Tag Archives: morality

Why?

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…is this man still on the payroll?

Robert McDonald, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, wrongly claimed in a videotaped comment earlier this year that he served in the Army’s elite special forces, when his military service of five years was in fact spent almost entirely with the 82nd Airborne Division during the late 1970s.

Haven’t had done, yet, with these problems of stolen valor, now that it’s reaching into the upper echelons of our Federal government?

US special operations forces (SOF) are composed of exhaustively trained and highly capable troops from each military service, including the Army Rangers, Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and Army Special Forces (also known as the Green Berets)—but not the 82nd Airborne. They [SOF] are certified to undertake the most dangerous and delicate missions….

To be sure, after having been found out, McDonald has issued an apology for his lie:

While I was in Los Angeles, engaging a homeless individual to determine his Veteran status, I asked the man where he had served in the military. He responded that he had served in special forces. I incorrectly stated that I had been in special forces. That was inaccurate and I apologize to anyone that was offended by my misstatement.

This was no little white lie, though, nor a politician’s…exaggeration for effect. On something of this magnitude, I get a little stiff-necked, and I ask: if McDonald had any integrity, he never would have made the claim in the first place; how, then, can we take his apology at face value? How, too, can we trust his apology when it didn’t come spontaneously, but only after he’d been caught out in his lie?

The John Kerry-Barack Obama Plan

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The guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair laid it out in his Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday.

Put simply, we are building a global partnership against violent extremism.

That’s so vapid and empty it doesn’t deserve comment. I include it only as an illustration of the depth of thinking and the level of importance Kerry attaches to this as sum and total of this Plan.

And this:

We must identify the zones of greatest vulnerability…. And then we must tailor our efforts and target our resources to meet the specific needs of those places. It may be training young people so they can get jobs and envision a future of dignity and self-reliance. It may be working to eliminate corruption and promote the rule of law, so that marginalized communities can enjoy security and justice.

The Community Organizer School of Realpolitik. Offering terrorists alternative career paths will set them free.

This Plan operates from a very fundamental false premise: that these terrorists don’t already see, quite clearly, their future of dignity and self-reliance, that the path they see to security and justice is not the path we prescribe. No, the terrorists of Daesh, of al Qaeda and its associates, of Boko Haram, of Jahbat al Nusra, of the Palestinian Authority, of Hezbollah, of… all see their path to dignity, to self-reliance, to their security, to their concept of justice is through the elimination of all nonbelievers and the destruction of Western Civilization, a polity they view as evil incarnate and with which they cannot coexist.

And their freedom lies in martyrdom in pursuit of that cause.

There’s also this…laugher (because the alternative is tears):

We’ve combated violent extremism before. We know there are tools that work. …we combined our efforts most recently to fight Ebola.

Oh, and this aside:

There is no room for Islamophobia or anti-Semitism.

No one is arguing otherwise, especially regarding Islamophobia. Decrying Islamic terrorists and Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islamophobia. That argument is of a piece with President Barack Obama’s statement that we’re not at war with Islam. The one is Kerry’s straw man, and the other is Obama’s. They’ll have to play with their dollies without me.

As a man said not so long ago, in America everyone has the right to be stupid.  But when it’s an American in State exercising that right, it’s downright dangerous for all of us.

A Journalistic View of the Importance of Truth

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This is what too many journalists are saying about NBC’s Brian Williams’ lie about being on a helicopter in Iraq that was forced to land after being hit by an RPG. They’re making these statements, too, while eliding Williams’ subsequently discovered lies concerning his…reporting…in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and in Israel, before that, during Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah. First up is Howard Kurtz, author of the piece from which the rest of the quotes below are taken:

What’s been striking to me is how many people are willing to end what has been a pretty solid career because of this one admittedly horrible mistake.

That’s because the career should end. The man has destroyed his credibility with his lie—a deliberate act, not a “mistake.”

Alan Colmes, as cited by Kurtz:

[I]t was “sad” to see this mistake “destroy a man and destroy his career.

No. Whether all of this destroys Brian Williams is up to Williams alone, what he chooses to learn from this, what he chooses to do about it. Whether it destroys Williams’ journalist career, it certainly should. He lied. At least three times.

Dan Abrams:

I am troubled by the fervor, occasional glee, and potentially disproportionate fury…. This alliance of certain capital-J journalists, conservative bloggers, and some who simply despise any rich and famous journalist are a formidable force.

No journalistic distortion there. Nope.

Joe Scarborough:

…the decision is made to judge what Brian Williams’ future should be, that that decision will be based on the entirety of his career and not on one or two or three mistakes.

Mistakes. I’m detecting a theme here. When a journalist lies, that’s just a mistake. No big deal. Nothing to see here.

Scarborough again:

If he exaggerated, if he puffed his chest out a little bit—news people do that.

Lies are just puffery. And since all news people do it, it’s OK. That Left morality, again: an act’s legitimacy comes from whether or not somebody else did it, or does it, too. Morality is not at all inherent in the act.

How can anyone ever believe what a liar says? Kurtz and his fellows apparently have chosen not to answer that one.

News Media

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First, there was Dan Rather and his nakedly falsified National Guard document, which he used on his 60 Minutes show to attempt to smear President George Bush the Younger.

Then there’s the constant smear campaign against folks like Governor Sarah Palin and the Tea Party as racists.

There’s the blatantly biased coverage of the Ferguson shooting.

Now there’s Brian Williams.

Brian Williams, the nation’s top-rated news anchor, has admitted fabricating a tale of being forced down by enemy fire in a helicopter over Iraq a dozen years ago.

Williams apologized on the air Wednesday evening, saying: “I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago.”

A lie is just a mistake, is it? Well, yeah, if…recognition…of it by the perp comes 2 years after the lie, it’s of personal interest to the liar to play down the lie, and it’s a journalist doing the down-play. He did, finally, tell the Stars and Stripes straight up that

I think the constant viewing of the video showing us inspecting the impact area—and the fog of memory over 12 years—made me conflate the two, and I apologize.

He only made the statement, though, after he’d been caught out by the helicopter crewman who were there—the ones who actually had been shot down by Iraqi ground fire.

He also said:

I would not have chosen to make this mistake. I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.

Except he did choose exactly that. Besides, how does one “conflate” the helicopter one’s in with another helicopter an hour and some miles away?

Is there anyone on the Left News Media who’s an honest journalist?

Oh, yeah: there’s also the woman who used to sit in the Secretary of State’s chair, Hillary Clinton, who lied about taking sniper fire in Bosnia.

And President Barack Obama’s repeated lies about Obamacare (and nearly everything else about his administration’s policies).

Is there anyone on the Left who’s honest?

In a Just World

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The Jordanian pilot, the one whom ISIS was wanting to trade for a terrorist in a Jordanian prison has been burned alive. Our President, Barack Obama had this to say:

Should in fact this video be authentic, it’s just one more indication of the viciousness and barbarity of this organization. This organization appears only interested in death and destruction.

Notice that: “this organization.” Obama still can’t find the…something…to recognize these as Islamic terrorists.

More importantly, this should now be a no-quarter war. These terrorists, and the nations who continue to support them, have forfeited their right to exist.

But our President has no clue of justice.