Target Centermass

Day: July 19, 2005

  • Toughest Domino Falls

    General William Westmoreland has passed away. This article was selected for both its perfect headline, which I’ve happily utilized, and its content.

    Retired US army General William Childs Westmoreland, who commanded American and Australian troops in the Vietnam war, has died at age 91.

    Westmoreland died yesterday of natural causes at Bishop Gadsden retirement home in Charleston, where he had lived with his wife for several years, his son James Ripley Westmoreland said.

    The jut-jawed officer maintained to the end that the US was not defeated by communist forces in South-East Asia.

    “It’s more accurate to say our country did not fulfill its commitment to South Vietnam,” he once said. “By virtue of Vietnam, the US held the line for 10 years and stopped the dominoes from falling.”

    He would later say he did not know how history would deal with him.

    “Few people have a field command as long as I did,” he said. “They put me over there and they forgot about me. But I was there seven days a week, working 14 to 16 hours a day.

    “I have no apologies, no regrets. I gave my very best efforts,” he said. “I’ve been hung in effigy. I’ve been spat upon. You just have to let those things bounce off.”

    Thank you for your service, Gen. Westmoreland. You never let the bastards get you too down.

  • I Was a Cylon

    “Obedient, robot-like killers.”

    For nine years, that was me, at least one weekend a month and two weeks a year. That is, after all, the description of American soldiers, according to a delightful piece of email sent to Blackfive.

    Whew! Glad I escaped that. Hell, brainwashed little ol’ me thought I was doing a service for the likes of the gent who wrote that. I’m sure that, in his own little peculiar way, the email author really meant, “Hey, y’all, thanks for the sacrifices[, baby-killers]. I really appreciate it[, you murderous slaves].”

  • Bush Nominates Federal Judge Roberts

    The buzz across the blogosphere and the media all day was about U.S. appeals court Judge Edith Clement.

    Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

    President Bush chose federal appeals court judge John G. Roberts Jr. on Tuesday as his first nominee for the Supreme Court, selecting a rock solid conservative whose nomination could trigger a tumultuous battle over the direction of the nation’s highest court, senior administration officials said.

    I have no stance at this time other than Judge Roberts is certainly no Justice Ginsberg and (please, please, please) hopefully no Justice Souter. Links to bios, reporting and blogging on Judge Roberts can be found at John Little’s Blogs of War.

    So, I’d like to throw out a couple of points about the erroneous buzz. First, expect the eeeevil puppet master Karl Rove to be blamed. Second, congrats to Dr. Steven Taylor at Poliblog — you got your impishly humorous wish.