Category Archives: War On Terror

Shocked. Shocked, I Tell You.

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I held off talking and writing about the Cascade Mall shooting on Friday, where a man the media immediately and hopefully desdribed as “Hispanic-looking” killed five at a Macy’s.

LIke any good Mitch Berg, I observed Berg’s 18th Law (“Nothing the media writes/says about any emotionally charged event – a mass shooting, a police shooting, anything – should be taken seriously for 48 hours after the original incident.  It will largely be rubbish, as media outlets vie to “scoop” each other even on incorrect facts.”), believing with sickening certainty that the shooter would be a Muslim with extremist sympathies, and believing in a somewhat more sarcastic vein that the shooter would be a Democrat.

And while we’re still technically under the boundaries of Berg’s Law, I just have to say;  Check:

A suspect in a mass shooting at a Washington state mall is arrested in Oak Harbor, Wash. (Twitter/Gerry Oliver)

Island County Sheriff’s Lt. Mike Hawley told reporters that he spotted Cetin near the suspect’s home in Oak Harbor, around 30 miles due west of the mall. Hawley said he immediately recognized Cetin as the suspect, turned his patrol car around and arrested Cetin without incident.

Arlan Cetin is an immigrant from Turkey.   While I may be a deplorable conservative, I do know Turkey is not “Hispanic”.

And although it’s premature to make the jump, the FBI is not ruling out terrorism.

And, er, check on the third point:

I’ll insert the usual disclaimers:  the vast majority of Muslim immigrants are perfectly fine people and good Americans.

Hillary voters, on the other hand…

 

Neerja Bhanot

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It was thirty years ago today that Neerja Bhanot won India’s highest honor for bravery in peacetime, the Ashoka Chakra Award when her jetliner, Pan Am Flight 73 from Mumbai to the US, was hijacked by terrorists from Abu Nidal, who were specifically targeting Americans.

Wikipedia takes up the story:

After 17 hours, the hijackers opened fire and set off explosives. Neerja Bhanot opened one of the doors. Although she could have been the first to jump out of the aircraft and flee to safety when she opened the door, she decided not to and instead started helping the other passengers to escape. Neerja was shot while shielding three unaccompanied American children from a hail of bullets of the hijackers. Out of a total of 41 American passengers, two were killed during the hijacking. A child on board, then aged seven, is now a captain for a major airline and has stated that Neerja Bhanot has been his inspiration and he owes every day of his life to her. 

I’m including the story partly due to its historical value…

…and partly to counter the notion that the cultural left continues to push – the idea that the individual is helpless in the face of adversity, to say nothing of aggression, without “the village” – the suffocating fog of government there to protect and validate them.  This thesis is trashed on a nearly-daily basis.  Faced with imponderable evil, against the most daunting odds, ordinary people do the most extraordinary things.  To attempt to has always been considered one of the greatest virtues of mankind.

And I’m here, in part, to keep reminding you of that.

So that, more importantly, you can remind others of that.

Uncommon Valor

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A company of 88 British paratroopers and Irish infantry, outnumbered six to one, hold out for two months without reinforcements…

And their near miraculous survival has been described as a latter day Rorke’s Drift, evocative of the 1879 siege in which 140 British soldiers held off a Zulu force of 3,000, later immortalised in the blockbuster film starring Michael Caine.
For 56 days in the autumn of 2006, the men at Musa Qala faced constant fire from fixed machine gun posts and mortars.
Hungry and frequently at the point of exhaustion, they were forced to somehow fend off 360-degree attacks from the Taliban, with little protection beyond a series of low mud walls.
They used up a quarter of all the British Army’s Afghan ammunition for that entire year.

…and are barred from talking about it for ten years.  

Yet while Rorke’s Drift has been immortalised in film and resulted in 11 Victoria Crosses, Musa Qala has been reduced to a controversial footnote in the history of the Afghan conflict.
It does not serve Whitehall well for details of such a poorly resourced mission to be revealed.
Steve Humphries, the award-winning producer who has painstakingly put the jigsaw of pieces together for broadcast a decade later, says: ‘It’s a shocking account of what was supposed to be a peaceful mission to help bring security and stability to the region.

