Free Republic

The competition was tough. So many candidates, but there can only be one true Asshat. To tell the truth, there was someone else in mind for the honor and the article was almost complete when I was told of an article in a Canadian newspaper written by the eventual winner. While it is certainly nothing new to hear a leftwing nutjob slamming Canadian sports celebrity/broadcaster/conservative/favorite son Don Cherry, it is the background of the article's writer that made this an easy choice. Montreal Gazette sportswriter Jack Todd is this year's Asshat of the Year. Not for his condemnation of Cherry,...

F-111B - a victim of the air war over Vietnam By Greg Waldron on December 8, 2010 The retirement of Australia's F-111Cs last week ended the long story of a successful, and iconic, long range bomber. Many forget, however, that US Navy's version of the aircraft, the F-111B, was a failure. The F-111B was big like the F-111C, though it had a stubbier nose to make carrier landings easier. Conceived as pure fighter (the naval version of the Tactical Fighter Experimental) in the early sixties, it would not need a gun. The F-111B's AWG-9 pulse doppler radar and Phoenix missiles...

Lt. Gen. Hal Moore took his sword from its sheath Tuesday evening, raised it and said, “I’m going to cut this cake like a soldier.” The cake didn’t stand a chance. Moore sliced swiftly through the sugary goodness to help commemorate the 45th anniversary of the Battle of Ia Drang, where outnumbered American soldiers held off the North Vietnamese on Nov. 14-16, 1965. Several hundred visited Auburn City Hall in a tribute to Moore and veteran journalist Joe Galloway, who co-authored the book “We Were Soldiers Once … And Young.” Between slices of cake, Moore and Galloway spoke to the...

<p>A Puerto Rican veteran of the Vietnam War has been awarded the Silver Star for helping to rescue a company pinned down by enemy fire in 1965.</p> <p>Angel L. Cumba served as a gunner with the 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division. He received the military's third-highest decoration Thursday during a Veteran's Day ceremony in the U.S. territory.</p>

“Since it’s generally accepted–but wrong–that Tet drove the American people against the Vietnam war, you have a class of commentators, and people in government too, who keep anticipating this kind of event–some grand event that will suddenly mark a sea change in the support of any military effort overseas, at which point people just turn against it,” says James S. Robbins, author of the new book "This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive."... To Robbins, the Vietnam narrative must be reclaimed from the “ruling class of hippies and leftists, who went from protests to the U.S. Senate in some...

Today is the publication date of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive, by James Robbins. ... I vividly remember following news of the Tet offensive in 1968 and subsequently fell for virtually every element of the myth of Tet that Robbins exposes in this lucid, important book. The book thus rings a bell with me, as I suspect it will for many readers of this site. Robbins argues that the myth of Tet has lived on to do much damage.

Note: Photo included, Wanted poster included, audio file and transcript include, and a link to America's Most Wanted included. (See below.) # Note: The following text (minus the photos) is a quote: Headline Archives The aftermath of the attack on Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin 40 years ago this week. TERROR AT STERLING HALL 40 Years Later, Fugitive Search Continues 08/23/10 Where is Leo Burt? You can earn up to $150,000 by helping us find him. Forty years ago—on August 24, 1970—Burt and three other young men protesting the Vietnam War carried out a pre-dawn bomb attack at...

The Army has dropped the Vietnam-era name "psychological operations" for its branch in charge of trying to change minds behind enemy lines, acknowledging the term can sound ominous. The Defense Department picked a more neutral moniker: "Military Information Support Operations," or MISO. U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Ken McGraw said Thursday the new name, adopted last month, more accurately reflects the unit's job of producing leaflets, radio broadcasts and loudspeaker messages to influence enemy soldiers and civilians. "One of the catalysts for the transition is foreign and domestic sensitivities to the term 'psychological operations' that often lead to a misunderstanding...

Congressman Phil Hare (IL, 17th District) is the perfect example of the sort of congressman no one should want. He's arrogant. He's dismissive. He's self-important. He's easy to anger. And worst of all he has disdain for his own voters. The man is simply a creep. In April we had video of this arrogant cuss saying that he didn't care about the U.S. Constitution in the Obamacare fight. Apparently that darned old rag of paper is meaningless to this powermad pol. This time we have Congressman Hare intimidating a voter and demanding that this Vietnam vet supply the congressman with...

This Dick Blumenthal even looks a little like Eliot Spitzer. And now it turns out, as somebody said yesterday, even Jane Fonda spent more time in Vietnam than he did. We’re talking about Connecticut Atty. Gen. Dick Blumenthal - you can call him “General.” .....

