I POSTED THE FOLLOWING ON STEVE MOYER'S BLOG, AFTER HE ANNOYED ME WITH A WHINY ATTACK ON AL GORE, INSTEAD OF REPORTING THE STORY THAT HE HAD SET OUT TO COVER, ABOUT NAVY LT MIKE MURPHY http://www.navy.mil/moh/mpmurphy/ RECEIVING THE CONGRESIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR: http://thetension.blogspot.com/2007_10_07_archive.html

The attack on former vice president Gore detracts from the gravity of Mike's award.
The British court's ruling contains its own factual errors e.g. more polars have been seen lost at sea, and their numbers have only increased in one small region where they are raiding garbage dumps (and endangering humans), while the overall population trend is in a steep decline.

Here's my problem with all of this: I absolutely respect and appreciate the sacrfice of Marcus Luttrell and the rest of his SEAL team, but Marcus shoots himself in the foot when he regales the reader with vague claims about WMD in Iraq in his previous missions in the Gulf. There were no WMD, and the whole Iraq war was started for bogus reasons. The U.S. Army's CALL said as much in its own official history--and that was written by active duty military men, not by some liberal in the suburbs. Luttrell should have stuck to the facts in "Sole Survivor" instead of jumping on the "Let me cash in on being a neocon" bandwagon. Had he left out the right-wing mythology that his own (former) bosses in the Pentagon never believed (since they're both retired, I suggest Marcus go have lunch with his former boss, Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, who'll calmly look him in the eye, and tell him how wrong he is i.e. there never were WMD) , and said as much before March 2003, "Lone Survivor" would have stood on its own merits.

I started the book twice, and couldn't go on, because all of the GWB ass-kissing was making me nauseous. An ex-submariner convinced me to try again, the third time. Once I finally got past all of the "George Bush walks on water, and loves his country" (my quotes) chapters, the book finally got interesting.

If you guys want to beat up on a vice president, start with Cheney, who along with his friends Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz got a lot of your friends killed in Iraq for no good reason, when they should have been in Afghanistan, hunting down Bin Laden.

The depressing part is that some of you guys out there are going to get mad, and write me emails calling me a commie traitor, or some other nonsense, but 20 years from now some of you will be shaving one morning, while getting ready to go to work, and you're gonna say "Oh man, we got screwed." You're not ready for that yet. It'll happen when your ready for it to happen.

Tom Miko(former) SPC4 back in the day when you had to spitshine your boots