17 March 2009 @ 6:26PM >> With President Obama railing against private health insurance companies and pushing socialized medicine, this seems odd:

The Obama administration is considering making veterans use private insurance to pay for treatment of combat and service-related injuries. The plan would be an about-face on what veterans believe is a long-standing pledge to pay for health care costs that result from their military service.

But in a White House meeting Monday, veterans groups apparently failed to persuade President Obama to take the plan off the table.

“Veterans of all generations agree that this proposal is bad for the country and bad for veterans,” said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “If the president and the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] want to cut costs, they can start at AIG, not the VA.”

Under current policy, veterans are responsible for health care costs that are unrelated to their military service. Exceptions in some cases can be made for veterans who do not have private insurance or are 100 percent disabled.

[...]

Veterans claim that the costs of treating expensive war injuries could raise their insurance costs, as well as those for their employers. Some worried that it also could make it more difficult for disabled veterans to find work.

The leaders of several veterans groups had written Obama last month complaining about the new plan. “There is simply no logical explanation for billing a veteran’s personal insurance for care that the VA has a responsibility to provide,” they wrote.

So apparently, U.S. military veterans are the only people whose health care Obama doesn’t want the government to pay for.

13 April 2008 >> A lack of action in Iraq leads to a pretty funny conversation in this video.

(Hat tip: Peter Mertz.)

12 March 2008 >> If you have 5 minutes of free time, this video will fill it with laughs.

13 January 2008 @ 12:20PM >> I got to know David French in producing Indoctrinate U. When I interviewed David, he was the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a non-partisan group that fights for the free speech and free thought rights of students and professors.

Recently, I got an update on David through a mutual friend, who pointed me to this, written by David’s wife Nancy:

I knew when my husband David French [...] watched the towers fall on 9/11 on his law firm’s television, he wanted to do something. Four years later, he did, by resigning from his role in the civil liberties arena and joining the Army Reserves. In 2007, he left the comfort of his home and family and went to Forward Operating Base Caldwell in Iraq where he serves as the Squadron Judge Advocate for Sabre (2d) Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment.

At Camp Caldwell, he has joined over a thousand soldiers who share less than a dozen phones and computers, making it impossible to stay in touch with family and friends back home.

David feels strongly about this form of service. And we made this decision as a family. David’s deployment has certainly challenged our family’s life. But we’ve been able to remain somewhat connected by sending him care packages. And many of our friends sent David care packages just as soon as we knew his mailing address.

However, David noticed many of the young soldiers receive nothing. Some have dysfunctional or almost no family support back home. Others come from very low income backgrounds where the families cannot afford to send many items.

To address this need, David and Nancy were involved in starting Operation Send-a-box:

Operation Send-a-Box aspires to send two care packages to every soldier in the Sabre squadron by the end of February—ambitious since there are over a thousand soldiers serving in this strategic location. The squadron’s chaplain has agreed to distribute packages to soldiers who have not yet received mail from home, beginning with the lowest ranked soldiers.

22 November 2007 @ 12:04PM >> ...to some selfless Americans who deserve it.

11 January 2007 >> There’s something about our psyche which seems to make self-criticism the new national pastime. Naturally, our political leaders know this. They know that when hundreds of newspapers and television stations align in a daily tearing-down of the war effort, the American people will eventually lose their nerve and want to give up. Others know this, too, which is why al Qaeda distributed copies of Black Hawk Down as a means to understand how the media can be used to amplify a relatively minor military failure and drive the United States from the field of battle. If terrorists provide enough negative footage to our media, they know we’ll turn and run. But if we fight too vigorously, that will be held up by our own media as evidence of our inherent evilness. More >>

23 November 2006 @ 10:13AM >> ...because there are folks like this in the world.

24 September 2006 @ 5:45PM >> Pajamas Media has an interesting report on the number of embedded reporters in Iraq. There are none from The New York Times, the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times. There aren’t any from CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, MSNBC or Fox News.

In fact, there are only nine embedded reporters in Iraq, and four are from armed forces outlets, leaving a grand total of just five embedded reporters. Of those five, three are from relatively small outlets—The Charlotte Observer, Polish Radio, and the Italian media network RAI—leaving just two major media companies with embedded reporters: the BBC and the Associated Press.

It makes you wonder where much of the Iraq War reporting is coming from. In some cases, the answer is local stringers whose loyalties and biases are—to be charitable—unclear. It’s interesting that the media is willing to utilize reporters embedded with terrorists and insurgents, but seems less interested in having reporters accompany our own military.

