Alternative History

A slight difference

Posted on January 31, 2020January 31, 2020 by Mike

Shark takes issue with my characterization of “FOBBITS, staff, S1, S2, S3, and all the rest of the REMFs,” which he calls misguided—a point I will happily admit just may be correct, not having ever been a member of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children my own self, bless their stout, coal-black hearts.

I think the Shark’s take is astute and well-expressed enough to be worth bringing out front here for further discussion in a new post, should any of you CF miscreants be inclined to such. A very large percentage of Ye Olde CF Blogge’s readership has always come from the military, both active duty and retired, so I kinda figured at least some of you might like a chance to chime in yourselves.

I appreciate the heated sentiment, however misguided.

I retired from the USMC in the middle of this past decade. In my experience, it was ALWAYS the warfighters who were coming to US “JAGs” seeking assistance/guidance on the ROE, target selection, and other issues. They were very aware of the risks of creating an international incident and a very prompt criminal investigation that would make a colonoscopy preferable, should they make a mistake. After President Reagan, the staffs were quite aware of the predilection of the administration to cheerfully blame the military for any perceived offense. President Trump’s recent pardons may signal a return to sanity, but it takes time to steer a new path for a military upper echelon that was schooled in the zero-defects insanity.

I/we USMC lawyers were trained to be a combat multiplier by assisting the pointy end of the spear, and not a hindrance. But maybe that’s just the way the Corps was back then.

I’m thinking maybe that “back then” part could just possibly be at the heart of our disagreement, but perhaps not. Like I said, I am not, nor have I ever been, either a Marine or a JAG officer, and therefore could quite easily be full of shit on this one. Either way, my humble thanks to Shark for sounding off. Your contribution to the discussion is much appreciated, my friend.

FUD with words

Posted on January 28, 2020January 28, 2020 by Mike

Tangentially related to that last post, another example of how the Left rewrites history to suit its own nefarious purposes.

Serious problems exist with some of the narrative spun about (Martin Luther) King, in particular, and the civil rights struggle, in general. Part of the problem, of course, is that King died young, enabling others, as with the two Kennedy brothers, to fill in the rest of the story and use it to further certain political agendas. King died short of his fortieth birthday; had he lived longer, presumably he would have evolved and, possibly, become a very different man than he was when he died–we will never know. What we do know is that the Democratic Party and their “progressive” media and education machines have rewritten the history of the civil rights struggle. This was driven home to me some years ago while visiting a college campus. The students assumed King was a Democrat, and the segregationists confronting the peaceful marchers, and using fire hoses, snarling police dogs, and truncheons, and wearing white hoods were Republicans. They assume a Republican killed King–today’s college kids probably believe the Tea Party had him killed. That the exact opposite is true, shocks many. King came from a staunchly Republican family–his father, a prominent leader in his own right–openly endorsed Richard Nixon against JFK in the 1960 presidential election. The Democrats had a one-party lock on the South. The party of slave owners and secessionists, had become the party of Jim Crow, school segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, poll taxes, and on and on.

Many Americans, not to mention foreigners, do not realize not only that the Republican party was formed in opposition to slavery and that Lincoln was a Republican, but that the famous Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose rulings dismantled the legal basis for segregation and put serious limitations on the power of police, was a former Republican Governor of California. It was, furthermore, war hero and Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who sent troops to Arkansas to enforce court-ordered desegregation at Little Rock Central High School. Congressional Republicans were the main supporters of civil rights legislation; their votes ensured passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, over the opposition of a significant bloc of Democrats–let us also not forget that Congressional Democrats for years blocked Republican efforts to pass federal anti-lynching legislation. All this, of course, is history, but an important chunk of American history that is being lost, distorted, or otherwise flushed down the memory sewer–along with the fact that anti-leftist J. Edgar Hoover proved the most formidable foe of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), an organization founded and staffed by Democrats, such as long-time Democratic Senator Robert Byrd.

Before I get back to King, let me address another issue that has been badly distorted and become something of a meme among the quasi-literate left. I refer to the idea that the parties have “switched places.” This is something I have heard from some lefties who, knowing the true history of the Democratic and Republican Parties when it comes to race and civil rights, try to argue that that was then, and this is now. Since FDR or so, they argue the Democratic and the Republican Parties “switched” places on the race issue, with Republicans taking the role of protecting white privilege and keeping minorities, especially blacks, down. The truth is quite different. What happened was that the old party of slavers, segregationists, lynch mobs, and secessionists figured out that government programs and intervention were the means to deprive Republicans of a significant voter bloc. The aim was to keep black Americans dependent on the largesse of government and Democrat-run urban political machines. Anyone who doubts that should read the crude comment in which President Johnson revealed the real purpose underlying his massive social program expansion, i.e., to keep black Americans voting Democratic. The Democrats have succeeded admirably at this objective.

