Sharia masseuses? Good luck with that

Here's an interesting story from Afghanistan.....

From TheLocal - Sweden's news in English -- A Swedish army gender adviser in Afghanistan has taken the Armed Forces to task for only employing local men to perform massages on troops stationed in Mazar-E-Sharif.

"It is the opinion of FS17 that there are no reasonable grounds for gender to be one of the profile requirements," he wrote.

Fahlstedt further stressed that his force was committed to strengthening the position of women in society by helping create the conditions in which they could become self-sufficient.

"It's not important as such whether women eventually get the job, what's important is that there's equality of opportunity and they are treated on the same terms as men."

I guess if we're going to invade a foreign country and impose our way of life on them, Afghan women may as well be guaranteed the same equal opportunity for work as men, even if it's culturally and religiously anathema to do so. I wonder when the first female masseuse will be stoned for touching a male, not her husband? Probably her first day on the job. At some point, you'd think these stone-aged, middle-eastern countries would emerge from the dark ages of primitive backwardness and join the modern world. Let's just hope this story has a happy ending.

Obama.....lead, follow, or get out of the way in Afghanistan!

In the one month since Gen. McChrystal asked Obama for more troops in Afghanistan, 43 Americans have lost their lives. It is outrageous for a commander in chief to ignore a theater commander like this. But Obama has more important things to worry about than Americans dying in God-forsaken, poppy fields half way around the world, fighting a war we'll likely not win. He's got his left base to appease.....the radical, peace-at-any-cost cowards who got him elected. The administration is hemorrhaging support over its disastrous domestic agenda and the last group they want to alienate is the anti-war peaceniks.....who he'll lose of he sends more troops to Afghanistan.

Look, I'm about as skeptical as anybody about the likelihood of successful nation-building in a country without a functing government and partially controlled by the Taliban and drug lords. I'm almost to the point of saying we should stop sacrificing Americans' lives in places where it does no good and come home, but if Obama is unwilling to pull out then he should support totally, the war effort there. Leaving McChrystal high and dry while our boys die is unforgivable!

I think this shows just what an amateur Obama is and what weak, panty-waste's he's surrounded himself with. These people are worse than the Clintons in terms of politicizing every single breath Obama takes. He can be political about the domestic stuff but, lives are being lost over there.....DO SOMETHING ALREADY!!! Be a leader or be a follower but, Obama can't just stand around waiting for the Afghanistan problem to go away.

Nation-building cannot be successful in Africa

As if Obama hasn't wasted enough of our tax dollars already with corporate bailouts, porkulus trillions, and promises of goody-bags of other peoples' money to the undeserving, now he's going to urinate still more of our blood and treasure down the God-forsaken rat hole that is Africa.....

The US is planning a dramatically more assertive policy in Africa, sometimes backed by a threat of force, to end conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria that are seen as among the principal obstacles to the continent's revival.

Do we really want our sons and daughters dying in Africa trying to bring peace to savages who've been waring and killing each other since the beginning of time? While a vast majority of the people want to be peaceful, productive, educated citizens, their brutal, dictatorial rulers keep them mired in poverty, hopelessness, and despair. The few elected official that exist in these war-torn nations are hopelessly corrupt such that any aid from outside is consumed by the government and it's friends...not the people.

I would support a clandestine, arms-supply program for any competent faction who demonstrated the will to overthrow, regardless of how bloody it's likely to be, the sitting dictators who rule with corruption and violence. But we don't need to waste more money, and now lives, than we already do in a place where it does no good.

Obama's magical apology tour

Obama is planning a trip to Germany to coincide with the anniversary of the bombing of Dresden toward the end of WW-II....

From TimesOnline -

But he will be aware of the sensibilities of his German hosts before the D-Day commemoration and by travelling to Dresden — a city destroyed by ferocious Allied bombing in February 1945 — Mr Obama will also acknowledge how Germany suffered during the Second World War.

"...he will acknowledge how Germany suffered"...that's code for, "he will apologize for the US having kicked the everyloving crap out of Germany".

As if the Germans would have stopped slaughtering the dirty Jooooos anyway, had we not stopped them. What an embarassing spectacle this Presidency has been. He's running all over Europe apologizing for America's perceived past sins, to get what? The Europeans to like us? Yes, the US and Great Britain bombed Dresden toward the end of the war. So what? The problem with liberals is that they judge every historical action by the US through the lenses of modern warfare capabilities and modern conventions regarding rules of combat.

Apologists like Obama believe Dresden was a peaceful sleepy town filled with Jew-loving Germans happily living as artists, writers, and architects. On the contrary, Dresden was a manufacturing and shipping center of military significance, as well as an culturally valuable town. Despite sniveling liberals' yammering about war crimes there, it was a perfectly reasonable military target. Sure, the razing of Dresden came 12 weeks before the end of the war and Germany would have been defeated regardless. But the nuclear weapon we dropped on Nagasaki was pretty pointless too. Sorry, war is hell! If you don't want to have your cities bombed and your civilians killed collaterally, then don't start wars.

The anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are approaching, I wonder how embarrassingly Obama will grovel, prostrate before the Japanese, as he aplogizes profusely for that too?

No matter what we do, it's not enough

Over on Drudge, the headline about the earthquake in Italy reads...

USA gives $50,000?

Notice the question mark. Is somebody complaining that we aren't doing enough? By contrast here's the official tally of aid that Italy sent to the US after Katrina....

Italy has offered to send two Hercules C130 cargo jets fitted with emergency aids, including 300 Adult camp beds, 300 blankets, 600 sheets, 1 suction pump, 6 lifecrafts, 11.200 chlorine tablets, 5 units of large first aid kits, baby food formula pumps, tents and power generators. Italy has also offered to send some experts of the Protezione Civile to help coordinating relief efforts in the damaged area.

Are you kidding me? This looks like a packing list for a weekend Boyscout camping trip. I could stroll into any Academy Sports and buy all this crap with my credit card. Now I'm not suggesting that we couldn't do more to help Italy with relief but, what's wrong with 50-large?

I wonder if the Obama suck-ups in the media will villify Obama for not doing more the way they did Bush for not doing enough after the tsunami, even though the US gave millions in aid more than anybody else?

I won't be holding my breath for that.

Joe Biden, the gaffe that keeps on giving

Obama seems to be the only person who doesn't know that he's abysmally lacking in executive experience, ability, or qualification to be President. In that way, he's the personification of the Emperor with no clothes. If that's the case, then Joe Biden must surely be the royal court jester.

If you recall, a month before the Spanish elections, Al-Qaida bombed the train station in Madrid. The cowardly Spanish people promptly elected an equally cowardly President in Zapatero. He won by promising to make nice with Al-Qaida and by promising not to lift a single finger to help the US rid Iraq of the Butcher of Baghdad in return for not bombing any more Spanish targets. One finger he did lift was his middle one, toward the US by pulling out of Iraq.

Biden was in Chile meeting with Zapatero last week and remembered to thank Zapatero for Spain's help in Iraq. What an idiot, and what a perfect representative of the most inexperienced, unqualified administration in US presidential history.

A Separate Pieces

Posted by Fawn

This will never last. We've seen this sort of thing dozens of times before. A hastily constructed peace plan designed to allow politicians to look good (and they do, look at the photograph above) while the root causes of the situation are ignored.

From the Associated Press:

“Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday signed the plan for a cease-fire in Georgia that his Georgian counterpart reluctantly agreed to a day earlier, setting the stage for a Russian troop withdrawal after more than a week of warfare.

The cease-fire plan calls for Russian forces to withdraw to the positions they held before the fighting broke out in Georgia's Russian-backed separatist province of South Ossetia. That appears to mean that hundreds of Russian soldiers who had been in South Ossetia previously as peacekeepers will be allowed to return.

The plan also grants Russian forces limited rights to patrol Georgia proper...”

The root cause of this conflict lies in ethnic and cultural differences with a dollop of Russian (and U.S.) cold waresque, geo-political grandstanding on top. All the reams of paper, hand shakes, false smiles and rhetoric will not solve this problem. For some predictions as to how this will play out take a look at the Albania, Kosovo, Serbian, et. al. Melt down, the Arab-Israeli disaster, Belgium, and soon, the fractioning of the United States along the anglo-Hispanic fault line. No, it may not happen tomorrow or even in our lifetimes but the problem is not solved, the tension remains, and it will reemerge.

In order for this situation to be solved, the Abkhazians and Ossetians either need their own autonomous, independent countries or they need to become Russians or Georgians with an e pluribus unum mindset. Anything short of this will provide the global community a lifetime of re-runs while Abkhazia and Ossetia remain separate pieces.

The Ugly American

Posted by Fawn

Bush sends Condi to Georgia today. What can we reasonably expect as an outcome? Nothing. Recently Condi said, "This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia where Russia can threaten a neighbor, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it," Rice said just hours before leaving for France. "Things have changed." and President Bush said, "My call, of course, is for the territorial integrity of Georgia to be respected and for the cease-fire agreement to be honored."

Can our leaders get any more elusive, any more mealy-mouth, any less supportive? Their apathy is palpable...and disingenuous, dishonest, and for the Georgians, disastrous. The Georgians lost two large chunks of their country...forever!

Here's the Russian translation of Bush and Condi's sentiments – and I paraphrase as my Russian is, well, rusty:

We are unwilling and incapable of intervening at this time. We are virtually leaderless, pre-occupied with our national beauty contest – the Presidential election, and are too busy absorbing our current events from the photographs in People magazine, and awaiting the next season of American Idol to be bothered with supporting or defending a fledgling democracy we helped set-up and have been encouraging for almost 15 years. Please, please don't put us in a tight spot, we are almost out of creative rhetoric and olive branch desk ornament gifts.

The Georgian translation is a little different. For those of you that don't know the Georgian language is unique in the world and not Russian. In fact there is only about a 20% overlap between the two. They don't even use the same alphabet. The Georgian translation:

Ah, sorry. What color blankets do you prefer?