The whole thing is worth a read – and I may see if the BBC streams it next week.

More White Christian NRA Members, I Presume?

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It’s hard to call any particular atrocity in France “the most sickening of all” – ISIS and its freelancers constantly push that envelope – but this one has to be on the short list:

A PRIEST has been beheaded and another hostage is ‘fighting for their life’ after two knife-wielding terrorists, reportedly shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’, took two nuns and several worshippers hostage at a church in northern France.

A third suspect has reportedly been arrested outside the church after a pair of ‘bearded’ attackers were shot and killed after raiding a Catholic mass at 9am in the French town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen in Normandy.

Father Jacques Hamel, believed to be 86-years-old, was the priest slaughtered by the duo as A’maq news agency, which is affiliated with ISIS, has officially reported that “two soldiers of the Islamic State” carried out the savage attack.

According to security sources, one of the attackers was a convicted ‘electronic tag wearing’ terrorist living with his parents.

Knife violence is kinda outta control today, isn’t it?

Gewalt Am Arbeitsplatz

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The fourth case of deadly German workplace violence carried out by angry right-wing white redneck NRA members of Arabic or Farsi descent – a suicide bombing in Nürnberg claiming 12, which can not possibly be connected to Islamicist terror – occurred over the weekend.

In related news, doctors in Bavaria note that the Munich spree-shooter was raising red flags…

…about being a suicide risk.  Fortunately, strict gun control laws that place a crippling burden on the law-abiding German citizen (who might have had a shot at stopping the slaughter in the time it took the Polizei to show up in densely-policed Munich) stopped the…

…oh, wait.  Never mind.

Falling Far Behind

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Whenever the subject of Islamicist terror is brought up, the left and media (ptr) springs to action to remind us that domestic “right wing terror”, which is just around the corner (we are constantly assured.

Someday.

Honest.

And who knows?  It could happen!

But if “the right” – with about four incidents of lethal terror in the past 25 years – is going to be much much worse. it’s going to pass Islamicist terror, they’re going to have to get hoofing to make up the numbers from this year alone.

Comprehensive Truck Control

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As this is written, as many as sixty dead in Nice, France.  The weapon?  A truck.

Berg’s 17th Law is in full effect; the mainstream media will get every single fact of this story wrong for the next 24-48 hours.

So I won’t speculate yet.

CNN – which is part of the mass media we should not trust for the next day or two – says the occupants (pl) of the truck started shooting at the crowd after they rammed into the throng.

We’ll see.

UPDATE:  We don’t know if this is linked with Nice, but it sure doesn’t look good:

UPDATE 2:  Le Monde says sixty dead:  the Daily Mail and Le Figaro say 73.  Frankfurter Allgemeine is saying 73 dead, 120 injured.

UPDATE 3:  Some French media reports on Twitter say the fire at the Eiffel Tower was just a truck full of fireworks burning.

If true, that’d be a pretty amazing coincidence…

UPDATE 4:  Sky News quotes French authorities saying it’s a terrorist attack, saying 75 dead, in critical condition.  They are also quoting a witness who said they saw one of the occupants of the truck coming out shooting

Here’s the live Sky News feed:

As this is written – 7:30PM Central US time – they’re vamping. Berg’s 17th Law is in effect.

 

Frustration

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It’s gotta be frustrating to be a terrorist, trying to actually get PR for attacks in America.

It’s gotta feel almost like a scene from Monty Python and the Life of Brian – they keep launching attacks in the US (via proxies, for the most part) and the government keeps blaming it on…others!

  • Nidal Hassan’s attack on Fort Hood?  Workplace violence!
  • The attack on the recruiters in Little Rock?  Street crime!
  • San Bernardino?  Why, that was workplace violence too, silly peasants!
  • Omar Matteen?  Whose ISIS sympathies were so clear that the Administration felt the need to clumsily redact them from public releases on the subject?   Apparnetly his victims were killed by self-animating Republican guns.

