Category — Afghanistan

Let me see if I have all of this straight.  Barack Obama, who didn’t support the surge in Iraq and won’t recognize the positive results, supports a surge for Afghanistan.  Pray tell, Messiah, what makes the Afghan surge more likely to yield results than the Iraq one you never supported?

And if that didn’t make your head hurt, Obama promises to end the war in Iraq and will celebrate by starting one in Pakistan:

“Al-Qaida has an expanding base in Pakistan that is probably no farther from their old Afghan sanctuary than a train ride from Washington to Philadelphia.

“We cannot tolerate a terrorist sanctuary, and as president I won’t,” he said.

“We must make it clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like (Osama) bin Laden if we have them in our sights.”

So Barrack Obama is going to “restore” our standing in the international community by violating the sovereignty of a nuclear armed Pakistan.  I guess you have to believe in his messianic powers to make sense of these plans.

If this is the best he can do with a prepared speech and teleprompter, no wonder he won’t face McCain in town hall meetings.  The debates should be very entertaining when this empty suit won’t have his campaign staffers whispering in his ear.

It’s also interesting to note all these policies were developed prior to his trip overseas where he was suppose to gain some gravitas on international issues.  Of course that dog and pony show is akin to visiting Niagara Falls and claiming you’re now qualified to be ambassador to Canada.

The Woodchuck roams through the literary venues selecting the most current and popular global offerings for the reader’s edification. Here is a choice selection, a favorite among the elite in the sandland tents and the DNC of the USA.

I wonder if Obama gets his subscription delivered at home or at the office?

I wonder if they made the three bozos clean the chopper? Kerry served in Vietnam; don’t know how much time he put in the birds.

Senators in Emergency Landing

WASHINGTON (AP) - Helicopters carrying three senior U.S. senators made emergency landings Thursday in the mountains of Afghanistan because of a snowstorm.   Sens. John Kerry, Joseph Biden and Chuck Hagel were aboard the aircraft. No one was injured, according a statement from Kerry’s office. The senators and their delegation returned to Bagram Air Base in a motor convoy, and have left for Turkey.

A small forced march with the troops would have worked wonders for these junketeering clowns.

“After several hours, the senators were evacuated by American troops and returned overland to Bagram Air Base, and left for their next scheduled stop in Ankara, Turkey,” the Kerry statement said. “Sen Kerry thanks the American troops, who were terrific as always and who continue to do an incredible job in Afghanistan.”

GAK! Kerry is shameless.

The lawmakers were on a trip this week that included stops in India, Turkey and Pakistan, where they observed the elections earlier this week.

Kerry and Biden are Democrats from Massachusetts and Delaware, respectively, and the Republican Hagel is from Nebraska.

Hagel, the RINO, isn’t running again, so why is he wasting our money flitting around the third world?

If you have the stomach for it, the truth-speaking link can be found here, embedded in an account of the dispute between “public intellectual” Terry Eagleton and novelist Martin Amis.

Tim Blair has the operative sentences:

“An audience of British leftists is asked: “Do you feel morally superior to the Taliban?” Their response:

Only about a third raised a hand to say they did, a nice demonstration of relativist liberal guilt.”

About which, we can conclude that two-thirds of the gathered lefties think of themselves at least as morally EQUIVALENT to the Taliban. Can I get an amen to that? No doubt a similar sample could be found here in Connecticut.

….He’s back on 8-Track

Islamist dirtbag, Osama Bin Laden, issued a plea recently for Europeans to abandon their mission in Afghanistan - one which most European militaries have pursued with only desultory interest anyway.

Two reports, here and here.

To me, capturing or killing this scrawny punk has been secondary to the goal of rendering him ridiculous. The cruelest, most exquisite punishment for a figure like Bin Laden - from a shame-culture, depicted on calendars and posters in garish pastels and reflective foils - is to imprison him on video and audio instruments, leaving him nothing but a pale image and reedy voice with which to issue ludicrous threats to his tormentors, like some midget emperor in a land of giants.

Crush his corporeality, strip him of the flesh and ceremonial gaud of the Islamist conqueror. As he dissolves to unreality, the deeper his ignominy. Nothing is too harsh for this cowardly, despicable bastard. This IS a clash of cultures. Only a corrupt and dissolute culture can take him seriously.

Does this sound different from North Vietnam and Victor Charley?

