Posted on 07/27/2008 6:46:01 AM PDT by connell
Most have now heard about the emails from soldiers in the field who were less than impressed by the fact that the Obamessiah failed to grace them with his holy presence. We posted on it yesterday.
Well, one of the first emails to travel around the net has now been "recanted" by the sender. The email itself was genuine, but now he is asking that people stop sending it around and posting it. He said it was meant only for his family.
The odds are good that what happened was that it got around, and since his name was attached, he caught a load of flak from his superiors. Military people are not supposed to show political preferences openly. Even though 75-85% of them are conservative, they're not supposed to let anyone know.
Snopes, of course, has used this as an excuse to discredit the entire theme of Obama's failure to visit the troops.
Concrete Bob has been communicating with Blackfive, and together, they are staying on top of the subject.
That Snopes would bend over backwards to defend a Democrat candidate should not come as any surprise. They've done it several times before.
Over the last few years, we (and others) have kept track of a few of these instances. We feel confident that a complete survey of Snopes' entries would reveal much more. In the meantime, read these articles and posts and add them to the list of evidence showing a left-leaning bias Snopes.
Bias at Snopes? (Facts in evidence not dispositive, but suggestive...)
Snopes' bias, Part II (The case is building...)
Online Rumor Mill Spins Its Own Myth(Snopes.com's leftwing bias undercuts its credibility)
Snopes: "T Kerry donates millions to fringe political groups through the Tides" = Urban Myth
Bush home v. Gore home (and Snopes' cute little bias)
A recent FR thread in re snopes, Obama, and John McCain.
A lot of people in the military are from less privileged backgrounds and embrace redistribution and a welfare state. McCain, who comes from a long line of military men, is himself a statist and has no real feeling for or understanding of the free market.
As a rule, military people, especially officers, will tend to be more nationistic than the population in general. Part of this is the result of having actually lived and traveled abroad, as well as long term serious study (as opposed to Obama’s whirlwind “fact finding” campaign event.) For whatever reason, Americans with more exposure to the world outside the United States, become more nationistic, not less, and not in a simplistic, jingolistic way either. Call it the Rudyard Kipling effect.
Snopes peddling malware?
By Justin Mann, TechSpot.com
Published: January 28, 2008, 8:44 PM EST
Snopes peddling malware?
Every once in a while, we hear about a legit site pushing malware. The reasons are varied, with some sites getting hacked, others relying on 3rd party vendors that may be less than trustworthy or they may just plain not feel there is anything wrong with pushing annoying or downright bad software onto people.
Snopes has been targeted as one of them. It seems for half a year now the company has been pushing Zango, formerly 180Solutions, onto people visiting the site in one form or another. Zango, whose own (former) employees don’t have anything good to say about it, has been spotted more than once peddling their wares in shady ways. So much so that the FTC saw it fit to levy a huge fine on the company. So why would Snopes, a site that has gained a considerable amount of fame for interesting factoids in dispelling or confirming urban legends, want to associate with these folks?
Money is one reason, though third party association is another. Regardless, it seems Snopes is very well aware that they are divvying up ads for Zango. I suppose someone has to, else where would Zango get the money to pay their millions in fines the next time the FTC comes after them.
http://www.techspot.com/news/28789-snopes-peddling-malware.html
It’s all a big conspiracy.
It's simply inscrutable. I once worked with an Air Force officer who, while in uniform, would rant and rave about Bush being responsible for the 9-11 attacks. And yes, I am dead serious.
bfl
...and the message is clear, and not one bit surprising. Obama's entire trip was a big political photo op and nothing more. He did not spend time with, care for, encourage, or visit the troops in general, and particulalry snubbed the wounded.
The man is unfit to serve as dog catcher as far as I am concerned.
SECOND LETTER (ANNONYMOUS)
I had a first hand view of Barrack Obama’s “fact finding” mission, when he passed through this base.