It’s gotten to the point that Al Quaeda (remember them?) is telling its lone wolves to try to focus on WASPS, to try to prevent the American social-justice grievance industry from co-opting their attacks for their own purposes:

In the June 12 attack in Orlando, Omar Mateen killed 49 people and injured 53 inside a gay nightclub. Although Mateen, who was later killed by police, told hostage negotiators he pledged allegiance to ISIS, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch has characterized the attack as a hate crime against gays.

“I cannot tell you definitively that we will ever narrow it down to one motivation,” Lynch told reporters last week. “People often act out of more than one motivation.

“This was clearly an act of terror and an act of hate,” she continued. “We will look at all motivations and hope to come to a conclusion there.”

Although Al Qaeda does not take credit for Mateen’s attack in the online article, it urges more “lone wolves” to take up arms. Jihadists should target “areas where the Anglo-Saxon community is generally concentrated,” it states. “This class of the American community is the majority and it is the one that is in the American leadership.”

On the one hand, it makes good PR sense; strip out as many hooks for the left’s exploiting the narrative as possible.

On the other?  They’ve tried it once – and it didn’t end well for them.

Reshuffling The Deck

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals instinctively maintain an excruciatingly calibrated hierarchy of victim-hood to determine who occupies the superior rank in any given situation.  Hillary lost the nomination to Obama because Black outranks Woman.  We all know that Gay outranks Christian and last month’s Bathroom Wars made clear that Trans outranks Women, too.

Orlando must have been an eye-opener for GLBT who have been accustomed to holding the top rung of the ladder.  Not only did a Muslim man specifically target gays for massacre, he boasted about it as he was doing it.  But today, the so-called “leaders” that GLBT thought were on their side, are defending the Religion of Gay Hatred.  The President won’t even mention its name.  Liberals are more worried about “toxic masculinity” than about actual dead men.

A week ago, homophobia meant which bathroom to use; today, it means which gravestone to choose.  Bad news folks: you’ve been out-ranked.  No civil rights for you.  Only Last Rites.

Joe Doakes

The “leaders” are also busily trying to manufacture a “gay muslim” constituency with which to feel solidarity – completely avoiding and ignoring the point of the entire massacre to begin with.

In Case You Hadn’t Had Enough Good News Today

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When Central Americans sneak across the border to the US, the ones who get caught claim asylum as refugees.  That entitles them to due process which means a hearing on their claims.  Except the courts are backed up for years. 

We don’t keep refugees in concentration camps at the border, we release them on their own promise to appear.  And being potential refugees, they’re immediately eligible for welfare, plus they can work pending the hearing, and the US Government pays their way to be resettled across the nation while awaiting the hearing.

The Orlando gunman worked for the company that has the contract to provide the transportation.

 Joe Doakes

Well, at least he’s not working at an airport…

…oh, crap.

An ISIS Victory On American Soil

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David French at National Review notes that ISIS has won both a tactical and strategic victory in Orlando – and done it on the cheap:

On Sunday, June 12, ISIS won a dramatic victory. Without risking any of its terror assets and without having to spend one dime of its financial assets, an ISIS volunteer vindicated its strategy of inspiring terrorist acts and launched the deadliest attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. The act not only shattered the lives of the victims and their families. It no doubt inspired still more jihadists to plot their own attacks both at home and abroad. Facing battlefield reverses in Iraq and Syria, ISIS struck back at its chief enemy. But the wins didn’t stop there. Incredibly, ISIS won not just in Orlando. It’s winning the aftermath. The American response to the attack has been beyond ineffective, veering decisively toward the counterproductive. We’re doing nothing more to deter or prevent terror attacks and everything to deceive our own people about the true nature of the threat. Rather than unite to fight a common enemy, we’re dissolving into partisan, polarizing stupidity.