The truth is ALWAYS “quite different” when the Democrat-Socialists are the ones telling it. This is NOT a coinkydink, I assure you. Folding, spindling, and mutilating the very language we speak is an age-old tactic of theirs, beginning with their hijacking of the term “liberal” its very self to mean the exact opposite of the original definition. Bejamin Dierker calls it “linguistic activism,” but I prefer the more direct and concise “lying” as a descriptor, myself.

This isn’t innocent linguistic drift or slang; it is a conscious effort to reshape society. The schemes include redefining words for personal gain, using modifiers to alter the meaning of a word, replacing technical words with colloquial ones, and creating new words. Each of these is a bullying tactic, which distort effective discourse.

It starts with misusing words or defining them based on circumstance rather than objective meaning. The entire purpose of defined language is to hold constant meaning so others can understand. Situational use starts to condition how people feel about words, building up a new connotation.

The classic example is the word “liberal,” which the far-left co-opted. It was adopted because of its positive connotation, and used as a cover for imposing greater leftist control under the guise of liberty. In reality, there is nothing liberal about failing to protect life, burdening individuals with regulations and taxes, or forcing individuals to provide services to others. This is no accidental misnomer, but strategic messaging to influence people. Who doesn’t want to support a policy that is “progressive,” “pro-choice,” or “affordable”?

When they use a word it means just what they choose it to mean, neither more nor less—but the meaning is always subject to change without notice. The question is, which is to be master—that’s all.

Exile for a reason

Posted on January 26, 2020January 26, 2020 by Mike

Telling the inconvenient truths.

Michele Antaki—a former UN interpreter, journalist, and translator—has written and sent me the following exclusive summary of a recent speech given in French by Ernest Tigori, an Ivorian intellectual and political activist, exiled in France, and winner of the 2017 Nelson Mandela Prize for Literature. In his new book “L’Afrique à désintoxiquer” (“Detoxifying Africa”), he explains why it is crucial to lead Europe out of repentance for its alleged crimes in Africa, and lead Africa out of infantilization. He presented it to great acclaim at a recent patriotic forum in Paris. Antaki’s write-up begins:

Since the 1990s, Tigori has vigorously denounced the political class ruining his country, and the general lack of prospects compelling Africans to leave their countries in droves, in search of a better future.

Regarding Europe, Tigori warns that uncontrolled migration from the South to the North shore of the Mediterranean may destabilize it beyond repair and that ethnic wars could well be looming on the horizon.

“It saddens me”, he says,” to see the white man beating his breast over and over, too emasculated to put up any resistance to people who’ve come to threaten him on his own doorstep”. He believes that a toxic mix of guilt, “human rightsism”, political naivety and crass ignorance of History have a debilitating effect on Europeans’ capacity to fight the invasion.

He accuses the corrupt African leaders of destroying the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings in all impunity, but is equally critical of the ideologues who are paving the way for them. They should stop blaming it all – slavery, the slave trade, colonialism, neocolonialism and racism – on a forever repentant Europe, who now has to carry the burden of this mass immigration to atone for its supposed sins against Africa.

Tigori explains how the History of black Africa from the 15th to the 20th centuries has intentionally been falsified in the 1940s by Stalinist strategists and their Communist followers, whose covert aim it was to tarnish the image of Western European nations, in order to drive them out of their colonial possessions and take their place. Up until now, that is 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the lies have stuck.

The myth the author debunks is twofold. No, Europe is not responsible for the practice of slavery in black Africa, nor is it guilty of colonial crimes. And, no, Africans did not allow themselves to be enslaved or colonized as “poor hapless victims”.

He goes on to explain how the myth of Europe’s debt towards Africa is perpetuated by certain powers that have a stake in keeping it alive. This myth, born out of Cold War Soviet anti-Western propaganda, is now serving another variety of the same agenda.

I have nothing to add except: read every word of it.

(Via WRSA)

What did the Ogabe junta know, and when did they know it?

Posted on January 24, 2020January 24, 2020 by Mike

Dirty as they come.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham reported Wednesday evening that she obtained a chain of State Department emails stemming from a standard request for comment from New York Times journalist Ken Vogel, whose reporting helped generate scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukrainian gas company Burisma.

