Category: Asia

Reality is starting to sink in. Okay, maybe that’s not the right way to put it. The Dippers are still banging away on the “bring ’em home at any cost” drum (why fight the enemy when you can embolden them with apparent gutlessness on the part of their foe?), so they clearly haven’t pulled their heads out of their backsides. Our soldiers, on the other hand, have always had it not too far in the backs of their minds that they may well one day be called upon to perform the three functions for which soldiers ultimately exist: killing, dying and doing as they’re told.

No, that doesn’t sound very nice, does it? Too bad. It may not be palatable to the “peace in our time” crowd, but every ground-pounder on the planet knows that when you strip away all the niceties and platitudes that are handed to those with weak stomachs and you find yourself in that Godforsaken place where the blade meets the bone, the truest and most honest purpose of a soldier is as an instrument of war. They are warriors first; the rest is good for parades.

It’s a disquieting truth, but a truth just the same. Soldiers often say that when they die, they’re sure to get into Heaven because they’ve already done their time in Hell. While half a joke, there is also a raw and visceral truth at its core. Soldiers spend years peeking through the cracks of the gates of Hell. And when those gates are flung wide from time to time, they walk in of their own accord, so that others will not have to.

“A soldier fights, not because he hates what is in front of him, but in his love for what is behind him.”

In that, we are in debt to them for each and every freedom that we enjoy and take for granted today. And we God damned well owe them our respect. Bleating, as Dipper Megan Walker did in London last night, that “we need to bring our troops home, and not in caskets,” is not respect and it is not support. It’s the gutless bawling of someone scared shitless that something or someone that matters to them may one day have to be placed in harm’s way for the greater good.

Don’t fool yourselves. This is a war and we are in it, whether we want to be or not. The only question is: where do we want to fight it, there or here? So my message to the “bring them home” crowd is simple: either fight, follow or get the hell out of the way but whatever chioce you make, shut the hell up!

Stop disparaging our soldiers’ motivations and judgement by saying no one knows why they’re there. Quit trying to undermine their morale by holding up every gutless whiner or, even worse, a soldier’s grieving loved one caught in a moment of weakness, as some sort of representation of the state of our national resolve. And above all else, knock off the “I support the troops but not the mission” hypocrisy; the two are morally conjoined, whether you like it, or even want to admit it, or not.

How can you support our soldiers? Show your support for what they do. Demand that the government give them the tools that they need; NOW, not decades down the road. Be there for them when they come home and pray for the ones who don’t.

It really is the least you can do.

They say that nobody’s perfect, and I guess this kinda proves that old adage out. Anybody with their cranium clear of their colon already knows that I’m quite the fan of Stephen Harper. I like the idea of having someone in charge who a) does what he said he would do and b) doesn’t steep himself headfirst in a bunch of namby-pamby, feelgood bullcrap whilst actually doing nothing about anything the way the Grits did for over a decade. But it must have been baked beans and chili dogs for ol’ Steve’s intellectual lunch the other day because, as brainfarts go, this one could peel the paint off the walls:

VANCOUVER — Prime Minister Stephen Harper is calling on the United Nations to impose sanctions against North Korea for its purported nuclear test.

Harper condemned the test blast and said the UN must make a “a meaningful and substantial response.”

Where the hell did that come from? This is the kind of wussese that I would expect out of the Librano$, or maybe the Dippers, but I expect better from Harper. This is the guy who stood up in the Gerneral Assembly in New York not that long ago and declared the very relevance of the UN was being tested and has, at times, vaguely hinted that he understands that the UN is long past any useful purpose and that it’s days are irrevocably numbered.

Let’s face it: the UN never accomplishes anything. It was useless in Bosnia, useless in Somalia, useless in Rwanda, and it’s useless in the Sudan. The last shred of respect that I had for that organisation vanished when it put Libya in charge of human rights. Maybe Harper hasn’t forgotten any of this and he’s giving them one last chance to prove their worth. I hope that’s it; I really do. But just in case I’m wrong and just in case Harper somehow (though I can’t imagine how) doesn’t really get it, I’m going to put it into terms so damned simple that anyone could figure it out (even me):

SATURDAY MORNINGS AND WORLD AFFAIRS
-OR-
Everything I Need To Know, I Learned From The Hitman

Okay, here we go. Think back to when you were a kid. Remember watchin rasslin’ on Saturdays? No, I don’t mean wrestling. Wrestling is an olympic sport. I’m talking about the figure-four leglock, the flying elbow smash and heads rammed into turnbuckles. Are ya with me now? Good.

Now, think back to those Saturday mornings when you used to watch the greats of the day stride into the squared circle. Back to the days when good guys like Rick “Quick-Draw McGraw, the Boogie-Woogie Man and Dusty Rhodes used to keep the world safe from scumbags like the Iron Sheik, Ted “The Million Dollar Man” Dibiase and Greg “The Hammer” Valentine while other guys like Rowdy Roddy Piper would just kick the crap out of whoever happened to be handy at the time. Still with me? Cool.

My favourites were always the tag-team matches. Whenever one of those was on the card you knew there would be some good mayhem someplace before the show was done. My all-time favourites would have to be the Hart Foundation, with Mike Rotundo & Barry Windham a close second.

