DADT

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. It’s about being forced to stay in the closet if you’d like to serve your country.

One dirty little (and undiscussed) secret underlying the policy is our national wish that all queers, lesbos and other disgusting misfits would also stay in the closet… out of sight and out of mind.

But in the military, it’s not merely about pandering to the homophobic panic of redneck teenagers who form the backbone of our fighting forces.

DADT is really about something that never gets discussed, even at the highest levels of power within the forces, because it’s too explosive a subject for even them to handle.

It’s about Sparta.

No, I’m not kidding.

The Spartans deliberately set out to create an army of lovers, the theory being that a soldier would be far more willing to die for his country if he was also to die defending the life of his soul-mate. It was terrific military policy, to create an army that was at the very least bisexual. You can see how well it worked by looking at the battle of Thermopylae – when a measly 300 Spartans (and a thousand or so other Greeks - who never get mentioned) held off the entire Persian Army of Xerxes for quite a long time, comparatively speaking. The Spartans went down… as it were… defending the lifeless body of their King, Leonidas, who, according to all reports, was quite a hunk of Greek manhood.

Can you imagine what it would be like if we had a national security policy enforced by a military composed of millions of happily queer couples?

Can you imagine what it would be like if we had a hunk of burning Greek love as a Commander in Chief?

I can.

Bullshit Thursday!

Karl Rove, on some Faux news yakking head program last night, maintained that Barack Obama is arrogant.

When I stopped pissing myself because I was laughing so hard, I tried to remember just how humble the Bush White House has been for the last nearly 8 years.

Nothing self-righteous about that crowd, nosireebob. "Contempt Prior to Examination" being their motto and all. Karl is contemptuous of anything to which he hasn't even given a cursory glance. George is arrogant, too. But his arrogance is just born out of sheer stupidity.

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I see that Don't Ask, Don't Tell is back in the news. For some reason.

Look, here's the bottom line on all this:

There was a time, not so long ago, when religious people practiced their religion privately. They differentiated between their personal moral beliefs and the need to accommodate differently held beliefs in a pluralistic society.

So we were led to believe. BULLSHIT. This was never the case. We pretended that we were one, big happy family but that only worked as long as everyone PRETENDED to be the same as everyone else, to play by the same rules, and to act as if we all believed the same collection of fairy tales about God and Country.

It was okay to be gay as long as a) you pretended you weren't and b) you kept your mouth shut about it. In other words, it was okay to be gay.... as long as you weren't.

And that's what Don't Ask, Don't Tell is really about. It's okay for YOU to be gay, as long as I don't have to think about it!

It's all about accommodating somebody else's religious prejudices.

Nothing more. Nothing less. Nothing else.

Institutionalized religious bigotry posing as military necessity.

And that, my friends, is a heaping load of Bullshit for today!

Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!!!!

There are rumors floating around that one of the names being considered as Barry's Vice-President is that of Sam Nunn, former senator from Georgia and former Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

That would be a catastrophe for the LGBT Community. This is the same Sam Nunn who immediately pulled the rug out from under the newly elected Bill Clinton in 1993 by engaging in self-serving political grandstanding by touring military bases all around the country and getting service members to "co-sign his bullshit" by getting them to say that such a policy would be detrimental to unit cohesion and morale (bullcrap) and by also engaging in a lot of public Pentagon-Ass-Kissing.

Senator Nunn was very good at kissing brass-ass.

But now he's "seen the light" and is, magically, proposing that it might be time to "revisit" the issue by having a "Pentagon Study" [translation= buried alive] conducted.

This is a straightforward, self-serving, crock of political shit from a man who would love to be Barry's Veep and would callously slap lipstick on his past personal pigs in order to make them seem more palatable to today's clearly different society!

You can read the whole story over at the Huffington Post by clicking HERE.



Meanwhile, back at the ranch, The Decider Douche is actually experiencing a "feeling" [whatever that is] regarding his legacy. Apparently he "regrets" that people will remember him as a warmonger as opposed to remembering him for what he really is, i.e. a drunken, Yalie frat-boy. Poor baby. You can get the details regarding that crap over in the UK by clicking HERE.

