Dakota Meyer's heartfelt plea for all of us to come together, and blame President Obama for police violence and racism.

President Obama giving Dakota Meyer the Medal of Honor.

A note from Dakota Meyer courtesy of Bristol Palin's possibly non-ghostwritten blog:

I’m tired. I’m tired of seeing my country divided and fighting itself. It has been tricked by the media and by this administration thinking that the enemy is us. Hitler used the common enemy approach prior to World War II to unite a splintered and struggling Germany. We used the common enemy of communism to unite our country for the 40 or so years that followed the end of that war. (So wait, we used Nazi tactics, and that is supposedly a good thing?) Then the wall came down and we lacked a true common enemy until September 11, 2001. (I'm going to guess that something this poorly written comes mostly from Meyer himself, with perhaps a little help with editing. But what I think he's trying to say is that we need somebody to hate in order to unite America. Which is pretty fucked up if you think about it.)

But then that faded and America was in a lull of sorts lacking unity. Then 8 years ago “Change” was brought to the White House and over the past 8 years I have seen that change. The media and the Obama administration have worked tirelessly and we are just about there now. We are not a nation as much as we have become groups of people fighting amongst one another because the enemy is us. (People standing up for their rights to be treated equally and justly is considered "fighting among ourselves?" Does Meyer think that was true during the Civil Rights marches, the rallies for women's rights, and the protests against war? You know what, he probably does.)

When did we become so ugly as a nation? Why are we ok with not being better human beings? I’m tired of watching people dying. I’ve seen too much of it. I’m tired of the anger over things that aren’t even understood. (Actually most of us DO understand it. And if you studied better so might you.)

Just stop. 

We know better than to act like this. Guns are not evil. Police are not evil. It is people who have become ugly and cruel to one another. It is people who have accepted the easy way out. They’ve chosen to be afraid and angry. They’ve chosen to blame other people for their problems. It is easy to be angry and blame someone else than to take responsibility for yourself. We need to just stop. Stop blaming other people and start now making ourselves better as human beings. (Okay black folks do you hear that? You have "chosen" to be afraid and angry and all you have to do is stop being angry and just accept that you will be harassed by the police and shot dead for having a legal firearm in your possession.)

It is time to be done with being bound by a common enemy and instead be bound by the commonality that we are all Americans. I am saddened by what happened this evening and the events leading up to it. My heart and my prayers go out to the families of the officers who were shot in Dallas tonight. (But not for the young black men who were shot by the police?) This isn’t what I want to leave for my daughter when I die and I will be dammed if I am going to sit here and do nothing.

So instead of doing nothing you attack the man who awarded you the medal without which nobody would even know your fucking name?

You know Dakota is right about one thing, the violent racism DID bubble to the surface when President Obama was elected.

However he didn't cause it, he was the target of it.

And ever since the first black man was elected President, and the racists stormed out of the shadows to attack him, we are seeing more and more black and brown people refusing to stay quiet about the institutional racism which has been present since the founding of this nation, and which many white folks seem to be learning about for the first time.

That is not tearing us apart, that is educating us.

And by the way Dakota, asking people in pain to stop sharing that pain publicly because it makes you uncomfortable demonstrates to most of us that the hero who earned that medal in Afghanistan is light years away from the man who was tricked into marrying a member of the Palin family.

Now you are a puppet being used to spread ignorance in the guise of wisdom.

Now you are helping to fund attempts to stifle a family's 1st Amendment rights.

Now you are an embarrassment to all of the others before you who have worn that medal which President Obama so graciously put around your neck.

Is THAT what you want to leave for your daughter when you die?

I don't think that the Rolling Stone review of American Sniper is going to make the conservatives very happy.

Courtesy of Rolling Stone: 

The really dangerous part of this film is that it turns into a referendum on the character of a single soldier. It's an unwinnable argument in either direction. We end up talking about Chris Kyle and his dilemmas, and not about the Rumsfelds and Cheneys and other officials up the chain who put Kyle and his high-powered rifle on rooftops in Iraq and asked him to shoot women and children. 

They're the real villains in this movie, but the controversy has mostly been over just how much of a "hero" Chris Kyle really was. One Academy member wondered to a reporter if Kyle (who in real life was killed by a fellow troubled vet in an eerie commentary on the violence in our society that might have made a more interesting movie) was a "psychopath." Michael Moore absorbed a ton of criticism when he tweeted that "My uncle [was] killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards …" 

And plenty of other commentators, comparing Kyle's book (where he remorselessly brags about killing "savages") to the film (where he is portrayed as a more rounded figure who struggled, if not verbally then at least visually, with the nature of his work), have pointed out that real-life Kyle was kind of a dick compared to movie-Kyle. 