16 September 2006 @ 7:53PM >> According to Rocco DiPippo of a blog called The Autonomist, the story I covered in “The Taliban’s Free Pass” on Thursday may not be accurate. DiPippo contacted an official at the U.S. Military’s Central Command who said, “Normally cemeteries and other religious places and spaces would be areas where we would try to avoid given their religious and cultural sensitivity, but there is no blanket prohibition, circumstances always vary.”

The CENTCOM official, Major Matthew McLaughlin, said that the sensitivity to sites like cemeteries “was not the driving force behind the decision not to engage this target — inappropriate to say any more on the rationale.”

It is understandable that the military would like to avoid attacks in sites that would be perceived as culturally inflammatory, and it makes sense to treat such sites with greater caution. But it would border on military malpractice to let high-value targets elude us because of that alone. Although it sounds like that may not have happened in this case, Major McLaughlin implies that the military’s default position is to stand down whenever the enemy occupies certain hallowed ground. I’m sure members of the Taliban and al Qaeda are aware of this, and I’m sure they take advantage of it.

I would hope that the rules of engagement allow such decisions to be made quickly enough that they could be acted upon before the opportunity slips away. How many layers in the chain of command need to sign off on a strike in this type of situation? How much time could that process take? As a civilian, I’d be curious to know.

Because my current impression is that we’re still holding back against an enemy that sees our restraint as weakness. And I’m not sure they’re wrong. Sensitivity is not necessarily a helpful trait in war.

14 September 2006 >> If you watched The Path to 9/11, you may be surprised to hear that this sort of thing is still happening:

Taliban terror leaders who had gathered for a funeral - and were secretly being watched by an eye-in-the-sky American drone - dodged assassination because U.S. rules of engagement bar attacks in cemeteries, according to a shocking report.

U.S. intelligence officers in Afghanistan are still fuming about the recent lost opportunity for an easy kill of Taliban honchos packed in tight formation for the burial, NBC News reported.

The unmanned airplane, circling undetected high overhead, fed a continuous satellite feed of the juicy target to officers on the ground.

“We were so excited. I came rushing in with the picture,” one U.S. Army officer told NBC.

But that excitement quickly turned to gut-wrenching frustration because the rules of engagement on the ground in Afghanistan blocked the U.S. from mounting a missile or bomb strike in a cemetery, according to the report.

[...]

Agonizingly, Army officers could do nothing but watch the pictures being fed back from the drone as the Taliban splintered into tiny groups - too small to effectively target with the drone - and headed back to their mountainside hideouts.

It’s another small sign that we’re still not 100% serious about fighting the war on terror.

---

Update: Major Matthew McLaughlin of U.S. Central Command disputes the accuracy of this report, saying that the location “was not the driving force behind the decision not to engage this target.”

22 June 2006 @ 12:11PM >> It is now considered gospel among those opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that “Bush lied” about Saddam Hussein’s weapons. That’s despite the fact that many prominent Democrats made the same claims during the Clinton Administration, and that virtually every other Western intelligence service believed Saddam was hiding such weapons. That’s despite the fact that Saddam Hussein himself discussed having those weapons, and that he felt the need to bribe French and U.N. officials during his cat-and-mouse game with U.N. weapons inspectors. That’s despite the fact that Saddam Hussein used those weapons before, and that’s even despite the fact, since the war started, that we’ve seen many bits of evidence that point to Iraq’s possession of WMDs.

No, despite all that, if your only source of information is the editorial page of The New York Times, you probably still believe that Saddam Hussein was an innocent man wrongly deposed by a bloodthirsty American president. You’ll probably also find ways to discount this latest report:

U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq have found about 500 chemical weapons since the March 2003 invasion, with more thought to exist, according to portions of an intelligence report made public yesterday.

“Since 2003, Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent,” said an overview of the report, which was declassified at the behest of Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, and Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican and head of the House intelligence committee.

“Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf war chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf war chemical munitions are assessed to still exist,” according to the report.

Expect this story to pass in a couple of days without much further discussion. There’s simply no good angle for using it to criticize the war effort. The media that spent a decade covering up for Saddam Hussein has too much invested in the “Bush lied” storyline, and deviating from that storyline now would require one massive correction for the last three years of reporting.

