The Khan Game

--Political Dead Letter Box;

Gatis Sluka (Latvia)

This is what he truly envies of these people,

the luxury of terror as a talking point

 --Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk,

 Ben Fountain

 Since Persia fell at Marathon,
The yellow years have gathered fast:
Long centuries have come and gone.

And yet (they say) the place will don
A phantom fury of the past,
Since Persia fell at Marathon
--Villanelle Of Change,
Edwin Arlington Robinson

There is nothing fair in this world
There is nothing safe in this world
And there's nothing sure in this world
And there's nothing pure in this world
--White Wedding,
Billy Idol 
 __________________________

Subtitles: "Khan Men"; "The Greatest Khan of All", and "Pro or Khan". [Sometimes it is hard to choose correctly.]

This past weekend Ranger attended his local Military Order of the Purple Heart [MOPH] banquet (August 7 is Florida's official Florida Purple Heart Day.) Gold Star families were also in attendance as special guests.

Gold Star families have lost a family member in an overseas conflict. They were invited to show sensitivity to the harsh sacrifice which they have also rendered our nation. It is a quiet and somber recognition the nation renders them, and these families are never to be exploited.

But while the privacy of these parents is sacrosanct, this rule was superseded the moment Hillary Clinton and the Khan family gathered on the stage and politicized the death of their son, parlaying their loss into a campaign coup. They fired the first salvo and no one should be surprised that they received return fire. While Mr. Trump may be ill-advised to have shot back, he was well within the rules of engagement.

While my sympathy abounds, the family voluntarily surrendered their attack-exempt status when they stepped up to the microphone.

The Khan's son died for their country, not for Mrs. Clinton's aggrandizement or gain, or to provoke Mr. Trump's reaction. Captain Khan did not die to be used in the partisan political arena.

To have done so was gauche, gross and a disrespect of the dead soldier. Mrs.Clinton showed herself to be as tone deaf as fictional senator Ray Wheatus in the series "BrainDead", when he propped up a dying soldier in his hospital bed for some publicity photos.

The Khan's were portrayed as raw and grieving parents, but their son was in fact killed in 2004 (12 years ago.) If one were cynical, one might imagine this was the only Gold Star family willing to shill for Mrs.Clinton.

Even death has a shelf life.

It is especially difficult to understand the cynical nature of putting Gold Star parents on a political convention podium as attack dogs when candidate Clinton has never attended an MOPH or Gold Star event in her entire political career.

We veterans and surviving families are not set pieces to be trotted out to entertain the nation in political elections. If this is how Mrs Clinton views the purpose of dead soldiers, how will she treat live soldiers if elected?

It is a sad politician that would exploit a soldier's death as blatantly as did the Democrats in Philadelphia.

{cross-posted @Rangeragainstwar.]

They Shot Their Trump Card

Shut up Kyle!

Shut your Goddamn’ Jew mouth.

You’re the reason that there's war

in the Middle East

--South Park

 That's just the way it is
Some things will never change
--The Way It Is, Bruce Hornsby 

And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
--Once in a Lifetime, Talking Heads

____________________

It was recently revealed that the Democratic Party (i.e., the Clinton campaign) attempted to discredit Mrs. Clinton's sole opponent, Mr. Sanders, by disseminating the word that he was an atheist, instead of Jewish (which he in fact, is.)

Are we to believe that dismissed Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was to blame for the dirty doings in order that Mrs. Clinton may not have still more smut attached to her already tetchy image?

As the first Jewish congresswoman elected from Florida and a hard-working graduate of a Florida state school, it strains credulity to believe that Mrs. Wasserman Schultz would sink so low against one of her fellows.

Unless she is a pathologically self-loathing Jew, she alone did not hatch this plan but was directed to do so by higher ups. Remember, Mrs. Wasserman Schultz was Mrs. Clinton's campaign co-chair in Clinton's unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid. Old loyalties die hard.

I did not know Mr. Sanders was Jewish, but it is now obvious: his campaign was doomed to failure out of the gate. Anyone in his right mind knows that a Jewish quasi-Socialist will not win election to the presidency of the United States. Whether atheist or Jew, does it really matter as far as unelectability for the Presidency in the U.S.?

