Pee is for Politician

[Schema Thing]

http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/01/16/pee-is-for-politician/

At the risk of this becoming a parlor game for bloggers, I have before me the ravings of two former commissioned military officers who became politicians – the dullard U.S. Rep. Allen West and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a big ol’ haircut without much underneath it – plus an unedited Youtube video showing several Marines in 3/2 peeing on the corpses of Taliban fighters.

Ex-U.S. Army LTC Allen West did his former service no favors when he emailed The Weekly Standard 172 words, each more hypocritically stupid than the one that preceded it, which one would think is hard to do.

And the magazine did its readers no favors by failing to mention that West was relieved of command; fined $5,000 as part of his non-judicial punishment under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice; and retired from the Army in disgrace after being accused of mistreating a detainee in Taji in 2004.

Since The Weekly Standard won’t, I shall do the heavy lifting. It’s not as if the facts in West’s case are in dispute. You can read them in official Army investigative files, including West’s own written confession to investigators.



Read more: http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/01/16/pee-is-for-politician/#ixzz1kEIdaxyk

West lamentably ends his piece with the demand for everyone to “shut your mouth” unless “you have been shot at by the Taliban” because “war is hell,” sort of the reverse-chickenhawk argument vomited onto a democracy that needs smarter politicians than Florida appears willing to give us.

War most certainly is hell. It was hell for Justin Watt, the Army whistleblower who ratted out the murderers and got threats from his fellow Americans because of it.

It was hell for Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca, two decent soldiers who sure didn’t deserve to die, much less the terrible way that they did, and our democracy must remember them because they served us faithfully, albeit tragically, even if West didn’t seem to recollect their names.

And war certainly was hell for the raped and murdered Abeer Qasim Hamza; her mother Fakhriyah Taha Muhsin; father, Qasim Hamza Raheem; and little sister Hadeel Qasim Hamza, innocent people who deserved far better from our nation than they got and who aren’t recalled at all by West, perhaps because they don’t count to him.

Gentle readers, I bet that war wasn’t hell for West, a fool who remitted a small fine and then settled into a retirement wholly funded by the American taxpayer. In fact, war has been quite kind to him.

War lets West, a fatuous fraud, play the role of a war hero, mugging on TV as war’s bogus martyr while stealing honor from soldiers who really earned it – somehow without beating detainees or blasting away like a bargain matinee cowboy to make them confess things that aren’t true.



Read more: http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/01/16/pee-is-for-politician/#ixzz1kEIvwoQh