Archive for: September 2006

Hey, everybody.  Not a lot of time right now but I know everybody is looking for news on the Toronto rally today, so I’m gonna just throw up a bunch of links.  Knock yourselves out…

Hundreds gather in T.O. for ‘Red Friday’ rally

T.O. supports the troops

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If anything demonstrates just how far some people’s heads can be heaved up their backsides, the recent moanings and groanings about the slow progress of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in southern Afghanistan’s Kandahar province does it in spades. Bleating bobbleheads like Taliban Jack! and Mr Dithers have been lamenting that we haven’t build enough schools, haven’t laid enough roads, haven’t [fill in the damn blank] enough, etc, etc, ad nauseum. The bellyaching’s getting so bad, it’s even starting to rub off on the guys on the ground like Lt.-Col. Simon Hetherington, who’s in charge of the PRT:

“We have had a lull, we need to get moving, I recognize that. I’m a simple guy. ‘Show me the schools you’ve built, show me the roads you’ve built, show me all that stuff.’ I can’t show you that now. If you come back in three months and you ask the same question, ‘What have you done?’ and I have the same answer . . . I’m probably going to be on a plane home because I’ll be fired.”

Not what I want to hear, and not something that any soldier wants to be saying either; believe me on that one. What gnaws my nether region the most, though, is that everybody (and I do mean everybody) seems to be missing the point here. The point is not that we haven’t built a bunch of schools. The point is not that we aren’t proceeding with reconstruction as fast as we planned. The point is, in fact, a question: Just why the hell were we ever saddled with such unrealistic expectations to begin with?

Now, before anybody decides to release the hounds, don’t get me wrong. The Afghanistan war (it is a war, don’t fool yourselves) is a winnable war and we’re the ones who are going to win it. Period.

But how the hell did we end up thinking that we were just going to waltz in and start having schools and hospitals popping up like daisies?? As the late Captain Nichola Goddard once remarked to her father, “you can’t do those things when the bad guys are charge; they just shoot you and move on.” Do we really think that anything, anything at all, can be accomplished while the Taliban are still running around?

Hi there, ladies and gents! I’m Floyd Bobblegrit, reporting to you live from beautiful downtown Kandahar where Canadian Forces personnel, local officials and a host of other dignitaries are gathered today to mark the grand opening of the brand new Jackiban Memorial Middle School today. Built by the men and women of Canada’s PRT, using manpower that was being previously wasted on combat operations under the delusional leadership of the previous Harper government, Jackiban Memorial will be the first ever all-girls’ school in Afghanistan. With a capacity for over 800 students and fully [BOOM] modern… what the hell was that!?!?

The Taliban are a backward, medieval and yes, evil cult who view anything that lifts the Afghan people out of the pit of fear ignorance as a threat. This includes hospitals, clinics, movie theaters and schools that let people without a penis in the door. The Taliban do not debate with things that they feel threaten them; they destroy them. Until we have clear military victory, reconstruction is a pipe dream.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is one damned inconvenient truth.

And now, from the “hold that excuse still while I get my chainsaw” department… I usually find MacLean’s a little too far to the left for my taste (even though I read it anyway), but every now and then, something pops up in those pages that reminds me just why I bother reading it in the first place. As some others have already noted, Mark Steyn’s recent book review in Canada’s national mag (a review of Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America — and What We Can Do About It, by Juan Williams) puts the boots to political correctitude almost as vigorously as the book itself:

Most Americans looked at what was happening in New Orleans and concluded that it’s a great place to enjoy a margarita with a topless transsexual Mardi Gras queen, but you wouldn’t want to live there: a deeply dysfunctional city exclusively controlled by Democrats for generations, it’s a welfare swamp with a lucrative tourist quarter. More to the point, its citizenry seem reluctant to learn the lessons. Despite the embarrassingly inept performance by Ray Nagin, the city’s Mayor Culpa whose Emergency Management Plan consisted of finding the nearest TV camera and pointing fingers at everybody else, his electorate nevertheless returned him to office out of the most feeble racial solidarity.