Vermont is another country; a Jewish -Socialist can be Senator there but in few other places. What were they thinking? Fronting Sanders seems a put up, to make it APPEAR that we have a viable democracy in the United States. After all, it would be unseemly for Mrs. Clinton to run opposed. Too Banana Republic; too Soviet.

But Mr. Sanders was never a viable candidate, and that he won as many votes as he did is a measure of the dissatisfaction of the electorate. A vote for Sanders was a no-confidence vote against Mrs. Clinton (who was the presumptive nominee from the start.) Sanders was the Democrat's Trump, and now they have none.

Who would be Mr. Sanders' constituents, he, an older white, Jewish man? He does not command the black vote nor the meso-feminist vote, which goes to the establishment Mrs. Clinton. He would not even corner the small Jewish vote.

Bernie got as far as he did on the disaffected lower-middle class white male and female vote -- precisely those who chose the non-establishment Trump on the Republican side.

You who voted for Sanders may think that spending their time also disdaining Trump was time well spent, but you have no candidate now. You drank the cherry Kool Ade Mrs. Clinton mixed for you, and now you have nothing. For the liberal True Believers, the best they can say now is, weakly, "We must not have a Republican".

It is a measure of the yearning of the Democratic base for something other than the Clinton dynasty that Mr. Sanders was able to garner such a following, and a damning reveal of the desperation of the Clinton group to even attempt the smear of Mr. Sanders.

 Jews in the U.S. may hold positions of authority which exploit their humor, intelligence, wit and capabilities. You may have your Rahm Emanuels, Judah Benjamins and Admiral Hyman Rickovers. Jews have won many Nobel and Pultizer Prizes, served as Supreme Court justices and served admirably in the armed forces (though after World War II they often could not be hired in the peacetime industries in which they had distinguished themselves during war because of anti-Semitism.) Hillary Clinton's daughter is married to a Jew. They may be doctors and lawyers, but not Indian chiefs.

Anti-semitism is the last great unbreeched bigotry in this nation, but we do not recognize it because Jews' successes are so outsized to their small numbers.

The boundaries to holding the office of Presidency will be breached in the order in which they were laid: First, a black man (15th Amendment), then a woman (19th Amendment). But before a Jew will be every other minority. Today, an Arab-descended Muslim man would be a good choice, a sort of holding out of the olive branch ("Sorry about that whole war thing.") Following Barack Hussein Obama, it is not far-fetched.

However, he will have to be Muslim in the way that Louisiana Governor Piyush "Bobby" Jindal is Indian: fully Anglicized, Hart Schaffner Marx, hair waxed and parted on the side. This will demonstrate the movement toward homogenization which is a necessary good today.

So it will be a woman after the first black President (who was quick to assure voters that he was Christian, and not Muslim, like his father and stepfather.) But should it be this woman, so freighted with problems of her own making, done in the name of clawing her way to the top?

In light of the recent revelations, Mrs. Clinton shows herself to be despotic and tyrannical, moreso than her Republican opponent has ever had the opportunity to be. She should be held to account, versus making her lady in waiting take the fall.

But this, the press will not allow. They have made our choice for us.

[cross-posted @ Rangeragainstwar.]

"Bell-bottom trousers, coats of navy blue..."

About the only thing that makes me laugh harder than wing-wipers all decked out in camouflage outfits is when squids do it.

I mean, those cammie suits'll make you SO hard to see on that ginormous fucking hunk of steel out in the in a fucking hole in the water, right?

What, blue cotton shirts and dungarees too much not-like-a-video-game for ya, Navy? They worked just fine when grandpap went out to sink the Imperial Japanese Navy.

I think what irks me about this nonsense is what some of the other waitstaff over at MilPub have complained about; that this isn't what services at war do, and, at least in theory the armed services are out fighting in various less-paved portions of the world even if the nation as a whole (outside of Victor Davis Hanson's prion-disease-addled brain) isn't. This also, IMO, isn't what services with a better grasp of their actual mission do; this is an artifact that ISTM that our armed services are infected with something that you see a lot if you look around the United States - that it's "better to look good than be good".