(The most disturbing passage in the book to me was the one where Kyle talked about being competitive with other snipers, and how when one in particular began to threaten his "legendary" number, Kyle "all of the sudden" seemed to have "every stinkin' bad guy in the city running across my scope." As in, wink wink, my luck suddenly changed when the sniper-race got close, get it? It's super-ugly stuff). 

The thing is, it always looks bad when you criticize a soldier for doing what he's told. It's equally dangerous to be seduced by the pathos and drama of the individual solider's experience, because most wars are about something much larger than that, too. 

Deifying a man who made sure to kill more people in order to protect his reputation as the most lethal sniper in the military. Just things conservatives do.

However to be serious if you actively engage in a contest where each point on the scoreboard signifies the end of a human life, you, in no way, deserve to wear the mantle of hero.

From all I can tell Kyle was a psychopath who found a legally supported, and celebrated, outlet for his murderous instincts.

Is anybody else having Jeremy Morlock flashbacks?

Cause I am.

Can't have a controversy about the Chris Kyle movie without Sarah Palin putting in her two cents, now can we?

Courtesy of the Bandwagon Jumper's Facebook page: 

God bless our troops, especially our snipers. 

Hollywood leftists: while caressing shiny plastic trophies you exchange among one another while spitting on the graves of freedom fighters who allow you to do what you do, just realize the rest of America knows you're not fit to shine Chris Kyle's combat boots. 

May the epic "American Sniper" bring nothing but blessings to Taya and the children of this true American hero. 

Thank you Bradley Cooper and Clint Eastwood for respecting the United States Military.

 - Sarah Palin

"Spitting on the graves of freedom fighters?"

Oooh she's pissy! Looks like somebody skipped their hormone medications.

And there she goes again speaking for "the rest of America." Who are these Americans, and why do they allow Sarah Palin to speak for them?

Personally I think they're just the voices in her head.

Remember though, Sarah has a personal stake in Kyle being deified by this movie as she hopes for some reflected glory since she met him during that bizarre "Stars Earn Stripes" show.

You remember that show right? That was when Kyle described Todd Palin thusly: 

"He’s Rambo, he’s straight up Rambo!"

Damn, you gotta wonder how much he was paid for that.

I think we all need to remember that  Chris Kyle was a man who killed over a hundred people from as far away as he could get, was well known as a habitual liar, and that he was killed by a fellow American serviceman when he decided that the best way to deal with PTSD was to put a weapon in the man's hand.

All I'm saying is that my threshold for what constitutes a hero is somewhat higher.

Sarah Palin spends her 49th birthday attending funeral. I wonder if it is for her career? Update!

Sarah Palin in Phoenix Airport possibly on her way to funeral in Texas.

Courtesy of the ghostwritten Facebook page of the Wasilla Wendigo:  

Todd and I are in Dallas today to attend Chris Kyle’s memorial and funeral service. I find it sad to see that flags aren’t flying at half staff for this American hero. (Well then lady you should call your pal Rick Perry since it is the Governor's call when the flags should be lowered or not.)We’re surrounded today by American patriots here in Texas – by Chris’ fellow veterans and active duty warriors. In honor of them, I hope our commander in chief pays his respects in some gesture of condolence for their comrade in arms who sacrificed so much to keep him and all of us safe. (Well he is busy running the country, and his wife Michelle has been busy paying her respects to the innocent victims of gun violence here in this country.)


We may never know to what extent Chris kept us free or how many lives he saved by his brave actions in the line of fire. But his fellow warriors know how important he was. My son Track couldn’t meet Chris when Todd and I first met him because Track was deployed to Iraq. Then when we got to know Chris even better, our son was deployed in Afghanistan. We’ve met a lot of people in recent years, and Track has been privileged to meet them as well. But he said about Chris, “Mom, he’s the ONE person in the entire world I would be star-struck to meet. He’s it.” 

God bless this great warrior. Let us keep his wife and children in our prayers, and may we never forget him or his sacrifice. 

- Sarah Palin

So Palin's son, who may or may not have actually been to Afghanistan, thinks that the "ONE person in the entire world" that he would be "star struck to meet" is a guy made famous for killing 160 people, and then writing a self aggrandizing book about it, in which he refers to the people of Iraq as "sub-human." “savages” and “cowards?"