Iran fighting ‘proxy war in Iraq’

Washington - Iran is fighting a “proxy war” through Shi’a militias against the Iraqi state and United States-led forces in the war-torn nation, US war commander General David Petraeus said on Monday.

“It is increasingly apparent to both coalition and Iraqi leaders that Iran, through the use of the Quds force, seeks to turn the Iraqi special groups into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq,” Petraeus said.

Petraeus was testifying at a crucial hearing of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees seen as a key moment for US strategy on Iraq.

Samo-samo stuff! Another proxy war, we give sanctuary to opponents where they take R&R. Once more, we’re battling another states cat’s paw. Syria and Iran deserve some serious pain. Any state offering client services and hospitality needs to get an intro course in “War, our way-101” with section 102 available for imbeciles.

Petraeus hearing starts with Democratic criticism

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus appeared before the U.S. Congress on Monday to give testimony in which he was expected to argue against withdrawing the bulk of U.S. forces from Iraq for now.

Appearing with U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, Petraeus listened to deep skepticism from the Democrats who seized control of Congress last year largely because of the profound discontent with the war among American voters.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat, began the hearing by telling Petraeus the Iraq war had left the United States unable to confront other challenges.

“The troops in Iraq are not available for other missions; to go into Afghanistan to pursue Osama bin Laden” whose al Qaeda militant group attacked the United States six years ago on Tuesday, Skelton said. [snip]

I never knew we had so many Congressmen of Flag Grade capable of running a war. Rep. Lynn Woolsey, Donk-CA is now on the tube expounding upon what the country needs to do, to wit: CUT & RUN. She must be a real terror in the card game “War.”
All the antiwar bloviators know is get out. Nothing of the consequences that follow makes any difference. The dhimmi position appeals to them; groveling is their natural state.

MoveOn.org Ad Takes Aim at Petraeus

[snip] In addition to liberal activist groups such as MoveOn.org, Democrats in both the House and Senate have impugned Petraeus’ testimony today…[snip]

Per usual, the moonbats try theater. Since large puppet heads don’t reach enough people, they fall back to the NY Rag, which cheerfully took their money! Killing the messenger does not alter the message.

Military In Iraq Want Energy Beam Weapon

Pentagon Concerned Weapon Seen As Torture Device

WASHINGTON — The military has been holding back using a device that fires energy beams instead of bullets, despite requests from U.S. commanders. [snip]

The Pentagon has refused to deploy it out of concern that the weapon itself might be seen as a torture device.

Perched on a Humvee or a flatbed truck, the Active Denial System gives people hit by the invisible beam the sense that their skin is on fire. They move out of the way quickly and without injury.

According to a document prepared by Marine Corps officials in western Iraq, reviews by military lawyers concluded it is a lawful weapon under current rules governing the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If it isn’t a lawful weapon, the military should go back to using flamethrowers and napalm which will give them a different sense their skin is on fire, eliminating the rancor over perceived torture.

This is crazy that the military is even worrying about such idiocy. Give it the label: Endorsed by the ACLU. U/L tested.

Another legacy of the British public school system

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2007/08/the_homoereotic.html

…….Is that Prince??

The battlefield is about the size of Texas; four times the size of New England.  Its average annual temperature is like that of Massachusetts.  Its capital city is on the same latitude as Phoenix, Los Angeles and Memphis.  It’s mountainous, dramatically uplifted more than a million years ago by the thrust sheets of the advancing Indian subcontinent.  Roughly half of the country is contorted by its definining feature, a majestic but forbidding mountain range.  The capital is Kabul, the battlefield is Afghanistan and the mountain range is the Hindu Kush.

The Hindu Kush, translated by some historians as “Hindu Killer”, is a Himalayan extension of the Alpine system of Europe and North Africa.  It’s officially part of the Pamir-Karakoram chain of the Himalayas;  it angles southwest from Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, the Durand Line.  There are seven mountain passes which have served as highways for invaders and trade at least since 1500 BC, when invaders from Central Asia brought what linguists now call the Indo-European languages to the region.

Alexander The Great, after marching and fighting the width of Afghanistan, used the Khawak Pass to reach Samarkand in 330 BC.  He led his starving army over the 12,000 foot snowy pass, and then west back through the Khyber Pass on the modern Hippie Trail to Kabul.  Today it’s likely that Taliban and other tribal fighters use the same passes for the purpose of fighting NATO and American troops.  The blood of thousands, maybe millions, of nameless soldiers and unaffiliated warriors has been spilled here since the first Aryans arrived 5000 years ago.

