Rachel Marsden tells us all about war and apples

That didn't take long. Convicted stalker and uber-right-wing noisemaker, Rachel Marsden, after having been canned from the Toronto Sun for something she wrote, has taken it upon herself to educate all of us about what it takes to properly fight a war. Having found a home online at the regularly inaccurate Canada Free Press, (presumably no traditional media outlet has answered her resume), she wags her finger and flaps her gums about how anyone with a shred of moral conscience is just not in the game. (The links are friendly. If you need to read her original you can link through them.)

If the West loses the current war against Islamofascism, it will be because some have lost all sense of what war really means.

From which one might assume Rachel has actually, you know, been to war and is about to give us some of the details of her experience.

It goes off the rails in the next paragraph.

Last week, in my weekly Sun Media column, I argued that it’s really not that big of a deal to make terror suspects like 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed essentially do what any kid does at Halloween when he bobs for apples--except in the presence of the CIA, and with the prize in the terrorist’s case being lifesaving information.

Really?! Apparently Rachel has never been waterboarded. The difference is in the position, the immobility, the hood, the strap across the chest and the fact that when some kid is bobbing for apples he can stop anytime he wishes. If you hold his head under the water until he starts to struggle and release bubbles you have now committed a criminal offence ranging anywhere from common assault to attempted murder. But then, criminal acts aren't outside Rachel's realm, are they?

That column triggered an email campaign spearheaded by the Daily Kos--the largest far-left blog in America--which appealed to the Sun’s new editor-in-chief from the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest leftist newspaper. As a result, after 2 years with the Sun and a hundred columns, my writing is now in search of a new home.

Well, yes, Daily Kos was involved, as were several Canadian blogs who found her soiling the pages of a respectable newspaper. We'll get back to that in a minute, but suffice to say I have found a suitable home for her writing: have a plunger handy.

Really, has society lost its collective mind to the point where we’ve forgotten how to properly wage a war?

Take off your kevlar, make a knee and tell us all about it battle-babe.

General Paul Tibbets, who dropped the A-bomb on Japan that ended World War II, recently passed away. According to the New York Times, Tibbets told a PBS documentary: “It would have been morally wrong if we’d have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die.”

Despite what Rachel may think, more people agree with Tibbets than disagree - and they're not all subscribers to the thoughts and musings of the American Enterprise Institution. What's that got to do with making fallacious comparisons of waterboarding to bobbing for apples?

And now here we are, 60 years later, wringing our hands over how we should treat people who have made it abundantly clear that they would have killed us, if we hadn’t nabbed them first. What’s the alternative that the terrorist sympathizers are looking for? To tickle them until they cry uncle and promise to be good boys?

No wonder the T.Sun got rid of her. She can't write coherently. She just tried to link a combat operation, albeit a controversial one, with how to treat prisoners once they are removed from theatre. Further, she insinuates that anyone who isn't cheerleading the torture of prisoners is a "terrorist sympathizer" and then just gets into some ludicrous exaggeration.

Hint: When they're captured, removed from the field, imprisoned and neutralized, the risk they used to represent is gone. Given that most of the prisoners held by the United States in Guantanamo were captured in combat the fact that they were attempting to kill their opposition is unremarkable. In fact, it is expected. The opposition was trying to do the same to them - until they surrendered. The difference between a uniformed soldier shooting at you from up-range and an indigenous armed non-soldier shooting at you from up-range is... nothing. Although I am certain Marsden wouldn't even allow the distinction of a uniformed soldier get in the way of her desire to have somebody else torture him, particularly if he originates from a Muslim background.

Let's skip the rest of her drivel and get to this.

War isn’t like divvying up the contents of a condo upon divorce so everyone walks away feeling good. It means people have to die. And sometimes even be forced to bob for apples with the CIA. Sorry, but that’s the way it has always worked. In the words of the A-bomb pilot: “I have been convinced that we saved more lives than we took.”

Here's where this gets good. Rachel Marsden, who's background includes having revealing photos of herself popped up on a website, who believes that half the males who look at the pictures want to sleep with her, is telling us what war is all about and how it's done. Here's where I pull the, "You don't get to tell us about the death and maiming in war unless you've done it" mantra.

I've been to war, Rachel, and you just took your odious, illiterate, right-wing torture-loving mantra and walked into my garrison.

Clearly you know nothing of war. People don't have to die; people do die, even though it is the duty of every combatant to minimize death. But because you have never been there, you don't get to tell us about it either way. Even if the bulk of your new audience is a bunch of mouth-breathing cretins.

The torture of prisoners is illegal. Period. Full stop. The abuse of prisoners is illegal. Period. Full stop. If a superior gives a subordinate a command to beat or abuse a prisoner who has clearly surrendered and has complied with the instructions of his captor (to the best of his ability to understand) that command is unlawful and the subordinate is under no compunction to obey. Period. Full stop.

You want to know how wars were fought properly? Try reading something other than your own drivel. Assuming you think the 2nd World War was fought "properly", (you opened that can with the Tibbets quote), I provide you with a lesson from that war. You can go here, here and here for the same study material. After reports reached Germany that prisoners had been found shackled...

Germany immediately protested the shackling and killing of the German prisoners, stating that they would start shackling British prisoners in retribution. The British War Cabinet met 8 October 1942 to discuss the German threat to shackle prisoners in retaliation for the incident on Sark. The Germans had decided that the shooting of the bound German prisoners was no accident. They claim to have recovered Allied documents after the raid on Dieppe that gave orders to shackle the hands of German prisoners. Without consulting Ottawa or any other Commonwealth government the Cabinet issued a statement stating that if Germany persisted in its intentions to shackle allied prisoners similar measures would be taken against German prisoners of war. Although the Canadian government in Ottawa was disturbed by the decision, there was nothing they could do except protest privately.

Oh, there's more. The shackling of prisoners is minor compared to what seems to be the standard of treatment called for by the right-wing wing noise machine today, but it was considered to be so outside the bounds of legality that Ottawa actually made both Britain and Washington change their minds within two months of the decision.

And there's this aspect which you, Rachel, are just too stupid to get.

A new pattern of home propaganda in Germanv became clear. The Nazi leaders were telling the German people that they could expect nothing but the most savage treatment if Germany lost the war.

The fact exists that the US government engages in torture of prisoners of war. The justification for such treatment is couched in the flimsiest of excuses, from creating a new and contradictory definition for a PW, (unlawful enemy combatant), to some sort of exaggerated operational imperative developed from the script of 24 and the worship of a fictional character who never has to stop and take a piss.

The word will, and probably already has been, spread among the population by the opposition that if the Americans ever take full control, you can expect to be brutalized. Look at what they do to those they take prisoner.

Let's get back to your telling us all about war. Think you're so goddamned informed on the subject? I've seen hundreds of you. The sound of a thunderflash sends you scurrying for the nearest hole while you check your underwear.

Fix that. Take Prole's advice, pack away your keyboard for three years and get some first-hand experience. It would be my pleasure to know that some DS in battle school is calling you a scummy little maggot and screaming at you for every little mistake. Then off to theatre. If you survive you can come back and tell us all about it.

And, as for being fired from your position at the Toronto Sun, go buy a mirror. The person you see in it got you fired.

In the meantime, why don't you see if you can hook up with Jonah Goldberg. He's another prize piece of shit who seems content to avoid the reality of war while relentlessly expounding on its virtues. You and he would fit together nicely. He was, after all, raised in a Republican whorehouse.