4 February 2006 @ 2:38PM >> A little historical perspective:

President Lincoln had to try five different commanders before settling on Ulysses Grant, and even Grant stumbled many times on the way to victory. The Union Army suffered 390,000 dead in four years, with fully 29 percent of the men who served being killed or wounded in what some critics claimed was “an unnecessary war.”

World War II was a serial bloodbath. Battles like Iwo Jima, Anzio, Ardennes, and Okinawa each killed, in a matter of days and weeks, several times the number of soldiers we have lost in Iraq. Intelligence was wrong. Planning failed. Brutal collateral damage was done to civilian non-combatants. Soldiers were killed by friendly fire. POWs were sometimes executed. Military and civilian leaders miscalculated repeatedly. During WWII, 7 percent of our G.I.s were killed or wounded.

Korea was first lost before it could be re-taken, at great cost, and thanks to political interference the war ended in a fruitless stalemate. Fully 8 percent of the American soldiers who fought on the Korean peninsula were killed or wounded.

The Cold War spawned by President Roosevelt’s expedient alliance with Stalin and other communists brought totalitarian bleakness and death to millions, endless proxy wars that consumed hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American and allied lives, and a near-nuclear exchange during President Kennedy’s watch.

Yet ugly as they were, each of the wars above eventually made the world a less bloody place by removing tyrants and transforming cultures. Those same goals drive our war against Middle Eastern extremism that is now centered in Iraq.

In Iraq, 4 percent of our soldiers have been killed or wounded. Those losses are lower than we suffered in nine previous wars. The Civil War, Mexican War, War of Independence, Korean War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, and Philippine War were all half-again or more as costly as Iraq has been.

2 January 2006 @ 1:26PM >> In times past, the valor of our men and women in uniform was worthy of coverage from the establishment media. Nowadays, the media rarely notices our soldiers unless they can be added to the death count. Leave it to the blogosphere to cover the stories that the establishment media ignores. The website Riehl World View presents 2005: The Year in Military Heroism.

24 December 2005 @ 1:17PM >> Notes from the U.S. military effort to help Pakistan in the wake of the devastating earthquake this past October:

U.S. helicopters have flown 2,500 sorties, carried 16,000 passengers and delivered nearly 6,000 tons of aid. Just as importantly, the Chinook has become America’s new emblem in Pakistan, a byword for salvation in an area where until recently the U.S. was widely and fanatically detested. Toy Chinooks (made in China, of course) are suddenly popular with Pakistani children. A Kashmiri imam who denounced the U.S. in a recent sermon was booed and heckled by worshippers. “Pakistan is not a nation of ingrates,” a local businessman told me over dinner the other night. “We know where the help is coming from.”

The extent of the U.S. military’s assistance, well-known to Pakistanis, barely registers on the radar screens of most Western news outlets. That’s a pity, because it overlooks one of America’s most significant hearts-and-minds successes so far in the Muslim world. The assistance also illustrates another frequently overlooked fact: When it comes to foreign aid, the Department of Defense is one of the biggest contributors, and what it provides is something no other country can replicate.

[...]

On a recent inspection tour of U.S. facilities here, Gen. Steven Whitcomb, commander of the U.S. Third Army, gave a series of pep talks to the soldiers. His remarks bear repeating:

“We’re fighting two wars. We’re still doing recovery operations from our own natural disaster. We still have soldiers manning the DMZ on the Korean peninsula. We still have sailors manning the flight decks of aircraft carriers at two in the morning. And we can still do this kind of thing. . . . You are all here for no other reason than that the United States asked you to be here. You’ve come to a place you can’t find on a map. But you are making a difference.”

3 November 2005 @ 10:05AM >> When you turn on the news or open the paper for reporting from Iraq, what do you see? These days, news coverage is little more than a recitation of the latest casualty reports on our side. One solider was killed by a roadside bomb. Another soldier was killed in a helicopter crash. Do you ever wonder what these soldiers were doing while they were alive? You’ll rarely hear that. Are you ever curious about any of our military operations? If we still had the media of World War II, you might actually learn something beyond the latest death count. But today’s media can’t be bothered with that.

And how about the political progress in Iraq? There have been two historic national elections, one to fill a parliament, and another to ratify the country’s new constitution. Iraqis literally risked death just to vote, and they still had higher turnout than American elections do. Yet I saw more media coverage of long lines at polling places in Ohio than these two Iraqi elections combined. It’s pretty damn remarkable that a country went from a brutal dictatorship to a struggling but hopeful democracy in two years. So why aren’t we hearing more about it?

