Another "Gotta See"

Unlike America's heroic anti-war demonstrators,
the man in the center has three bullets in him,
but h'es still not out of the fight

Just like last week's "Porn Star," "Gates of Fire" is another must-read. Michael Yon, an independent journalist imbedded with an Army unit in Mosul, reports on the very human real-world war being fought in the streets of Iraqi cities. It's a far cry from the body-counting anti-war screeds coming from the reporters lounging by the hotel pools in Baghdad.

Take particular note of this:

About two weeks ago, word came that Nohe's case had been dismissed by a judge on 7 August. The Coalition was livid. According to American officers, solid cases are continually dismissed without apparent cause. Whatever the reason, the result was that less than two weeks after his release from Abu Ghraib, Nohe was back in Mosul shooting at American soldiers.

LTC Kurilla repeatedly told me of--and I repeatedly wrote about--terrorists who get released only to cause more trouble. Kurilla talked about it almost daily. Apparently, the vigor of his protests had made him an opponent of some in the Army's Detention Facilities chain of command, but had otherwise not changed the policy. And now Kurilla lay shot and in surgery in the same operating room with one of the catch-and-release-terrorists he and other soldiers had been warning everyone about.

As it turns out, the terrorist mentioned above winds up shooting LTC Kurilla. Seems we have a problem with liberal judges wherever we go these days.

"Gates of Fire" is long, but as with "Porn Star," it will richly reward your attention.

Monk



Update: On a related topic, Victor Davis Hanson takes up his rhetorical hammer and hits the anti-war nail right on the head:

It is becoming nearly impossible to sort the extreme rhetoric of the antiwar Left from that of the fringe paleo-Right. Both see the Iraqi war through the same lenses: the American effort is bound to fail and is a deep reflection of American pathology.

An anguished Cindy Sheehan calls Bush "the world's biggest terrorist." And she goes on to blame Israel for the death of her son ("Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel").

Her antiwar venom could easily come right out of the mouth of a more calculating David Duke. Perhaps that's why he lauded her anti-Semitism: "Courageously she has gone to Texas near the ranch of President Bush and braved the elements and a hostile Jewish supremacist media."

See, for example, this and this and compare them with this and this. Proof again of the old political proverb that the extremes of right and left meet at the back somewhere.

What do they all have in common? Yep: It's all the fault of them Damjooz and Christers! Git ridda them and the world would be safe for Lyndon LaRouche and Ward Churchill -- jus' like B'rer Schicklegruber an' B'rer Dzhugashvili said, back in the day!

Moonbats of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your minds!

Monk

PS: Here's what passes for witty, urbane civil discourse from the.....well, I'm not really sure what this guy is.....could be a Neo-Nazi or a Raelian -- all one can tell is a) he really doesn't like VDH (aren't threats such as his actionable in law?) and b) he hasn't washed his hair in about sixteen years.

Another Update: So when do our courageous, "speak-truth-to-power" hippie-wannabe "troop supporters" start spitting on our troops and yelling, "baby killers!" Can't be long now. Unbelievable. (Bow to With Cheese for the link):

CARBONDALE, Ill. - For two years, Carbondale residents have been riveted by the writing of a little girl imploring her father in Iraq: "Don't die, OK?"

Only now are they learning there was never any danger of that.

The Daily Egyptian, Southern Illinois University's student-run newspaper, today will admit to its readers that the saga - of a little girl's published letters to her father serving in Iraq - was apparently an elaborate hoax perpetrated by a woman who claimed to be the girl's aunt.

Carbondale readers devoured it. Letters to the editor begged the newspaper to keep Kodee's story coming.

"Everyone who comes into my office reads her story and they all talk about this little girl. I tell everyone I meet about her because she has touched my soul so deeply. She has touched more lives than she'll ever know," read one letter submitted by Chad Anderson, a Carbondale doctor.

"I'm rily mad at you and you make my hart hurt,"' she purportedly wrote in one published letter to the president. "I don't think your doing a very good job. You keep sending soldiers to Iraq and it's not fair. Do you have a soldier of your own in Irak?"

The story began unraveling this month, when the woman contacted the paper and said the girl's father had been killed in Iraq.

Staff members began gathering background for a story on the girl's father's death - the kind of backgrounding that hadn't been done in the two years the paper had written about Kodee and carried her column. They quickly discovered that the military had no record of Dan Kennings.

I guess they teach the CBS brand of journalism at SIS Carbondale. This woman and her cohort on the Daily Egyptian are Pulitzer material. American Mainstream Journalism -- Setting the Standard!

Monk