Give me Bush!

Da'd'l be Jeb.

Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) will be resigning from the Senate, according to several senior Republican sources familiar with his thinking.

He made the announcement at a morning staff meeting, where he said he will not be returning to the Senate after the August recess.

Martinez announced he wasn’t seeking re-election to the Senate last December, but he had insisted that he would be serving out the remainder of his term, which expires in 2011.

Especially if he says he will not run for the office in 2010 ... or even if he does. Gov. Crist isn't going to appoint himself - much less Rubio. Some talk of TOM (The Other Martinez, former Gov. Beh, but I'll let Byron comment on that).

Sad to say, but I was an early support of Martinez when he ran for Senate. I kind-of regret that choice. Martinez seems to like to quit a lot.

What do I do with my medals?

GWOTEM and GWOTSM. I never really liked them anyway, as I am convinced we award too many medals and ribbons - but still.

It's official. The U.S. is no longer engaged in a "war on terrorism." Neither is it fighting "jihadists" or in a "global war."

President Obama's top homeland security and counterterrorism official took all three terms off the table of acceptable words inside the White House during a speech Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

"The President does not describe this as a 'war on terrorism,'" said John Brennan, head of the White House homeland security office, who outlined a "new way of seeing" the fight against terrorism.

Do we rename them, or do I just put them in the corner with my Cheney Shrine?

AFG: garbage in, garbage out

Remember growing up your parents always warned you about the kids you hung out with, to pick them well? Ditto with what you read, and what you listened too. Spend too much time with the wrong ideas in your head, and it starts to rub off on you.

Say what you want about GWB, but in Iraq he listened to the right people when it counted most. Keane and Petraeus. If he had listened to the ISG and then Sen. Biden (D-DE), then Iraq would have never had the chance it has now (that can still be lost BTW) and the consequences for this nation would be ... well ... don't even want to think about it.

So, who is the Obama Administration listening to?

Top U.S. officials have reached out to a leading Vietnam war scholar to discuss the similarities of that conflict 40 years ago with American involvement in Afghanistan, where the U.S. is seeking ways to isolate an elusive guerrilla force and win over a skeptical local population.
The overture to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stanley Karnow, who opposes the Afghan war, comes as the U.S. is evaluating its strategy there.

When you bring in a person whose intellectual high points are beating a drum of defeat, loss, and his view of national military disgrace into a conflict that he does not support (BTW, what did he want us to do in 2001/02?) and does not believe you can win, what type of advice are you going to get?

If you are looking for a way to win, you don't go picking fruit from that orchard.

If you want to know the world view of Karnow, just watch this PBS love fest of non-critical self-congratulation hosted by Charlie Rose with Stanley Schanberg, HDS Greenway and other like minded "experts" from Vietnam. Perfect example of the Vietnam those people want the nation to think about - because it excuses their complicity in the death of millions.

Funny, they never talk about what happened in Vietnam the way the military and unbiased history sees it. The facts are simple.

• Tet was a victory by the USA and South Vietnam ... on the battlefield. The press, leading with the stab in the back mis-characterization by Cronkite, helped the North attack the allied Strategic Center of Gravity (support at home in the USA), by calling it something else.
• Vietnamization worked so well that by the time the 1972 invasion of the South by the North took place, the North was defeated with South Vietnamese forces with a few USA advisors, financial and material support, and airpower.
• Defeat in Vietnam only came in 1975 when the post-Watergate/post-74 election Democrat controlled Congress shut down all monetary and military support in time for the Soviet-Chinese supported North to invade again. That is how South Vietnam was lost.

So, back to Afghanistan. If Karnow is who the White House is listening to, then Admiral Mullen needs to get his A-game going and General Petraeus needs to work as best he can to make sure the military is clear and direct on what is needed to win.

Do not let defeatist Democrats and the leftist press once again hang a self-fulfilling prophecy of defeat they engineered around the military's neck.

That is another great lesson from Vietnam. The senior leadership under no circumstances should let themselves take the blame for political actions of others. We are not part of any political administration, we simply report to The President as Commander in Chief and report as required by law to the Legislative Branch. We do not have to spin for politicians, or hew to a political talking points memo. We should always speak the truth as we know it. That goes for Administrations of any Party - and any SECDEF. We support and defend the Constitution, not individuals.

Political administrations come and go - but the truth will always come out. In our professional lives we should never been seen as part of the political landscape.

Sims, Mitchell, Connolly. Study. Read. Reflect. Look in the mirror.

Fullbore Friday

Last month, we lost a lion of the Cold War. It is amazing, especially in NYC, who could be just around the corner.

Of all the things I spent my time on there, wouldn't it have been great to have audited a class of his, or at least asked him if I could buy him a cup of coffee?

Major General Béla Király, PhD - Hungarian Army and Member of the Hungarian Parliament.

Well done on a life well lived. From the NYT's Obit;

Gen. Bela K. Kiraly, the commander in chief of the revolutionary forces in the Hungarian uprising of 1956, who for more than half a century was considered a folk hero in Hungary, and who returned there in 1989 to serve in its post-Communist government, died Saturday in Budapest. He was 97.

story at Brooklyn College, where he taught from 1964 to 1982. Before returning to Hungary, he lived for many years in Highland Lakes, N.J.

A former major general in the Hungarian Army, General Kiraly was the senior military leader of Hungary’s short-lived revolt against Soviet forces in the autumn of 1956. As commander in chief of the Hungarian National Guard and the leader of the Budapest garrison, he commanded a force of 26,000 insurgents and 30,000 Hungarian Army troops who had joined them.

