Okay, One Clark Blog: General Releases His Service Records

Clark '04

Will Bush do the same? hehehehe

I've Been a Bad Boy

No blogging since Monday. Won't be able to again until next Monday. That's what happens when your head cook quits. Don't let this happen to you.

See ya Monday.

If Bill Clinton Had Been Busted For Abusing Pain Pills...

STLtoday

It's interesting to see the way the liberal media are playing this. I'm looking at a copy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Saturday, October 11th, edition - the day after the big announcement. Well, the story is on Page 2, and right next to his photograph, in large boldface print, is the following quote: 'I take full responsibility for this problem.'

That's interesting, folks, because if you look at his actual statement - not what the liberal media say he said, but what he really said - you get a different take on it. First, he says he's got back problems. So he's blaming it on that. Then he says he had surgery, but the surgery wasn't successful. So he's blaming it on the doctors. Then he says the pain medication was addictive. So he's blaming it on the pharmaceutical companies. Folks, he blames it on everybody but himself! But as long as he puts in that obligatory line about taking responsibility, that's what the liberal media are going to grab: Clinton takes full responsibility!

"Rush" keeps going and going in this article...

Army probes soldier suicides

USATODAY.com

Most of the suicides have occurred since May 1, after major combat operations were declared ended. Experts say harsh and dangerous living conditions combined with a long deployment can worsen existing depression. And the accessibility of weapons in a war zone can quickly turn a passing thought into action. "It just takes a second to pull it out and put it to your head and pull the trigger," Ritchie said.

The last episode of Band of Brothers deals with this phenomenon. Easy Company, along with other soldiers, was stuck in Austria after V-E Day with no chance of going home. The demoralization was palpable. And then there's the Astroturf letters...

Are the deaths of cooperating Iraqis being targeted by the resistance being calculated by anyone?

To those fighting the U.S. presence in Iraq -- loyalists of former president Saddam Hussein, religious extremists, foreign terrorists -- Iraqis cooperating with the U.S.-led occupation have become the new target of choice. From police officers to Governing Council members, they are regarded by opponents of the occupation as collaborators -- and as much easier prey than U.S. soldiers and civilian reconstruction workers, whose compounds are now encircled with tall concrete barricades, dirt-filled barriers and miles of razor wire.

"They are targeting the new leadership of Iraq because they can't get to the Americans, because the Americans are very well protected," Rubaie said an hour after the explosion, as he sat in a windowless room, his arm in a sling.

They're the latest victims in Bush's "Bring it on" bravado. But then who cares about a few dead Iraqis? Right? Yeesh.

By the way...

...today's my birthday. Been out of my tweens now for three years or so.

And now I'm off to work.

New Front in Iraqi War: Rival Shiite Government Forming

Washington Post

Sadr is the son of a highly respected Shiite cleric who was assassinated in Najaf in 1999. The extent of his own following, however, is not clear. Unlike several more senior clerics, he favors establishing a theocracy similar to that of Iran, a government fashioned by and answerable to unelected religious figures.

In addition to ministries of Interior, Justice and Foreign Affairs, for example, Sadr's cabinet will include a ministry for the "prevention of vice and promotion of virtue," Abdel Hadi Daraji, a Sadr aide, said in an interview Saturday.

Daraji said rules on vice and virtue, as interpreted from the Koran, would be enforced by the militia that Sadr organized in the weeks after Baghdad fell to coalition forces. Its members still patrol sections of Sadr City, home to 3 million mostly poor Shiites.

"You know very well that there is a connection between the military and the political," said Daraji, who called the United States "a terrorist organization" during Friday prayers outside Sadr's headquarters in Baghdad.

"The imam's army is the military side," Daraji said, "and the cabinet is the political side."

The Governing Counsel still holds some ground in Iraq, but this guy might undercut the whole process. This is what happens when you don't do post-war planning, or worse, when you do post-war planning and then shelf the plan.

Only Senior Administration Officials Can Prevent Political Wildfires

Probe Focuses on Month Before Leak to Reporters (washingtonpost.com)

The FBI isn't just looking for the leakers - it's doing a case analysis of how this adminstration handles classified information. The Bush Administration should take a page from fighting forest fires and burn the leakers now, before the conflagration consumes them all.