Going after the NRA over Orlando – which many politically and socially prominent gays and media figures are doing – is a little like attacking the Eastern Orthodox Church over Hitler’s invasion of Russia; they weren’t there, and they had nothing to do with it.

French notes the deepening vacuity of our political class in dealing with this:

  • The western and moderate Muslim world’s campaign against ISIS remains dilatory and indecisive.
  • It’s not only validated ISIS’s latest tactic of farming out its terrorism in the West to “do it yourselfers” who get their information from ISIS’s very polished print and web presence, it gave them a poster boy with a big victory.
  • The entire US response so far?  Jabbering about gun control (which doesn’t affect terrorists in the least – even if you went door to door and grabbed every gun in the United States tomorrow, they could switch to gasoline, dynamite or knives), scabrous pronouncements against Christians and gun owners.

Everything but the two things that would work:  getting serious about ISIS, which is not only not the “JV team”, but is running rings around Barack Obama, and decreasing the number of places where citizens are rendered statutorily helpless targets.

One Of These Days. Honest. Really.

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For the 22nd year out of the past 22, the Department of Homeland Security warns us that “right-wing extremism” is coming.  Boy, howdy, is sure is.

Aaaaaany day now.

Yep!  This is the last warning!

No, stop laughing!

And it’s gonna be as bad – no twice…no, eleventy-teen times as bad as Islamic Extremist terror:

Also this week came news of the DHS comments concerning right-wing extremists, which were made during the Homeland Security Advisory Council’s January meeting – only one month after Muslim terrorists Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik killed 14 Americans in an attack in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015.

“Member [Austin Police Chief Art] Acevedo reminded the Council that the threat from right-wing extremists domestically is just as real as the threat from Islamic extremism,” the official meeting minutes state.

Johnson apparently agreed with Acevedo’s sentiments, the official records noted.

Sometime in the next three months, look for DHS to reclassify Islamic Extremism as “right wing”.

Lie First, Lie Always: And Out Come The Ghouls

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The last spent cartridge casing had barely pinged off the ground when the ghouls of Minnesota’s “Safe Criminals” movement came streaking out of the shadows to rip the bloody shirts off the (ahem) victims of an ISIS terror attack to try to jam their agenda down our throats.

Kim Norton – fresh from utter failure in the legislature, and apparently on her way to a fat, cushy job with a pro-murderer-safety non-profit:

Theatrical deep breath, here.

OK.  From the top:

  • Universal Background Checks:  For whatever reason, notwithstanding the fact that Omar Mateen had been under investigation for his terrorist sympathies and was famously unstable, Mateen didn’t come up on any background checks.  Why?  Bad reporting?  Official political correctness?  Let’s assume both.  Either way – while “universal background checks” would have made owning a gun harder for any of Mateen’s potential victims, it would have done nothing to stop him.
  • Rethink Carry Laws:  OK, let’s think.  Had one single gay man in that bar – a “gun free zone”, as usual – had a gun, it might have changed the course of events (as it does more often than our disinformed, and sometimes disinforming, media believes).  Of course, carrying a gun in a bar is a misdemeanor in Florida, which seems not to have been much of a deterrent to Mateen.  So yes, maybe it’s time to “rethink” the law to de-stigmatize the law-abiding citizen.
  • Not “normalizing carrying”:  Ever notice how places where law-abiding citizens normally carry are almost never the target of mass shootings or terror attacks?  And when they are, the attacks are more likely to end with dead shooters and terrorists?

So yes, Kim Norton – take a moment to stop gorging yourself on the blood of innocent victims and do some re-thinking.   Please.

Of course, Kim Norton is a gun-grabbing ninny because she gets paid for it (or will be, soon).    Rabbi Latz – apparently the brother of Senator Ron “I Went To Harvard, Don’t You Know” Latz – tweeted in response to a local human rights advocate who pointed out exactly what I pointed out to Rep. Norton, above:RabbiLatz

That Latz, rabbi at a “progressive” congregation in Saint Louis Park (who was in the process of dislocating his spine while bending over backwards to pin this atrocity on gun owners, rather than an ISIS terrorist) is in mid “smug response” with this tweet is the sort of inevitability that you learn to accept when dealing with orcs and the gun issue.

