It's amazing how so-called conservative women will twist themselves into pretzels to defend Pete Hegseth, for example by lowering Brett Kavanaugh to his level

 

 Don’t let the left do to Pete Hegseth what it did to Brett Kavanaugh 

It’s the Brett Kavanaugh show all over again. ... Was Hegseth also in another relationship at the time [2017]? Maybe. But he’s being nominated for secretary of defense, not for the role of our boyfriend or husband. His personal life issues should stay personal. 

As Megyn Kelly pointed out, “Having difficulty in one’s personal relationship, especially after having served two tours — which it’s not uncommon for these combat vets to come back and not be able to navigate their love lives all that well — is much different than being a rapist.”

 

Brett Kavanaugh isn't on his third wife, or his second, and hasn't cheated on his first one, let alone on three and then lied about it by omission. There is no moral equivalence between Pete Hegseth and Brett Kavanaugh whatsoever. 

Hegseth meanwhile served in combat in Iraq in 2005-6, having married wife number one in 2004. That marriage ended in 2009, reportedly due to his infidelity, and he remarried the very next year in 2010, both of which life-altering events occurred while he was executive director of Vets For Freedom, 2007-2012.

In 2012 he was an active duty military instructor in Afghanistan, but evidently for not very long.

In that same year he had started a political action committee called MN PAC, briefly ran for the US Senate from Minnesota starting in February, lost at the Republican Convention in May, and also became CEO of Concerned Veterans for America that year, a job he held until 2015, having become a Fox News contributor the previous year.

It is laughable to suggest that this biography matches a man suffering from the post-traumatic stress of two tours of duty in the Middle East. He looks more like an ambitious climber trying to make the most he can out of what little he's got.

 

Iraq combat vets wondered why National Guard member Pete Hegseth showed up in Iraq in 2005 leading a platoon

 “I showed up in the 101st Airborne Division, in one of the most storied units in our nation’s history, with a bunch of combat vets who’d already done a tour in Iraq and they looked at me like, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’” Hegseth said in a 2021 interview on “The Will Cain Show” podcast.

One former officer who served with Hegseth said he was surprised to see a National Guard member taking on such a role. He surmised that Hegseth probably wanted to run for office someday and thought a combat tour could help, the former officer said. ...

The former Army officer who served with Hegseth in Iraq said he believes he has latched on to “populist scenarios” in a quest for personal gain. When news of Hegseth’s potential nomination emerged, old acquaintances from those days got back in touch with one another, the former officer said.

One text he received especially stood out. All it said: “WTF?”

More.

Tim Walz implies he stood at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan as a member of the national guard

 He didn't. He was in Congress when he did that, on January 9, 2008:

WALZ RETURNS FROM OVERSEAS TRIP INVESTIGATING MILITARY HEALTHCARE.

It's all so vivid in his mind on 9/11/2021 right? So vivid he puts Bagram in Iraq.

The period between the words "national guard. I stood" is 2005-2008.

His guard service ended in 2005. The Middle East trip was in January 2008.

 

 

Friday night news dump, when no one is paying attention: Harris-Walz campaign admits in a statement that Walz misspoke about using weapons in war

 He's been misspeaking for 18 years.

And like Harris, he's not being asked any questions and is letting an unknown person from "the campaign" do his speaking for him.

You'll never hear from him about his four other lies about his military service, and he will in future simply refer to this "clarification" about this one if he is ever asked in public in order to deflect from the others, and the press will say good enough and let him.

This is how the game is played, if you are a Democrat.

It's good to be a Democrat.

Meanwhile J. D. Vance never made any claims about "putting his life on the line", as if Walz did in Italy. Walz never made it past Italy. Vance was a USMC combat journalist in Iraq.

 

AS I SAID -- the editor

Tim Walz has lied for years about serving in Afghanistan, he's a total phony: He never served in-country anywhere, he was never in combat with a weapon of war, he retired to avoid deployment to Iraq with his unit, he said he didn't know he was being deployed but did, and was demoted from Command Sergeant Major as a result

Five fucking lies about his service.

He's an insult to the uniform.

His own press release in March 2005 quotes him saying it was his responsibility to deploy to Iraq with his unit.

When he found out they were deploying, his commanding officer is on the record saying he went around his command to retire.

