quietly crawling right back to Rush Limbaugh.

Forgive me, if I’m somewhat less than impressed by any of this absurdity.

Here’s the bottom line, folks: What it comes down to is this, Rush Limbaugh attacked a young woman for exercising her right to address Congress.  A lot of people in positions of power on both the left and the right condemned Limbaugh for his thuggish tactics, some more strenuously and sincerely than others, but in the final accounting only one American leader stepped forward to offer support and defense to the victim. It wasn’t a Senator or a Representative.  It wasn’t those CEOs and business leaders. It wasn’t those four sorry bastards seeking the White House. 

And it sure as bloody hell wasn’t any hypocritical Christian leader or prominent clergyman.

No, when the mob gathered to watch and jeer while a bully beat up the weak and helpless, it was the President of the United States who stepped forward.

It was Barack Obama who called Sandra Fluke personally and offered his support. 

And that, right there, says everything you need to know.

Iditarod 2012

 

This weekend was the kickoff of the Last Great Race. 

Those of you who know me personally know of my passion for this uniquely Alaskan event, and my absolute respect for these mushers and their amazing dogs. 

I’ve written about the Iditarod since Stonekettle Station was first on the internet.  Three years ago in response to questions I was getting about the race and why I love it so much, I wrote the following article. Since then, each March on race weekend I’ve reposted it along with pictures and updated commentary from that year. This will likely continue.

 

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AN EPIDEMIC OF DIPHTHERIA IS ALMOST INEVITABLE HERE STOP I AM IN URGENT NEED OF ONE MILLION UNITS OF DIPTHERIA ANTITOXIN STOP MAIL IS ONLY FORM OF TRANSPORTATION STOP …

Those lines were part of a message sent by Curtis Welch, MD, on January 22nd, 1925 via radio telegram from Nome to all towns in the Alaskan Territory.

That desperate message was intended for the Territorial Governor in Juneau, and the public health service in Washington D.C. and it sounded an emergency of almost unimaginable horror. Dr. Welch was facing a disaster the likes of which are rarely seen outside of fiction.

At the turn of the century, during the boom town glory days of the Klondike gold rush, more than 20,000 people lived in Nome – in January of 1925, long after the gold and gold miners had run out, Nome boasted a population of around 1400, about 975 white settlers and 450 Alaskan Natives. The last ship of the season, the steamship Alameda, had left Nome harbor two months before, tracking south ahead of the encroaching winter ice. The sun had followed the steamship, disappearing below the southern horizon and leaving Nome locked in the grip of –50F temperatures and the endless Arctic night.

During the Alaskan winter, Nome’s only contact with the outside world was unreliable HF radio – and the more reliable dog sled mushers and their teams who carried the mail and what light cargo they could via the old Iditarod trail.

Shortly after the departure of the Alameda, a native child fell sick and died. At first Dr. Welch was unsure of the cause, but as more and more children sickened over the next few weeks he began to suspect diphtheria – an upper respiratory tract infection caused by Corynebacterium diphtheriae. In the early stages, diphtheria mimics the symptoms of tonsillitis, the flu, or the common cold – which is why Welch, with the primitive diagnostic tools available to him at the time, was slow to recognize the impending disaster. Left untreated, diphtheria destroys the nervous system, leading to a loss of motor control and sensation, and very quickly, death. Diphtheria is highly contagious, with fatality rates up to 10% in the general population and as high as 20% in young children and adults over 40. Among the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, the fatality rate is much higher. More than likely, crewmen from one of the visiting ships had unknowingly brought the disease north at the end of the shipping season, leaving behind a deadly time bomb. As Welch noted in his radio message, by January an epidemic was almost inevitable. Nome’s only doctor was staring straight into the specter of at least 300 immediate deaths – all of which would be his family and friends.

But the pending disaster was far, far worse and far more horrifying. Nome was the hub of the surrounding area, the native population around the town numbered well over 10,000. Those natives had no resistance to the disease at all.

Their expected mortality rate was nearly 100%.