On May 1, 2019, Vogel contacted State Department official Kate Schilling about a story he was working on regarding an Obama administration meeting in January 2016 with Ukrainian prosecutors and mentioned the name of the CIA analyst believed to be the whistleblower whose complaint sparked impeachment proceedings that led to two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Ingraham did not state the name of the alleged whistleblower — Fox News hosts are banned from doing so until the identity is confirmed — and blacked out the name when showing excerpts of documents. However, she likely was referring to Eric Ciaramella, who some Republicans and conservative media figures believe is the whistleblower.

In the email, Vogel wrote, “We are going to report that [State Department official] Elizabeth Zentos attended a meeting at the White House on 1/19/2016 with Ukrainian prosecutors and embassy officials as well as … [redacted] from the NSC … the subjects discussed included efforts within the United State government to support prosecutions, in Ukraine and the United Kingdom, of Burisma Holdings, … and concerns that Hunter Biden’s position with the company could complicate such efforts.”

Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and other allies claim Joe Biden improperly used his role as vice president to pressure Ukraine to fire Shokin, who was widely seen as corrupt, in 2016 to protect his son from an investigation into Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company at which Hunter Biden held a $50,000-per-month position on the board. But the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and other allies had the same objective, and Joe Biden was repeating U.S. policy that had been set out by Washington’s ambassador to Kyiv in the preceding months and was briefed by White House staff just ahead of the trip.

Joe Biden has dubbed the allegations as “false, debunked conspiracy theories” about him…

Why, of course they are, Gropey. Bizarrely, Honest Joe issued a more vehement and formal denial to his libmedia pals, urging them to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain:

Former vice president Joe Biden’s extraordinary campaign memo this week imploring U.S. news media to reject the allegations surrounding his son Hunter’s work for a Ukrainian natural gas company makes several bold declarations.

The memo by Biden campaign aides Kate Bedingfield and Tony Blinken specifically warned reporters covering the impeachment trial they would be acting as “enablers of misinformation” if they repeated allegations that the former vice president forced the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma Holdings, where Hunter Biden worked as a highly compensated board member.

Biden’s memo argues there is no evidence that the former vice president’s or Hunter Biden’s conduct raised any concern, and that Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s investigation was “dormant” when the vice president forced the prosecutor to be fired in Ukraine.

The memo calls the allegation a “conspiracy theory” (and, in full disclosure, blames my reporting for the allegations surfacing last year.)

Uh huh. Which would no doubt be why you so obnoxiously bragged about it later, I guess.

It is irrefutable, and not a conspiracy theory, that Joe Biden bragged in this 2018 speech to a foreign policy group that he threatened in March 2016 to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Kiev if then-Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko didn’t immediately fire Shokin.

“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden told the 2018 audience in recounting what he told Poroshenko.

“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event.

Yet more actual facts follow, every last word of which entirely damns Senile Uncle Gropey as precisely what he is and always has been: a wholly corrupt, dishonest, manipulative, and singularly incompetent political hack. Nick Arama poses the pertinent questions, saving the most important one for last:

Did someone squash it so as not to hurt Biden? Was this whole Ukraine call scam/whistleblower game cooked up to prevent all this from coming out because Trump had raised the issue of the case being possibly improperly shut down? And is it really not just to protect Biden but to protect the Obama administration in general from yet another scandal?

Oh, I think we can all guess the answers easily enough, thanks. The burning query at this point is simplicity itself: what, if anything, will be done about this?

Update! Hey, did somebody mention fake “whistleblower” and conniving Deep State grubworm Eric Ciaramella earlier?

Make no mistake. Although Democrats have tried mightily to convince America that their (fourth) impeachment effort developed spontaneously out of the patriotism of a career civil servant, the truth is, anti-Trump operatives in the president’s own NSC were already plotting to remove the president from office two weeks into his term. All they needed was a pretext to get the ball rolling. The Ukraine phone call in July 2019 provided the pretext they and their Democratic allies in the House had been waiting for.

As a former White House official told Sperry: “They had a political vendetta against him from Day One.”

I originally thought to include the meat ‘n’ potatoes of the Ciaramella revelation in the excerpt, but decided just to go with Heine’s closer instead. You’ll want to read all of it, though; it’s a veritable Who’s Who of Ogabe stay-behind saboteurs seeded throughout the FedGovCo permanent bureacracy, from shadow-government skulker Ciaramella to REMF doughboy Vindman, every last one of whom ought of right to be rockin’ orange for their acts of treason and sedition before too much more time passes.