Afghanistan borders six countries.  Pakistan to the east and south, Iran to the west and south, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China to the north.  Its China border lies at the dead end of the valley of the Wakhan Corridor.  The Wakhan is a 150-mile long, ten-mile wide geographic tendril, like an appendix, projecting northeast, between Pakistan to the south and Tajikistan in the north to the Chinese border.  It’s an atavistic survival of Britain’s Great Game with Russia, a border anomaly established to deny Russia access to the Indian Ocean.   Marco Polo used the valley almost eight-hundred years ago to travel that portion of The Silk Road.  Today it’s a remote, hostile patch, the habitat of the Marco Polo sheep, and probably the route used to smuggle drugs to China.

The short account is that humans have been scrambling over, fighting for, and surviving in this land for 50,000 years.   It was Hellenized by the Macedonians and their successors, converted to Buddhism by adherents from India, ignored militarily by the Romans but conquered and converted by Muslims, trampled by Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, by Darius and other Persians and Parthians; invaded by Turkic tribes, by the British, the Russians and Americans.  Simulataneous with low-grade warfare, it was also a web of routes for The Silk Road, the commercial paths taken by bearers of luxury goods from the east to the Mediterranean world.  The world’s first mobile shopping mall.

The material for Julius Caesar’s silk curtains probably came through Afghanistan from China, over rocky, barren trails now prowled by American Rangers and Special Forces.  Julius and other Romans who possessed silk, believed that it grew on trees.  Julius, Augustus and Tiberius had intermittent difficulties with the Parthians, who, along with the Afghan Kushans, controlled the trade routes through Afghanistan.  The Romans were not welcome there.  The Parthians left no written account of themselves, but must have known the origins of silk.  Perhaps they played the first lasting joke on the Romans.  They told them it was gathered like fruit and nuts.

The historian’s routine explanation for Afghanistan’s long travail is that it lay at the “crossroads” of competing civilizations; that it was the junction between south and central Asia and the Middle East.  These designations are entirely theoretical to the historian-geographer.  They mean nothing.  The human explanation for the boiling activity in the region is that the wars of conquest that tortured Afghanistan for 5000 years were wars for local power, for goods, and to a lesser degree, religion.  They were fought for the things that fill the voids left by deprivation, insecurity and the anxieties of hard-scrabble life.   It hasn’t ended.

The communist coup staged in 1978 led to the Soviet invasion, and then to the Taliban in large part because of American indifference.  Millions were killed and exiled in the civil and religious wars of the past thirty years.  Today Afghanistan resembles nothing as much as itself of a thousand years ago.  Ghosts everywhere, in every corner of every mud hut and mountain pass.    It is our obligation to bring the country back to life. 

My understanding of Treason as a legal and ethical matter is that of a patriot layman.  I know very little about the subject.  Article III of our Constitution employs only nineteen words for Treason…(it) “shall consist only in levying war against them (the United States), or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and  Comfort”.  The Englightenment figure who composed these lines might have been Jefferson.  Another man who had something to say about Treason was Madison, who ruminated on the topic in Federalist #43.  None of it helps.

The minimalist description of Treason in Article III means, to me, that the author of the passage on Treason faced a process problem, and he knew it.  The 18th century was a time when the crime of Treason was kin to the crime of Heresy from a few centuries earlier.  Heresy was a thought and speech crime of disloyalty, and in the European hereditary monarchies, Treason was nearly the same.  America,  the new country aborning when our Constitutional author wrote his portion of Article III, had no room for either of these crimes.  They just didn’t fit.

So he didn’t mention the thought and speech crime of disloyalty, which is what Heresy and Crown Treason is.  He mentioned only an act.  An act of betrayal, and a pretty narrow one at that.  He knew that one can be disloyal without betraying one’s country if one doesn’t act upon it.  The example of disloyalty in action is John Walker Lindh.  He was probably disloyal for the entire segment of his life that he spent with the leftists cranks who raised him.  His spiritual journeys to Pakistan and Afghanistan are what got him into trouble; not thoughts of disloyalty but joining the Taliban.

Lindh wasn’t charged with, or prosecuted for, Treason.  Hardly anyone ever is.  He was charged with conspiring to kill Americans, and with supporting terrorists, although he pleaded to the lesser charge of carrying explosives to the Taliban.    That’s what sent him to jail for twenty years, and sent his ridiculous father into a frenzy of belated support for his son.

