Benghazi - More Excuses & Lies

The Christian Science Monitor reports on claims that calls for military assistance in Benghazi were denied.

“For our top leadership, with all the technological and military tools at their disposal, to have done nothing for seven hours was a joint civilian and military failure of initiative and nerve,” writes West, a Vietnam combat veteran who has reported extensively on US combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Secretary of State Clinton has said the responsibility was hers. But there has been no assertion that the State Department overruled the Pentagon out of concern about the sovereignty of Libyan air space. Instead, it appears passive groupthink prevailed, with the assumption being that a spontaneous mob would quickly run out of steam.”

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At a press conference this week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the US military did not quickly intervene during the attack because military leaders did not have adequate intelligence information and felt they should not put American forces at risk, reports the Associated Press.

"The basic principle is that you don't deploy forces into harm's way without knowing what's going on; without having some real-time information about what's taking place," Mr. Panetta told Pentagon reporters. "And as a result of not having that kind of information, the commander who was on the ground in that area, Gen. Ham, Gen. Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation."

BULLS__T!  That's called a "movement to contact".  It's a standard offensive operation.  In fact, in a real movement to contact, you don't even know the enemy's location.  In Banghazi, the enemy's location was obvious!

I don't know who made the call to deny assistance, but somebody did, and that somebody deserves prison.

Lions Led By Jackasses

Scott on Cape Cod has a piece of the Benghazi story I hadn't read yet.

A short distance from the American compound, two Americans were sleeping. They were in Libya as independent contractors working an assignment totally unrelated to our embassy. They also happened to be former Navy SEALs. When they heard the noise coming from the attack on our embassy, as you would expect from highly trained warriors, they ran to the fight. Apparently, they had no weapons, but seeing the Libyan guards dropping their guns in their haste in fleeing the scene, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty snatched up several of these discarded weapons and prepared to defend the American compound.

Not knowing exactly what was taking place, the two SEALs set up a defensive perimeter. Unfortunately Ambassador Stevens was already gravely injured, and Foreign Service officer, Sean Smith, was dead. However, due to their quick action and suppressive fire, twenty administrative personnel in the embassy were able to escape to safety. Eventually, these two courageous men were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers brought against them, an enemy force numbering between 100 to 200 attackers which came in two waves. But the stunning part of the story is that Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty killed 60 of the attacking force. Once the compound was overrun, the attackers were incensed to discover that just two men had inflicted so much death and destruction.

Please read the whole thing,

Contrast the courage, quick thinking and decisive action of these former SEALs with the cowardice, indecision, blame-shifting and back-stabbing in DC.  "Lions led by jackasses".

Why We Home School (Continued)

Educating Ourselves has some great information on the "education" bureaucracy's priorities.

Between 1950 and 2009, the number of K-12 public school students increased by 96 percent. During that same period, the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) school employees grew by 386 percent. Of those personnel, the number of teachers increased by 252 percent, while the ranks of administrators and other staff grew by 702 percent—more than 7 times the increase in students.

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...if student growth had matched that of non-teaching personnel from 1992 to 2009 and if the teaching force had only grown 1.5 times faster than the pupil enrollment, American public schools would have an additional $37.2 billion to spend per year—the equivalent of an $11,700 a year increase in salary for every American public school teacher.

The "education" bureaucracy's priorities have nothing to do with educating children.  They have everything to do with providing high-paying, high-benefit jobs with cushy retirements to government bureaucrats.  It's a self-perpetuating waste machine.

The worst part is that the government stiff forces people like Aimee and me, who choose to opt out of it, to pay into it.

But here's the biggest question.  Teachers whine incessantly that they don't get paid enough.  Why don't they do something about this?

Chimps, War and Morality

How most people see chimps.

Most people think of chimps as cute, cuddly, near-humans, because they don't know much about chimp behavior.  For example, Jane Goodall, most famous of all chimp researchers, witnessed the following event in 1974.

A gang of male chimpanzees invaded their neighbors’ territory and attacked a male chimp sitting by himself in a tree. The intruders dragged the chimpanzee to the ground, pinned him down, and bit and hit him all over his body. The attack ended when one member of the gang threw a rock at the bleeding victim. The battered chimp was never seen again and presumably died from his injuries.

That lead to a 4-year-long "war" between the two tribes in which the aggressors killed all the other tribe's males, annexed their territory and took all their females. 

Since then, researchers have recorded territorial wars between chimp tribes in multiple locations, like Ngogo, Uganda.

Young male jumping on a recently-killed rival.

Enemy males will be held down, then bitten and battered to death. Females are usually let go, but their babies will be eaten.

Last year, the Ngogo chimps stopped patrolling the region and annexed it outright, increasing their home territory by 22 percent

The objective of the 10-year campaign was clearly to capture territory, the researchers concluded.

So, is this moral, or immoral behavior?  What if a group of men attacked another, killed all the men, ate the babies, took the women for sex and took their land?  Would that be moral, or immoral behavior?  What's the difference?

Sesame Street

They brought this on themselves.

Heh.

Why Get Married?

Dave Swindle posits an excellent question.

If a transcendent God doesn’t exist and death is the absolute end then what difference does it make if a man spends his money on a wife and kids or on toys and escorts?

Anybody out there have an answer?  I don't, but of course, I agree with him. 

As a Christian, I believe fathering my seven children is the most eternally significant thing I could possibly do, and I can't do it anywhere near as effectively without my wife, Aimee, as I can with her.  The eternal significance of raising children gives our marriage purpose, which motivates us to try harder to fix the inevitable problems that arise in married life.

But even if we had no children, our marriage would still have eternal significance, because the Bible describes marriage as an earthly picture of Christ's love for the Church.  Our attempt - even if fallen, imperfect and ultimately inadequate - to model that love makes our marriage eternally significant. 

If there is no eternity, then there is no eternal significance.  And without eternal significance, there is no temporal significance either. 

So, why get married?

12-Year-Old Girl Shoots Home Invader

Another story "Liberal" gun grabbers hate and refuse to admit exists.

A 12-year-old girl said she never had fired a gun before she took aim at an intruder while home alone this week.



Degenerate Dirt Bag, Stacey Adam Jones

 Kendra, a sixth-grader at Calera Elementary, called her mother about 9:30 a.m. Wednesday to say a man was ringing the doorbell and banging on the door, St. Clair said.
“She said he was continuously ringing the doorbell and when no one answered he opened the screen door and started banging on the door,” St. Clair said. “She told me she didn't know where he had gone after that.”
St. Clair told her daughter to get her .40-caliber Glock pistol and go into the bathroom closet, which has reinforced locks on the door.

Among the many excuses "Liberals" use to violate Americans' 2nd Amendment rights is that only a well-trained person - a Soldier or police officer - can effectively handle a firearm in defense of self or others.  It's an obvious lie, but many Americans fall for it.

Obviously, more training is better, but as this story illustrates, with a gun, even a completely untrained 12-year-old girl can defend herself from an evil, full grown male. 

So, "Liberals", explain what other device makes that possible.