Category Archives: Phonies and Assclowns

mad-magazine-trading-private-bergdahlWith the motions phase of his trial not going well, Bowe Bergdahl — through his radical lawyers led by elderly Stalinist retread Eugene Fidell — has requested that his name be added to President Obama’s last great list of pardoned prestoopniki.

The request for pardon shows, perhaps, that Bergdahl and his lawyers know what’s been obvious to anyone following his saga — the dude’s guilty, guilty, guilty.

White House and Justice Department officials said Saturday that Bergdahl had submitted copies of the clemency request seeking leniency. If granted by Obama, it would allow Bergdahl to avert a military trial scheduled for April where he faces charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. The misbehavior charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.

If the pardon isn’t granted, Bergdahl’s defense team said it will expand its legal strategy to the new administration by filing a motion arguing President-elect Donald Trump violated his due process rights with scathing public comments about the case.

Bergdahl deserted his post in 2009 and went over to the Taliban. Hundreds of Americans risked their necks searching for him, and some of them were killed. Others suffered life-changing wounds.

In May 2014, the Administration made a secret deal with the Taliban to swap 5 terrorist leaders detained in the Guantanamo Bay facility for the traitor. Unlike the men who were placed at risk or injured seeking him, or the families of the slain, or, for that matter, any of the soldiers who went to Afghanistan and did their duty, the turncoat’s release was celebrated by President Obama. Giving the President’s general tilt towards jihadi terrorists and against American fighting men, a pardon is a real possibility.

Bergdahl is unlikely to be as celebrated by President-Elect Trump, who has pointed out that “in the old days,” we shot traitors like him.

Fidell, the Leftover Left activist leading Bergdah’s delay-disrupt-deny defense, thinks he can use Trump’s hostility to his client to get the traitor sprung, if appealing to Obama’s fondness for his client doesn’t work.

Fidell said he plans to file a motion seeking dismissal of the charges against Bergdahl shortly after the January inauguration, arguing Trump violated Bergdahl’s constitutional due-process rights.

The defense has been noting Trump’s comments about Bergdahl in what they’ve dubbed the “Trump Defamation Log.” A version included in the court record lists 40 such instances as of August.

“All of these things put together and repeated rally upon rally for basically a year have a cumulative effect that I think is totally at odds with the right to a fair trial,” Fidell said in a phone interview.

Unfortunately for Gene Fidell, whose dream world would be a regime where radical lawyers could control who could speak and what they could say, his dream isn’t becoming real.

Good luck with the technicalities, because everyone knows, regardless of legal maneuvers, that Bowe Bergdahl is a traitor and a prince of Blue Falconry. Even the Taliban don’t want him back!

This entry was posted in Don’t be THAT guy, Phonies and Assclowns, Unconventional Warfare on by Hognose.

Damon Linker, No Deep Thinker

Damon Linker isn’t particularly special today, he’s just an illustration of an immutable law: the more time you spend in the Acela Corridor, the more you see the Outside World through a glass, darkly. This makes most Washington and New York pundits entertaining to read on the subject of war: they can always be counted on to reverse cause and effect, creating what the late Michael Crichton called “‘Wet streets cause rain’ stories”; and they often miss very large beams that are clouded by the motes of partisanship and self-regard that multiply in their eyes, like some sort of virus, lofted in the foul air of their coastal enclaves.

See if you can guess what very large beam is missing from this emphatic statement by Linker (the elisions are for brevity and do not alter his argument, as you can see at the link):

Both … nominees, [and] journalists …avoid talking about the fact that the United States is waging war in at least five countries simultaneously: Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia.

Anything missing there? We have a hint, and we still have ineradicable 15-year-old dust from the place on some of our gear: Afghanistan. The word does not exist in his essay. And that’s only one. Despite the current tensions the gormless incumbents of both Presidencies have produced, US Forces have been working intimately with Filipino forces in tamping down the Abu Sayyaf insurgency there, a process that occasionally goes to Bulletsville and more occasionally racks up a US casualty, who used to be, at least, counted as an OEF casualty alongside his Afghan brothers.

So it’s seven wars. Not counting the ones we’re not counting, and believe me, they’re there: Damon Linker doesn’t know about them because the Times and the Post don’t know about them, because most of their international bureaux are closed or are staffed by host nation stringers with their own agendas. And because one of the markers of the speciation of Homo acelaicus is his distance from and revulsion by Homo combativus. 

It’s a safe bet that nobody in the Linker bloodline has suited up for combat in the 45 years since Nixon ended the draft (or in the years before that, where an array of deferments spawned for the convenience of the children of Homo acelaicus kept them out of harm’s way). The whole point of having an aristocracy is hereditary rule, dissociated from standards or merit, for the benefit of the aristocrats. 

Linker is critical of the press in his article, but only because they’re not dumbing things down enough for the real retards, the American people. You see, wars are complicated, and journalists, well:

…journalists have no faith … in the American people to process and evaluate that information in a responsible way.

Well, when the public doesn’t trust the press, and when Damon Freakin’ Linker is the guy who’s going to heal this rift, maybe he’s got the arrow of causation characteristically ass-backwards. Who is it that mistrusts whom, here?

…the press actively contributes to making our politics stupider. Instead of enlightening members of the general public, it entertains them.

Of course, his idea of “enlightening” involves socializing them to Acela Corridor values, so he’s doomed to failure outside of his coastal Echoplex. And then he whines that, this election year:

…the media has come in for unprecedented hostility and abuse….

