Maggie's Farm

This from someone who actually had/has PTSD, with good reason: he lost an arm to an IED.

I’m more than a little angry right now.  Yes, I’m irate that some shitbag Major (“shitbag” is often used as a technical term in the Army) opened fire on a group of his fellow Soldiers killing 12 and wounding 30. But that’s not even what is under my skin right now. What is bothering me is the general reaction of our media and those stupid enough to think this was not an act of terrorism, but was caused by supposed PTSD caused at Walter Reed Army Medical Center….

In order to actually have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, you have to go through some sort of traumatic event(s) to have “post stress.” Can therapists be emotionally troubled by the things they hear from patients? Yes.  But you cannot catch PTSD from someone.  It's not the fucking swine flu.

I cannot tell you how angry I am right now as a former patient of Walter Reed.  It is an absolute fucking slap in the face for people to use his time there as an excuse for what he has done.  It is an absolute fucking slap in the face for all the wonderful people there who help soldiers every single day.  Some of the most kind, caring, and noble people I have ever met in my entire life work at Walter Reed Army Medical Center day in and day out helping wounded Soldiers like me.

To fallaciously say this guy has PTSD from his time at Walter Reed as an excuse for opening fire on a group of innocent Soldiers is beyond reckless.  It's an absolute slap in the face for every caregiver and every wounded warrior who ever set foot on Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

BTW, here's a column I wrote at Military.com a few years ago about PTSD, based on a study that even the NYTs called "authoritative."

Scott Johnson, at PowerLine blog, sums up the reaction among apologists/deludists re: Hasan as "PISS", post Islamic stress syndrome.

This is weird, but  interesting!

fi  yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too

Cna yuo raed  tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht  I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of  the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it  dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny  iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.  The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by  istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot  slpeling was ipmorantt!

November 9 marks the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, put up by the communist rulers in 1961 to stem the drain from behind the Iron Curtain of those to whom freedom meant everything. There was widespread shock throughout the West at the end of the Cold War, which seemed endless, costly and perhaps unwinnable, and the fall of the existential threat of communism and its terrible toll on mankind, which to some seemed impervious or even eventually triumphant.

Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, writes about “Tyranny Set In Stone: Why We Must Not Forget The Lessons Of Berlin.”

As we look around the world today, a melancholy spectacle greets our gaze. The Soviet Union is no more, but a minatory if diminished Russia has taken its place. A possibly nuclear Iran. A confirmed nuclear North Korea and Pakistan. Preposterous anti-American strongmen like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. An increasingly rampant threat of Islamofascism. The enemies of freedom and the West are more numerous than ever. It is here that the two deepest lessons of the Berlin Wall lie. First, that tyranny frankly confronted can be defeated. But, second, that the victory of freedom is never final: it must always be renewed not only through our willingness to acknowledge and struggle against evil, but also through a forthright proclamation of our own founding principles. It is this last requirement of freedom that seems most difficult for Western intellectuals. To quote Kolakowski once more, there is “one Great Cause that has persisted more or less intact throughout the past decades in the Leftist mentality: the loathing of democratic countries. Allegiances changed, but if there was something enduring in Leftist politics, it was this: in any conflict between a tyrannical and democratic country, the tyrants were right and democracy wrong.” One would have thought that the admonitory tale of the Berlin Wall would provide an incontrovertible disabusement. Alas, it is a lesson we have yet to absorb.

President Obama is too disinterested, and occupied accomplishing nothing, to attend the 20th anniversary celebration in Berlin.

P.S.: Here's another rumination on 1989 and another fall.

Those who don't remember, or who never learned about communism, might want to read this short essay.

It's not a real commercial, but still...

The Congressional Budget Office’s initial analysis of the Republican alternative to Obama/PelosiCare is striking.  Lowered federal deficit, lowered premiums, more freedom of choice, less government intrusion into medicine and peoples’ personal lives, support for health care and savings innovations (including cutting the huge costs of “defensive medicine” by having tort reform – which the tort lawyer funded Democrats conveniently left out), and increased and easier coverage for those with pre-existing conditions.

