Career trumps integrity

It was predictable. There's no way that he'd have ever gotten his job in the first place if Bush didn't have strong reason to expect him to be a good soldier and just say what he's told to say.

Petraeus has no integrity.

He's claiming that no one could have said things back in January, things he actually said back in January. What he's trying to do is claim that improvement in Anbar province is attributable to the surge when the truth is that his own words described improvements in Anbar before the surge. Now he pretends what he said back in January wasn't said.

This is all just nonsense. You can't believe anything that any of those slimeballs say. Generals are scared to death that they might say something that ends up costing them a few hundred a month in their retirement benefits. Service to the country my ass. Self serving slime is more like it.

UPDATE:
Let's see, he didn't "clear" his statement with anybody but the date he's presenting was "vetted" by two intelligence agencies.

Okay.

UPDATE:
One of the reasons The General thinks we need to stay in Iraq is so that Iran doesn't take over.

The reason we used to support Saddam was as a way to keep Iran in check. That really worked out well.

UPDATE:
Chris Mathews of MSNBC is harping on The General's answer to a question about whether or not the current strategy in Iraq will make American safer if it succeeds.

He doesn't know, he says. He hasn't thought about it. He's focused on achievement of the message.

How many stars does this guy have?

What the hell has happened to the US military?

Walter Reed needs more than a change in top management

Joan Baez doesn't "fit".

In a letter to The Washington Post published Wednesday, she said rocker John Mellencamp had asked her to perform with him last Friday and that she accepted his invitation.


"I have always been an advocate for nonviolence and I have stood as firmly against the Iraq war as I did the Vietnam War 40 years ago," she wrote. "I realize now that I might have contributed to a better welcome home for those soldiers fresh from Vietnam. Maybe that's why I didn't hesitate to accept the invitation to sing for those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In the end, four days before the concert, I was not 'approved' by the Army to take part. Strange irony."

Has Bush managed to make every single employee of the federal government completely incompetent? That's a hell of an acheivement to have been able to replace every single competent federal employee with Regent Law School grads.

Volunteer armies are run by incompetent Generals

In a 60 minutes editorial, Andy Rooney made an arguement for using the draft to fight American Wars. Andy is so sure we can fight wars with draftees he even thinks we don't need a standing Army.

Basically he argued that the draft results in a better class of soldier. He's right. Not onloy that I think it results in a better class of General, it improves the whole military. We have a serious, excess suppply of incompetent, even cowardly, generals that's a direct result of a volunteer military.

I went to vietnam as part of a drafted military. I enlisted in the Navy, I wasn't drafted, but without the draft I'd have never enlisted. Not that we did quite as good a job winning our war as Andy did when he was drafted.

One characteristic of draftees that you don't often find in volunteer warriors, is a lack of tolerance of complete bullshit. I'm not sure people like our current crop of generals would actually be generals in a drafted Army. Nobody seems to ever require actual competence to succeed in a volunteer army, all it takes is typical chicken-shit avoidance of actually doing anything.

General Kiley gets to retire. Why isn't he being court-martialed. A General in a real Army that displayed the level of incompetence of this guy wouldn't survive. There's something seriouly wrong with a volunteer army if they make General's out of clowns like this and then don't even require competent performance.

Update. Some comments on Walter Reed, the Army, and the VA