I realize that this is an extreme effect of selective observational bias, but...to me the impact of all this fussing about appearance give the impression that We the People (and We the Armed Forces) care if you are terrific at something only if it gets out there in the news, or into social media.

Oh, and the solution to the USN's cammie-pant problem?

Put all the gobs in GREEN cammie outfits.

FFS, people. You're fucking sailors!

Why not be proud to look like 'em?

Ransom?

I think not.  I’m old enough to remember 1979 and the aftermath.

But I’m reminded of the Danegeld.  Now that was ransom bigtime.  The English tried baptism, danegeld payments, built huge fleets that were destroyed, they built burrhs, even tried ethnic cleansing (St Brice’s Day Massacre).  None of it worked.

The master at Danegeld was Cnut Sveinsson, aka Cnut the Great, or more commonly Canute.  He, or his predecessors started out small, then 16,000 pounds, then a few years later incrementally ran it up by 50% to 24,000, then later to 36,000, then 48,000, then to 72,000.  Don’t recollect where he stopped.  But eventually he got the entire treasury when he became King of England.   He was also King of Denmark, Norway, a huge chunk of southern Sweden, and parts of northern and western Scotland.

His reign as King of England started a thousand years ago in 1016 AD and lasted for 19 years to his death in 1035.   At least one historian has called him <i>"the most effective king in Anglo-Saxon history"<i> even though he was a Dane and not English.  Too bad his sons were not as wise as he.  With infighting they only lasted another seven years before the Saxons took back the crown.  I have to wonder if Duke William of Normandy would ever have invaded England if Cnut was still around?

Too bad the History Channel series ‘Vikings’ does not cover Cnut's era instead of Ragnar’s.  Or perhaps the author Bernard Cornwell should write of Cnut instead of the so-called Alfred the Great in his Saxon tales.

November 2016 Questions

Conventions are done.  Lots of media discussion about things.

Three questions for the pub:

1. Given who Hillary Clinton is and how her team rolls, what are the odds that she/her team doesn't do something that is highly unethical (gray to black area legally), get caught, lie about it and then get caught in the lie?
2. Given who Donald Trump is and how he has run his campaign as a gigantic cry of victimization against a corrupt establishment, what are the odds that he concedes quietly if he does lose?
3. What are the odds that both happens?  Who's planning for a constitutional crisis?

PF Khans

The Fool on the Hill

--Hillary waves and Smiles,
(El Neuvo Dia)

And the face of the nation
Keeps changin' and changin'
The face of the nation
I don't recognize it no more
--The Face of the Nation,
John Mellencamp 

The truth is incontrovertible.
Malice maty attack it, ignorance may deride it
but in the  end, there it is
--Winston Churchill

They got little hands
And little eyes
And they walk around
Tellin' great big lies 
--Short People,
Randy Newman
_______________________

This last year of incessant, relentless press excoriation of Mr. Trump and those who voted for him is dispiriting. The burden of hatred which spewed forth from nearly every outlet a reasonable person might access has been daunting. It has been a year of detestable press.

Entirely ignored by the press has been the investigation of the momentous and unlikely phenomena of Trump's nomination, without resorting to the ad hominem. But the press is an institution which also feeds at the political trough.

Mr. Trump is the court jester who revealed that the other would-be emperors were naked. The sour- grapes simpering of Mr. Cruz at the Republican National Convention gave lie to the fusty Republican trope of being the party possessed of true red-blooded American bonhomie. If it ever was, it is no more.

For this, Mr. Trump shall be rewarded as the next Fool on the Hill. And for those renting their garments, tell me that you voted for Uncle Bernie with joy in your heart (in the Kondo-ian sense). And will you hold your collective nose as you check the box for the supposed heir to the Clinton dynasty?

In Trump, Republican voters did not see a fundamentalist Christian or any of the myriad vested interests represented by the other 15 stuffed shirts fronted by the Republican machine. The majority of Trump's followers did not vote for him out of any great love for the man, but for the fact that he was Other.

The Democrats never had any such option.

These voters said "no" to the party icons and scions. They refused to eat the lie which said, "Here are 15 candidates from among which you may choose, but choose you must, if your party is to have a chance." The voters for Trump said NO to tyranny and political dynasty.