Nowadays, diphtheria would be treated with antibiotics, Erythromycin or even the big gun, Procaine Penicillin G. But antibiotics didn’t exist in 1925, and the best treatment was diphtheria antitoxin. The antitoxin didn’t cure the disease but rather neutralized the toxins released by the diphtheria bacillus into the victim’s bloodstream – giving the body’s own immune system a chance to combat the infection without having to deal with being poisoned at the same time. Unfortunately, even today the antitoxin doesn’t neutralize toxins already bonded to tissues and does nothing itself to kill the bacteria. For the antitoxin to work, it has to be administered as early as possible, usually immediately as soon as a doctor makes the clinical diagnosis of diphtheria infection and without waiting for laboratory confirmation.

One other thing to note: the antitoxin is perishable. Dr. Welch had antitoxin on hand, all of which had expired.

And so he radioed for help.

No ship could reach them, and in fact couldn’t get within 500 miles of Nome by then. No plane, not even the most advanced aircraft in the Alaskan Territory at the time, the Postal Service’s DeHavilland DH-4, could fly under the winter conditions – their open cockpits and liquid cooled engines made that utterly impossible.

The only solution was dogsled.

The antitoxin would have to be transported via a relay of sled dogs, from Tanana to Nome, a distance of 674 miles through astoundingly rugged territory in temperatures that were at record lows, -50 to –60 degrees Fahrenheit.

Wild Bill Shannon led off, mushing out of the train station in Tenana with the twenty pound package, about 30 doses, of serum in his sled at 9PM on January 27. Shannon’s team was composed of nine dogs, all inexperienced, led by Blackie. Shannon was forced onto the frozen Tanana River, with temperatures approaching –62F he ran behind the sled to stay warm. He mushed into Minto with his face frozen black from the cold, hypothermic and severely frost bitten. He left three dying dogs in Minto, and headed out for Tolovana. Another dog died on the trail.

Edgar Kallands picked up the relay in Tolovana. When he arrived at Manley Hot Springs, they had to poor hot water over his hands to pry them off the sled’s handlebars.

Meanwhile the world waited. Nome’s plight had caught the attention of the entire globe . Famed Arctic explorer Roald Amundsen, even offered to make an attempt in an airplane. The Navy proposed sending one of its ships as far north as possible, then assembling a plane on the ice pack and launching it towards Nome. Many other ideas were suggested. All were rejected as too risky and foolhardy. Nome would live or die with the mushers and their dogs.

The serum went north, from Manely Hot Springs via native mushers arriving at Bishop Mountain on January 30, at 3:00 in the morning. The temperature was –62F, and dropping. Charlie Evans mushed out of Bishop Mountain and lost both of his lead dogs on the trail, legend has it that he himself held the traces and led the remaining dogs into Nulato.

Tommy Patsey took the next leg out of Nulato and across the Kaltag Portage. The serum was handed off to Victor Anagick and then to Myles Gonangnan at Unalakleet at the edge of the vast Norton Sound.

A storm was rising. The type of storm you’ll only find in the deepest of arctic winter on the ‘Sound. The kind of storm that comes from winds driven across two thousand miles of frozen ocean. Gonangnan took one look at it and decided not to cross the ice – he knew the storm winds could easily push the pack ice and open leads to the frigid black water below, cutting the team off from land and dooming 10,000 people to almost certain death. He choose instead to circle the Sound in whiteout conditions and with wind chills approaching 70 below zero in gale force winds. He arrived in the native village of Shaktoolik at 3PM on January 31st damn near froze to death. Henry Ivanoff, took the serum and headed out into the storm.

At the same time the serum was heading north, Leonhard Seppala rode south out of Nome to meet the relay in Shaktoolik. Sappala crossed Norton Sound on the ice and turned east toward Shaktoolik in blinding conditions. Just outside Shaktoolik, he meet Ivanoff who had gotten tangled up with a reindeer and was struggling to free his harness and dogs.