Now, there’s a body of law which governs the matters of espionage, sabotage, disclosure of secrets, that kind of stuff.  I don’t know where Lindh’s statutory problems come from, but it clearly isn’t Treason, even though he certainly fits one description of a treasonous slug.  His legal difficulties, then, cloud the matter of Treason even more.  If we can’t decide what Treason is, then what is a traitor?  No American is subject to punishment for disloyal thoughts, moods or attitudes.  Treachery is not necessarily treasonous.

History is of little use in clarifying the matter.  50,000 presumed “traitors” were executed in France after the liberation, either by the sham legality of French courts, or through revenge killing, because they supported the Vichy government.  De Gaulle himself was ruled a traitor by the same government.  Lord Haw Haw was executed after WWII because, as a British subject, he openly supported The Reich.  Hitler’s potential assassins were found guilty of treason because they didn’t support The Reich.

The problem, at the moment, is that Treason no longer matters.  It’s been erased by new targets for our loyalties. The old ways have been shattered by the suspect aims and bogus ambitions of early 21st-century American life.  It’s impossible to sustain loyalties to a welfare state,  to a nation without self-respect, or to the UN, to a mall or product line, or to any of the ideas supported by the idiot persuasions of the political class.  Unrealistic and fantastic, American politics is a silly pantomime of national purpose.  The human response is to find other things worthy of our loyalties.  Organizations of all kinds are our surrogates for the national family we no longer have.

Sometimes in this search for loyalties, things go wrong.  The robed law lords expect loyalty to some codes and not to others, which is why Libby is in jail and Berger is free. It explains a droning dolt like John Conyers and his calls for impeachment, or the free-immigration fanatics whose loyalty has fixed upon abstractions about compassion and not about a mature concept of citizenship.  Politicians are loyal to the frauds of their own propaganda.  The list is very long.  Loyalty is a personal issue, not a national issue.

Treason can only exist where the nation is understood, by its citizens, as a family.  For me, that includes liberals and the crazy left, even if we’re estranged.  I love the flag.  If called upon I would go again, to fight and die for it, anywhere, anytime, at any age, and for everyone who lives under its snap and flutter.   No law requires this of me or anyone else.  The country that offers this dispensation is worthy of our loyalty as nothing else in life can be. 

The first matter in this introduction is to thank my host at New England Republican for the opportunity to contribute to his blog.  He’s taking a risk.  I’ve commented here promiscuously for about four years under the foreshortened given name with the Celtic “H” (Rhod), and now NER is allowing me in the door without patting me down.

It’s been said here that I’m a knuckle-dragger.  My ear is pressed to the radio, pencil in hand, recording my talking points from Limbaugh.  I’m an “unpatriotic right-wing hooligan”, a “despicable winger”, and a drug-addled, baby-killing villain from the Vietnam War.  There’s more, but these are just a few of my favorites.  Still,  it hasn’t been all fun.

I plan to divorce that careless entity Rhod from the responsible contributor I plan to be, with the grand conceit of calling myself “Hotspur”.  Hotspur is one of Shakespeare’s most interesting characters.  He’s not a good guy in every way, but I like the ring of the name.  That other guy can live down to his reputation elsewhere.

I was born a long time ago, into a Scots-English New England family of carnival-mirror Republicans.   We had so many ideological distortions, I still don’t know if we were conservatives, liberals, or something else.  Furiously anti-FDR, derisively anti-Eisenhower, sniffily anti-JFK, vaguely pro-Stevenson, peace-loving, pro-military flag wavers, business owning foundrymen, clannish and skeptical civil rights supporters, church-going without piety; that kind of stuff.  It’s impossible to rebel in such a family.  You can’t ditch one set of parental values without projecting its approved opposite.

As a child I lived for long periods in the pre-integration South as well as in industrial Connecticut, and will never vilify either region for unenlightened racialism or smokestack landscapes.  America is wonderful in countless ways, with nothing that is permanently sullied by our mistakes.

An early 1950’s summer morning on Georgia’s Route 17 can’t be made vile by segregation.  And the smell of burning coke (vacuum-burned coal) and the tunes of a forge and train whistle at night in Connecticut, are evocative of strength, purpose and hard work.  This country is the sum of its parts, and the bad things are washed away by the dazzling light of the good.

