Flight Pundit

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

William Shakespeare

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For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action nor utterance, nor the power of speech, to stir men’s blood. I only speak right on. I tell you that which you yourselves do know.

William Shakespeare

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I get stories all the time about Marines, and it’s hard to pick and choose which ones mean a lot. This one really pulled on my heart so I decided to share it… Read it and be proud.

Addressing members of his Napa church Tuesday, Marine 2nd Lt. Steve Keisling said their prayers helped bring him and the 33 Marines under his command home alive.

The 25-year-old decorated Marine earned several standing ovations followed by hugs from members of the Napa Valley Baptist Church, as he shared his experiences.

He spoke mostly of his fellow Marines. “Boot camp makes you a man, but combat brings you up to the next level,” he said. “I have the deepest respect for these guys.”

I really like that statement…”Boot camp makes you a man, but combat brings you up to the next level”- It should be a motto of some sort for the Marines who have been in combat situations.

He held the highest praise for a Navy medical corpsman assigned to his platoon. He said the 18-year-old was “a small-town kid from Kansas” who grew up in Iraq. “He was a boy when he went with us. One incident and he turned into a man,” Keisling said.

The medic was among nine men seriously wounded when a roadside bomb exploded beneath their vehicle outside of Karmah, near Fallujah.

“When we got hit he was in the truck. He was wounded. He had a lot of internal injuries, but he didn’t care. He was still crawling from Marine to Marine, giving them morphine, making sure everybody was taken care of,” the lieutenant recalled.

What a hero…

The lieutenant is a graduate of Napa High School, Napa Valley College, and Sacramento State University, where he earned a degree in criminal justice in 2002.

He joined the Marine Corps in 2004. “I come from a family of Marines,” he said proudly.

Go read the rest of this article. He talks about a typical day in Iraq, and he’s going back in February.
Semper Fi

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Seems that some (Islamafreakoid type) people aren’t happy with Congressman Tancredo’s remarks about the Flight 93 Memorial. The Islamic terrorist supporting group CAIR has a press release today demanding that GOP leaders condemn the congressman’s words.

Press Release Source: Council on American-Islamic Relations
CAIR: CO Rep’s ‘Crescent’ Comments a Ploy to Gain Publicity
Tuesday September 13, 7:37 pm ET
GOP Leaders Urged to Repudiate Tancredo’s Islamophobic Views

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 /PRNewswire/ — The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today dismissed Rep. Tom Tancredo’s (R-CO) comments on the design of a memorial to those aboard a plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11 as a cynical political ploy designed to gain national attention. (See: http://tancredo.house.gov/)

CAIR also called on state and national leaders of the Republican Party, including President Bush, to repudiate Tancredo’s Islamophobic stance on the memorial issue.

I don’t think the GOP leaders are going to pay any attention to this. If any of them do so, I’m going to stop supporting them. This makes it clear that CAIR has no clue how things work here in America. By calling Tancredo’s remarks a “cynical ploy designed to gain national attention” proves the point. Tancredo is only responding to people he represents as well as millions of others seeking a voice in Washington.

In a letter sent to the National Park Service, Tancredo opposed the design’s shape “because of the crescent’s prominent use as a symbol in Islam.” Extremist and anti-Muslim Internet bloggers have associated the design’s semi- circular shape with Islam, despite the fact that the designer, the park service and relatives of crash victims say the shape is a circle broken by the flight pattern of Flight 93 when it crashed near Shanksville, Pa. (The crescent itself has no religious significance in Islam, but is commonly associated with that faith.)

I suspect relatives of the victims will speak out soon enough. Many people associate this “broken circle” with Islam because it is so often used by Islamafreakoids on their web sites, in their video releases and other media.

“Representative Tancredo once again demonstrates his anti-Muslim bias and his thirst for publicity,” said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. “He apparently believes he can only gain attention on the national political stage by fabricating a false controversy based on bizarre Internet conspiracy theories.”

Awad added that CAIR is only challenging Tancredo’s implicit linkage between the faith of Islam and terrorism, and will respect whatever the victims’ families believe is an appropriate design for the memorial.

Tancredo was recently involved in a controversy over similarly Islamophobic remarks suggesting support for bombing Mecca, Islam’s holiest site.

CAIR, America’s largest Muslim civil liberties group, has 31 offices and chapters nationwide and in Canada. Its mission is to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.

CAIR supports terrorists, plain and simple, and actively participates in fundraising for groups like Hamas. Like the ACLU, it will go out of it’s way to defend the shoe bombers want-to-be’s along with the Mohamed Atta’s of the world. I have yet to hear any effort from this group condemning the London Bombings and other Islamic attacks on freedom.

Cross Posted @ Vince Aut Morire

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