Seppala took the serum and turned back into the teeth of the storm, again crossing the ice of Norton Sound. His lead dog, Togo, managing to find the way with almost supernatural instinct. Togo led the team unerringly from Ungalik to the road house at Isaac Point on the far side of Norton Sound, and in one day they covered a distance of 84 miles through one of the worst arctic storms on record. They rested at the road house, and then departed into the full power of the worsening storm, and as they ran across the ice the 65 mile per hour winds begin to open leads behind them and the ice began to break up. Seppala managed to make the shore, just ahead of the buckling ice and crossed Little McKinley Mountain – climbing nearly 5000 feet in the process. Seppala reached the road house at Golvin at 3PM on February 1st and passed the serum on to Charlie Olsen.

Olsen lost the trail in the storm and suffered severe frostbite to his hands while trying to save his dogs, but he made it to Bluff on on the evening of February 1st. Gunnar Kassen was waiting for him.

Kassen attempted to wait out the storm, but instead of lessening it kept getting worse. Kassen, afraid that drifts would block the trail, departed Bluff at 10PM into a 60 mile per hour headwind and whiteout conditions so bad that he could not even see the wheel dogs harnessed closest to the sled. He missed the lodge at Solomon and was two miles beyond it before he realized his mistake – so he kept going. Beyond Solomon the trail became an endless nightmare. The winds flipped Kassen’s sled and the precious cylinder of antitoxin fell out and was lost in the snow. Kassen froze his hands feeling around in the drifts for it. He found it, righted the sled, and continued on to Point Safety, making it ahead of schedule on February 2nd. Kassen’s lead dog, Balto, had performed an almost unbelievable feat of navigation through the storm.

Ed Rohn, believing that Kassen would have to wait out the storm at Solomon was not prepared when Kassen arrived. Because it would take time to ready Rohn’s team, and time was of the utmost importance, Kassen elected to continue on rather than wait. Kassen and Balto covered the remaining 25 miles and arrived two hours later on Front Street, Nome at 5:30AM on the morning of February 2nd.

Not a single glass ampoule of the antitoxin was lost, and the serum was thawed and ready for use by noon. Altogether the teams covered 674 miles in 127.5 hours under extreme arctic winter conditions in a hurricane force gale.

That was the first relay.

There were more, carried by many of the same men who ran in the first relay.

And later there were plane flights.

Nome was saved and so was the Alaskan Native population.

Rarely in fact or fiction has there ever been anything to match the skill, courage, and dedication of those men and dogs.

 

Today, we remember the events of that long ago time with the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race.

It began humbly enough.

The Last Great Race had its origins in the mid 1960’s, the idea of Dorothy Page and Joe Redington Sr (later called “The Father of the Iditarod”), as mostly unnoticed competitions between enthusiasts of a slowly dying and mostly forgotten way of life.  Snow machines and technology had long ago replaced dogs on the snowy trails of the north, and mushing was a skill likely soon to be lost in the frozen blizzards of history – along with diphtheria epidemics and open cockpit mail planes.

Later Redington, along with local school teachers Gleo Huyck and Tom Johnson, came up with the idea of extending those short races all the way to Nome – many, including Dorothy Page thought they were crazy. But in 1973, the very first Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race followed the old traces 1100 miles from Anchorage to Nome and forty years later The Iditarod is an ingrained part of our state’s history – and more than any other event, responsible for reviving and preserving dog mushing in North America.

The race begins on the first Saturday in March after a two week winter festival known as The Fur Rendezvous (called simply Rondy by Alaskans) with a ceremonial start in downtown Anchorage.

 

The whole city turns out for the celebration and people come from all over the world to watch the mushers and their dogs run through the streets.

 

It can be little crowded on 4th Street, but the crowd is always good natured and well behaved. The streets smell like wood smoke and grilling food. The air is filled with laughter and the excited yipping of the dogs.  Even if you hate crowds, as I do, it’s damned hard not to like this one.