The whole review can be found here. As for me, I’m not much of a reader these days, but I think I just might buy this book.

A little tip o the hat here to the Turner Report for two excellent postings of late that I found through BT.  The first is a letter from a lady named Maria, the wife of a former soldier, which garnered several comments on the post, not all of them complementary.  The second is a response from Theo, her husband.  As long-winded as I usually am, sometimes it’s best just to let other folks use their own words:

Maria’s post

Theo’s post

EEK! Those nasty, totalitarian Catholics are at it again. No doubt emboldened by a mean, nasty, evil Tory government (who plan to destroy health care, rip the country apart, force women to get pregnant so they can deny them abortions, yaddayaddayadda), the Catholic group Genocide Awareness Project has set up a graphic display at St. Michael Catholic secondary school in Stratford, Ontario. The display leaves no room for doubt that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being and puts it in exactly the context that it belongs in, which is the last thing that the anti-infant bragade ever wants anyone seeing.

Included with pictures of aborted babies were other images of death, including a lynching and the Nazi Holocaust during which six million Jewish people were slaughtered.

The display, belonging to an anti-abortion group called the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP), was set up near the building’s main entrance yesterday. It was part of “pro-life events week” at the school.

Naturally, the pro-infanticide crowd are busily making fudge in their collective Stanfields over all this. Look for lawsuits, rent-a-crowds and all the other usual tactics to be pulled out of the coat hanger crowd’s tickle trunk in the next few days. Look for a Charter challenge too, no doubt. Never mind that the Charter says NOTHING about the supposed “right” to slaughter the unborn but lists “freedom of conscience and religion” before anything else (even with all its flaws, the Charter managed to get at least one thing right)! That’s just a pesky little detail that the coat hanger commandos would rather you not bother yourself with.

The teachings and position of the Catholic Church on the subject of abortion are both clear and well known: it’s murder and it’s a sin. Period. And no amount of browbeating by the schreeching hoardes is ever going to change that.

Many say that the battle is already over, because abortions have been happening for decades. Nothing is over.

Many more say that this is a divisive issue that should “be allowed to just go away so we can get on with more important things.” Well, here’s a surprise: I actually agree with that statement. This is a divisive issue and we do have other important things that need to be done.

So ban abortion and let’s get on to them.

THAT is how it will go away. That, and no other way. Because we will NEVER give up.

As if the traditional family wasn’t under attack enough already, some hag from Ontario is now trying to get herself legally declared by the courts to be a child’s third parent. Yes, that’s right: third parent. Nobody in this country, however, has any damned business acting surprised by this news. In their orgiastic savagery of all things traditional, the malevolent would-be social engineers of the far left have been “redefining” the definition of anything and everything that didn’t let them get their own way. They’ve redefined homicide to target the unborn, they’ve redifined judicial authority to target our democracy and they’ve redefined marriage as the first salvo in their war against the family and traditional faith.

Because loyalty to God and family often conflicts with the kind of loyalty to the herd which is vital to these socialist leeches, the family has got to go, and the churches with them. Read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four sometime. And just in case anyone is harbouring the delusion that this is a new thing:

The original application made three years ago, which seeks a declaration of parenthood, would give the mother’s same-sex partner the same rights as if she were a biological parent.

That application failed because the family court ruled it did not have the authority to make a judgment on the case.

The applicant appealed, arguing she was in a special situation because same-sex couples require assisted human reproduction.

She contended that if the law does not make room for three legal parents, it is a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantee of equality.

Gee, whiz, a Charter challenge. There’s a big surprise. The preferred weapon of those who wish to impose their will on the majority without ever having to worry about being held accountable by the very people whose way of life they are trying to destroy.

How long is it going to be before we finally see a leader with the guts to stand up and speak the unspeakable: the Charter is a deeply flawed document that is more useful in the trampling of rights (just ask Scott Brockie) than it is in protecting them. It needs to be scrapped and we need to redo another Canadian Bill of Rights from scratch, one that actually protects instead of persecutes.