A Couple of Things to Note

I was kicking around today over on BlackFive, and found a couple of interesting things.

Woodrow W. Keeble: Medal of Honor Recipient
I found this story on the blog, BlackFive. It's the story of the
Woodrow W. Keeble, the first and only Sioux to be awarded the MOH.
He received the award for gallant service on 20 October, 1951 near
Sangsan-ni Korea. Definitely read the citation, and the background, they are amazing. The presidential comments are interesting too.
The medal was awarded 3 March, 2008 . . . how come I didn't see this
in the papers?

BlackFive post

173rd Airborne Brigade
Also on BlackFive, but via Michael Yon, I saw this call for support for the members of the 173rd Airbirne Brigade, currently serving in Afghanistan, and recently suffering a hatchet job in the NY Times. You can send a letter of thanks/support to them via this email address (adjusted in an attempt to avoid spammers): skysoldiers173rd[at]gmail[dot]com

BlackFive post
Michael Yon

Some Great Writing/Reporting

Dan Henninger has a terrific column in Today's WSJ (I think that I start a lot of my posts with that phrase). He quotes, at length, the speech that LTG (Ret.) Ricardo Sanchez delivered last week to the Press Corps. The MSM quoted from this speech and trumpeted how courageous Sanchez was to criticize his former boss.

MSM accounts all quoted "incompetence," "nightmare . . . no end in sight . . . " What they neglected to report was that Sanchez savaged the Media for the first half of the speech. When I first heard that he was going after Bush I thought what's his axe? I learned quickly when reports mentioned that Sanchez was the general in charge of the theater when the over-hyped Abu Graib pictures broke. There was his axe, and I must admit that I largely ignored it -- it seemed one more negative, MSM-hyped-Bush-is-stupid-and-Iraq-is-a-failure-kerfuffle.

Then I cam across Michael Yon's dispatch . . . . he published LTG Sanchez's remarks in full. The full story, in context, emerged. LTG Sanchez is critical and rightly so -- he commanded men and women in combat whose lives were endangered by the (treasonous) reporting of the media and the (treasonous) machinations of the incompetents in our congress and the poor PR efforts of the office of the president. It is unsurprising that the media would not report on their own savaging, they have their own narrative to fill out and must help to ensure the defeat of this country -- never let the full story get in the way of that.

Summer Surge

There's been much ink spilled about "The Surge" currently underway in Iraq. I've linked to some dispatches from Michael Yon, reporting from the front lines, as well as articles appearing in the Wall Street Journal. Depending on which pub you read we're losing (NY Times, Boston Globe, MSM in general); things are going well (WSJ); or thngs are hard, but the pros in our military will prevail (Yon). I'm not a Pollyanna, I think that things could have gone better in Iraq had we taken a more aggressive stance and killed people while taking and holding ground.

It appears that we are doing this now with Gen. David Petraeus's Surge. From the non-MSM it sounds, if given time, then we will actually win in Iraq. Victory in Iraq is what we all should be hoping for but sadly we're not. The Dems are running on a platform of retreat, surrender and defeat and some Republicans are growing wobblier by the day in their support of the war. As I mentioned in an earlier post we have to win this war and winning this war should be all that anybody cares about. As a nation we go apoplectic about the the success or failure of our sports teams -- how can we roll over for this?

While the insipid and cowardly politicians who supposedly run this country play politics and strive to hang onto their cushy gigs, our armed forces are slugging it out and winning. They need to be given time to win -- but that's what the pols and the MSM don't want. How un-American.

Jeff Jacoby, the lone conservative voice at the Globe has a great paragraph in his column today:

Political correctness is no strategy for victory. Islamic fascists will not hate us less if we avoid all mention of the theology that inflames them. Winning the war the jihadists have declared -- the war of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb -- begins with moral clarity. Denial is a luxury we cannot afford.

Two Good Posts

Two good posts from Michael Yon -- a freelance journalist in Iraq (former Special forces guy too).

Be Not Afraid
Operation Arrowhead Ripper Day One

Obviously the main stream media missed this buildup because, the war is, you know, lost.

God Bless our troops.

Happy hunting.