Perhaps it deserves it? When a guy pontificating about all the wars we’re in elides the fact that his boy and his girl are responsible for many of the new theaters of war in which this one conflict is being conducted, by abandoning Iraq and Afghanistan initially, and then fomenting new wars in Libya, Syria, and even Egypt? When a guy pontificating about the wars forgets about Afghanistan?

Almost everyone I know has been to Afghanistan. To fight. Only to return to the dripping contempt of the Damon Linkers of the world, the sunken, shriveled,  fans in the press box, to whom everything that is good and holy emanates from their beloved political sports-teams.

We’re not ready to lynch reporters here, not even Damon Linker, but we would vote “not guilty” if put on the jury of someone who did.

This entry was posted in Don’t be THAT guy, Phonies and Assclowns, Unconventional Warfare on by Hognose.

The Greatest Blue Falcon Ever

File photo (1989) of an F-14A live-firing an AIM-9. Just not at an American jet.

File photo (1989) of an F-14A live-firing an AIM-9. Just not at an American jet.

Here’s a story of a guy who’s probably the ultimate Blue Falcon — of all nations, services, and epochs. Yes, he’s that bad. First, the backstory: Timothy W. Dorsey is probably the worst example ever of how an Admiral’s son can rise in rank in the Navy despite, shall we say, limited competence.

Dorsey’s father, James Dorsey, was an aviator who rose to three-star rank (Vice Admiral) in Pentagon billets after his shipboard days ended. So Timothy’s career skids were greased, and in the 1980s, he skated through training and into the cockpit of an F-14, then the Navy’s premier fighter plane. Career-wise, he blew past aviators with better skill and judgment.

At least, until 22 Sep 87. As an investigating board put it, in the words of board chairman VADM Kendall E. Moranville:

The September 22, 1987, destruction of USAF RF-4C was not the result of an accident, but the consequence of a deliberate act. His subsequent reaction [to the radio command] demonstrated an absolute disregard of the known facts and circumstances.

He failed to utilize the decision-making process taught in replacement training and reacted in a purely mechanical manner. The performance of Lieutenant Timothy W. Dorsey on September 22, 1987, raises substantial doubt as to his capacity for good, sound judgment.

We necessarily rely on the self-discipline and judgment of pilots to prevent such incidents; we have no other choice. Nothing, in my opinion, can mitigate Lieutenant Dorsey’s basic error in judgment.

Yes, Dorsey, carrying out what was supposed to be a guns-cold practice intercept of a friendly reconnaissance jet, armed, locked, and fired an AIM-9 Sidewinder entirely on his own volition. The two pilots in the Air Force jet ejected and survived with minor injuries. Then, he lied about it, displaying a shoulders-wide streak of moral cowardice in his character. A former squadron mate:

I would never have guessed he’d ever make it to commander, much less admiral. In fact, I thought his career was over back when the shoot-down happened. He refused to accept any blame for the shoot-down and swore he was just following ROE even though he knew it was a friendly. I mean, the guy did it on purpose.

For most people that board’s dry understatement, “substantial doubt as to his capacity for good, sound judgment,” would have, shall we say, nailed the three wire on their Naval career.

But most people can’t rely on Admiral Daddy Dorsey (at the time of Timothy’s RF-4 kill a RADM) to run interference. Dorsey Junior couldn’t fly — they clipped his wings after that staggering display of poor skill and character, forbidding him from ever flying a Naval aircraft again, although they still allowed him to wear the wings on his uniform — but he continued onward and upward in the Naval Reserve. Fast forward to 2012 (we’ve changed the order of some of the quoted paragraphs):

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta this month announced to the Senate several nominations for promotion to admiral.

On the list is Navy Reserve Capt. Timothy W. Dorsey, … who, while assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, committed what the report said was an “illogical act.”

Dorsey intentionally fired his fighter jet’s missile at an Air Force reconnaissance plane, nearly killing its two aviators and destroying the aircraft during a training exercise…

His promotion to admiral has some in the aviation community shaking their heads, especially because minor discretions by flight officers over the past decades have resulted in reprimands and the ends of careers.

Compare Dorsey’s career trajectory — “Mess up and move up” — with what happened to anyone who attended Tailhook in the wrong year. In the end, he didn’t get his Admiral’s Star, but it took an Act of Congress (albeit without the capital A) to stop the promotion.

One wonders what Capt. Michael W. Ross and First Lt. Randy H. Spouse think about Dorsey. Who are they?

“The airplane just starts shaking like you wouldn’t believe,” Ross said. Both he and Sprouse thought they had collided with the F-14.

“I’ve got fire lights – let’s get out of here!” Ross shouted.

“I’m gone!” Sprouse said from the back seat as he pulled an ejection handle rigged to both seats.

Back on the F-14, [Dorsey’s backseater] Holland took to the airwaves. “Mayday! Mayday!” he shouted. “Got a kill on a Fox 4!” Within moments, the Navy brass was on the radio, demanding answers.

“I’m sorry,” Holland recalled Dorsey saying as they circled the downed aviators and watched the burning wreckage sink. “I guess I kind of screwed this up.”

That was before he started applying the DAMN method:

  1. Deny everything;
  2. Admit nothing;
  3. Make counteraccusations;
  4. Never change your story.

Within 30 minutes, a rescue helicopter from the Saratoga plucked Ross and Sprouse from the water and took them to the carrier. Their injuries were relatively minor – primarily a badly bruised hand for Ross and a dislocated shoulder for Sprouse.

Indeed, while Dorsey’s willful screw-up didn’t have big consequences for Dorsey, it did for RF-4C pilot Ross, who’s full of reconstructive hardware and in pain every day, to one extent or another:

His ejection caused a powerful whiplash that resulted in a degenerating spine and a premature end to a career he believed was on a path to make the rank of general.

