A man of honor

I never knew what an unbelievable man he is. I am so humbled.

At the Vietnam Wall we saw something unbelievable. We noticed three small index cards at the base of the Wall. I knelt down for a closer look and noticed that a 4-star general's rank was pinned to each card.


The cards were personally addressed and said something like:

These are Yours - not mine! With Love and Respect, Your Platoon Leader, Pete Pace 1 Oct 2007

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had laid down his rank for his boys who died in Nam. Oct 1 was the day he stepped down as Chairman."

Bush Address the Troops

Bush spoke to the troops today. I am continually uplifted when he speaks the way he spoke today. He said that Americans will not abandon Iraqis. He is right, especially for this American.

For stories like this:

A routine meeting on Aug. 18 became a saga of tragedy and heroism when a young Iraqi man gave his life to save his family and his U.S. Army friends.

The soldiers he saved that day say they will never forget the man’s sacrifice.

A Muslim in God's Heaven, I say.

And lest we forget:

Katie Couric must be spitting nickels to be upstaged this way, by the way, with the visit from the President and the warm welcome he received. Her rage must be something to behold today. All that planning and promotion, right down the drain.

Wizbang did a bang up job!

The bottom line is, Katrina's storm surge did not wash the wall away. As you may remember, water had been seeping under the floodwall at the break location for about a year before Katrina. The ground under the levee was soaked and ready to give at any moment...

What I will say next will probably completely throw you. Katrina saved probably over 50,000 lives.

That levee was doomed. If it had failed without notice, the death toll would have been measured in tens of thousands. There would be no evacuation, no preparation, no Feds at all. (such that they were anyway) no Coast Guard in choppers etc. Tens of thousands of people would have been dead in hours and tens of thousands more would have died on 120 degree rooftops waiting for rescue. It would have been unimaginable. - More unimaginable.

"Luckily" -and I groan when I say that- Katrina allowed the city to be evacuated.

Read it all.

The bottom line is, we are arguing over the WRONG thing, apparently. Not Bush, or Nagin, or FEMA, but the incompetence of building the levee. The federal government has dumped so much money into New Orleans and building the levees but they were built wrong from the get-go. Who benefited? Who got all that money?

This is the issue that needs to be resolved.

'No Drug Smuggler Left Behind!'

President Bush was so buoyed by the warm reception he was given in Albania that he immediately gave all 3 million Albanians American citizenship, provided they learn Spanish. The offer was withdrawn when Bush found out most Albanians haven't broken any U.S. laws.

Enough said.

Although she gets harsh on tv, to read her is to like her. And if you do not like her, you can always fisk her.