Let's all be grateful that there's only 222 days left in office for Captain America, after which he will, we can all hope, slip back into ignominious anonymity, a fate he so richly deserves.

The Marines Are Looking for a Few Good Felons (and so's the Army)

Today's outrage can be seen by clicking on the title of today's blog, above. It seems that the armed forces would "prefer" the company of known felons to that of known queers.

You always hear a lot of yammer about how allowing gays into the service would adversely affect morale. Bullshit. The people who foment this particular argument are not the troops or sailors in the field or at sea but, rather, it's the party-line of the Royal High Muckety-Mucks back in the Pentagon. And the reason they foist this nonsense on the public and even onto their own personnel is simple:

Because Ma and Pa Kettle, back home in East Jeebus, Utazona, will NOT let little Johnny or little Suzie sign up to serve as cannon fodder in meaningless wars of superiority if they even suspect that little Johnny or little Suzie (whom they've always, secretly, had their doubts about anyway) will meet up with one of them big-city kuwheers who will, in one wild evening of hot man-on-man or gal-on-gal sex, totally get them to succumb to temptation and to convert to the Dark Side.

It's really about recruiting numbers (theirs, not ours). The Pentagon Brass doesn't give a rat's ass about Ma and Pa's religious beliefs (or Johnny's or Suzie's, either). But they DO care about their prejudices. Especially, they care about catering to all those prejudices in order to make sure that the war machine is kept primed and pumped with the hot, steaming, patriotic, well-meaning and totally ignorant fuel of war, the flower of our nation's youth.

So, calling all Felons out there!

Uncle Sam Wants You (but in the good way, not the bad way! I think.)

Peter Piper Picked A Pecker

The (hopefully soon-to-be erstwhile) Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Peter Pace, went and shot his mouth off the other day about his personal opinions.

Now as anybody who has ever been in the service will tell you, military personnel don't have personal opinions. At least, not for public consumption, they don't.

I'd be very interested in knowing whether or not he was in uniform during this interview. If he was, he may well have been in violation of DoD Directive 1344.10 (June 15, 1990) which, loosely, prohibits members of the armed forces from participating in partisan political activities while in uniform. Granted, it's targeted specifically against running for office, but you could stretch the point.

And the point really is that whether or not he meant to the CJS has used his bully pulpit much the same way that Mann Coulter used hers.

How demoralizing is it for the closeted gay troops under his command, quietly upholding THEIR end of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" bargain, to know that their ultimate military commander thinks that they are "immoral?"

How is that helpful to morale and group cohesion? Does he honestly think there are 12 gay people in the services? Does not not know that there are thousands upon thousands of gay people in the services, quietly toiling away in the service of their nation? And that, naturally, begs the question, just what fucking planet does this Bozo live on?

When crap like this happens I am always reminded of my favorite story regarding the origins of the "Don't Ask" policy. When President Clinton first proposed issuing an executive order to allow gays to serve openly, and Sam Nunn, then the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a Georgian Democrat to boot, hit the road with his "Sam and Pony Show" to ask dumbass Bos'ns Mates what they thought of the proposed policy change, I nearly died laughing when I read about the response of one Air Force Pilot:

"If they let gays in the military, I'll resign my commission and join a civilan airline."

The theory being, I suppose, that the recreational air-travel business is a GREAT place to avoid that nasty homosexual element, currently serving drinks and snacks in coach, business and first class... and thank you for flying Continental!

But if the General did resign, what we he do for a living? I don't know what marketable skills Marine Generals have, outside of invading places. I'm sure the General is very good at invading places.... and shooting his mouth off.

Being at the top of the military pile, I don't know who gets to take the CJS to the woodshed. The SecDef, I suppose. That would be Bob Gates. I hope Bob has summoned General Peter to D.C. for a little "come to Jesus" meeting on the subject of keeping his big, fat, yap shut about his personal shit.

Just like he expects all of us Mo's in the military to do!