“I’m not trying to say I flew when I was unable. I never did that,” Col. Ross said. “But it got to the point where I started getting myself in positions where I was doing more desk work than flying.”

All told, he said, he has had seven back surgeries in which surgeons have installed screws, plates and rods to keep him functional.

Fished out of the water and taken to the Saratoga, Col. Ross waited for an apology from Lt. Dorsey. It did not come until last year, when the former Air Force pilot received a note from Capt. Dorsey as his nomination was pending in the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Meanwhile, what’s a man who’s got a really bad character, and has decided to ply his Navy trade part-time as a Reservist, going to do with the rest of his waking hours? What the rest of the cheats, connivers and chiselers do: go to law school. And he became head, general counsel, and spokesman for a racket that cons lower-IQ lower-enlisted guys in military towns into overpaying for shoddy merchandise, and then gouges them with lawsuits, filed thousands of miles away in Virginia, where Blue Falcon Dorsey, like Admiral Daddy Dorsey before him, is “connected.”

Now, recently Dorsey’s personal and political pal, Attorney General Mark Herring of Virginia — whom you may remember as the guy who tried to singlehandedly erase all concealed-carry reciprocity of VA with other states, until the state legislature folded that dictate until it was all sharp corners and proceeded to clean out his polyps with it — announced that he had a great deal in the form of a settlement.

The deal is a great one — for Blue Falcon Dorsey and the other crooks of USA Discounters. They get rid of all past, present and future legal liabilities with a $40 million slush-fund infusion to Herring and other state AGs, cleaning up their balance sheet — and letting them continue to cheat service members to their heart’s content. Cha-chingg!

And the deal is a great one — for Herring, giving him $40 million in off the books money he can sluice to his pals in connected “non-profits.” Just in time for the 2016 election! Cha-chingg!

The deal is a crappy one for the service members that Dorsey used to, still does, and will continue to rip off, as Dorsey and Herring do the grip-n-grin and laugh about the chumps.

In the bad old days when a base/post, brigade/wing, or battalion/squadron commander was king, he would put chiselers like Dorsey’s USA Discounters “Off Limits” and let them work their wiles on the civilians. You can see why the last few Secretaries of Defense and the Navy, and their political buddies like Mark Herring, and their crony capitalists like Four-More-to-Ace Dorsey, have wanted to see the services “fundamentally transformed.”

But it turns out not to be necessary, because Almost Admiral Four-Short-of-Ace Lawyer Timothy W. Dorsey and his gang ran USA discounters into the ground. And it went bankrupt in 2015.

Don’t worry about Dorsey, though. You know ol’ Blue Falcon paid himself first.

(Many hat tips to Jonn and NHSparky at This Ain’t Hell for most of the links in this post. There was also a good story in the Washingtonian, but it’s not online any more, just a comic-book style illustration of Dorsey smoking the RF-4).

This entry was posted in Don’t be THAT guy, Lord Love a Duck, Phonies and Assclowns on by Hognose.

Assclown of the Ides: Rudi Gresham, Legend in His Own Mind, #3

Rudi Gresham wearing a uniform, not one of whose insignia he actually earned.

Rudi Gresham wearing a uniform, not one of whose insignia he actually earned. No CPT, INF, SF, 7th Group, CIB, Master Blaster wings — every one’s a fraud.

We have written and have followed up once about the legendary SF phony, former peaked-at-PFC clerk and chaplain’s assistant Rudi Gresham. Gresham has been claiming for decades to be a retired major, or lieutenant colonel, or something — like most habitual liars he puts little effort into the consistency of his lies, even though he seems to have come to believe them himself.

Now that his deception has been exposed, he and his proxies are claiming he was a super-secret-squirrel CIA officer. Would you believe: he wasn’t that, either? With a bunkered-up Rudi having deleted most of his own social media presence, these claims are being advanced, in part,  by proxies such as SFA Chapter 34 head Mike Mika, a genuine SF vet who has partnered with Rudi in some charitable endeavors. Another Rudi defender, SF vet and author Don Bendell, has turned on his former friend, after evidence that Rudi had lied and had cheated Don out of money became overwhelming. Don prides himself on being a man of honor. Imagine how betrayed he must feel.

In fact, this has been a very profitable, if underhanded, imposture for Rudi. What he seems to have done to Don is to offer to act as a middleman to facilitate a donation to a worthy cause, and then give the recipient half of the donation Don gave him to pass on!

Remember what we like to say about phonies: it’s never just Stolen Valor with these guys. There’s always some other misconduct comorbid with the imposture.

When Guardian of Valor outed Rudi (something that many in the SF community had known was coming, as it had been discussed in private forums closed to the public and to any non-SF person, such as, for instance, Rudi), Don Bendell was one of the friends who sprang to his defense — at first. As GOV puts it in a 27 August update:

After our story was published, we received countless emails and phone-calls from former colleagues of Gresham’s, and those that had supported him all the way up until we outed him. One certain person was Rudis best friend. He defended him and told us we had no clue what we were talking about, that Rudi was an honorable man.. until he saw the evidence. Once we presented him with it, he was devastated to say the least.

He confronted Rudi, who admitted to Don that he was in fact lying about being a Special Forces Retired Officer. In an email sent to Mr. Gresham from his former friend, he tells him of the incident in which he admitted this.

Don didn’t just send the letter to Rudi, and to GOV. He BCC’d it to everybody who’s anybody in the SF community, and asked that it be shared in the private fora mentioned above.