Whether it’s bias, laziness, incompetence, or just a fascination with the bloody, if you get all of your news from the establishment media, you’re getting a pretty skewed vision of the new Iraq. Many people have noticed this for a long time, soldiers especially. Recently, CNN interviewed one soldier who gave a critique on the media’s coverage:

[I]t is kind of disheartening sometimes to see everything focused on just the, the death and destruction and the IED strikes and not focused on how well the U.S. and coalition forces are doing building up the Iraqi police services and the Iraqi army. It really is a tremendous effort being put into that infrastructure and building a self-sufficient government over there. And they’re absolutely making progress.

But you almost never see that progress covered. Instead, you see the exact same story—with a few variables changed—repeated over and over.

The media’s decisions about what to cover and not cover are made by a handful of people in New York and Washington, DC. If they all share similar views, that may explain why virtually all coverage of Iraq is identical: the latest death count, and little more. It’s been this way for so long that even journalism students are beginning to notice. In the Columbia Journalism Review, certainly no bastion of neo-conservatism, one columnist questions the state of Iraq reporting:

[T]he 2,000th military death in Iraq happened to fall on exactly the same day as the Iraqi constitution was officially passed. The constitution story, though appearing on many front pages, paled in placement and headline size to the 2,000-death story, with many papers boldfacing and enlarging the number “2,000,” so that it eclipsed any other nearby story. As one would expect, conservative critics jumped at this as further proof that, once again, the liberal media was trumpeting the bad news and suppressing the good news.

The columnist did a quick search and found that “[i]n the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times there was just one story each about the constitution passing. Whereas the 2,000 deaths story inspired three to four stories and a couple op-eds and editorials per paper.”

In my mind, every soldier who dies is significant. The first, the fiftieth, and the five-hundredth death are equally worthy of our sorrow and our gratitude that some people are willing to sacrifice their lives for others. But the 2,000th death is a story only because we happen to use a base-10 counting system. Is one number a bigger story than another because it has a few zeros on the end? Is it a big enough story to eclipse something as historic as a freed people voting themselves a new constitution?

In the media’s reporting, the storyline for each event in Iraq is set even before it happens. To the small clique of media bigwigs who make these decisions, negative stories get prominence and virtually everything else gets ignored. So what happens when reality doesn’t quite fit the predetermined model? Well, that’s just a minor inconvenience that can be fixed with a little selective editing. Take, for example, The New York Times and its body count watch for the 2,000th soldier killed in Iraq. The Times coverage mentioned Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr, who died earlier this year on Memorial Day. Starr left a note for his loved ones to be read in the event of his death. Here’s some of what he wrote:

Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I’m writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances. I don’t regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.

Here’s how the Times reported Starr’s statement:

Sifting through Cpl. Starr’s laptop computer after his death, his father found a letter to be delivered to the Marine’s girlfriend. “I kind of predicted this,” Cpl. Starr wrote of his own death. “A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances.”

Starr’s words posed a problem for the predetermined storyline, so the Times just left most of them out. That’s how a statement in support of the operations in Iraq became a simple fatalistic prediction of death. And that’s far from the first time the Times has shaped quotes to fit its worldview.

So what does this all mean? For now, it means that the media’s artificially negative portrayal of Iraq is sapping U.S. support for the war. But in the long run, it’s proof that the establishment media is willing to destroy itself in the process of furthering a political agenda. The media’s only real asset is their credibility, and they’re pimping out that credibility every time they try to jam current reality into a Vietnam-era model of the world.

Psychologically, it is understandable. The media has never been as powerful as it was when it turned the nation against the Vietnam war. Some people have a hard time letting go of their glory days. But for an industry that’s already in decline, selling a product with so many obvious flaws makes about as much sense as shooting yourself in the head while you’re jumping off a skyscraper.

---

(Correction: An earlier version of this post erroneously referred to Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr as the 2,000th U.S. soldier who died in Iraq. His profile was included in New York Times coverage of the 2,000 mark, but was not himself the 2,000th soldier killed.)

26 August 2005 @ 6:16PM >> Many have grown bored with the predictable reporting from the establishment media. It’s simply a running count of deaths—unless, of course, it’s the enemy that dies, in which case you never hear about it.

For a good example of what real war reporting looks like, you must look outside the major media. This is the kind of reporting that occurred in World War II—and rarely since, it seems.

26 August 2005 @ 6:09PM >> Jack Kelly reports:

Colonel Thomas Spoehr is annoyed with New York Times reporter Michael Moss, for what I think is a good reason.

