Captain America Calling

I could go off but am not quite ready to unleash the torrent yet so you get a few snippets and disjointed non sequiturs.

First came Paris, than we had the Prez, saying, I got this, Isis is contained, J.V. team blah, blah, blah. America, you've got nothing to worry about.

I was driving to Pasadena as the events in San Bernardino unfolded. Very scary, sounded like three terrorists initially, armageddon coming down pretty close to home.

When I heard about the body armor and the high caliber weapons, like most of us, my first reaction was islamic terror. I know, its unfair, we just had a white boy godsquader shoot up a Planned Parenthood, but this one just felt like Islamic terrorists to me.

When the news initially came in, both the President and his attorney general, Loretta Lynch, cautioned that it might merely be a workplace dispute. And anyone objectively perusing the facts knew that it wasn't, the planning, the caliber of the bullets, that explanation didn't feel right at all. Sort of reminded me of the initial administration spin on Benghazi, a reaction to a movie. We all knew what went down was terrorism.

God the President was hoping that it was a workplace dispute.

So we all know the upshot. The refugees people were worried about weren't the problem after all. It was a home grown radical and his mail order bride. Someone forgot to ask her to check the "are you a jihadi? box"on the handout on the plane. Another Nidal, Boston, Chattanooga.

Lot of questions. Did the mother think it was at all unusual to have a bomb factory in the house? Was the baby a prop? The dopey neighbor who cleaned up vomit at the tavern, Marquez, intimated that there were a whole bunch of sleeper cells here, when do the other guys get the secret dog whistle?

Jerry Morgan, owner of the tavern, said Marquez worked at the door to check IDs on band nights.
“People ask me, ‘What did he do?’ ” Morgan said. “I say, ‘You stand at the door and ask him for his ID.’ There’s his job description. Vomit on the carpet? He was the guy that cleaned it up. Cigarette butts in the parking lot? He was that guy. Quiet guy.”

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I thought it was interesting that Farook Syed's dad said not to argue with the jewish guy at work, Israel had two years left, tops. Not sure if that was word from this administration. But I did think it was funny that Lynch told muslims to call her if they felt they were getting bullied.

According to FBI statistics, jews have born the brunt of recent hate crimes and bullying, approx. 56% with Muslims at 11% in 2014. How come we never got her phone number?

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports: Hate Crime Statistics, 2014, there were 1,140 victims of anti-religious hate crimes in the U.S. in 2014. “Of the 1,140 victims of anti-religious hate crimes: 56.8 percent [56.8%] were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Jewish bias.” That amounts to approximately 647.52 instances where Jewish individuals, businesses or institutions were targeted.
A mere “16.1 percent [16.1%] were victims of anti-Islamic (Muslim) bias,” amounting to approximately 183.54 instances where Muslim individuals, businesses or institutions were targeted.
In the U.S., Jews were targeted an astonishing 40.7 percent (40.7%) more than Muslims in the year 2014.
Anti-Christian bias (including both anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant bias) came in fourth at 8.6 percent (8.6%), behind anti-other religion bias (11.0%). According to FBI statistics, “6.1 percent [6.1%] were victims of anti-Catholic bias” and “2.5 percent [2.5%] were victims of anti-Protestant bias” respectively. There were approximately 98.4 instances where Christian individuals, businesses or institutions were targeted.
6.2 percent (6.2%) of the 1,140 victims of anti-religious hate crimes “were victims of bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, groups),” and “1.2 percent [1.2%] were victims of anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.”

In fact there have been horrible hate filled and violent acts perpetrated against jews recently in Brooklyn. Will you ever hear a peep out of this administration? Doubtful. Lynch is after all, the woman whose HBLSA organization invited the PLO to come to Harvard and then forbade jewish students from participating and asking questions.

Neighbor said that she thought it was weird that the woman next door was running around with the burkha and the automatic weapons. But she was afraid of being called a racist. And she was probably right, Lynch would have been in her face in no time.

One of the things that bothers me is that in the blanket denial from the CAIR types and the usual muslim advocacy groups where we hear the same old blah, blah blah about the behavior not being part of islam, something else creeps in.

The L.A. Director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations Hussam Ayloush said on CNN’s New Day Friday that the United States was partly responsible for terrorism carried out by Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS.
Ayloush made the comments live in San Bernardino, California, the site of a recent shooting attack that left fourteen people dead. Authorities now believe one of the shooters declared their allegiance to ISIS during the attack. “Let’s not forget that some of our own foreign policy, as Americans, as the West, have fueled that extremism,” he said.