That a liberal rabbi, in the midst of a smug, know-nothing dismissal, tries to invoke the dissenter’s soul is purely loathsome.  The “Rabbi” is a blot on his calling.

Later, when I called him on his lack of command of the facts, he sniveled:

Screen Shot 2016-06-13 at 7.14.03 AM

“Rabbi” Latz is a thug and a wanna-be bully for abusing his ecclesiastical position to support a political agenda (an agenda I believe, and can prove, to be morally retarded, but that’s really irrelevant to the issue at hand – thuggish bulliness).   I may not “have all the answers” – but despite the fact that he has none, he not only trumpets his ignorance, but wraps it in unearned self-righteousness.

There may be few people in politics I respect less than “progressive” clergy.

Plain Sight

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Despite passionate denials by the Pollyanna Pair — Dog Gone and Penigma — I remain convinced that Brussels and Paris are linked. They are small unit actions in an slow-motion war being waged by fundamentalist Muslims against the West. The incomparable Fernandez explains why it’s worse than I thought.

In the six months since the Paris attack, Belgian authorities searched the Muslim-dominated neighborhoods where they believed accomplices were living. Authorities couldn’t find the bombers because they were being hidden by their neighbors.

The Brussels bombers were not lone wolves acting against the wishes of the Muslim community. They were supported and protected by members of the Muslim community. When Dutch householders hid Jews from Nazis, we applauded. But when Belgian Muslims hide suicide bombers from law enforcement, we have a different view.

Digging out the remaining co-conspirators and future martyrs will be arduous if the Belgian government even has the stomach for it, must less the money and manpower to answer the question: When will we know we’ve got them all? How far down does the tap root go? When will we be safe?

Geert Wilders, candidate for Prime Minister of the Netherlands, says if he wins he’ll crush Islamic terrorism, close the national borders and de-Islamize The Netherlands. Sounds like a new buzz-word has been coined, more catchy than Reconquista 2.0. One could pass it off as racist hatemongering except Wilders presently lives under a death sentence because of a fatwa issued against him by Imam Feiz Muhammad.

Now the really big question: are there embedded terrorist cells here, in the United States? Maybe even in our own Minnesota Muslim community? The San Bernardino attack and US Attorney Luger’s recent indictments suggest there may be. What are we going to do about it?

Joe Doakes

What are we going to do?

Where “we” means “our current ruling class?”

I’m going to guess “vigorous virtue-signaling”.

The Terrorists Are Pretty Much Winning

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This observation is a whack upside the head (emphasis added):

Some U.S. counter-terrorism officials say much of the gap between Washington and Belgium — and some other European countries — is cultural. Europeans’ deeper commitment to personal privacy sometimes prevents or delays sharing of information such as travel data — that is taken for granted in the United States.

The idea that Europe – the contintent of sheep-like government-addled socialized drones who gave us Naziism, Socialism, Communism and Soccer – have more commitment to personal privacy than the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is a jab in the gut.

In The Changing Fashion

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Read the Old Testament.  War was constant in ancient times, tribe against tribe.

Read Medieval history.  War was constant in Medieval times, family against family.

The Treaty of Westphalia, signed in 1658, nationalized war.  From that point on, “war” could only be conducted by nations.  All other violent conflict was “crime.”

We’re still operating under that intellectual framework.  President Obama doesn’t consider terrorism to be “war” because it’s not being waged by a distinct nation.  It’s just “crime.”  That’s why he sent the FBI to investigate the Benghazi consulate bombing – to look for clues so they could prosecute the criminals who blew it up and murdered our ambassador.

At some point, we need to shed our antique notion.  Military historian William Lind theorizes war has moved into a new generation characterized by smaller groups loosely affiliated in furtherance of a long-term goal.