Between 1962 and 1971, I obtained a college degree, served in Vietnam as a combat radio operator; worked at a series of white, blue and gray collar jobs, two of which called upon similar resources.  School teacher and clown.  I prospered more as a clown, and I’m still contemplating the intelligence I gained the very day I gave up that job.  A nasty little boy of about four years of age snarled at me and said “You’re not a REAL clown, you’re just a man in a clown suit!”

Barely past the simian stage of boyhood, that kid was on to something important.  Even if there’s no such thing as final truth, we need to assert the nearly real and spurn the fake, the fantastic and the imitative.  The greasepaints of self-deception, of untruth and prejudice coat and smear our insights.  Our first responsibility is to be REAL clowns.

 Today I’m self-employed.  I live in the lower Connecticut River Valley, am married and have three sons in the military, all of whom are combat veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.  One is a paratrooper, an airborne combat engineer; another is a Cavalry Scout turned Ranger currently in Special Forces training, and the third is involved with security and judicial matters for figures like the very dead Saddam Hussein and the temporarily alive Chemical Ali.  We have all been fortunate beyond measure. 

Put away the flags

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed. Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power. [snip]

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq. [snip]

Howard Zinn was a World War II bombardier.

Howard, I believe in disproportionate response. When I’m attacked I kick the perps so hard, their neighbor’s teeth hurt. It does infuse the attacker and the neighbors with a calm demeanor. Repeat as necessary for use as a prophylactic.

Secular and religious Pakistani officials, silent on the 1989 Khomeini fatwah issued against Rushdie, are outraged over his knighthood. This response to his knighthood has enhanced understanding of the religion of peace a great deal.

From Musilms, British knighthood for Rushdie is insensitive, but having Rushdie murdered brings crashing silence.

The jihad against knighthood and cartoons is a illustrative moment in history. According to the Religion of Peace Religious Affairs Minister Ijaz-ul-Haq, some suicide attacks might help you see the error of your ways.

The Religion of Peace adherents are exposed by this voluble indignation more than they realize; the liberal West will miss its meaning entirely.

[snip] Salman Rushdie with his wife Padma. Rushdie was awarded an OBE this weekend, but Pakistan has demanded it be withdrawn.

Iranian conservatives attacked the Queen over Salman Rushdie’s knighthood, with a top MP saying the British monarch lived in a dream world and a newspaper labelling her an “old crone.”

“Salman Rushdie has turned into a hated corpse which cannot be resurrected by any action,” Mohammad Reza Bahonar, first deputy speaker of Iran’s parliament, said in an address to the house.

“The action by the British queen in knighting Salman Rushdie, the apostate, is an unwise one,” he said, to loud cheers from MPs.

“The British monarch lives under this illusion that Britain is still a 19th century superpower and that bestowing titles is something still deemed important.”

Hard line daily Jomhuri Eslami also launched a scathing attack on the queen, describing the monarch as an “old crone” whose action was a “grimace to the Islamic world.”

“The question is what the old British crone sought by knighting Rushdie, to help him? Well, her act only shortens Rushdie’s pathetic life,” it added. [snip]

[snip] “Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said Mr. Rushdie’s knighthood would hamper interfaith understanding and that Islamabad would protest to London.”

[snip] Pakistani Islamists chant slogans in front of a burning effigy of Indian born author Salman Rushdie during a protest in Karachi. Muslim radicals have burned an effigy of Queen Elizabeth as Pakistan summoned the British ambassador over Rushdie’s knighthood and Iranian hardliners turned their fury on the monarch. (AFP/Asif Hassan) [snip]

[snip] Religious Affairs Minister Ijaz-ul-Haq on Monday said the award for Rushdie justified suicide attacks, prompting outrage in Britain, although he later withdrew the remark.

Pakistan’s senate on Tuesday condemned the “blatant disregard for the sentiments of the Muslims by the British government by awarding (a) knighthood to Salman Rushdie, who committed blasphemy against the Holy Prophet.”

Legislators in North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, which is ruled by an alliance of hard line Islamists, called for Pakistan to sever diplomatic ties with London.

Around 150 hard line protesters in the eastern city of Lahore torched an effigy of the British queen and called for Rushdie to be handed to a Muslim country and dealt with by a Sharia court, witnesses said.