Shall we add that he promised in 2018 a moderate "One Minnesota" governorship, but instead gave them a culture war, signing a bill providing for abortion up until the time of birth, legalized marijuana, gave drivers licenses to illegals, and made Minnesota a mecca for trannies?

He's a lying snake and always has been.

Gun-banner Tim Walz lies, he never carried weapons of war in a war

He had a chance to go to Iraq with his field artillery regiment in 2005, but he decided to retire instead after 24 years of service.

He exaggerates his military experience, and reminds me of no one so much lately as Peter Meijer, who did the same.

It is disrespectful to veterans who actually were in combat.

 

 

The background coming out on Tim Walz shows he's a left wing kook just like Kamala, not a "centrist", which is why she picked him over the Jew Shapiro from Pennsylvania

 Some say he's a sacrificial lamb for a losing proposition and that Democrats are saving their A-team for the next time.

Joe Biden to Dem. Rep. Jason Crow, decorated for valor in combat in Iraq: "Tell me who did something that you’ve never done with your Bronze Star like my son!"

 

 President Biden Says Beau Biden's Bronze Star Is Worth More Than Representative Jason Crow's Combat Award

In a leaked Zoom call with moderate House Democrats on Sunday, President Joseph Biden once again used his dead son, Beau Biden, this time, to insult and denigrate the military and combat service of Colorado Congressman Jason Crow (D). Biden was unhinged as he told Crow to "tell me who did something that you’ve never done with your Bronze Star like my son!" President Biden was attempting to convey the message that he was fit and able to continue on with his campaign and snapped at Crow when he politely expressed his concerns to the president. 

Instead of addressing Crow's and other moderate Democrats' concerns, Biden snapped at Crow and went on a full-blown assault, which ended with an attack on his Army and combat service and comparing it with his son Beau's service. Biden specifically ridiculed Crow's Bronze Star in a pathetic and out-of-bounds attack, which the campaign did not deny or dispute. ... A Bronze Star with "V" is the fourth highest award for valor in combat, with the Silver Star, Service Cross (Army Distinguished Service Cross, Navy, Air Force Crosses), and Medal of Honor preceding it. 

Read the rest here.

Beau Biden's Bronze Star lacked the V-device which Crow received on his.

 

Trump takes the war to Biden's home turf, turns out big, enthusiastic crowd in North Philly

 Biden took 81% of the vote in Philadelphia County in 2020 but won Pennsylvania by only 82,000 votes.

 Trump: "I went to school in Philadelphia" lol, which is some lie you'd expect Joe Biden to say but is actually true in Trump's case.

CNN, 19 April 2024:

President Joe Biden spent three days this week campaigning in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania. He littered his remarks with false and misleading claims on subjects ranging from his annual earnings to his cap on seniors’ prescription drug spending to the demographics of China to the frequency of his past travel to Iraq and Afghanistan.

And in Biden’s most eyebrow-raising remarks of the campaign swing, he told and then retold a story in which he strongly suggested his late uncle, Ambrose Finnegan, was eaten by cannibals after his plane was shot down while he fought in World War II. Biden’s dramatic details don’t match the Defense Department’s official account of the plane crash.

Here is a fact check of eight of Biden’s Pennsylvania remarks.

More.

 

Link:

Is four days long enough since Iranians killed American soldiers for them to escape back to Tehran or nah?

 SHOWDOWN: Pentagon plans for strikes on Iranian personnel and facilities approved...

Weather will be a major factor in the timing of the strikes, the U.S. officials told CBS News, as the U.S. has the capability to carry out strikes in bad weather but prefers to have better visibility of selected targets as a safeguard against inadvertently hitting civilians who might stray into the area at the last moment. ... [SECDEF] Austin told reporters the U.S. was trying to "hold the right people accountable" without escalating the conflict in the region.

Iranian ballistic missile attacks on Erbil, Iraq and Balochistan Province in Pakistan, a nuclear power, show the Biden administration's policy of appeasement is an abject failure

 Biden's weakness has emboldened Iran, which is betting that the superpower which cut and run in Afghanistan has no stomach to stop the aggression of the religious dictatorship in Tehran.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Within 24 hours, Iran launched missile and drone strikes on targets in three countries — Iraq, Syria and Pakistan — and took the extraordinary step of announcing its responsibility for the attacks, triggering anger from its neighbors. ... Baghdad recalled its ambassador to Iran after the Monday night attack ...