I guess that is hardly surprising considering the fact that he was raised in a house by a man who once brutalized a fellow student because he was black, and whose mother is famous for inciting racism across the nation in response to the election of the first African American President.

So where better for a woman who spends much of her time mythologizing her life, and promoting the use and misuse of guns, than at the funeral of a man who made a name for himself by killing people from a distance, and out of harm's way, and who lost his life at the hands of a man whose mental health was virtually destroyed by his time around gun violence?

Is too much irony poisonous?

Update: By the sway it looks like once again Palin is wrong as flags ARE being flown at half mast.

Idiot!

Update 2: Of course Palin could not show up at this funeral without grabbing some attention for herself. Here is a short interview with Granny Grifter.
The word for today kids is "patriotism."

An article from one year ago offers a troubling look into the murderous mind of the "heroic" American Sniper Chris Kyle.

After Kyle's death at that shooting range in Texas, most of what has been written about him has been a glowing account of his life as a heroic sniper fighting the bad guys overseas.

I personally did not know much about him, and had no intention of reading his book.

As it turns out, within his book is a look inside the mind of a man who probably should NEVER have been issued the weapon, or given the training, that allowed him to kill 160 people.

Almost exactly one year ago there was an article written and published on a blog called Pro Libertate, and written by a man named William N. Grigg. Mr Grigg DID read Kyle's book and his takeaway was that he was anything but heroic: American Sniper:

The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, the ghost-written memoir for which Kyle claims primary authorship, offers convincing testimony that Kyle not only failed to display genuine courage in Iraq, but was incapable of recognizing it when it was exhibited by desperate patriots seeking to evict the armed foreigners who had invaded and occupied their country. 

The insurgents who fought the American invasion (and the few “allied” troops representing governments that had been bribed or brow-beaten into collaborating in that crime) were sub-human “savages” and “cowards,” according to Kyle. 

“Savage, despicable evil,” writes Kyle. “That’s what we were fighting in Iraq…. People ask me all the time, `How many people have you killed?’... The number is not important to me. I only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights, but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives.” 

“The people we were fighting in Iraq, after Saddam’s army fled or was defeated, were fanatics,” Kyle insists. “They hated us because we weren’t Muslim. They wanted to kill us, even though we’d just booted out their dictator, because we practiced a different religion than they did.” 

Actually, most of them probably wanted to kill Kyle and his comrades because they had invaded and occupied their country. They were prepared to use lethal force to protect their homes against armed intruders who had no right to be there. 

Ironically, Kyle’s book offers evidence that he understands that principle; he simply doesn’t believe that it applies to Iraqis. 

“They may have been cowards, but they could certainly kill people,” observes Kyle of the guerrillas. 

“The insurgents didn’t worry about ROEs [Rules of Engagement] or court-martials [sic]. If they had the advantage, they would kill any Westerner they could find, whether they were soldiers or not.” 

If that charge (made on page 87 of Kyle’s book) is accurate, it might reflect the fact that the Iraqi resistance (as well as the tactics of foreign guerrillas who joined the fight) was playing according to ground rules established by the U.S. early in the war. 

On page 79, Kyle describes the Rules of Engagement that his unit followed when they were deployed to Shatt al-Arab, a river on the Iraq-Iran border: “Our ROEs when the war kicked off were pretty simple: If you see anyone from about sixteen to sixty-five and they’re male, shoot ‘em. Kill every male you see. That wasn’t the official language, but that was the idea.” (Emphasis in the original.) 

Those orders were of a piece with the studied indifference to civilian casualties that characterized the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign that began the war. In preparing that onslaught General Tommy Franks and his military planners were guided by a computer program that referred to civilian casualties as “bugsplat.” Franks had no compunction about ordering bombing missions that would result in what the computer projections described as “heavy bugsplat.” After all, aren’t the lives of American military personnel “clearly worth more” – to use Kyle’s phrase -- than those of the Iraqi civilians, who were mere insects to be annihilated? 

There is much more, most of it rather stomach churning, but you get the idea.

It can be argued that Chris Kyle was turned into a heartless assassin by a country that needed him to decimate a people who dared to fight back against the Americans who invaded their land, but I am not sure if that is enough to explain the absolute monstrous attitude that he seems to have directed toward these people, that ostensibly. we were there to liberate. And it makes me wonder just how many of those 160 kills were people who presented an actual threat, and how many simply represented a people that he openly despised.

I am certainly not suggesting that Chris Kyle deserved to be gunned down by a PTSD suffering fellow soldier at that shooting range in Texas. I am just saying that after reading this shedding tears of sympathy would seem hypocritical at best.