Trump would not have won his party's nomination if a straggling band of Naderites or Perotians had cast votes helter-skelter in a kamikaze mission. These voters got it and said "No" to the Fortunate Sons ("no" to a Bush III). "No" to pandering special interests (Rubio couldn't take his home state). "No" to the religious fanatics. They know that all emerged from the same bag, and paid obeisance to the same dirty machine.

This perspective should have been revitalizing, but the press could not allow it, for it did not fit into their gestalt of a "backward-looking, hopeless uncool and bigoted" Trump electorate. 

They refused to say that Mr. Trump's "Yes" was a "No" to all the rest. For all the money and concerted press effort to deconstruct and unravel him, top-down, inside-out, it did not matter. You may call it what you will: the last gasp of the white chauvanist male (a view which provides succor to most academics) or flyover state ignorance, but derisive labels do not change the fact.

They could not fully construct him as grotesque, because it was not he, per se, who captured the voter's  imagination. It was that he was NOT they (i.e., the Others). If elected President, hopefully he will recognize the gravitas and great yearning which lies behind the facticity of his nomination.

Theirs is a hope for a nation which does not spin apart, enervating itself with self-destructive diversions. The Good Liberals call this necessary progress, but the commonweal is suffering. America still lives between the extremes, and it is their hope which is on display in this nomination.

The press is wholly beside itself, waiting like wolves at the door this week, hoping for the eruption of some violence -- something, anything, to mar the reality -- all the while demeaning those Trump supporters who held signs which expressed a desire for a safer nation. They cannot spin fast enough, and they must soon confront their failed project.

No matter, there will be evermore to carp about.

Mr. Trump is outside, and is not bought and sold; he is therefore, unsafe to those who would continue the current disarrayed status quo. He, moreso than the other party puppets, is a man situated in place and time.

He may not be a man for all seasons, but he is a man for this season.


Part II:  on press violence -- "Carp Diem: A  Year of Living Dangerously in the Press."

[cross-posted @ Rangeragainstwar.]

July 1916

The Battle of the Somme lasted five months from July to November 1916.  There were over a million dead and wounded:  420,000 British, 200,000 French, 465,000 German.  It was going to be a major British/French offensive.  However, with the German offensive at Verdun and Paris threatened, the French diverted many of their Somme divisions to prevent a German breakthrough to Paris.  There was also a three pronged offensive by the Entente that summer: the other two being the Brusilov Offensive in the East (one million eight hundred thousand casualties), and the Sixth Isonzo Offensive on the Italian Front (a paltry 100,000).  Throw in the casualties for the German Offensive at Verdun (976,000), plus those from the everyday grind of war and then the total for the year is well over five million.  1916 was a bad year to be a soldier.

 

Mametz Wood was an objective of the British in early July.  A newly formed unit, the 38^th (Welsh) Infantry, got their baptism of fire at Mametz.  The unit defending Mametz was the Lehr Regiment of the 3rd (Prussian) Guards Division, rated as one of the best German combat units by Allied intelligence.  The 38th took massive casualties and had to be pulled out of the line to be rebuilt and were not combat effective for a year afterwards. 


Soldier-poets Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and David Jones were at Mametz.  As was Frank Richards, a buck private who in 1933 wrote the memoir "Old Soldiers Never Die", the line that Dugout Doug MacArthur used 20 years later.    Sassoon won a Military Cross for gallantry at Mametz.  Modern Welsh poet Owen Sheers writing in 2005 composed this piece to commemorate those who died there: 

Mametz Wood 


“For years afterwards the farmers found them –
the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades
as they tended the land back into itself.

A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,
the relic of a finger, the blown
and broken bird’s egg of a skull.
…
Their socketed heads tilted back at an angle
and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.
As if the notes they had sung
have only now, with this unearthing
slipped from their absent tongues.”

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-36667730

https://www.amazon.com/Welsh-Mametz-Somme-Jonathan-2016-04-27/dp/B01HCA32I2/ref=sr_1_13?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1468048942&sr=1-13&keywords=mametz+wood

https://www.amazon.com/Mametz-Wood-Three-Stories-Tales-ebook/dp/B00OZHHDKY/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1468046258&sr=1-5&keywords=mametz+wood