Red Shirt Fridays

By all means, support the troops. I don't want to imply that one should not support the men and women who face death every day in service to their country. Supporting the troops is a noble goal.

But this shit is just fucking stupid.



That's right. They bleed red, so we wear red. Well, I guess that makes us even then!

Something is wrong with our society if we have convinced ourselves that wearing a red shirt is somehow helping to support the troops. How did we get to the point where we can feel like wearing a certain shirt or putting a ribbon-shaped magnet on our car is actually doing something?

Let me explain something, Red-Shirters.




These are the troops.















They are over here











And here.












You, on the other hand,






Are here.






And the troops can not see what color shirt you are wearing, what with them being over there.

And if they could somehow see your red shirtHow exactly do you suppose that the color of your shirt would make one Goddamn bit of difference in their lives.

"Well, it sure does suck being shot at all the time in this God-forsaken desert, but hey, Doug from Ohio has a red shirt on! Let's get 'em, boys!"

No, wearing a red shirt only helps you. It gives you the illusion that you are somehow doing something to help our brave men and women in uniform. But you aren't. Your shirt does nothing. Neither does your bumper-sticker. Just like me wearing my lucky Giants shirt didn't help the Giants win last night. (Which they did!)

All your stupid red shirt does is lets you strut around as though you are contributing to the war effort and feel superior to the imaginary people who don't support the troops.
Here's what they say on the Red Shirt Fridays Website:

We care only about making our support of our servicemen and women known to our fellow Americans and the world. We are a silent majority that does not wish to remain silent anymore.

See, they want to make their support of the troops known to other Americans. In other words, they want to look good and noble to other people, not help the troops.

If you really want to support the troops, try giving money to one of these organizations

a non-profit organization

Disabled American Veterans
Building Better Lives for America's Disabled Veterans

Help us Send Care Packages to our Troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Gulf!

'Sponsor A Package'

Want to send your support to a Soldier in harm's way,

but have no idea of what to send, who to send it to, or how to send it?

And there are plenty of others. If you want to actually do something for the troops, take the money you were going to spend on a stupid fucking red shirt and give it to one of these organizations. Then keep giving until it hurts. And leave the red shirts for freshman quarterbacks.

Being Glenn Beck

Today, I try to imagine how things look in the mind of someone like Glenn Beck.

September 07, 2009

Controversial school speech posted

And it's more insidious than anyone could have imagined!

Prepared text of Obama's speech to school students

OBAMA: Hello, everyone — how's everybody doing today? I'm here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia.

A grown man fraternizing with underage high-school girls! Disgusting!

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school.

Where I come from, that's called rubbing it in!

And no matter what grade you're in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could've stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

In bed? He doesn't even try to hide the sexual innuendo!

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years,

It's like he's saying that it'e OK to have lived in Indonesia. Which is not even part of
America!

and my mother didn't have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school.

Shamelessly admitting that he's not really an American!

So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday — at 4:30 in the morning. Now I wasn't too happy about getting up that early.

Obviously a slam at home-schoolers!

Every single one of you has something you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer.

Sounds suspiciously like "from each according to his ability," eh comrade?


Maybe you could be a good writer — maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper —

Encouraging children to grow up to be a part of the liberal media elite!

You'll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS,

A cure for God's punishment for people who have sex? And women who get breast cancer because they shamelessly have breasts? Who does he think he is?

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems.

Passing our nation's problems on to the children? Have you no shame?

If you don't do that — if you quit on school — you're not just quitting on yourself, you're quitting on your country.

You mean nothing as an individual. You have importance only in as much as you can be of service to the state! Sound pretty Hitlerey/Staliney to me!


Now I know it's not always easy to do well in school.

Wow! The soft bigotry of lowered expectations! Why not just tell them to give up?
My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother

As if that's OK! Way to encourage the breakdown of the nuclear family!

a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn't always able to give us things the other kids had.

Fomenting class resentment! A slippery slope leading to BOLSHEVISM!

Jazmin didn't speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

Oh, sure! Scholarships for illegal aliens! I'll bet a deserving citizen had to give up his place at Brown to accommodate Little Miss Jumping Bean!

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career.

Why do you have to tear down anyone who is successful? Why do you hate success? You notice no one from the mainstream press will ask Obama that! Even Micheal Jordan is probably afraid to confront him lest he be attacked by ACORN Thugs.

If you get in trouble, that doesn't mean you're a troublemaker,

Yes, that's exactly what it means. Quit being soft on crime! Lock him up and throw away the key!

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

Don't you mean Allah?


You know what? That is kinda fun! I should put on the crazy pants more often!

See how much better the private sector is!

The Global War on Terror is, if nothing else, a showcase for what can be accomplished when government functions like military operations are outsourced to the private sector. Naturally, the ruthless efficiency of the private sector saves money. Although Blackwater and other mercenaries get paid like 10 times as much as actual soldiers, but I'm sure that somehow that translates into savings for us, the taxpayers. Because private for-profit companies always do everything better than government agencies ever could. And they do it cheaper, even if it costs more!

And sure, occasionally a soldier gets electrocuted, or served tainted meat, but Halliburton's gotta make a profit somehow, right?

But for the best example, one need look no further than
This company was hired to provide security for the American Embassy in Kabul. Let's take a look at these fine young men in action:



What the Fuck? That can't be right!





Oh, Dear God!

What the hell is going on here?

Photos of embassy guards holding sex parties in Kabul have caused a stir in Washington. Some of the men involved claim they were forced to participate by their supervisors at the ArmorGroup security firm.

AAAAACK!!!!!

