Tag: navy seals

Jan Schakowsky (D, IL): SEALs are criminals!

Rep. Schakowsky, attempting to explain why photos of the military operation that killed Osama bin Laden would not be released, had this to say:

“These are pictures of a violent crime scene. This is a dead person. A dead Osama bin Laden,” she said.

Now, I will readily grant that normally a statement like this should be subject to Occam’s Razor.  The simplest way to explain the problems with the first sentence* would be to simply postulate that the person who uttered it is a semi-literate buffoon who is so unthinkingly programmed to parrot outworn and exploded progressive agitprop that she is truly unaware that even suggesting that Navy SEALs are criminals for killing Osama bin Laden is offensive.  Or that she has not contemplated that her aforementioned parroting handily confirms every not-nice said about the average progressive antiwar politician’s judgement, character, and native mother-wit.  Or that (by extension) Schakowsky is accusing fellow-Democrat President Barack Obama of war crimes, given that he gave the order.  Yes, really, if this had just been uttered by some nobody then you could simply chalk the comment up to pig-ignorance, coupled with thee utterer being a natural-born damned fool. Continue reading Jan Schakowsky (D, IL): SEALs are criminals!

BREAKING: ThinkProgress pig-ignorant about military.

Legal Insurrection tipped me to this one: apparently, ThinkProgress (link available via Legal Insurrection) got itself in a bit of a tizzy over a story in the Mexican press that one of the Navy SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden was the son of Mexican immigrants, which apparently means (according to TP) that we need to pass the DREAM Act* and that the military is by the way keeping Latinos down.  Now, let’s establish something right off of the bat; I don’t know who was on that SEAL team, and it would not surprise me in the slightest to hear that one or more of them were of Latino ancestry.  Or any other ancestry, frankly.  That’s not the point: the point is that when you’re a hardcore partisan ideologue using a story for agitprop, you should probably check the story first to make sure that you don’t get burned.

ThinkProgress did not check the story first.

Quick: read this sentence (from the original Mexican newspaper article that sent TP into a tizzy) and tell me what’s wrong with it.  It’s OK if you don’t speak Spanish: neither do I, really – and I still can pick out the howler, so you should be able to, too.

El soldado Rubén Mejía, nacido en este país y de padres guanajuatenses, ha sido ascendido a sargento por el operativo en que un equipo enfrentó y dio muerte a Bin Laden.

“Sargento.”

Continue reading BREAKING: ThinkProgress pig-ignorant about military.

Europe starting to talk about ‘war crimes?’

Pajamas Media took a survey of various European media sources and their evolving reaction to the Osama bin Laden excision.  It will not surprise anyone in the slightest to hear that the level of disapproval has been increasing all week, with many an envious sneer along the way.  The German response is particularly telling  (they’re usually a leading indicator of Left-wing antiwar thinking*): even the center-right (hah!) magazines want international tribunals and investigations and whatnot.  So we should probably see the first calls for that over here in about… a week or so.  Probably followed with the leaking of the SEAL team’s names by some fellow-traveler in the Executive Branch with a grudge against the military and an iPad, so I hope that the SEALs are taking my advice and getting a lawyer now.

I’m also going to give some free advice to the White House: and I actually hope that they’ll take it, because this is an American issue, not a Right/Left, Republican/Democrat, or Competent/Incompetent one.  Let’s just say that I don’t really care what’s on the tapes that we’re suddenly now saying that we don’t actually have.  This is because I’m reasonably sure that there’s nothing drastically awful on them, given that they weren’t suppressed from the get-go: so there’s nothing like an actual noncombatant being molested or shot out of hand or anything like that.  If there is something like that on them then I would have to wonder why the administration didn’t react with horror at the time, but never mind that right now: the point is, I expect that the video record doesn’t show an actual atrocity. Continue reading Europe starting to talk about ‘war crimes?’