The victim, in this case the United States, is at least partially responsible according to the advocacy groups. You hear the same sort of stulyot from CAGE UK.

Short of Boko Haram, I can't think of anybody as barbaric as ISIS. To think that any of their behavior can be at all justified and that any civilized person would take that road simply boggles the mind. But the radicalization sounds reasonable to Hussam Ayloush. Because we were mean to Morsi, who himself was guilty for a host of abuses that the Islamists conveniently forget.

Anyhow we have our share of mass murders in this country and you can't pin the lions share on ISIS sympathizers but they  are responsible for a lot of the ideological killing. You have your stray abortion doctor killing and Eric Rudolph or Tim McVeigh but when I hear of a terrorist incident killing innocents I'm just not looking for errant methodists or lutherans.

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I heard William Cohen, the ex defense secretary and Senator on the radio decrying our war readiness last week. In our haste to beat sword into plowshare he said we were in the 35% readiness range. Things are broken and much of our military has been mothballed. This general says it's more like a 50% readiness level.

Gen. John Paxton, the assistant commandant of the Marines, told senators earlier this year that half of the corps’ units in the United States are not at “readiness levels needed to execute wartime missions, respond to unexpected crises and surge for major contingencies.” At the same Capitol Hill hearing, Admiral Michelle Howard said the Navy is “at our lowest surge capacity that we’ve been at in years.” And while presidential candidates of both parties have called for the United States to use its air power to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Larry Spencer said that when it comes to the “combat air forces that we have right now, less than 50 percent are fully spectrum ready.”

I think the President should level with the country. We can't go to Syria because we let the military go to hell. Sorry.

And the military is reporting a serious bomb shortage.

The US military says its 15-month bombing campaign on the Islamic State is depleting its munitions supply and that additional money and other support is “critical” for “the long fight.”
"We're expending munitions faster than we can replenish them,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said Friday. “We need the funding in place to ensure we're prepared for the long fight. This is a critical need."
The Air Force has reportedly fired more than 20,000 bombs and missiles in Syria in the fight to dismantle the self-proclaimed Islamic State.
Air Force officials say they have enough munitions right now but project a shortage and want more long-term planning and funding to meet future needs.
“B-1s have dropped bombs in record numbers,” Welsh also said. “We are able to manage inventories to sustain operations against ISIL at this time. We do need funding in place and the ability to forecast for production to be ready for the long fight ... We continue to work on a longer term funding strategy which is absolutely required."
The Air Force now has an estimated 142,000 "smart bombs," or guided munitions, and 2,300 Hellfire missiles, used in drone strikes to kill terrorists.

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I have to go and so I will leave with one last thing. I don't like the way this administration wags its fingers in Americans faces and lectures them about not being scared and not alienating the poor muslims. Cue the high minded idealism. All of these politically correct platitudes. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Playing right into the terrorists hands, they tell us. The truth of the matter is this administration would rather sit on its hands and do nothing about the ISIS problem, short of complaining that Germany isn't ponying up enough money and pout that Putin won't change his mind about Assad. Oh ya, and why are we the only ones calling them ISIL when the rest of the world uses the term ISIS? Are we continuing to display our intellectual superiority?

50 Special Forces fighters, to go with the four men it took a half a billion to train, they should turn the tide, that is if Captain America is leading the charge.

ISIS has declared war on us, they are serious, wishing them away won't work. The visa program is a joke, it is obvious that it won't work either. Americans are quickly losing faith in their government's ability to protect them. I get it, not all muslims are islamic terrorists, but I'm pretty sure that all islamic terrorists are muslims. We get to figure out who is who. Bill points out that you are far more likely to be killed by a cow than a terrorist and that may be. But the psychic terror that these events cause is still palpable.

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It is apparently so easy to become a beast. I heard a commentator on MSNBC seriously ask another talking head if they thought that the San Bernardino pair may have been radicalized by listening to Donald Trump? Huff Po has a primer today out on how to avoid islamophobia.

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The President is admittedly in a tough spot and he has put the military in a tougher spot. No targets that can incur environmental or collateral civilian damage. What percentage of sorties are scrubbed? Very tough to fight a hygienic war.

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Bacevich disagrees with the threat, interesting viewpoint. Go to go. More later.

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It pisses me off when people come to my country and kill innocent people for ideological reasons, even worse when Americans do it. I want my President and the left to be pissed off about it too.