That’s what Belgium looks like to me.

That’s what war looks like today.

Joe doakes

The good news:  we’ll never see another World War 2 again.

The bad news:  we’ll never see another World War 2 again.

Good Spirit. Lousy Idea.

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Anyone with a living soul was nauseated by the display in Cologne on New Years Eve, where thousands of men of “North African” descent roamed the street in gangs, sexually assaulting women and impeding the police’s attempts to respond.

Here in the US – where this sort of thing is thankfully very rare – the responses depended on the responder’s politics.

People on the left strenuously denied there was a problem, or blamed it on fraternities affiliated with the NRA.

People on the right bought another box of ammo.

Either would be more productive, I suspect, than this group of…er, males in the Netherlands:

The sign says “If you’re not wearing pants, you make less of a mess when they attack you”. No, that’s not true. It says “Don’t make women dress chaste / keep your hands to yourself”. That’ll show ’em.

I’m sure the women of Cologne are thankful for the “solidarity”.

A more productive statement?  Germans are doing their best to arm themselves, as best they can given Germany’s patriarchal gun laws.

And where real people try to arm themselves, you can count on the media to get the Victorian vapours.

The caption says “The Weapons industry profits from the Refugee crisis”. Naturally. Blame Big Gun.

Or in this case, I suppose, the Hohenzollern vapours.

Which group do you suppose will actually benefit the women of Germany – the shooters or the Dutch guys in dresses?

Halpert The Headless Thompson Gunner

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I saw 13 Hours over the weekend.

Several reactions:

Worst Fears Not Realized:  I’ve been rooting for this movie for a long time – ever since I met “John “Tig” Tiegen (Dominic Fumusa), and Mark “Oz” Geist (portrayed in the movie by Dominic Fumusa and Max Martini, respectively), and got a chance to interview them on my show last year.

But when I saw that Michael Bay was directing it, I felt my hope curdle into a icy ball of despair.  Bay was behind the loathsome Pearl Harbor and all the bad Transformers movies that followed on after the good one.    (Of course, he also did The Rock and the very underrated Pain and Gain, so perhaps I’m being a little harsh on the Bayver).

In a Michael Bay movie, .223 rounds apparently use napalm as a propellant.

But while it included some of Bay’s signature moves – the MTV-era editing, the slow-mo explosions, the Die Hard-style wisecracking between battle scenes – it all actually worked well.  And sometimes superlatively – as in a scene when a group of State Department employees in an armored Mercedes are getting shot at at point-blank range by a group of locals.  Really, really stunning sequence.

But the movie largely focused on the story.  And it’s there that things get interesting.

The Story Behind The Story:  The movie, of course, is about one of the most controversial events in recent years – the September 11, 2012 attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.  During the attack, the US Ambassador, a State Department communications staffer, and two CIA security contractors were killed.   The situation could have gotten much worse but for the team of CIA contractors – ex-military men working as guards for the CIA compound – who responded, defending the State Department compound for 13 hours, until a scratch team of American intelligence and military led a friendly Libyan militia to the rescue.

In a typical Michael Bay movie, there’d be a twist at this point. I won’t give you any spoilers, but any infantryman can probably tell you how this turns out.

The controversy – for those of you who’ve been asleep for the past three years – is over whether a “stand down” order was given to successive levels of potential US paramilitary and military response, from the contractors on the scene all the way up to the Air Force in Italy and the 10th Special Forces group in Croatia.  If so, of course, then the Ambassador and the contractors were left dangling for half a day without any government support.  The Administration and the CIA have angrily denied it; Hillary Clinton said it made no difference at this point; the contractors on the scene all swear by it.

It’s Michael Bay – and yet it works.

The movie plays a little peek-a-boo with the issue, but for one key episode; as the State Department and CIA staffers on the scene ask, then beg, for support, we are treated to scenes of CIA contractors being held on their leash; F16s in Italy sitting on the runway, unmanned; Green Berets in the Balkans, sitting and waiting.