We had been sitting on Don’s dynamite letter because we did not know if he wanted it published beyond those private places. Guardian of Valor has published the whole thing as a screen shot as part of that update; let us know in the comments if there’s demand for selectable text, ’cause it’s still sitting in our inbox.

This is somewhat personal for your humble blogger. Not as personal as it is for poor Don, an honorable vet who was lied to and ripped off face to face by Rudi Gresham, shameless SF fraud. But it’s still personal enough. We make no Vietnam claims here, but came by our SF and Ranger tabs, and our memberships in SFA and SOA, legitimately. It is personally highly vexatious that a phony could simply assert such things, and then, having used such phony credentials to worm himself into high places, Gresham today is using his relationships with politicians and former executive appointees to try to shore up his false claims.

It doesn’t matter how many selfies he’s got with Jeb! Bush, or Lindsey Graham, or Tony Principi, or Mike Hayden. Rudi Gresham is a fraud. He used that long-running fraud for personal gain, often at the expense of charities he claimed to be helping (or in the case of some charities, the whole thing was as big a fraud as Rudi’s claimed career).

He profited greatly by these false claims. There is no legal recourse because the Supreme Court, nine lawyers untainted by real-world exposure (or military service), ruled that, while they fully support jailing phonies who pretend to be lawyers, Stolen Valor frauds are just using their First Amendment rights to promote themselves, and who cares who’s a real veteran anyway? Truly an attitude you need to be within Uber range of an Acela Express stop to hold.

Rudi’s strongest surviving defender, Mike Mika, appears to be entirely legit as an SF vet. And, unlike Rudi, he seems to be involved in vets’ and Montagnard charities on a basis of selfless service, which is admirable. But to put the most charitable spin possible on it, he has been blinded by Rudi’s donations to his causes — donations which, if Rudi treats them like he did the ones from Don, he skimmed rather badly without telling Mike — and he still defends him. GOV tells this story (“Mike” is Mike Mika):

[T]he Mike he is speaking of in the email, I was contacted by, was the President of the local Special Forces Association which Rudi had recently resigned from after being a  member for a several years.  He is the author of the website supporting Rudi Gresham. He told me he had some information that would change my mind about Rudi and asked to meet with me one afternoon, and I agreed. At this meeting I was asked not to discuss much of it…

…a sure sign of bullshit…

…but it was agreed that Rudi was never an officer in the US Army (agreed by Mike Mika) and that the main concern was over a lawsuit stemming from the Martin Luther King family and the book “Killing The Dream”, by Gerald Posner.

This is utter nonsense. There was such a lawsuit between various Kings — who are understandably protective of their late father’s image — and Posner, but it was settled many years ago. It appears to have been about the King family and James Earl Ray’s defense attorney trying to establish that there might have been a conspiracy to kill King. (Posner, trained as an attorney, makes a case in his book and argues convincingly that there was no conspiracy, and James Earl Ray murdered Rev. King alone ). And it has nothing to do with whether Rudi is a phony. It’s just more poo flung from the monkey cage to try to distract people from Rudi’s endless (until 2016, anyway) impersonation.

It seems that Mr. Gresham is quoted throughout an entire chapter in that book, and maybe this could start some new theories. Who knows?

No, it just means that author Gerald Posner is one more victim of Rudi’s long-running deception campaign.

Like I told them, my only concern is the truth about Mr. Gresham’s background, not this other stuff. So again they tried to show me the letter from General Yarborough, and again I tell them that this holds no water as it was written in the 90’s.

They also showed me photos of Mr. Gresham with the director of the CIA, trying to also convince me that he was also some type of secret agent for the Government. I had to just shake my head. We left the meeting with a promise to meet with Mr. Gresham the following Friday in Charleston, S.C. I awaited the phone call for the meeting but it never happened.

One of the fascinating things about Rudi is his involvement with Thomas Burch in the phony charity the National Vietnam Veterans Foundation. Both were SF phonies. Burch had a slightly stronger claim, because he was just promoting himself from a JAG assigned to SF in Vietnam to a FAG (Former Action Guy); Rudi’s claims were even more outrageous as he never rose above PFC and never got closer to Vietnam than Fayetteville, North Carolina. But what fascinates us is the possibility that both were so deep in their impersonations that neither one seems to have realized that the other was a phony, too. 

It has happened before: two Texas guys started a Vietnam War museum: they claimed SEAL and SF, and each believed the other was telling the truth, even though he knew he himself was lying. Was that the deal with Burch and Gresham and their phony charity? We’ll never know, will we? It’s not like we’re going to get straight answers out of these guys. They’re going to lie until their last breath, and then, the gravedigger will need to use a corkscrew to make the holes for ’em.

Let’s not forget who Hans Rudolf “Rudi” Gresham really is. Private First Class. (And in retrospect, promotion to that grade sounds like a classic Army error). Clerk-typist. Chaplain’s Assistant. And, as his actual DD 214 says, “Nothing follows.”

This entry was posted in Don’t be THAT guy, Phonies and Assclowns on by Hognose.

How Wall Street Celebrated 9/11

Here’s a group of Wall Street banksters, from Goldman Sachs or one of those other gangs of greedheads, celebrating 9/11 last week:

Yes, that’s a group of [censored]s taking selfies with a blow-up doll and yukking it up at the memorial. Supposedly it was the bachelor party for the cretin with the inflate-a-date. May his wedding bring him the bride he deserves (it probably will. No doubt she, too, has no values beyond the shallow, selfish, and material. The Gods of the Copybook Headings are already preparing to chortle over the divorce settlement).