The matches always followed the same formula, but we watched them anyway (hey, we were young; give us a break). It would go, with a few little variations here and there, something like this:

Good guy A would be in the ring, pounding the crap out of bad guy A (or B) so hard that his grandkids were going to be born dizzy. The bad guys’ manager (because bad guys always had managers) would then pull some stunt while the ref wasn’t looking, usually a cheap shot, to get good guy A off-balance for a few seconds. Good guy B would holler at the ref to do something about it and the ref would go over and demand an explanation from the manager, who would shrug with a “what, me?” look on his face while bad guys A and B would drag good guy A over to their corner behind the ref’s back and proceed to double-team the crap out of him. This would go on until good guy B finally lost his cool and jumped into the ring to help his buddy, at which point the ref would suddenly finish with being distracted by the evil manager and jump over, grab good guy B and herd him back to his own corner while good guy A was still getting stomped by bad guy A, bad guy B and the manager across the ring. No matter how much the crowd would scream and point, the ref never managed to look the right way and catch the skulldiggery that was going on just a few feet away and it was always the good guy that got admonished for jumping in when he wasn’t supposed to.

What the heck does all this have to do with world affairs, you ask?

It’s simple: the UN is the ref.

After recieving many requests from readers of this blog, I have now begun work on a series of pages dedicated to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country in the current Afghan War. This area, which I have chosen to call the Honour Roll (because I’m not creative enough to come up with anything better), can be accessed here or by simply clicking on the “Honour Roll” link on the lefthand sidebar of this page. This will likely cut into by rant time somewhat but I think it’s worth it and, judging by the email that i’ve been getting, many of you feel the same way.

The Honour Roll area will contain no political commentary and while user comments are welcomed, they must all be submitted directly to admin@rightcrazy.com in order to be posted. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but this is being done to prevent the kind of vandalism that has occurred on similar pages in the past.

The Honour Roll pages are not meant for judging whether the war is right or wrong or anything else; they are merely a show of respect of our brave men and women who have given their lives for us, such as:

Trooper Mark Andrew Wilson
Sgt. Craig Gillam
Cpl. Robert Mitchell
Pte. Josh Klukie
Pte. David Byers
Cpl. Shane Keating
Cpl. Keith Morley
Pte. Mark Graham
Sgt. Shane Stachnik
Warrant Officer Frank Robert Mellish
Pte. William Cushley
Warrant Officer Richard Francis Nolan
Cpl. David Braun
Cpl. Andrew Eykelenboom
Master Cpl. Jeffrey Walsh
Master Cpl. Raymond Arndt
Cpl. Christopher Reid
Sgt. Vaughan Ingram
Cpl. Bryce Keller
Pte. Kevin Dallaire
Cpl. Francisco Gomez
Cpl. Jason Warren
Cpl. Anthony Boneca
Capt. Nichola Goddard
Cpl. Matthew Dinning
Bombardier Myles Mansell
Lieut. William Turner
Cpl. Randy Payne
Pte. Robert Costall
Cpl. Paul Davis,
Master Cpl. Timothy Wilson
Pte. Braun Woodfield
Cpl. Jamie Murphy
Sgt. Robert Short
Cpl. Robbie Beerenfenger
Cpl. Ainsworth Dyer
Pte. Richard Green
Pte. Nathan Smith
Sgt. Marc Leger

I will be adding an entry or two per day, as I find the time. Hopefully, I won’t be losing any ground.

Well, well; will you just look at this? It seems that in spite of all the liberal media’s, hounding, coaching, weeping and wailing, pissing and moaning, doomsaying and God only knows what else about the alleged faltering will of the Canadian public over the mission in Afghanistan, most of us just don’t seem to be getting the message.

That’s right; just like before, yet another poll has showed that the Canadian stance toward securing clear victory in the Afghan War is hardening, not wavering. Yessiree, it seems that us simpletons of the Great Unwashed just can’t get our little heads around the fact that the best way to deal with a tyrannical regime like the Taliban is to just run away and hide and hope that someone else will take care of the problem (preferrably the Yanks, so that we can criticize them for their intolerance later).

Sometimes I almost like polls, especially when they look like this:

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.

[Because of the perverse glee that I get from watching Debbie and Alex poke at each other, this has become one of my favourite threads. As a result, it is the only one to be migrated from the old blog with comments intact (manually, no less). It’s just so much fun…]

This didn’t take as long as I thought. Taliban Jack!, Canada’s answer to Neville Chamberlain, was seen in the company of the talking high foreheads at the Ministry of What You Should Think today mewling that he didn’t want Canadian troops to bugger off out of Afghanistan after all. Seems that poor Jack! only said that our boys should just be moved to the northern part of the country and that the MSM just twisted everything around to make him look like a disloyal doofus.

Right. And David Duke’s just a misunderstood civil rights champion.

Lyin’ Layton is, of course, so full of shit that his hair hasn’t room to take root anymore. There was no doubt whatsoever as to what he was saying at the recent Dipper convention. The only thing that has changed is that his gutless disloyalty is now threatening to come back and bite him on the ass at the polls. And let’s face it, this was never about respect for our troops, Canada’s image, or any of the other bullshit that the Dippers will toss out.

It was about scrounging a few more votes out of the anti-Bush crowd, period. So now the Not Democratic Party will do what all good little Lefties do when they realise that their balderdash will cost them more than it will gain: flip and flop as they twist in the wind of public opinion from the extreme left.