While I can’t name it, it’s one of the largest air bases in the region, with up to 8000 troops (depending on influxes and transients in mobilization/demobilization status), mostly Airmen and Soldiers, but some Marines, Sailors, Koreans, Japanese, Aussies, Brits, US Civil Service, contractors including KBR, Blackwater and Halliburton, among others in the news. The overwhelming majority of all of these are professional, courteous and disciplined.
Problems are rare.
Casualties are also rare. This base has a large hospital for evacuation—twenty plus beds. I have yet to see a casualty in one, though I am told there are about three evacuations a week through this region, of which two on average are things like sports injuries, vehicle accidents or duty related falls and such. You can tell from the news that the war is going well. The ghouls are now focusing on Afghanistan, since there is no blood to type with here.
This oped is of course subjective and limited, but I will try to present the facts as I saw them. I wasn’t able to see much, which makes a point all by itself.
When his plane arrived (also containing Senators Reed and Hagel, but the news has hardly mentioned them), there was a “ramp freeze.” This means if you are on the flight line, and not directly involved with the event in question, you stay where you are and don’t move. For a combat flight arriving or departing, this takes about ten minutes, and involves the active runway and crossing taxiways only. For Obama’s flight, this took 90 minutes, during which time a variety of military missions came grinding to a halt. Obviously, this visit was important, right?
95% of base wanted nothing to do with him. I have met three troops who support him, and literally hundreds who regard him as a buffoon, a charlatan, a hindrance to their mission or a flat out enemy of progress. Even when the rumors were publicly admitted, almost no one left their duty sections to try to see him, unless they were officers whose presence was officially required.
Mister Obama’s motorcade drove up from the flight line and entered the dining hall toward the end of lunch time. Diners were chased out and told to make other arrangements for food, in the middle of the duty day.
Now, there are close to 8000 troops on the base and its nearby satellites. No one came up from the Army side (except perhaps a few ranking officers). The airbase resumed operation, once he cleared the flightline, as if nothing had happened. The dining hall holds about 300 people and was not full. The troops did not want to meet him and the feeling was apparently mutual. In attendance, besides the Official Entourage, were the base’s senior officers, some support personnel, and a very few carefully vetted supporters who’d made special arrangements. No photos were allowed. No question and answer with the troops. No real acknowledgment that the troops existed.
Obama left around 1530, during the Muslim Call to Prayer, so he’s not a practicing Muslim. He was in a convoy guarded by (so I’m told) both State Department and Secret Service Personnel.
Less than three hours…
Within 48 hours he was in Afghanistan. It takes most troops longer than that to in-process and get cleared on safety, threats, policies and such. Yet he somehow made a strategic summary by not talking to anyone and not seeing anything.
Twenty-four hours after that, he was in Kuwait, back here, and then home, so fast we didn’t even know he arrived the second time at this base.
I can’t imagine any officer of the few he met told him anything other than what they tell the troops, and what their own leadership at the Pentagon tell them—we’re winning. Our troops are stomping the guts out of the insurgency. The surge worked and is working. If the insurgents have to divert to Afghanistan, it means they can’t fight in Iraq anymore. We should not change the rules and retreat with the enemy on the ropes as we did in Vietnam. We should finish kicking their teeth in. The Iraqi government now controls 10 of 18 provinces, with US assistance in the rest. Let us win the war. 90% of the troops I know, even those opposed to the war, say that is the way to win. Victory comes from winning, not from “change.” In fact, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is on record as opposing Obama’s strategic theory.
Since he obviously knew in advance that’s what they’d tell him, and since he didn’t care to talk to the troops (we’re told by the Left that the troops are horrified, shocked, forced to commit atrocities with tears in their eyes, distraught, burned out, fed up with losing, etc) and find out how they feel, and was barely in country long enough to need a shower and a change of clothes, we can only call this for what it is.
A disgraceful PR stunt, using the troops as a platform for his ego and campaign.
In comparison, I’ve seen four star generals and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on this base. They each held an all ranks call, met with and briefed the personnel, and took questions on every subject from tour length to uniform design to rules of engagement to weapon choice to long term policy, from the newest airmen to the senior NCO with TEN 120-180 day tours since Sep 11. It’s very clear they want to know what the troops think, and to keep them informed of events. It’s equally clear mister Obama does not.