Look at these guys (and the pictures of them and their buddies at the link). No wonder a bunch of illiterate goatherds, who aspire to marry a sister or cousin like Dad did, and wipe themselves with their own hands, think they can beat us.

According to the Daily Mail, these  were Britons working in one of the big, lawless, tasteless, and classless American banks. Obviously they’ve combined the moral leprosy of their own nation’s legendary football hooligans with the moral ebola of their shallowest and crudest American hosts, and steeped the resulting concoction in the Petri dish of the crude and greedy Manhattan banker culture.

They continued this unseemly show until an officer of the NYPD asked them to leave. They argued with him, of course. (After all, laws don’t apply to Wall Street people. And if they look like they might, a quick contribution to the right foundation will fix things).

Wall Street values are Goldman Sachs values. And this is what they look like in action.

You could ask God to damn their souls, but they don’t believe they have any souls — just appetites. And they may be right.

UPDATE

We found lot of others writing about this yesterday after we drafted our story.

This entry was posted in Don’t be THAT guy, Phonies and Assclowns, Unconventional Warfare on by Hognose.

How To Explain Why You Hate Poseurs

stolen-valor-SF-phonyCall them what you will — poseurs, wannabes, walts, blowfish, or the World War I vintage term, “four-flusher” — but we hate ’em. Doesn’t even matter if they’re faking our service. A guy who pretends to be a Naval Aviator or a Marine Scout Sniper infuriates us just as much as some goon rockin’ an unearned Green Beret, and we’re pretty sure that the beret goon also gets up the nose of our Navy, Marine and Air Force bros.

That said, it’s easy to discuss this with fellow vets, because we’re all pretty much on the same page, regardless of what heights we scaled (or depths we plumbed) during our time in uniform. But it’s hard to get it across to most civilians. That’s probably why the Supreme Court invalidated the Stolen Valor Act. None of them are actual vets, are they? They’re all Yarvard lawyers. They would never find against a prohibition on practicing law without passing the Bar Exam — that’s something that hits them where they live.

But military service? Meaningless, foreign, distant and contemptible — that’s how the Justices of the Supreme Court see you, and how the vast majority of judges and lawyers see you.

So this article by Scott Faith at Havok Journal, which is almost a year old, is a pretty good resource when some judge, lawyer, or other non-military person looks at you in complete puzzlement when you’re ranting about the medieval tortures you have in mind for some poseur. It’s called “Why Veterans Hate Posers So, So, So, SO Very Much,” and that’s just what it is.

Faith makes a real effort to explain why we loathe poseurs, and who is and isn’t one:

So who isn’t a poser under this definition?  The short answer is, outward appearance on its own doesn’t count, it’s all about intent.  People who wear military-style fatigues to do rugged work like hunting, or simply to stay warm, are not posers.  Children who are obviously too young for military service aren’t posers.  People who wear military-themed clothing, including unit- or qualification-specific shirts or hats, are not automatically posers (do you think everyone wearing an NFL jersey played professional football?).  Legitimate re-enactors aren’t posers, and as for Airsofters… well, that’s debatable.  Anyway, even celebrities who wear stylized military uniforms or hipsters who wear military-style jackets or hats to be “ironic” aren’t posers, they’re just douchebags.  That’s an important difference.

He even creates a taxonomy of four classes of the scrotes. And he runs through the possible solutions, including the all-time favorite:

Unfortunately, the “summarized ass whipping” is not recognized as a legal course of action, so most of the time military posers do not get the punishment they so richly deserve…. So now it’s pretty much an open invitation for military posers, to include well-known celebrity actors like Shia LaBeouf, to carry on however they want.

The fact of the matter is, what most of these guys need is a personal and particularized beating, but the lawyers (see above comments about the vet-hostile ethos of the Supreme Court) won’t let you do that.

So… Big Boy Rules are in effect. Don’t get caught.

This entry was posted in Don’t be THAT guy, Phonies and Assclowns, Veterans’ Issues on by Hognose.

The Fall of Kathleen Kane, Anti-Gun Attorney General, is Complete

korrupt_kathleen_kaneKorrupt Kathleen Kane was convicted Monday of all nine charges, including felony perjury and misdemeanor obstruction of justice. Her failure to take the stand in her defense was probably the last straw, but the fundamental problem, from her point of view, was that she was guilty, and the sort of redirection, obfuscation and tu quoque that was so effective with her allies and friends in the press had no grip in the courtroom. The jury spent a token 4½ hours deliberating before bringing back the across-the-board guilty verdict.

Now we can see why she and her mob lawyer, Mafiosi’s pal Gerald Shargel, fought the motions phase of the case so long and hard — a procedural victory was her only hope. Unfortunately for Kane, she ran out of delays and had to face a jury of her peers, six men and six women from a cross-section of citizens. There’s only so much even the Teflon Don’s lawyer can do for you, when the facts of the case scream “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Off with her head!”

guilty paper 1 guilty paper 6

Kane was released in her own recognizance, after promising to surrender her passport — a routine formality — and accepting a much less routine condition from judge Wendy Demchick-Alloy, who threatened her with immediate imprisonment if Kane attempts to retaliate against any witnesses. Where could the judge have gotten an idea that such a thing was a possibility? It must have come from the facts of the case, and Kane’s demeanor.

