Tag Archives: Army

News

How do Afghans feel about the US military deployed in Afghanistan?

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Article from Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

Nearly seven out of 10 Afghans support the U.S. presence in their country, and 61% favor the president’s military expansion there. Among congressional Democrats, the results would likely be reversed.

ABC News, the BBC and ARD German TV announced their fifth survey of Afghan citizens since 2005. The national random sample of 1,534 Afghan adults between Dec. 11 and Dec. 23 shows a huge turnaround from last year — a 30% increase in favorability toward the American troop presence.

The Afghan Center for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research in Kabul, part of Vienna, Va.-based D3 Systems Inc., conducted the field research.

The poll also registered a new high in Afghans expecting to live improved lives a year from now: 71%, a 20-percentage-point jump from a year ago. Added to that, 61% think their children will enjoy life quality superior to their own — a 14% increase from last year.

Some people watch the movie “Avatar” and are taken in by disgusting and repulsive smears against the US military. And some people care about the way the world really is. The US military is a great force for good in the world, and we owe them our gratitude and respect.

Wouldn’t it have been better for all concern if the money spent on making anti-military movies like Avatar had been spent helping the Afghan people? Oh – buy that’s what the US military does. And they safeguard the very liberties that are abused by rich Hollywood filmmakers who insult them for doing so.

I never watch movies in the theaters, and I never rent them. If there is a movie made that reflects my values, then I buy the DVD. Usually that’s one or two movies per year. Be careful with your money – there are more important things in life than entertainment. Like honor.

News

Obama cuts off aid to pressure Honduras into communist dictatorship

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Post from Hans Bader at the CEI’s Open market blog.

Excerpt:

The Obama Administration is about to cut off aid to Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Earlier, the Obama Administration blocked travel to the United States by the people of Honduras.

[…]State Department lawyers, who are not experts on Honduran law, plan to declare the ex-president’s removal a “military coup” to justify cutting off aid, even though Honduras has a civilian president, and the ex-president was lawfully removed from office (although his subsequent exile may technically have violated Honduran law).

[…]Confronted with the sound legal basis for removing the ex-president under his country’s constitution, the Obama Administration has responded with a series of increasingly weak rationalizations for stubbornly seeking to force his return on the Honduran people.

[…]Obama’s demand that Obama reinstate its would-be dictator has emboldened other elected leaders in Latin America to try to make themselves dictators. (Even the liberal Washington Post, which has not endorsed a Republican for president since 1952, admitted in an editorial by Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl that the Obama Administration has shown a “willful disregard of political oppression” by left-wing dictators in Latin America).

Obama’s demand that Honduras’s ex-president be returned to office has been supported by the Cuban communist dictator Castro and the Venezuelan socialist dictator Chavez, who counted Honduras’s deposed president as an ally, despite his background as a wealthy and corrupt landowner.

But allying with Castro and Chavez to force the return of Honduras’s would-be dictator has not even improved U.S. relations with their countries. The dictators Castro and Chavez continue to attack and oppose the United States at every turn, and oppose all of its Latin American initiatives, like its plans for bases in Colombia to fight drug trafficking. Obama has received nothing in exchange for his appeasement of Latin America’s left.

The article details the flaws in Obama’s support for a communist dictatorship in Honduras.

Commentary

A closer look at the life of Ted Kennedy

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ECM sent me this magnificent essay about the life of Ted Kennedy.

I like this essay because it really explains where liberals get their liberal ideas. Ideas like bailouts, big spending, moral relativism and lack of personal responsibility, are the direct result of his silver-spoon upbringing.

Here are the topics:

  • his academic record, including his expulsion from Harvard for cheating
  • how his father pulled strings to shorten his Army contract
  • his sparse resume
  • his role in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne
  • the inconsistencies between his policies and his personal behavior

Excerpt:

Insulated by the consequences of his behavior, Kennedy was also shielded from the consequences of his policies. He was the champion of busing who kept his own children far from the public schools; an advocate of publicly funded campaigns who bankrolled his political career with his family’s shadowy financing; an icon of feminists who used women like Kleenex, serially harassed members of the opposite sex, and spent ten hours attempting to rescue his political career as he denied the young women suffocating in an air pocket in his Oldsmobile professional rescue attempts; and the primary booster of socialized medicine who assembled a dream team of neurosurgeons to consult on his treatment for brain cancer. The proverbial limousine liberal was made real in Trustfund Ted.

It’s fun to contrast this story with the life stories of self-made moms like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. They started out in normal families, married and had children. There is a reason why people use expressions like “trust fund liberal” or “limousine liberal”.