The story is a good example of how The New York Times manufactures bad news from Iraq.

23 August 2005 @ 9:15AM >> Dissent is patriotic, we’re often told. So this must be the highest form of patriotism:

The USS Iowa joined in battles from World War II to Korea to the Persian Gulf. It carried President Franklin Roosevelt home from the Teheran conference of allied leaders, and four decades later, suffered one of the nation’s most deadly military accidents.

Veterans groups and history buffs had hoped that tourists in San Francisco could walk the same teak decks where sailors dodged Japanese machine-gun fire and fired 16-inch guns that helped win battles across the South Pacific.

[...]

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a former San Francisco mayor, helped secure $3 million to tow the Iowa from Rhode Island to the Bay Area in 2001 in hopes of making touristy Fisherman’s Wharf its new home.

But city supervisors voted 8-3 last month to oppose taking in the ship, citing local opposition to the Iraq war and the military’s stance on gays, among other things.

“If I was going to commit any kind of money in recognition of war, then it should be toward peace, given what our war is in Iraq right now,” Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi said.

Update: In the San Francisco Chronicle, Cinnamon Stillwell reports that San Francisco has effectively declared itself a “military-free zone.”

9 August 2005 @ 10:05AM >> Two female U.S. Army captains recently won their respective state beauty pageants.

One of the benefits of having female officers is knowing how much more offensive it is to the enemy. And the fact that some of them are this attractive might entice the Jihadists to visit their 72 virgins a little sooner...

19 July 2005 @ 11:11AM >> Item 1:

[Brigadier General Jay] Hood was briefing the subcommittee on one particular terrorist detainee [who] had lost his leg. During his stay at Guantanamo, American military doctors provided him—at taxpayer expense—with a modern prosthetic leg, Hood said. A subsequent review of his status resulted in the decision to release him from American custody.

Hood told the subcommittee that this terrorist has since rejoined the fight with his jihadist brothers in Afghanistan.

Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairing the hearing, revealed some of his outrage at that fact with biting sarcasm.

“Has he reported back from the battlefield against Americans how well the leg we provided him with works?”

Item 2:

During a routine patrol in Baghdad June 2, Army Pfc. Stephen Tschiderer, a medic, was shot in the chest by an enemy sniper, hiding in a van just 75 yards away. The incident was filmed by the insurgents.

Tschiderer [...] was knocked to the ground from the impact, but he popped right back up, took cover and located the enemy’s position.

After tracking down the now-wounded sniper with a team from [the] Iraqi Army Brigade, Tschiderer secured the terrorist with a pair of handcuffs and gave medical aid to the terrorist who’d tried to kill him just minutes before.

(Emphasis mine.)

1 July 2005 @ 4:39PM >> This Fourth of July weekend, consider checking out America Supports You, a site dedicated to sending words of encouragement to our selfless troops stationed around the world. Please let our military personnel know that they are not forgotten as we celebrate our nation’s independence.

19 May 2005 @ 5:48PM >> Terry Moran, the Chief White House Correspondent for ABC News, admitted the anti-military bias of the media in an interview with Hugh Hewitt:

There is, Hugh, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it’s very dangerous.

(Via Glenn Reynolds.)

19 January 2005 >> In response to my two previous posts on Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, one reader says:

While I agree with you, let me point out an oft-forgotten point: the military doesn’t have any control over whether or not gays serve. Congress does. If a person is discovered to be homosexual, his/her Commander is required by law to initiate seperation action. There is no choice in the matter. For the issue to change, Congress must revise the applicable Military Law.

The same goes for troop levels: the Pentagon can’t arbitrarily increase troop levels anywhere it wants; it must consider it’s total allowed effective strength, and meet treaty-obligated force levels in various places. South Korea and Europe have a min-manning that MUST be met, because Congress and the President have entered into treaties that require it.

If I remember it right, Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell started as an executive order signed by President Clinton, which means it can only be rescinded by another executive order or, as this reader points out, by an act of Congress.

If this is the case, it has interesting implications for my current film project. A number of schools ban ROTC and refuse to allow military recruiters on campus. Although these bans go back to the Vietnam War, the current stated reason is that Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell discriminates against gays, so banning the military from campus is a protest against Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. But if the military has no control over the policy, then why are these schools punishing the military for something they don’t control? It’s like punishing people for the color of their eyes.

I’ve created a discussion topic about this; if anyone has more information about the legal details of this, please join the discussion and let us know!