Kane may not have gotten the message. Kane coatholder and devotee Bruce Castor, now acting-jack AG, has hinted that he might charge witness Josh Morrow with perjury, in an attempt to avenge his fallen heroine.

guilty paper 5

After some consideration of brazening it out still further, prompting legislators to make impeachment noises, Kane resigned on Tuesday. (In PA, removal from office is automatic on sentencing, not conviction). What remains is sentencing. She will be sentenced on 24 October 2016. While she could receive seven years on the perjury rap — the other eight charges are misdemeanors — it seems unlikely that someone so well-connected will be sentenced to prison time, especially as Shargel will continue to appeal as long as she can pay him.

guilty paper 4A previous attempt by legislators to remove her from office after her indictment was fended off by her fellow Democrats, who are grateful to her for spiking state corruption investigations (the investigations proceeded, though, in the hands of the Feds and the City of Philadelphia) and for her anti-gun activism.

Like Virginia’s similarly anti-gun Attorney General, Mark Herring, Kane singlehandedly erased most of the reciprocity agreements contracted by previous AGs, complaining that licensed handgun carriers were the cause of Pennsylvania crime. Unlike Herring, though, Kane wasn’t slapped down by the legislature, and eliminating reciprocity between Pennsylvania and other states — and driving national mandatory full faith and credit recognition forward — may stand as her one achievement.

As Attorney General, she redirected resources away from violent crime, and towards her two bêtes noirs: the state’s gun owners, and child abusers. Because of her inability to distinguish between actual, exploitative and vile obscenity, and mildly off-color cartoons and email memes, she was a complete failure on the kiddie-diddler front. (It was her predecessors who put Jerry Sandusky away, as Kane cast aspersions from the campaign trail). The same Manichean worldview that led her to demonize gun owners, led her to perjury and obstruction of justice in an attempt to settle a score with an attorney she saw as an enemy, top prosecutor Frank Fina.

Fun fact: Kane, during her tumultuous time in office, demanded that subordinates address her as “General.”

The “General’s” next stop should be “general-population” in one of the state warehouses for naughty girls. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving person. Instead, she’ll probably get some combination of probation and (gag us) “community service.”

Hasn’t she serviced the community enough?

This entry was posted in Don’t be THAT guy, Phonies and Assclowns, Poly-Ticks on by Hognose.

Assclown of the Ides: Rudi Gresham Follow-Up

Gresham sucked up to trusting politicians with his phony claims of SF heroism. Now photos of him with the same pols he lied to are a cornerstone of his campaign to obfuscate his fraud.

Gresham sucked up to trusting politicians with his phony claims of SF heroism. Now photos of him, doing the grip-n-grin with the same pols he lied to, are a cornerstone of his campaign to obfuscate his fraud. It’s not like PFC Gresham can stand on his real records.

Notorious Special Forces and Vietnam phony Rudi Gresham, who’s been scamming SF luminaries and the community since his undistinguished turn as a PFC, has been mounting a counterattack on the (actual) Special Forces soldiers who outed him.

Gresham hasn’t hit the rock bottom of, say, John Giduck (another unrepentant phony who had one point had a “reputation management” firm posting bogus web content stuffed with his name to try to spam his stolen valor history down below the top Google search results), but he’s done a bunch of things to discredit himself even further, so it’s time to grease the skids beneath him a little more.

He has set up a website defending himself at rudigresham.com. It has the laughable title: Rudi Gresham: A Life in Service. (In service of what? In service of the nation’s longest-running veteran impersonation, maybe.) What is there are a couple of documents indicating that General William Yarborough had believed in the 1990s that Gresham had served with him on active duty. As Gresham’s own authentic records show, that was not possible, unless General Y had a secret assignment for a clerk typist or chaplain’s assistant, the only two positions Gresham ever held.

Even if taken at face value Gresham’s testimonial documents do not prove that Gresham is the former SF officer he has claimed to have been for at least 35 years. They only prove that some real retired officers like him and still believe him — or that some dead retired officers used to. And how can anyone take any document from Gresham at face value, when he submitted forged documents (notably a fictitious DD 214) to the Special Forces Association and Special Operations Association while pursuing memberships (for which he never legitimately qualified). Anything posted by Gresham is, by default, a perjurer’s testimony, and it should be received with the same level of caution.

If Gresham were not a phony, but an actual former SF officer, really trying to clear his name, you would expect a site to include such things as an SF graduation certificate (everybody gets one, although Rudi never did, because he never attended the course), SF graduation and MOS award orders (which are preserved both at the Regiment and in the National Archives, except none exist for Gresham, because he never attended the course), testimony from former teammates and classmates (which don’t exist in Gresham’s case because, well, you have to be on a team or in a class to have mates, and Gresham never was).

You can tell when he’s lying. His lips move.

rudi with jeb and nickiThe awards Gresham has worn in public include the SF Tab, Captain, Major and Lieutenant Colonel rank, the Master Parachutist badge, and more. In the picture on the left, Gresham is wearing at least three SF insignia for which he never qualified: the SF Shoulder Sleeve Insignia (“Patch,” requires assignment to an SF unit); the SF Tab (requires individual SF qualification); and the SF Distinctive Unit Insignia (“Crest,” assignment to SF). The two politicians with him are also displaying Medal of Honor association cups, but Gresham is wearing no Medal of Honor, even though he’s just as qualified for that as he is for all the SF junk with which he’s bedecked. (You can see more pictures of these at the links below). The highest rank device Gresham ever earned was the single chevron and rocker of the Private First Class. The only qualification badge Gresham ever earned was the Parachutist Badge (often called the Novice Parachutist badge).