When the uprising began on Oct. 23, General Kiraly was weak, ill and exhausted; he had just been released after spending five years in prison, four of them on death row, on manufactured charges of espionage. After the uprising was put down violently by the Soviets less than two weeks later, he fled to the United States.
...
Bela Kalman Kiraly was born on April 14, 1912, in Kaposvar, in southwest Hungary. After graduating from the state military academy in Budapest, he served as an army officer in World War II. In later years, General Kiraly said in interviews that he had tried to join the Russian side in the war rather than serve with Hungary’s fascist forces, but was unable to do so.

During the war, Mr. Kiraly commanded a battalion of 400 Jewish slave laborers at the Ukrainian front. Disobeying orders from his superiors, as The Jerusalem Post wrote in 1993, he “put the 400 men under his command into Hungarian uniforms and treated them humanely.” For his actions, he was honored in 1993 as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial authority in Jerusalem.

Captured by the Russians in 1944, Mr. Kiraly was sent to Siberia. He and two dozen of his men managed to escape from the train carrying them there and walked over the Carpathian Mountains back to Hungary. Mr. Kiraly was made a general in 1950 and appointed leader of the military academy in Budapest.

In 1951, General Kiraly was arrested on charges of subversion, sedition and spying for the United States. (The charges are now widely believed to have been concocted by Hungary’s Stalinist leaders.) He was given a death sentence, later commuted to life at hard labor. In October 1956, General Kiraly was among the prisoners paroled by the Hungarian government in a futile effort to appease mounting popular unrest.

When the uprising started, General Kiraly was in a Budapest hospital. “I was skin and bones coming out of five years of imprisonment,” Agence France-Presse quoted him as saying in 2006. “I was far from being healed, so I had to slip out of the hospital because the doctors would not let me go.”

At the request of Imre Nagy, a liberal Communist who was Hungary’s prime minister from 1953 to 1955 — and who was returned to office at the start of the uprising — General Kiraly organized the loose confederation of students, workers and other insurgents into a well-oiled fighting force.

“In 24 hours, I created a professional military staff,” the general said in the Agence France-Presse interview.

But it was no match for the hundreds of Soviet tanks that rolled into Budapest on Nov. 4. Pursued by two tank divisions, General Kiraly and a small band of resistance fighters headed for Austria. As they approached the border, the general ordered his men to blow up a nearby ammunition dump. With the Soviet tanks enveloped in the resulting cloud of smoke, General Kiraly and his men slipped through the border fence.

General Kiraly made his way to the United States, where he remained for the next 33 years. In 1958, Mr. Nagy and other leaders of the uprising were executed by Hungary’s post-revolutionary government. Had General Kiraly returned, he would most likely have met the same fate.

There is a lot more, please read it all.

It is men like this that make you ask; "What have I really done with the life that I have been given?"

I used to be a regular at a small restaurant that was owned by a husband and wife team. He was an officer in the Hungarian Air Force and escaped after the fall. He told me almost all of the other officers in his unit were executed immediately after capture; he kept running, made it to Austria then the USA. He still proudly kept a picture of himself in uniform with him.

A proud people. I hope this century is better to the Hungarians than the last.

Teh foniks

Figure out why this made Phib laugh,

Twenty-two-year-old Julio Castillo (HOO'-lee-oh cas-TEE'-yoh) had faced up to eight years in prison. Montgomery County Judge Connie Price said Thursday she believes Castillo is remorseful.

I'll wait for them to do this with the Italian, German, Chinese, Congolese, and Russian names any day now .....

Can LAWFARE get you killed?

Want to be gobsmacked? Read Michael Yon's latest.- and help the solution.

In this war we not only have to fight the enemy over there - but we have to fight the sheltered and clueless here.

Diversity Thursday III: Medical Deform Edition

From John Rosenberg via The Corner. This is why it is called a Diversity Industry.

A few days ago, noting some of the provisions in one of the pending health care bills, I asked, Is Your Health Care Culturally Incompetent?.

Now, looking at the 1018 page bill just passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on a 31-28 vote, I have one question: Was it written by anthropologists?

I ask this because of the bill’s pervasive concern with “culturally and linguistically appropriate services” (page 91), “EFFECTIVE CULTURALLY AND LINGUISTICALLY APPROPRIATE COMMUNICATION” (page 106), “DEMONSTRATION TO PROMOTE ACCESS FOR MEDICARE BENEFICIARIES WITH LIMITED ENGLISH PROFICIENCY BY PROVIDING REIMBURSEMENT FOR CULTURALLY AND LINGUISTICALLY APPROPRIATE SERVICES,” (page 405), concern with “the effect of delivering culturally and linguistically appropriate services on beneficiary access to care, utilization of services, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of health care delivery, patient satisfaction, and select health outcomes” (page 415), with the “COORDINATION OF DIVERSITY AND CULTURAL COMPETENCY PROGRAMS” (page 914), with “CULTURAL AND LINGUISTIC COMPETENCY TRAINING FOR HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS” (page 915).

Pausing for a moment on this coordination of diversity and cultural competency programs, be reassured that in giving grants to meet this goal,

the Secretary shall give preference to entities that have a demonstrated record of the following:

(1) Addressing, or partnering with an entity with experience addressing, the cultural and linguistic competency needs of the population to be served through the grant or contract....

Can anyone say, “ACORN Enrichment Provision”? There are several of these.

Joy.