Why?  That question is left danging out there.

And two of the conservative reviews I’ve actually read mirror the controversy; Armond White thinks Bay defers to entertainment over substance, using the tension as just another showy Michael Bay editing trick.   Cranky T-Rex at Hot Air thinks it’s a feature, not a bug:

Bay and screenwriter Chuck Hogan wisely avoid having the story they are telling sidetracked by political concerns.  Instead they are able to hammer home the horrible truths about Benghazi that have thus far been written off as Republican political pandering.

Of course, this blog’s standard procedure is to assume all bureaucrats are lying, so you know where my money is.

The movie has been portrayed as a challenge to the inevitability of Hillary’s coronation.  I’m way too cynical to think the American people are that perceptive – but hope springs eternal.

Brothers In Arms:  The casting, of course, was interesting to say the least.

For starters – if there’s one actor in Hollywood that’s benefitted from being utterly and completely typecast, it has to be Max Martini, as Mark “Oz” Geist.

Martini and Geist at the opening. The resemblance is more than just physical.

I interviewed Geist last year – and met him, shortly after that, at an event on the 13 Hours book tour – which was the first time I’d heard that the book was going to become a feature film (which shows you how closely I follow all things Hollywood.

And while I can’t honestly say I thought “Max Martini would be the perfect casting choice to portray Geist”, it all made perfect sense, personally as well as in terms of resemblance, in the actual movie.

Of course, the casting of Jon Krasinski as the pseudonymous and fictional “Jack Silva”, portrayed as a former SEAL colleague of Tyrone “Ty” Woods (played by James Badge Dale, of Longmire fame) is a little riskier.   I thought, going in – “Jim Halpert as a SEAL?”

It’s not Krasinski’s first take at a military character (he played a bit part in Jarhead, in 2005), but it’s his first since he became “Jim Halpert” in The Office, one of the best sitcoms of the century so far.  Did he blast out of the typecast?

Yes and no – and to the extent that he didn’t, that’s OK, since he’s not in the movie to portray a real former SEAL with a striking resemblance to a sitcom character; he’s basically the audience’s third-person-omniscient stand-in in the story.

Does he pass as a SEAL?  Well, he doesn’t pass as the Hollywood stereotype of a SEAL – which is probably a good thing.

So yes, it took me a bit to get past the habits picked up in 11 years of watching The Office (and yes, I’ve seen every episode, at least in the first seven seasons, at least a few times, and yes, it’s better than the Brit version), but I pulled it off.

(The film’s other Office alum, David Denman – who played warehouse worker and Pam’s first fiance “Roy”, plays the real-life David “Boon” Benton, and passes pretty easily as a former Airborne Ranger).

Krasinski and Denman.

Conclusions:  As filmmaking craft?   It was great bit of filmmaking.  The things that play as whiz-bang cliches in most Michael Bay movies generally work, here.

Acting?  It never stretches credulity.

The message?

Well, I’ll let you watch it, and leave it to each of you to figure out what you think about it.

Worth seeing in a theater.

Tangled Web

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Lying about having lied.  It’s like she just can’t stop herself.  Learned it from Bill?  Taught it to him?

“It would have been perfectly acceptable to say “Hell yes, I knew it was a terrorist attack as soon as it happened.  But knowing that doesn’t tell you where this bunch came from, who’s supporting them, who’s funding them, so we can stop the next attack.  We needed to keep the public spotlight off these terrorists while our agents and investigators back-traced them and their support network.  So yes, I lied about the attack in the immediate aftermath, in order that I would not have to lie after future attacks, because there would BE no future attacks.  And there haven’t been.  Your side is the one that keeps screaming we’re in a war, now you’re bitching that I lied to the enemy to buy time to hunt them down and kill them.  Make up your minds – do you want to fight terrorism, or not?”

Instead she lies to the families, and to the world, and then lies about having lied to them.  For what possible benefit?  It’s like she can’t help it.  She’s just a liar.

Joe Doakes