As a reminder, here’s a few pages on the real Rudi Gresham:

  1. Previous WeaponsMan.com coverage: Assclown of the Ides for June, 2016.
  2. The original Guardian of Valor exposé. Pay special attention to Tom Marzullo’s letter, quoted at great length. Gresham — a one enlistment, PFC chaplain’s assistant who has played ever since at being SF, former officer, and General Officer’s ADC (a position usually reserved for young officers marked for rapid advancement) — nearly got Marzullo, a no-kidding SOG recon guy, tagged as a wannabe. Note also that Gresham, like SF phony Thomas Burch, was profiting from a phony veterans charity, the National Vietnam Veterans Foundation, that seems to have existed for the sole benefit of the insiders, namely Burch and Gresham.
  3. The original This Ain’t Hell post containing Rudi’s real records.
  4. This thread at ProfessionalSoldiers.com (an SF-specific online forum and hangout) recounts some aspects of various actual SF men’s battle to expose the well-connected phony Gresham. As the site founder put it (in Post #10 of that thread):

Once Rudi Gresham aka Hans Rudolph Gresham found out that real Green Beret’s had his real military records one of his first acts was to resign his life membership in the Special Forces Association. That in itself begs the question, “Why?”

I’ll tell you why, he either resigned or he was going to be removed in an official vote. This is not the first time the SFA has had frauds in their ranks, some of the scam artists are good, real good if you were a former clerk typist…….

Note these details from Post #31:

…after several incidents involving Rudi… I was skeptical this guy was what he said. I brought it up on SF brothers and the naysayers came pouring out mostly Tom Marzullo about tailwind. Well i figured Tom was just grinding up an old wound. When the FOIA revealed the truth i was surprised, but it then all seemed to make sense. He got his VA appointment because of his political work for Bush. This was also where his false history of being an SF Officer perpetuated.

We actually disagree with this. We think his longstanding SF Officer impersonation was also key to his VA appointment.

It seems he was vetted by Canon in the 90s to the SFA but is was from more lack of verification than real vetting. A false DD214 was presented along with letters from General Officers supporting him. None of these documents were kept by the SFA . Beaver McCann the pres of SFA tried to verify him later, as well, but had the wrong SSN, so nothing came back. Nobody thought to question any of this or dig any deeper. After all, wasn’t Rudi getting money to SF projects? Not his money, mind you, other peoples’ money.

The only kind of “S F” Rudi Gresham ever was, and still is, is a Sack of Feces.

This entry was posted in Phonies and Assclowns on by Hognose.

TSA: Terrorists Seeking Access

Release_TSAMisconductReport-01

This illustration is an older report, from a Congressional Committee. But its title never goes out of style.

Remember when the bozos in DC redefined the mission of NASA as “Moslem outreach?” That was pretty weird — they’re alien, but not that kind. But if you were wondering whether an agency ever could top that for Mecca-facing featherbrained imbecility, wonder no more. And you know what agency did it.

No one good, decent, honest, competent, moral, ethical or intelligent has ever been employed at the TSA in any capacity whatsoever.

The latest outrage that these no-good, indecent, dishonest, incompetent, immoral, unethical and unintelligent payroll patriots have inflicted on us, actually took place in 2014 and 2015 and has been previously reported: special guided tours of security areas and procedures, exclusively for… Somali Moslems. It’s back in the news because Judicial Watch finally pried the documents loose with a FOIA request, and they’re pretty bad. JW summarizes:

On at least two occasions—December 18, 2014 and February 18, 2015—federal authorities granted the unprecedented excursions of the facility’s sterile and secure areas, according to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) records obtained by Judicial Watch. The DHS agency that conducted the expeditions, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), provided the Muslim participants with “an in-depth, on-site tour and discussion of CBP’s airport, including both inbound and outbound passenger processing,” the TSA files state. Besides multiple roundtable meetings between CBP and Somali community leaders including imams, the records show that a luncheon and “cultural exchange and educational brief” also took place between December 2014 and February 2015 so that attendees could ask about the agency’s “specific practices” at the airport.

The roundtable events and airport tours were organized by Abdirizak Farah, who is identified in the records as a policy advisor in the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL). Farah joined DHS in 2010 with an annual salary of $89,033 and by 2015 his yearly pay increased to $130,453, according to a government database. The TSA’s “Somali liaison officer” in Minneapolis, Andrew Rhoades, told Judicial Watch that the special airport tours were organized for Somali Muslims after they complained to Johnson that they felt “harassed and profiled” by CBP at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. The DHS secretary had “a sympathetic ear to that,” Rhoades said, adding that no other group has been granted such airport access by DHS. “Now, I will say we’ve never done that, or we don’t do that, to let’s say the Hmong community living here in Minneapolis, uh, the Christian community, the Catholic community, the Irish… whatever you want to call it. This has been the only one,” Rhoades said.

The complaints originate in the same extremist, wahhabi / salafi mosques that have radicalized dozens of Twin Cities youths, sending them down the path of Islamic terror.

The region has a large Somali Muslim community and Somalia is a terrorist nation that’s largely controlled by the extremist group Al Shabaab. In June three Somali-American pals from Minneapolis were convicted by a federal jury of conspiring to commit murder in Syria on behalf of the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and to provide material support to the designated foreign terrorist organization. Six of their buddies pleaded guilty and one was charged in absentia, presumed dead in Syria. Back in 2013 a mainstream news outlet reported that the Al Qaeda affiliate that terrorized a Kenyan shopping center and murdered scores of innocent people included Somalis from Minnesota. Among them was 22-year-old Ahmed Mohamed Isse of St. Paul and 24-year-old Abdifatah Osman Keenadiid of Minneapolis.