14 January 2005 @ 2:53PM >> An e-mail in response to yesterday’s post:

Your post: “Pentagon’s ouster of valuable translators continues” makes me prouder of our American military. It is good to know that someone is still concerned about morals.

If utilizing the skills of gay citizens prevents an attack in which other American citizens would be killed, then in what alternate reality can we pronounce it “moral” to boot gays out of the military?

We know that there’s a tremendous backlog of documents waiting to be analyzed because we don’t have enough translators fluent in Arabic and Farsi. We also know that, on the morning of September 11th, 2001, there were documents not yet translated that contained clues about the attacks. Now, I’m not saying that September 11th would have been prevented if openly-gay translators were allowed to serve, but it certainly doesn’t help to artificially constrain the number of people who can take part in the defense of our nation.

How many documents sitting today in some translator’s overflowing inbox contain information that could be used to prevent a future terrorist attack? Of course, we’ll never know until those documents get translated. Let’s just hope we don’t find out after an attack, when it’ll be too late.

I’m not a military expert, and I’m willing to accept that some concessions might need to be made in order to integrate openly-gay people into the military. There are issues of housing and the sharing of facilities that might complicate matters, just as there are with women. I would imagine that it’d be distracting for a gay man to be surrounded by a barracks-full bunch of half-naked men, just as I might have a little difficulty doing my job if I were surrounded by a horde of half-naked women. Those issues need to be resolved, but I don’t think they’re insurmountable, and I certainly don’t think they should be used as excuses to refuse the service being offered by good Americans who want to help us win a war.

Let’s face it: gay people are going to be gay whether they’re in the military or not. If they’re willing to lend a hand in the defense of America, then we might as well take them up on it.

14 January 2005 >> Deroy Murdock has a revealing column on a poor choice of priorities in the U.S. military:

Name the greater risk to national security: patriotic military translators who happen to be homosexual or anti-American Islamofascist terrorists who happen to be homicidal. If you picked the latter, thanks for putting U.S. safety first. Alas, the Pentagon disagrees.

According to new Defense Department data, between fiscal years 1998 and 2003, 20 Arabic- and six Farsi-language experts were booted from the military under President Bill Clinton’s 1993 “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy. These GIs trained at the elite Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif. Had they graduated — assuming 40-hour workweeks and two-week vacations — they could have dedicated 52,000 man-hours annually to interrogate Arab-speaking bomb builders, interpret intercepted enemy communications or transmit reassuring words to bewildered Baghdad residents.

Preparation for these vital activities ends when a dedicated warrior is found to be gay. Under “don’t ask,” if that GI’s homosexuality becomes evident, he must stop conjugating verbs and head home.

It seems to me that we shouldn’t be turning away any capable person who’s willing to serve our country, especially now. While integrating gay personnel may pose unique challenges to the military, we should remember that the military was at the forefront of racial integration. Segregation in the military ended years before it did in society as a whole, and it was a success.

The future of our nation depends upon the effectiveness of our armed services. Why artificially limit the pool of talent available to our military?

2 September 2004 >> The problem with John Kerry isn’t so much that he changed his mind about such a defining moment in his life, it’s that he has no explanation for why he changed his mind. When a man undergoes a major personal transformation—such as President Bush’s decision to quit drinking—there’s usually a very telling biographical episode that gives us some insight into the man’s character. But in the case of John Kerry, there is no explanation. We’re just supposed to accept at face value that, one day, Kerry throws his medals away and the next he brandishes them as evidence of his heroism. One day he accuses his fellow soldiers of mass atrocities in Vietnam, the next day he stands on stage with a handful of them as evidence of his strength.

So, who is John Kerry? With just over sixty days to the election, we still don’t know.

Last night, Senator Zell Miller, a Democrat from Georgia, broke away from his party to speak at the Republican Convention. Miller’s speech sought to end the mystery of John Kerry by reciting more from Senator Kerry’s voting record than Kerry himself cited at his own convention. More >>

13 May 2004 >> For us to achieve a just victory, it is important to hold ourselves to a higher morality. And when we fall short, the rest of the world should see that we can confront our own mistakes. If airing the Abu Ghraib prison pictures helps us do that, all the better. But we must not let terrorists take it as a sign that we don’t have the stomach for war. That’s why it’s important to show the rest of the world that we’re not afraid to kick some ass. And if seeing the gruesome images of Nick Berg’s beheading gives us the mettle required to win this war, then he will not have died in vain. More >>