Tuesday, October 05, 2010

It's all a joke to Jamie Elizabeth Stiehm

What kind of a sicko is Jamie Elizabeth Stiehm? "The Iraq War Came and Went But Facebook Is Here to Stay" (US News & World Reports) is the headline of her bad drivel and she's responsible for that headline because it comes from her own badly written column: "The Iraq War came and went but Facebook is here to stay. Now we are all living in some semblance of a Harvard dorm room." What is it about uglies like Stiehm that make them think they're funny? Because life started the laughter when it gave them that face?

Does the ugly dog think she's funny? Does she think it's funny that 7 US service members died in the Iraq War in September? (Click here for DoD -- which isn't counting the Kuwait death.) Is that funny to her too? You know what's funny to me? Masculine looking women who pile on the make up to try to look feminine and never succeed. So the manly looking Jamie Stiehm is high-larious to me.

If you're a columnist, you don't write crap like that. The Iraq War hasn't ended and Jamie can whore all she wants (hopefully there is a backup career with that face) but all she does is disgrace herself.

She didn't spin irony in her bad column and she's certainly not a stylist. She's just a bad writer whose 'insights' are as blunt as her face. The Iraq War didn't end for anyone except the crowd so tired of 'serving' by paying five to ten minutes attention to it per week. For those losers, Barack's August 31st speech meant "freedom." They could return to their badly written, ill thought out columns on pop culture. Ladies and gentlemen, from the front lines of illiteracy, Jamie Stiehm.

The Dog Face Jamie Stiehm thinks it's cute to crack dumb and pretend a war ended. Yesterday on All Things Considered (NPR -- link has text and audio), Kelly McEvers reported on a recent battle:

KELLY McEVERS: The troubles in the palm grove started when local residents reported that insurgents affiliated with al-Qaida had assembled there to build bombs. An Iraqi commander led a unit of Iraqi soldiers in to investigate.

Lieutenant Colonel BOB MOLINARI (U.S. 25th Infantry Division): And that's when he had his first casualties. And once he had those, they called us up.

McEVERS: That's Lieutenant Colonel Bob Molinari of the 25th Infantry Division based in Hawaii. He says Iraqi commanders from a total of seven different units showed up at the scene, even the minister of defense was there. Molinari says too many commanders meant no coherent plan of action. Iraqi soldiers were sent into the grove in single file, each headed by an officer. Molinari says insurgent snipers would simply take aim at the guy with the epaulets.

Lt. Col. MOLINARI: It was a matter of as soon as the officers went down, the jundi went to ground, and they didn't know what to do next.

McEVERS: Molinari says the Iraqi soldiers, or jundi, fled from the palm grove and requested American firepower. So the Americans employed bombs, mortars, grenades and Special Forces, but the enemy only hid in drainage ditches, waited, then came out again, shooting. In all, five Iraqis were killed and 13 were wounded. Two Americans were wounded as well. By the second night of battle, the Iraqis ordered a full retreat from the palm grove.


Wow, that doesn't sound like: "War over." And maybe if Jamie weren't writing about movies that are aimed at people (boys) twenty-five to thirty years younger than she is, she could sit at the grown ups table and write about something that really matters? But that would be too taxing and might force her to, in fact, grow the hell up.

Instead of waxing on about her trip to the mall scoping out tween boys, Jamie could try about something real. John Prados covers reality in "Reframing the Iraq War" (Huffington Post):

The more we learn about how the Iraq War began the worse the story gets. For all we thought we knew, now a new set of formerly secret records of both the Bush administration and the British cabinet of Tony Blair sheds glaring light on the prewar machinations of both governments designed to make the conflict happen. Posted as a three-part series by the National Security Archive, the documents, along with extensive analyses by Archive Iraq Project co-directors Joyce Battle and myself, plus British journalist Christopher Ames, lay out the case in unprecedented detail. The analysis demonstrates that the Bush administration swiftly abandoned plans for diplomacy to curb fancied Iraqi adventurism by means of sanctions, never had a plan subsequent to that except for a military solution, and enmeshed British allies in a manipulation of public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic designed to generate support for a war. This time the case is made with actual secret government records, not merely the press releases and talking points of the neo-cons.

Jamie missed that, she was too busy scoping out the butt cleavage on the 16-year-old boy standing in line ahead of her at the ticket counter and remembering how she was almost popular the first day of her junior year until she started laughing and yet again wet herself in front of the entire school.

Poor little Jamie, it's all so cute and funny to her. It's not so funny to the woman who e-mailed this morning about her brother who died in the Iraq War and her cousin who's over there right now. But that's the sort of messy reality that Jamie can't deal with. Better to reduce it all to trivia and stay mindless.


Tricia Pemberton (News Ok) reports on a speech the New York Times Iraq bureau chief Anthony Shadid gave where he noted, "I often ask myself, what price did Iraq have to pay, did America have to pay? I find myself still haunted by the death of that informant, not because of what he did but because of what his father was forced to do." Jamie's not plagued by those questions, she's just wondering what tween topic she can next snark on.

The following community sites updated last night and this morning:


And we'll close with this from Peace Mom Cindy Sheehan's "More b.s. charges against me" (Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox):

There were about 12 of us on the caravan and as we got out of our cars at the main gate of Travis, we were loudly and aggressively accosted by an old man wearing a very tight military uniform. Of course, he screamed all of the clichés like: “traitors,” “cowards,” and the ubiquitous, “why don’t you get a job.” However, usually the war-niks don’t physically cross-over to the peace side, but this one did.

We formed our small protest holding banners and we did the dance with the Military Police of where we could stand, where we couldn’t stand, etc—and we were just getting ready to get back in our cars when the Veteran approached me and started yelling in my ear as I was giving a statement to the local press that were gathered.

I turned around to him to tell him to get out of my space, when he put his face directly into my bullhorn, while still screaming his inanities and insanities. At that time he violently slapped my bullhorn and threateningly stepped towards me, then some of the other ladies there stepped between us.

We tried to get the Fairfield PD, who were there to make sure our contingent of women (many who had to be physically helped in and out of our rented van) didn’t get out of hand, to arrest the man, but they said they would have to arrest us, too—because it was a “he-said, she-said” thing. (Yeah, right—they were right there and the video shows them placidly looking on while I was being accosted).

After some arguing with the police, we decided to leave and head to the next base, and we were rolling out of the parking lot when the Fairfield PD pulled ME over and gave me a ticket for “obstructing traffic.” That would be shocking if it weren’t so predictable. The officer that pulled me over had on a US Marines headband—hmmm?

To make a long story short, after 10 months of pre-lims, etc, I have to go to another hearing for a citation. It’s not a life and death situation, but it’s the “death of 1000 cuts” that steals our time and resources to try and wear us down.

The hearing is this Wednesday in Fairfield at the court at 8:30am, but from 7am to 8am, many of us will go back to Travis AFB to protest the usage of drones that has dramatically increased in the last ten months since the incident that I have described.



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thomas friedman is a great man






oh boy it never ends