As we worked our way through the press, I held the camera over my head and snapped a dozen shots. Eleven of them were nothing special, then I got this one. The camera was set in facial recognition mode and the autofocus locked on to the man in the bottom left-of-center who was staring intently into the lens – and suddenly the impersonal crowd had a face. And I love the color and the huge snow flakes caught mid fall.

 

There’s every kind of food you can imagine, but it’s Alaska so you better have yourself a Reindeer brat smothered in onions. 

 

The ceremonial start begins on 4th Street at the Iditarod Mile Zero Marker (a bronze statue of  a running sled dog) and goes about eleven miles across town to the Campbell Airstrip.  This is a good warm-up for the dogs and helps temper their enthusiasm, who at this point just hours before the real race begins are bounding bundles of excitement and energy.   Typically during the ceremonial start, the teams tow an additional sled in tandem behind the main sled and bring along “Iditariders,” i.e. folks who have either bought or won a chance to ride along through the cheering crowds with their favorite mushers.  The Iditarider concept helps raise money to support the teams and makes the race personal for a lot of fans.

My wife was an Iditarider on Alan Moore’s sled in 2007. 

 

Which is how we met and became friends with Alan and his wife, musher Aily Zirkle. Aily is Bib #14 this year. Alan is sitting out the race, having given up his slot to a rookie racer who has been training at their kennel.  Considering what’s on the line here, It doesn’t get much classier than that. Seriously.

The Fabulous Aily Zirkle herself:

 

The dogs take the excitement in stride. They’re beloved athletes, born and bred for this and despite the protestations of certain animal rights organizations, these dogs are often better cared for than the most delicate and pampered toy poodle living in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue.  There are few things that will earn you the contempt and scorn of mushers and Alaskans alike, than not placing the welfare of your dogs above all else.  Aily herself literally risked her own life to save her dogs when she was attacked by a moose on the trail, and that’s pretty damned typical of the regard mushers hold for their dogs.  

Despite all the noise and excitement, few of the dogs act as if there is anybody else on the streets of Anchorage except for themselves.  They sit calmly and uninterested while fans snap pictures and the crowd shouts its lungs out.  They don’t start getting excited until they get hooked to the traces, then it’s an entirely different story.

 

Sunday, the day after the ceremonial start, the race begins in earnest on a frozen lake 70 miles north of Anchorage in the tiny town of Willow.  Some years, we’ve been on that lake at thirty below in blowing snow, but not this year. Today, like last year, was a gorgeous Alaskan day, clear and mild and not a cloud in the sky.  The temperature was about 30 degrees warmer than it usually is this time of year.

This didn’t keep anybody from firing up the fire pits and propane warmers.  30 degrees warmer than usual is still only about 8F or so. 

The race starts with the first team out of the gate at 2PM, and each subsequent musher follows at two minute intervals.  About fifteen minutes before each team’s turn, the dog handlers start forming up the teams.

The dogs get a last minute feeding.  Running, they’ll burn an amazing amount of calories, in the range of 15 to 20,000 per day, with that kind of energy expenditure their problem isn’t staying warm in subzero temps, it’s just the opposite – which is why these dogs typically have shorter fur and are smaller than you’d expect.  

The dogs need a constant, high calorie food intake and they typically get topped off right before they form up.

I love the expressions on the dogs’ faces in the following picture, especially the gray one (the first dog facing the camera) Oh Boy! High protein fish slop again! My favorite!

And then it’s time for the race, only a thousand more miles to go!

 

For the rest of us, it’s back to Anchorage via car or bush plane.

 

My wife and I saw old Joe Redington race his last Iditarod in 1997 at the age of 80.   He died two years later, in 1999, and was buried in his favorite dogsled in the town of Wasilla where it all began.

His legacy is a very big deal in Alaska, it’s a celebration of much more than a mere sport, it reminds us forcefully of our history here in The Great Land, it speaks directly to a triumph of the human spirit in this harsh and beautiful place.

More, the race reminds Alaskans every single year of those long ago men and their dogs who dared greatly, and won.