Pakistan’s foreign ministry said Tuesday that it “strongly condemns the unprovoked violation of its airspace by Iran” which it said killed two children and injured three more. It added that “it is even more concerning that this illegal act has taken place despite the existence of several channels of communication between Pakistan and Iran.”

More. 

Pakistan is believed to possess over 100 operational nuclear warheads which can be delivered from a number of different platforms. 

Would Iran attack Pakistan like this without having the same capability, or are they just fools?

Once again, it was the idiot liberal Republican George H. W. Bush who advanced the anti-capitalist Democrat global warming agenda

 . . . the Inflation Reduction Act was signed by President Biden earlier this summer. It had been thirty years and sixty-five days since President George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro.

Here.

George also spawned the redundant hate crime legislation, huge increases to LEGAL immigration, wheel-chair access at every intersection's crosswalk among other expensive accommodations for the ambulatory handicapped, who in 2016 are fewer than 7% of the population, an unchastened Saddam Hussein, and READ MY LIPS . . . NEW TAXES.

Oh yeah. He also literally spawned the guy who didn't keep America safe on 911 and gave us the expensive nation-building wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the insidious Patriot Act, but don't get me started.

Everything BUSH has been terrible for America, which is saying a lot when everything Democrat always is anyway.  

Same old same old: Dick Cheney escalates on Trump like Dick Cheney escalated on Iraq

''There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,'' Mr. Cheney said. ''There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.''

 

 

Cheney Downloads on Trump in Campaign Ad for Daughter...

'Never been an individual who is greater threat to our republic'...

Video...

The price of NATO membership for Sweden and Finland is for them to throw the Kurds under the bus to please Turkey

 Same as it ever was.

The Kurds have been pretty much voiceless in the West since Winston Churchill first threw them under the bus in 1919 and used British air forces to attack them, advocating eventually that Turkey be given control of northern Iraq.

 

 

 

NATO members once more are ignoring Turkey’s role against the Kurds. This concerns internal Kurdish oppression in Turkey, bombing the PKK and Yazidis in Northern Iraq and killing and cleansing Kurds in Northern Syria. ...

NATO, the European Union, and the G7 anti-Russian Federation alliance ignore human rights in Turkey and the fact that this nation is occupying two nations (Northern Cyprus and Northern Syria) – while also bombing Kurds and Yazidis in another nation (Iraq). At the same time, the EU and G7 seek Saudi Arabia to increase energy production. Therefore, ignoring the conflict in Yemen: the Saudi Arabia-led war that has been bombing this nation for many years (weapons bought from America, France, and the United Kingdom).

The Kurds are perennially thrown under the American and NATO bus. Hence, Finland and Sweden are set to join the anti-Kurdish power plays of NATO before even being accepted. 

More.

Last time I checked, Ron DeSantis deployed to Iraq with SEAL Team One in 2007, but gutless Trump never deployed anywhere

 

Another woke general crawls out from under his retirement rock, wants FOX News banned from all US military bases

 Paul D. Eaton, here.

Hillary supporter, critic of Bush 43's Iraq War.

Sean Davis of The Federalist only pretends that wars in Ukraine and Taiwan will be wars of our choosing

We can bolster the defenses of these nominally free states in order to prevent Russia and China from attacking them, or we can do what he says and do nothing, inviting their demise.

He is profoundly mistaken.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/09/following-debacles-in-iraq-and-afghanistan-failed-interventionists-are-now-agitating-for-wars-in-ukraine-and-taiwan/

FBI had at least a dozen "informants" involved prodding along the Gov. Whitmer kidnap plot

But as it was revealed that the FBI had at least a dozen informants heavily involved in the Watchmen — including that Iraq veteran — critics say the G-Men did as much to prod the plot as they did to prevent it from happening in the first place.

The agents took an active part in the scheme from its inception, according to court filings, evidence and dozens of interviews examined by BuzzFeed. Some members of the Wolverine Watchmen are accusing the feds of entrapment. ...