The FBI and Congress have launched probes into the radicalization of the Somali American community in Minnesota. Al Shabaab recruits young men in local mosques and ships them off to train and fight in Somalia. Last fall the area’s largest newspaper published a story confirming that Minnesota leads the nation in the number of people who have left or sought to leave the country to fight with terrorists aligned with ISIL or ISIS. An attorney who attended the June trial of the convicted Somali-Minnesotans explains in a newspaper column that the broader terrorist ring consists of young first-or-second-generation Somali-Americans who freely took advantage of educational and employment opportunities in the Twin Cities. Their social lives centered on local mosques, they supplemented their education with Islamic studies, are observant Muslims and want to live under the caliphate declared by ISIL. “They yearned to wage jihad and to die as Islamic martyrs,” the column states, adding that “they hate the U.S.” Many of them traveled through Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport while pursuing terrorist causes.

So, that’s exactly who you want looking at the security precautions that are so secret that:

  • journalists can’t see them;
  • the public can’t see them;
  • some in law enforcement can’t see them; and, even,
  • the TSA won’t prosecute its employees caught stealing from luggage (a widely practiced TSA “fringe benefit”) for fear of revealing them.

But hey, open wide for the Kenya shopping-center murderers.

But it wasn’t just a tour: the TSA promised the Somali radicals

…modifications to practices that would allow for operations to be more culturally sensitive.

What more is there to say? No one good, decent, honest, competent, moral, ethical or intelligent has ever been employed at the TSA in any capacity whatsoever.

This entry was posted in Don’t be THAT guy, Lord Love a Duck, Phonies and Assclowns on by Hognose.

Assclown of the Ides (late!): Wayne Simmons

Even as he was being sentenced to Crowbar Motel, Wayne Simmons kept insisting to the judge that he was really a super-duper secret agent. This Ain’t Hell has the report, linked below:

Wayne Simmons; sentenced and unbowed

(I’m not sure how we pulled that embed off… it just happened? Blogging with WordPress is like being Homer Simpson: “Life is a bunch of things that just happen.” Pardon the digression).

TAH’s story was based on one at the Washington Post, about which, more in a moment.

Meanwhile, TAH bagged not one, but two phony vets in relation to the Republican National Convention, a phonyish Woman Marine who was actually going to speak (she was dropped when exposed), and a phony Vietnam hero photogenically holding up a flag.

So why did the Post, which normally cares not a whit about phonies (they routinely tonguebathe phony Vietnam vets Richard Blumenthal and Tom Harkin, phony Indian Elizabeth Warren, and phony black Shaun King), suddenly get interested in a phony? Not just because it was a good news story (or they’d write about the others, yes?). Perhaps because among Simmons’s fraud victims was the Post’s arch-rival Fox News, which fell for the clown’s clown act utterly. The Post’s Rachel Weiner:

Wayne Simmons was a professional football player, a drug trafficker, a nightclub doorman, a Fox News guest analyst and an intelligence adviser in Afghanistan.

What Simmons, 62, was not, according to all available evidence, was a CIA agent. In federal court in Virginia on Friday, just before he was sentenced to 33 months in prison, he apologized for lying about his security clearance, his criminal history and his finances.

Wait, what? Criminal history?

Authorities first began investigating Simmons in the fall of 2013 when a woman he had a romantic relationship with came to the FBI saying he had taken her money in a real estate scam. The probe ended up going much deeper.

Authorities excavated Simmons’s life and career, starting with his claim that he was recruited to the CIA out of the Navy in 1973.

In fact, according to prosecutors, Simmons was discharged from the Navy for medical reasons just a couple of weeks after he enlisted. And former CIA officials told the government that they did not recruit agents out of basic training.

Simmons went on to briefly work on a pipeline in Alaska and then played football for several years with the semi-pro Baltimore Eagles and the National Football League’s New Orleans Saints.

Again, his career was cut short by medical problems, according to the records provided by the government.

Each of the missions Simmons claims to have then undertaken on behalf of the CIA was, according to a long court filing from prosecutors, merely the scheming of a petty criminal.

The Post article is replete with details about this guy’s scheming, always crooked, always self-serving, and always resolutely small-time. He seems to have been a hard-core narcissistic knucklehead who couldn’t stop playing Baron Munchhausen. Example:

Defense officials told investigators that a 1996 operation to “recover a very special alloy or object, most likely a Picosatellite,” simply never happened. Finally, Simmons’s Grasonville, Md., CIA safe house was, in the government’s assessment, just a dilapidated vacation home.

It just gets deeper and deeper. Read The Whole Thing™, because we’re only showing you a few highlights.

After starting at Fox, Simmons became part of a group of military veterans cultivated by the Defense Department under Donald H. Rumsfeld. He traveled to Guantanamo Bay with the group. Former Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, told prosecutors that there was no vetting done to be in the program, because it required no security clearance.

Rumsfeld later wrote a letter supporting Simmons’s effort to have his wife buried at Arlington National Cemetery, according to prosecutors.

Eh. Why do these politicians think their buddies and their buddies’ wives need to pollute our national reliquary? No, just because it took you two weeks to medical out of Navy basic, and just because of the rich fantasy life you’ve lived since then, doesn’t mean you’re a hero outside of your own mind.

And as we often say, Stolen Valor is never an “only” crime. True for Simmons as for so many others:

Simmons pleaded guilty in April to major fraud against the United States, wire fraud and being a felon in possession of a firearm. His prior record includes firearms, assault and gambling offenses, prosecutors said.

Two years and nine months to reflect on all those crimes is not going to be enough. We need sentencing reform, something like 10-20-Life.

This entry was posted in Phonies and Assclowns on by Hognose.