Christopher Shays of Connecticut found it puzzling: over time, his friend Attorney General Richard Blumenthal kept revising how he talked about his military service during the Vietnam War. Mr. Shays, a conscientious objector who avoided the Vietnam War, has his own theory about Mr. Blumenthal’s evolving descriptions of his service: “I think that it was a way that he quickly bonded with people I am sure he admired and respected.” When Paul Kingman, a Navy veteran who lost feeling in his feet after chemotherapy, called Mr. Blumenthal’s office in 2007, he was trying to get a hearing for disability payments...

As the New York Times has reported, Connecticut Attorney General and Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal remained stateside during the Vietnam War thanks to five deferments he obtained, the last of which enabled him to take a job in the Nixon White House. During research for my book The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (Doubleday 2008), I uncovered some documents that showed Blumenthal, then a staff lawyer for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a key domestic policy adviser to the president, had aroused the suspicions of Attorney General Mitchell. The year was 1969, and the country was wracked by...

America won the Vietnam War. You hadn't heard? Then check out "The Politi- cally Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War," Phillip Jennings' new entry in the popular Regnery series. Mr. Jennings wrote the book with a specific purpose: "To settle scores with the pernicious mythmakers of the Vietnam War." These include journalists, politicians and academics, who both created the myths of Vietnam and profited from them. For this group, Mr. Jennings has three words: "Shame on you." Mr. Jennings' book is a well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context. It is not...

Ultimately, South Vietnam became a casualty of American domestic politics: Watergate, the oil crisis and a general crisis of national confidence. The 1973 Paris Peace Agreement was a flawed deal forced on Saigon with promises of future support that were soon broken. President Nixon was hounded from office. The emboldened Democratic Congress cut aid to South Vietnam and left the Paris Peace Agreement unenforceable. President Ford was too weak politically to force the issue, even if he had wanted to. Hanoi seized the opportunity in the spring of 1975 and invaded the South. The South Vietnamese mounted a spirited defense...

WASHINGTON — Col. Robert L. Howard, an Army veteran from San Antonio and one of the Vietnam war's most highly decorated soldiers, was laid to rest Monday at Arlington National Cemetery as friends and family looked on. A survivor of five tours in Vietnam, he received the Medal of Honor for directing a counterattack when 250 enemy troops almost overwhelmed his platoon in December 1968 when he was a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army Special Forces. Wounded by grenades and unable to walk, he continued to command and was the last to board a helicopter that took his...

"Daniel Ellsberg (born April 7, 1931) is a former American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg _____________________________________________________________ "As a response to the leaks, the Nixon administration began a campaign against further leaks and against Ellsberg personally. Aides Egil Krogh and David Young under John Ehrlichman's supervision created the 'White House Plumbers,' which would later lead to the Watergate burglaries."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#Fallout _____________________________________________________________ So what is Daniel Ellsberg...

Closure after 40 years Local Vietnam veteran returns to Vietnam and Cambodia to put closure on the wounds of war after many years.    Suncrest residents Len Koolstra and his sons Dan and Jay recently returned from a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. In every way, it was an eye-popping, life-altering adventure for the trio in the Far East, a place the younger Koolstras had never  been before. But for the father, it was a full circle, the end of a long emotional journey, a closure for a 40-year battle. In Oct 1968, Len Koolstra, then a 20-year old young sunny...

<p>Witter in New York, Rescorla used the same tactics to calm co-workers as he led them from their offices during the attacks on the World Trade Center.</p> <p>Rescorla survived battlefields in Southwest Asia, but he apparently was not so fortunate Sept. 11. Currently on the missing list, Rescorla was last seen in a 10th-floor staircase. He is credited with saving 3,800 colleagues, while sacrificing himself.</p>

YORK It took 41 years, but a York County airman missing in action since the Vietnam War has finally been laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery after his remains were positively identified earlier this year. Melvin Douglas Rash, of Grafton, was buried with full military honors Dec. 7 at the revered Washington-area cemetery. He had been missing since 1968, when his Air Force C-130 airplane was presumably shot down over Vietnam. After years of dead ends, the plane's wreckage was finally positively identified in 2002 in a jungle area near the Laotian border. It took six years before military...

PHETCHABUN, Thailand – Thailand sent army troops with shields and batons to evict some 4,000 ethnic Hmong asylum seekers Monday and send them back to Laos despite strong objections from the U.S. and rights groups who fear they will face persecution. Under tight security, more than 1,000 of the Hmong were loaded onto covered military trucks and driven out of the camp toward buses waiting near the Lao border, Thai authorities said. Journalists kept at a distance from the camp could see many children inside the trucks. With the eviction under way, the United States called for it to stop....