This op-ed and the CBO Director’s transmittal letter briefly sums it up; the full CBO analysis is here. According to the CBO, less of those called uninsured, although in actuality only about a quarter are citizens truly needy, would be covered than under  ObamaCare.  Many of those actually needy would be covered, and others already insured would better afford keeping their coverage. This is at a savings of $1+ trillion, and our freedoms, and the ability of our world-leading health care innovations to not be stifled.

Sounds like a real choice, right? Throw out the baby with the dirty water, a la ObamaCare, or provide a proper cleansing.  Not with this heavily Democrat Congress.  But, wait and work for 2010 to correct that.

The Associated Press screwed the pooch*, in multiple ways, in its reporting of the release by the JFK Presidential Library of previously classified recordings of President Kennedy's meetings in 1963 with advisors about Vietnam. The discussions involve the unauthorized cable from the State Department lending support to a coup against South Vietnam’s President Diem.

1. The JFK Presidential Library, administered by the National Archives, expressly admonishes in its press release: “Members of the media are cautioned against making historical conclusions based on the sound clips and transcript alone.”

The AP’s report, instead, leads with, “Newly released White House tapes from the Vietnam War era portray President John F. Kennedy wrestling over the fate of South Vietnam's strongman in a situation that appears to mirror President Barack Obama's quandary today in dealing with Afghanistan's shaky government.” The AP’s headline: “Tapes show Kennedy was conflicted over Saigon coup” My local newspaper one-upped the AP by changing the headline to “Like Obama with Afghanistan, Kennedy had issues with an ally.” (Sorry, the website for the San Diego Union-Tribune is still down, but once up you can find the link there.)

2. The AP report concludes with a sheer ignorance by its reporter, Barry Schweid: “The battlefield situation gradually worsened for South Vietnam and the United States, and the conflict drew to a close under President Richard M. Nixon. All U.S. ground troops were gone by March 1973, and the United States evacuated Saigon in April 1975.”

In fact, the battlefield situation, after the governing and combat chaos spawned by the US backed 1963 coup against Diem, stabilized and, indeed, markedly improved after the almost total decimation of the Viet Cong during and after Tet ’68, then under President Nixon’s turning command over to General Abrams (see here) whose direction reduced the North Vietnamese forces to barely subsisting across the borders in sanctuaries, then with US logistics and airpower backing it up the South Vietnamese Army roundly defeating the North Vietnamese invasion of 1972. It was the post-Watergate abandonment of US pledges to supply airpower and arms to South Vietnam, perpetrated by the liberal majority that got control of the US Congress, that led to the downfall of South Vietnam to the massive invasion from North Vietnam in 1975.

3. In between, the AP doesn’t bother to mention that JFK’s Ambassador to Vietnam, Frederick Nolting, in the recordings released says, “my view is that there is no one that I know of who can – who has a reasonably good prospect of holding this fragmented, divided country together except Diem.” Many careful scholars of Vietnam have documented that Diem was falsely portrayed by some influentials in the media and within the US government’s advisors. The coup unleashed years of governmental instability and weakness within Vietnam, requiring heavier US commitment of troops to hold and reverse the unleashed downslide in South Vietnam’s defenses. (See, for example, here.)

4. President Kennedy, in the period in these tapes, is not in favor of the coup unleashed by his State Department. In effect, though, he at least ultimately acquiesced.

In no substantive way does the situation in Vietnam during the 1960’s parallel that in Afghanistan today, except in the muddled thinking within our White House and Congress, poor MSM reporting, and the American people’s declining confidence in and tolerance for unsuccessful half-way measures.

* http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/screw_the_pooch [edit] Verb

1. to screw up; to fail in dramatic and ignominious fashion