Since the 9/11 attacks, the FBI has reportedly recruited thousands of informants. Some, according to a recent investigation in The New York Times that centered on the dubious arrest and conviction of the so-called “Herald Square Bomber” by the use of an informant, said they were retaliated against if they refused. ...

Coulson said he and others are “very upset” the FBI hasn’t arrested anti-government and anti-fascist protesters who have been leading violent demonstrations in Portland and Seattle for more than a year — yet are bearing down so hard on those arrested for the insurrection at the Capitol.

Read it all here.

Looks more and more like a replay of the FBI's Michigan Hutaree Militia fiasco from 2010.

 

LOL, The Atlantic has declared the pandemic over and will stop collecting data on March 7, 2021

It's good to be a Democrat.

Meanwhile through Feb 20 2,802 people in the US have died of COVID-19 every single damn day in February, the second highest daily death rate measured monthly since the beginning of the pandemic.

Everyone thinks the recent big drop in cases means it's over? What a joke.

New cases in Feb just through 2/20 total 1.873 million, far exceeding May 2020's 1.799 million. The country went into SHUT DOWN mode with far fewer new cases in March 2020: 188,461. In April when so many Americans perished there were just 1.075 million new cases.

It's way too early to stop collecting data, unless of course you have an axe to grind, like the neo-cons did when Goldberg at The Atlantic insisted Iraq had WMD.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Fred Upton, Republican chucklehead, MI-6, waits until the very last hours of the Trump administration to declare: "But it is time to say: Enough is enough”

What courage! What principle! What restraint!

Upton joined nine other Republicans in the US House, including my own freshman congressman Peter Meijer, Republican chucklehead, MI-3, and all the Democrats, 222 of them, to impeach Trump a second time 232-197. Four Republicans did not vote.

The roll call is here. Upton is quoted here.

Upton, 67, has spent his life as a useless heir to a Whirlpool fortune estimated under $10 million. Once an aspiring journalist with a B.A. in journalism, instead he became a staffer to the libertarian Republican Representative David Stockman in the late 1970s and followed him to OMB under Reagan in the early 1980s. He first ran for Congress in 1986, eleven years after graduating from the U of M. He has been a congressional pest ever since, aren't they all?, who has inflicted on the American people such things as lightbulb bans, eventually styling himself as a moderate.

Meijer, now 33, is embarking on a similar trajectory, but with a gappy resume. Reportedly worth $50 million from the Meijer grocery store chain, Meijer has landed in Congress also after a decade of searching for himself.

Meijer got in to West Point but ignominiously dropped out after one year, became an Army Reservist, and went to Columbia in 2008 where he salvaged himself with a B.A. in anthropology by 2012. He interrupted this period at Columbia with service in Iraq in 2010-2011 as a sergeant. Post graduation in 2012 he served with an NGO 2013-2015. He took a wife in 2016, and an MBA from NYU, apparently 2016-2017. Then there was a brief stint in 2018 with Ilitch Holdings of billionaire family fame as an "analyst" which ended in January 2019. When Justin Amash left the Republican Party in July 2019, Meijer announced his candidacy.

Just as Upton took up the occasion of the Capitol attack as a moment of historic gravitas which inspired him to rise to impeach Trump, Meijer similarly has over-dramatized it by relating it to the drama of his "combat" experience as an intelligence advisor in Iraq (insert smirk here). He also laughably pondered out loud the danger those in the order of presidential succession were in from the trespassers on January 6. He reminds one of no one so much as the ex-bartender become US Representative, AOC, who has similarly made it a point to appear distraught and blow everything completely out of proportion to the reality in keeping with her modus operandi everywhere. Think of red-lipsticked Alexandria at the border fence a while ago, clad in white, head in her hands, weeping, sporting her $600 wristwatch.

The lefty Michael Tracey has framed such over-the-top demonstrativeness as "unhinged threat inflation" in recent days, which is exactly what we're being subjected to for demagogic purposes. The manipulation of the American people is nothing new, it's just that these young people are probably less aware of it as a technique than they are themselves victims and mimickers of the technique.

No so with Upton. He is the old hand who is too grown up and knowing for this, who knows just when to say just enough in order to receive huzzahs as a statesman instead of the harangues for the seat-warmer he is in reality. 

Somehow the American people are content to let such people put us $28 trillion in debt. We chuckleheads have the chuckleheads we deserve.