..on the part of the tarnished media.

Amid giddy reports of desertion and Woodstock like celebration by an aging leftist media, one that has been searching for bad news among the good news on the war against Islamic extremeism, American Thinker once again stands in stark contrast by publishing this article:

Military Desertion Rates and the Associated Press

US troops improving the Iraqi landscape, one IED at a time. Warning: Language; wanton destruction of Iranian property.

link

the blog québécois

SimplyJews

My besuited groomsmen and I attended the Great State of Maine Airshow, now clad more casually, at the soon to close Brunswick Naval Air Station with 130,000+ other folks. We got to see some fine flying from the Blue Angels as well as some other curious planes. Here are a few shots taken with my crap US phone.

Can anyone tell me what these two planes are?

To emphasise what a pain it will be to get home from the next one; wherever it might be, Dave & I spent about 30 mins in a queue to leave as were heading so locally. It took George several hours to get onto the highway as he was going south.

can the CBC be far behind?

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated – many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

I keed, I keed. The CBC will report positive news from Iraq about the day after Peter Mansbridge’s hair grows back.

the blog québécois

I was reading up on the now-finalized purchase of Boeing C-17 heavy airlift by the government. I see that the USAF is allowing us to cut in on their current order. That’s most gracious on its part. Or maybe it’s getting a bit fed up with schlepping our tanks ‘n’ stuff around.

Not everyone was thrilled by the news. One man took time from his busy schedule of marching for Hezbollah to denounce it:

“We believe you can lease the aircraft you need for this role,” said Denis Coderre, the Liberal Partys defense critic. “It doesnt make financial sense to purchase these planes.”

Aside from the fact that Coderre is a blithering idiot, there are plenty of good reasons to buy the planes, as enumerated in this Globe and Mail comment thread on the same story (to my surprise, it was about 70% in favor).

I’d completely forgotten about it, but this commenter reminded me of one of the perils of depending on outside assistance:

in one example in the late 1990s we used a foreign owned and registered cargo ship to return sensitive communications and other military equipment to canada from a mission abroad. a contract dispute arose between the canadian government and the owner of the ship while the ship was at sea. the owner ordered the captain to stay at sea and to not sail into montreal harbour and to not deliver his cargo until the dispute was resolved. needless to say, a navy ship went out and had to escort the freighter back into canadian waters (after we boarded it and took control of it). i worked in the ops centre and witnessed this whole fiasco unfold.

It actually happened in August of 2000; as I recall, commandos (either JTF-2 or a specialized Navy team) had to rappel down from helicopters to seize the ship. Most likely the prospect of having our decrepit Sea King choppers hovering overhead so terrified the crew that they offered no resistance.

More on the incident here.

the blog québécois

Not only is that cretin Fayed wasting tax payers money looking into the death of his idiot son and his bimbo for a girlfriend it seems that his shop is turning away soldiers in uniform on Poppy Day. And one trip to Harrods will show you how much the bloke has ruined the once venerable shop with its camp over the top kitsh. The worst of which of course is his “shrine” to Dodi & Diana which is about as naff as one can possibly imagine. His and his store are vile…avoid like the plague.

Interesting story here saying that, according to some historical revisionists, the Battle of Britain in 1940 – which foiled the Nazi planned invasion of Britain – was more down to the Royal Navy than the heroic fighter pilots in their Spitfires and Hurricanes.

Well, Britain’s “Senior Service” probably would have blown any invading fleet out of the water, but as we knew from many other campaigns in WW2, absolute mastery of the air was vital to ensuring victory. I don’t think any British naval defence of this country could have been a success without knowing that the Luftwaffe had been bested by the “few” who are forever remembered as the heroes of Britain.

And let’s face it, has there ever been a sexier-looking aircraft than the Spitfire?

As a former member of the NZ military it is a pretty appropriate person to write it.

They are getting a raw deal in the history books. But even better RAB has explained the birth of PR.

“Well ok! we called it Iceland cos that’s what it looks like” Waddia mean youve discovered somewheres further west? It’s huge, and it’s frozen solid and it looks like Iceland. For Odins sake call it Greenland this time, we’ve just invented PR.

I needed a good laugh today and this quote did it for me. There has got to be something to make the buggers sail across the North Atlantic in an open boat! And they didn’t stop at “Green”land they kept going to Atlantic Canada and even Maine.

Guido has recently been made aware that the UK’s armed forces are not the only one’s quietly being reshaped and re-organised and this raises an interesting question in his mind. Since the other major stakeholders in the EU and the much vaunted, and rejected, EU Constitution are also reshaping and resizing their military establishments, and given that this started around the time the EU Constitution began to take shape around such ideas as “Joint Foreign Policy”, “Joint Monetary Policy”, “Joint European Defence Force” and all the other “joint” activities that would have shifted all power directly to “Ministers” appointed by Brussels, could this “downsizing” be part of the Federalist dream of creating a USE to rival the USA?

On the surface and for public consumption, both our own government and the EU strenuously deny this – except the French who reply that it is “an inevitable destiny”. Whose I wonder? The long cherished desire to recreate the Empire of the Franks from the period 800 AD perhaps? It certainly begins to look more and more as if the reshaping of our once proud and independent Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force is being done to fit in with a “Master Defence Plan” drawn up in Europe in which the French, British, Dutch, Italian, German, Danish, Swedish and Spanish Fleets will be combined into “National” Squadrons all flying the Flag of the USE Defence Forces. So too with the Armies, all the Regiments in the UK have been recreated and reformed – ostensibly to “modernise” them – and it would seem that they now would make a better “fit” in a larger Pan-European Force than as a stand alone Army. Even the RAF has suffered from this, with it’s frontline capability being steadily reduced, while it’s Transport Wings have been expanded slightly. The RN has lost the strike capability of it’s Fleet Air Arm, now reduced to flying helicopter’s and reliant on pilots and aircraft “borrowed” from the RAF and sent to sea on the one remaining mini-carrier.

Stephen Green, Mr “Vodkapundit”, links to a BBC story about the discovery of a large amount of “radioactive material” from locations in Iraq. The details are certainly disquieting.

There is no doubt that in certain respects, intelligence about WMDs in Iraq proved faulty, although it was, let’s not forget, accepted by many governments, including the French (who probably had the invoices), and that of Bill Clinton, that Iraq had WMDs. But this sort of information does not quite square with the “Bush Lied!” bullshit that one sees in parts of the media these days. Nothing to look at here folks, please move along.