“The punishment for a blasphemer is death,” Shahid Gilani, who heads the youth wing of Pakistan’s radical Jamaat-e-Islami party, told the crowd. [snip]

A tape shows Taliban suicide bombers graduating from a training camp:

The tape shows Taliban military commander Mansoor Dadullah, whose brother was killed by the U.S. last month, introducing and congratulating each team as they stood. 

“These Americans, Canadians, British and Germans come here to Afghanistan from faraway places,” Dadullah says on the tape. “Why shouldn’t we go after them?”

Could someone explain to me again why we haven’t sealed the borders yet?  Or why we can’t seal them without “comprehensive” immigration reform?  But not to worry says the administration: 

U.S. intelligence officials described the event as another example of “an aggressive and sophisticated propaganda campaign.”

Suppose the denial has anything to do with our president’s ardent pursuit of “comprehensive” immigration reform?  Others aren’t so sure: 

“It doesn’t take too many who are willing to actually do it and be able to slip through the net and get into the United States or England and cause a lot of damage,” said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism official.

What “net” would that be?  There are ½ a million illegal immigrants streaming into the country now.  It’s not a real stretch to assume motivated terrorists can make it too. 

Call your elected officials and let them know its time for real border security without amnesty.

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Congress is keeping Andrews Air Force base plenty busy this year ferrying lawmakers all over the globe at taxpayers’ expense. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi took his wife, nine Democrats and two Republicans - Reps. Dan Lungren of California and Mike Rogers of Alabama - on a whirlwind tour of the Caribbean last week. After stops in Honduras and Mexico, they stopped in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the delegation stayed at the five-star Caneel Bay Resort.

In a separate trip to the Caribbean last week, Rep. Eliot Engel of New York squired his wife and four Democratic members to Grenada and Trinidad. [snip]

All told, the military flew at least 13 congressional delegations to various destinations during the Easter recess — at an estimated rate of $10,000 or more per flying hour.

The congressional delegation trips, known as CODELs, are paid for by taxpayers. They are supposed to be directly related to members’ official duties, and House guidelines also stipulate that delegations include members of both parties to qualify for military planes — a requirement that Speaker Nancy Pelosi waived for Engel’s group and two other delegations. [snip]

In their successful campaign to win control of Congress last fall, Democrats accused Republicans of extravagant travel paid for by lobbyists. Some of these trips carried a strong whiff of influence peddling. The worst that can be said of CODELS, and critics often say it, is that they’re junkets. [snip]

Not the Dims, they wouldn’t have this culture of taxpayer abuse; that’s the GOP rip-off.

Thompson’s office said he toured the Caribbean because he now chairs the Homeland Security Committee and wanted to see vacation hot spots to “examine border security and port security.” Three other members of the delegation also brought along their spouses.

It is well known that the Caneel Bay resort hires terrorist pool boys; Grenada and Trinidad are bomb making factories and free fire zones.

Since al-Qaeda has taken over the US Virgin Islands, Iowa and Kansas have become nightly targets for terrorist attacks. The three other members said they took their spouses along to prove the resort isn’t as bad as the media makes it out to be.

At the Caneel Bay resort, where room rates reach $1,100 per night, the spokeswoman said Thompson and his wife paid the “government rate.” But, according to the reservations department, Caneel Bay doesn’t “offer any government rates.” [snip]

The Caribbean trip led by Engel, who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, explored the “best practices for emergency disaster relief” and energy policy, according to his office.

Traveling with Engel and his wife were Reps. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Tex., and Barbara Lee, D-Calif. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who went to Belgium in a delegation led by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., earlier in the week, also joined Engel’s Caribbean trip. She brought her husband with her.

Frank’s trip to Belgium and London was related to his work as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, according to his office. The trip, which also included Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., was designed “to further understand the interrelationship between various issues related to the financial services regulatory structures” of the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, according to Frank’s office.

Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., also led a trip to Belgium over the two-week Easter recess. In February, Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, took a delegation there.

They were investigating methods of international currency exchange, habitually called shopping.

“We’re at war with Iraq and Afghanistan, but apparently our members see Belgium as our most urgent international destination,” scoffed one Republican member of Congress.

Last week, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., defended Congressional travelers after a trip he took to Syria came under intense White House criticism.

“Members of Congress are not simply potted plants, though the White House apparently would like them to be,” he [Lantos] told reporters after his return. [snip]

I see Congress as a much more coherent body similar to a vegetable garden: cabbages, rutabagas, parsnips, okra…