Content by John Rohan
Posted at 1:36pm on Mar. 3, 2008 The Feminist vs. the War Hero
By John Rohan
Promoted from diaries by Mark I.
Yesterday, while stumping for Hillary Clinton, feminist writer Gloria Steinem shamelessly decided to take a swipe at John McCain's service record:
“Suppose John McCain had been Joan McCain and Joan McCain had got captured, shot down and been a POW for eight years. [The media would ask], ‘What did you do wrong to get captured? What terrible things did you do while you were there as a captive for eight years?’” Steinem said, to laughter from the audience....“I mean, hello? This is supposed to be a qualification to be president? I don’t think so.”
...
“I am so grateful that she [Clinton] hasn’t been trained to kill anybody. And she probably didn’t even play war games as a kid. It’s a great relief from Bush in his jump suit and from Kerry saluting.”To the Observer, Steinem insisted that “from George Washington to Jack Kennedy and PT-109 we have behaved as if killing people is a qualification for ruling people.”
Sorry, Gloria, but knowing how to defend your nation is a qualification for ruling people. One of the jobs of the President is to be Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces (of the most powerful military in the world). And in my book, that means that military experience is a great asset.
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Posted at 1:55pm on Feb. 29, 2008 "Barack Hussein Obama" - there, I dared to say the "H-word"
By John Rohan
(Cross-posted from my weblog)
This nonsense is getting ridiculous.
The United States of America has become much too hypersensitive as a nation, and much too obsessed with the concept of race when it is considered a racial slur simply to call a man by his given name.
According to Michelle Obama, the name "Hussein" is a "fear bomb". Republicans have already run for cover and pledged not to use it anymore.
For years, it's been considered perfectly acceptable to call George W. Bush "Dubya" after his middle name. Why should Obama get special treatment?
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Posted at 8:40am on Nov. 14, 2007 From "Top Gun" to "Lions for Lambs"
By John Rohan
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last 50 years, you know that Hollywood has changed considerably since the Roosevelt era. They are turning out one film after another where the bad guys are not the terrorists, but Americans. This has gone on since Vietnam, but now the movies are coming out while the War in question is still in progress. Of course, Al-Qaeda couldn't be happier, but Hollywood is paying a price for it. Literally. Maybe I shouldn't gloat in their misery, but lately these films are all huge box office disasters. The reviews for Lions for Lambs are particularly dismal. Professional reviewers overall give it a score of 47 (out of 100). Rendition, and In the Valley of Elah have garnered only slightly better reviews and fared just as poorly in ticket sales. The Kingdom's reviews were also sub-par, but while it did a bit better (perhaps more action and less preachy then the others) it still came in way below expectations, making $50 mil on a film that cost $80 mil to produce.
To Hollywood, this must have been quite counter-intuitive. Polls show that the country is disillusioned over the war, and the President's approval ratings are at an all-time low. How could an anti-war film miss?
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Posted at 5:18pm on Nov. 6, 2007 Drowning in waterboarding stories!
By John Rohan
Pun intended. Do you feel like there's a little too much discussion of "waterboarding" these days at the expense of all else? The media was flooded this week (another pun) with news about the controversial technique of forcing a prisoner to talk by simulating the gag reflex during drowning. It was all the rage during Michael Mukasey's confirmation hearings for Attorney General. Just in the last day, there have been five waterboarding stories on the front page of Digg.com alone (link will quickly expire). By contrast, in the same amount of time there was only one front page story about the volatile events in Pakistan (and that was angled to slam the Bush administration).
During my first tour in Iraq 2003-2004, I interrogated dozens of Iraqi prisoners, and no, I didn't torture or waterboard any of them. Nor did anyone else in the theater. This laser-beam like focus on the technique is far out of proportion to it's importance; it feels like: "waterboarding everywhere, but not a drop to drink..."
The LA Times thinks that Mukasey should not be confirmed, simply because he refused to recognize it as torture. They also claim this is important because:
Torture, and water-boarding in particular, is one of the top issues facing the Justice Department, the subject of numerous lawsuits and one of the most obvious, predictable topics at the hearing. It has been discussed literally thousands of times in the media during the last six years [emphasis mine]
"One of the top issues"? In all this hype, people seem to lose sight of one important fact: The United States has used waterboarding only three times, the last time being in 2003. So it hasn't even been used in the last four years, is unlikely to be used again, and it's one of the "top issues" facing the DOJ today? Are they kidding us? Is this where our country's priorities are?
Posted in Breaking News — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 8:08am on Oct. 26, 2007 TNR's defenders - in their own words!
By John Rohan
This is an updated and condensed version of an article I posted on my web site back in August (for original version, check here). I thought now would be a good time to bring this up; the recent leak/release of the Beauchamp transcripts shows us what most military people already knew - his articles for TNR were fake. I realized this long ago, but not everyone did. Notice how almost all of the writers below are pretty quiet on the controversy now?
This is not an article to bash Scott Beauchamp. As I said in the original version, now that the Army has handled the matter, I consider it closed. I'm a soldier myself (with two tours in Iraq), and I don't have any beef with him anymore.
Instead, this is an article to bash the radical leftist opinionsphere that all assumed, without any knowledge of the matter whatsoever, that Beauchamp was telling the truth and all his detractors were liars. Most of the comments below were written shortly after Aug 2, when the editors of TNR claimed they had completed a "re-investigation" and stood firmly by the story. So the many supporters of The New Republic felt vindicated over what they felt had been dishonest, right-wing smear jobs designed to silence all critics of the war. They believed this solely because they wanted to, and in the midst of all their premature jubilation, this group, which was largely clueless of the military, sounded off in ways that they probably regret now...
Anyway, enjoy. A lot of quotations are here, and they range from well-known authors to the truly obscure (I believe in equal treatment for all). These quotes are exact, except that asterisks (*) have been inserted in certain foul language:
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Posted at 11:51am on Oct. 22, 2007 Bobby Jindal win due to "ethnic cleansing"
By John Rohan
By now, most people who read this site already know that Representative Piyush "Bobby" Jindal won the election for governor of Louisiana with 53% of the vote. What you may not know, is why he won it. According to the conspiracy theorists, it was all due to the "ethnic cleansing" of Hurricane Katrina which forced black people out of the state! Didn't you know this was all part of Karl Rove's plan to win Louisiana?