NOTE: In order to comment, you must be registered and approved as a CF user. Since so many user-registrations are attempted by spam-bots for their own nefarious purposes, YOUR REGISTRATION MAY BE ERRONEOUSLY DENIED.

If you are in fact a legit hooman bean desirous of registering yourself a CF user name so as to be able to comment only to find yourself caught up as collateral damage in one of my irregularly (un)scheduled sweeps for hinky registration attempts, please shoot me a kite at the email addy over in the right sidebar and let me know so’s I can get ya fixed up manually.

ALSO NOTE: You MUST use a valid, legit email address in order to successfully register, the new anti-spam software I installed last night requires it. My thanks to Barry for all his help sorting this mess out last night.

Comments appear entirely at the whim of the guy who pays the bills for this site and may be deleted, ridiculed, maliciously edited for purposes of mockery, or otherwise pissed over as he in his capricious fancy sees fit. The CF comments section is pretty free-form and rough and tumble; tolerance level for rowdiness and misbehavior is fairly high here, but is NOT without limit.

Management is under no obligation whatever to allow the comments section to be taken over and ruined by trolls, Leftists, and/or other oxygen thieves, and will take any measures deemed necessary to prevent such. Conduct yourself with the merest modicum of decorum, courtesy, and respect and you'll be fine. Pick pointless squabbles with other commenters, fling provocative personal insults, issue threats, or annoy the host (me) and...you won't.

Should you find yourself sanctioned after running afoul of the CF comments policy as stated and feel you have been wronged, please download and complete the Butthurt Report form below in quadruplicate; retain one copy for your personal records and send the others to the email address posted in the right sidebar.

Please refrain from whining, sniveling, and/or bursting into tears and waving your chubby fists around in frustrated rage, lest you suffer an aneurysm or stroke unnecessarily. Your completed form will be reviewed and your complaint addressed whenever management feels like getting around to it. Thank you.

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

Fake Phony Fraud(s), S'faccim: two excellent descriptors coined by the late great WABC host Bob Grant which are interchangeable, both meaning as they do pretty much the same thing

Mordor On The Potomac: Washington, DC

The Enemy: shitlibs, Progtards, Leftards, Swamp critters, et al ad nauseum

Burn, Loot, Murder: what the misleading acronym BLM really stands for

pAntiFa: an alternative spelling of "fascist scum"

"Mike Hendrix is, without a doubt, the greatest one-legged blogger in the world." ‐Henry Chinaski

Subscribe to CF!

Shameless begging

If you enjoy the site, please consider donating:

Correspondence

Email addy: mike-at-this-url dot etc

All e-mails assumed to be legitimate fodder for publication, scorn, ridicule, or other public mockery unless specified as private by the sender

Allied territory

Alternatives to shitlib social media:

A few people worth following on Gab:

Click to embiggen

Notable Quotes

"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, ~~but too early to shoot the bastards.~~"
—Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution

Claire's Cabal—The Freedom Forums

"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
—Daniel Webster

“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill.”
—Charles Bukowski

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
—Ezra Pound

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
—Frank Zappa

“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.”
—John Adams

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
—Bertrand de Jouvenel

"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
—GK Chesterton

"I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free."
—Donald Sensing

"The only way to live free is to live unobserved."
—Etienne de la Boiete

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
—Dwight D. Eisenhower

"To put it simply, the Left is the stupid and the insane, led by the evil. You can’t persuade the stupid or the insane and you had damn well better fight the evil."
—Skeptic

"There is no better way to stamp your power on people than through the dead hand of bureaucracy. You cannot reason with paperwork."
—David Black, from Turn Left For Gibraltar

"If the laws of God and men, are therefore of no effect, when the magistracy is left at liberty to break them; and if the lusts of those who are too strong for the tribunals of justice, cannot be otherwise restrained than by sedition, tumults and war, those seditions, tumults and wars, are justified by the laws of God and man."
—John Adams

"The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
—Frederick Douglass

"Give me the media and I will make of any nation a herd of swine."
—Joseph Goebbels

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
—Ronald Reagan

"Ain't no misunderstanding this war. They want to rule us and aim to do it. We aim not to allow it. All there is to it."
—NC Reed, from Parno's Peril

"I just want a government that fits in the box it originally came in."
—Bill Whittle