Private security contractors who guard the US Embassy in Kabul have engaged in lewd behavior and humiliated subordinates, according to a report released this week. Photographs and video footage show scantily dressed guards engaging in drinking and demeaning sex games.

The images come from Camp Sullivan, the quarters of the security personnel for the US Embassy in Kabul, only a few kilometers from the embassy complex in the Afghan capital. They show naked men, employees of the security firm, whose genitals are only barely covered with a kind of black beer mat. The men are drinking, dancing naked around a fire, licking each others nipples and grabbing each others testicles. They perform sex acts, pour vodka down each others' naked backs and drink it from the buttocks.

So, wait. Are you saying maybe it's not the best idea to send over a bunch of cowboy mercenaries into a war zone where they will be seen as representing the United States of America at a time when we're trying to win over the hearts and minds of the local populace?

What are you, a commie?

Andisheh Nouraee

One of the advantages to living in Atlanta is that we get to read Don't Panic!, a weekly feature written by Andisheh Nouraee in our local free weekly paper Creative Loafing. here's an example of his work:

Man, oh man, if you think the American political system’s all screwed up, take a look at Afghanistan’s.

We Americans only have to contend with one secretly Muslim president who wasn’t born in the United States.

In Afghanistan, they’ve had a Muslim president who wasn’t born in the United States since 2001!

Worse still, of the 40 candidates vying to replace incumbent Hamid Karzai in the Aug. 20 presidential election, I’m pretty sure all are Muslims who weren’t born in the United States!

And get this: All these people are, like, totally open about the fact that they’re Muslim non-Americans.

They're not bothering to engage in any President Obama-style cover-ups (i.e., forge a U.S. birth certificate, build a time machine to 1961 to place a birth announcement in a U.S. newspaper in anticipation of a presidential bid 47 years later, or attend Christian church for most of their adult lives.)

I know it sounds crazy, but these Afghans are almost acting like it’s perfectly fine to be a Muslim born outside the U.S. WTF? Don’t they watch Fox or CNN in Afghanistan? Don’t they know!

The bookmaker’s favorite is Karzai.

Karzai is one of the only cast members left over from the first season of the War On Terror™. He’s an ethnic Pashtun and veteran of the U.S.-backed Afghan war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Karzai didn’t much mind the wicked Taliban (also Pashtun) when they came to power in the mid-'90s, but by the time Operation Enduring Freedom rolled into Afghanistan in 2001, he’d had a big falling-out with them.

Diplomatically astute, handsome, and uncommonly stylish (Gucci’s Tom Ford once called him the most chic man in the world), Karzai maneuvered his way into the black heart of the Bush administration by offering himself up as their fantasy Afghan – acceptable to Afghans and friendly to Western governments.

It didn’t hurt that Karzai’s also telegenic as hell – brilliant at schmoozing U.S. journalists who only ever interview people who are fluent in English. Karzai was the magic man: the first Afghan in history as comfortable on cable as he was in Kabul.

So naturally, we “helped” make him interim president of Afghanistan in 2001 and backed his campaign to become Afghanistan’s first-ever elected president in 2004.

The knock against Karzai is that he’s ineffective and corrupt.

I’m all for bashing Bush administration puppets, but calling him ineffective is somewhat unfair. No one Afghan is up to the job.

Afghanistan is the poorest, least-developed country outside sub-Saharan Africa. If you look up “shithole” in the dictionary, there’s picture of a shithole acting all offended that you dared compare it to Afghanistan.

Afghans simply cannot fix their country on their own. The U.S. and allies pledged mountains of security and development aid, but neither emerged in sufficient quantities. We preferred to spend the effort and money on Iraq.

Afghanistan’s miserable poverty hasn’t abated, and the savage fundamentalism of the Taliban was replaced after 2001 with warlordism, widespread government corruption at all levels, and an opium-based economy.

Meanwhile, the security situation is awful. The Taliban rebounded from its 2001 mauling. It has gotten stronger each year. Depending on who’s estimating, the Taliban control one-quarter to one-third of Afghanistan.

To fight the Taliban, the U.S. and NATO keep stepping up operations – catching more and more innocent civilians in the crossfire. The U.N. says 1,013 Afghan civilians have been killed in the war against the Taliban so far this year, up from 808 during the same period in 2009.

Unless the Obama administration is totally head-faking, it’s planning to escalate the war in Afghanistan significantly before the end of the year. There will be 68,000 U.S. troops there by the fall – part of an Afghan “surge” Obama hopes will bring enough of a semblance of order to Afghanistan for him to draw down U.S. forces next year.

Next week, I’ll talk about the opposition candidates.

There's more here: http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/BrowseArchives?searchCategory=oid:6976

Stupid, Stupid Parents

Parents angry over Obama speech

Some are outraged by the president's planned address to the nation's students next week

Are you fucking serious? Outraged? Really? How can you be outraged over something that hasn't even happened yet? "I don't know what the president is going to say, but I already know that it will fill me with OUTRAGE!" You want to know what the president is planning on saying?

"I'm going to be making a big speech to young people all across the country about the importance of education; about the importance of staying in school; how we want to improve our education system and why it’s so important for the country. So I hope everybody tunes in."

So, outrage? Really?

"The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power," [Florida Republican Party] Chairman Jim Greer said in a press release.

Ok, if that were remotely true, you might have a beef here, but where in the hell would you get the idea that the President is going to justify plans that exist mainly in your imagination to schoolchildren? I mean, do you really think the President is going to waste his time explaining economic policy to children who haven't developed the intellectual capacity to understand them or the maturity to sit and listen to them? That's what next week's joint session of Congress is for. Oh, snap! No he didn't! Hell, yeah I did. Take note, aspiring bloggers, that's how it's done!