From here we must move to my op part of the oped.
Obama clearly doesn’t care about the troops, doesn’t care about America, doesn’t care about anything except hearing his own voice and the chance to sit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…From where he’ll bring us the proven Democratic wartime leadership of Bosnia and the Balkans (US forces still there), Somalia (US forces prevailed despite being ill equipped by executive order, and taking heavy casualties), Haiti (what were we doing there again?), Desert One (oops?), Vietnam (where we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory), Korea (still there), WWI, and the fluke success of WWII won by such wonderful liberal notions as concentration camps for Japanese Americans, nukes, FBI investigations of waitresses who dated soldiers in case they were “morally corrupt” and the (valid) occupation of and continued presence in Italy, Japan and Germany for 60 years, which they are conveniently pretending won’t happen with Iraq.
That’s not “change.” That’s “failure we can do without”.
ping
Why give Snopes the traffic? Modern Conservative is probably doubling their traffic with all this stupid attention. And for what?
I still think there is alot of truth to the original letter. Here is the recant:
“I am writing this to ask that you delete my email and not forward it. After checking my sources, information that was put out in my email was wrong. This email was meant only for my family. Please respect my wishes and delete the email and if there are any blogs you have my email portrayed on I would ask if you would take it down too. Thanks for your understanding.”
Most of the time, if it’s non-political and non-ideological, Snopes and Wikipedia can be given the benefit of the doubt.
But I was taught in school many years ago always to analyze the news, never to take it for granted, and always to think for myself.
In many instances, all you have is probabilities, not complete certainties. For instance, is there a clinton body count? Well, we have plenty of evidence as to clinton’s bad moral character. We have more dead bodies surrounding his path through life than coincidence can account for. Dozens of people who worked for him have turned up dead in suspicious circumstances.
In cases like Ron Brown and Vince Foster, the evidence is circumstantial but, I think overwhelming.
Finally, we know that he has been involved in corrupt and criminal activities. He grew up among the Dixie Mafia in Hot Springs, he was involved with several drug smuggling enterprises, he was friendly even in the White House with drug smugglers, he and his brothers indulged in drugs themselves—cocaine, not just marijuana.
So, is clinton responsible for numerous murders? Probably. I’d say the odds are at least 999-1. But not certainly.
Newspapers used to get things wrong pretty often through sheer laziness and carelessness. When they wrote a story about something you knew about first hand, there were always at least small details that were wrong. For instance, in those recent terrorist stories, not knowing a backhoe from a bulldozer.
But in recent years they have been repeatedly caught telling outright lies or deliberately concealing the truth. So, anyone who trusts them on important matters without doing a bit of checking and analyzing, and considering what grounds they might have to tell a deliberate lie, is a fool.
SNOPES
DRUDGE
KOS
Karnak Says: Name three internet websites that have been ‘lavishly funded’ by Al Gore(google) and the DNC.
“So, anyone who trusts them on important matters without doing a bit of checking and analyzing, and considering what grounds they might have to tell a deliberate lie, is a fool.”
As with most websites, it isn’t altruism the keeps them in business, it’s money.
Once in a while, money is used as an incentive to get the truth.
Most of the time, money is used as an incentive to keep the truth hidden.
SNOPES is just on the side of making money.
DRUDGE,KOS, the same.
You have to sniff ‘em out. They’re everywhere.
People cite Snopes and Wikipedia as if they were gospel...
An email that is going around right now comparing McCain’s and Obama’s proposed taxes was also denied by Snopes. Considering that the data in the email came from a couple of reputable sources, I could only conclude that the rebuttal came directly, or indirectly, from Obama’s camp and that Snopes chose to publish that information rather than dig around a little bit on their own.
Money is one cause of distortion. Ideology is another. The major media are in the process of destroying themselves, driven more by ideology than money, and they are too stupid to understand what the problem is.
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