I hate to point out that the photos of Wonkette’s Jack Stuef looks just like you would expect a guy who thinks it’s cool to trash a three-year old with Down ’s syndrome because he disagrees with the child’s mother’s politics to look like.  The bloated face, the pursed lips, the sorta hipster glasses that really come off as “nerd” – he looks like the guy who proudly wore a t-shirt through high school that read “Dungeon master” until he realized too late that doing so was just one more card in the deck stacked against his ever kissing a live girl.

Now, it’s proper for me to mock Jack Stuef because he’s a grown man and not a little kid with a handicap. Well, technically, that’s inaccurate.  He’s certainly grown – the dude looks like he’s never met a burrito he didn’t like and that he’d detonate in a burst of bile and used Pringles if he ever tried to do a sit-up.  But he’s not a man.

It’s not fashionable to expect men to be men anymore – I’m sure Jack listened intently and internalized every lecture by his Georgetown University gender identity studies course professor and probably considers whole idea of “being a man” at best an anachronism and at worst some sort of Bu$Hilter/Haliburton conspiracy to reinforce the patriarchal paradigm.  But, of course, the characteristics we label as “manly” are not restricted to those with Y chromosomes – honor, courage, integrity, duty and the willingness to take risks for the greater good do not know gender.  Hell, most of the “real men” in the GOP have bore children.

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Last week, at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Mo., a conference on the Korean War saw the CIA release of a large volume of long-classified documents. One of them led to this revelation:

Declassified Documents Show CIA Blunders in Korean War

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency committed two major blunders during the Korean War by underestimating the threat of a North Korean invasion of South Korea and failing to predict the intervention of Chinese communist troops until a day before it happened. . . . The revelations are contained in a set of CIA documents that were declassified on Wednesday, including a report entitled “Two Strategic Intelligence Mistakes in Korea, 1950,” which reviews the mistakes.

According to the report, a [CIA] paper dated on June 19, six days before the Korea War broke out, noted that “while [North Korea] could take control of parts of the South, it probably did not have the capability to destroy the South Korean government without Soviet or Chinese assistance,” adding “This belief caused them to ignore warnings of [North Korea’s] military buildup and mobilization near the border, clearly the ‘force protection’ intelligence that should have been most alerting to military minds.”

The CIA had been monitoring China’s moves from the start of the war, but even after the balance tipped in favor of South Korea with the success of [MacArthur’s] Inchon landing operation that choked off the communist advance, it saw no signs of Chinese intervention. On Oct. 12, it reported, “While full-scale Chinese Communist intervention in Korea must be regarded as a continuing possibility, a consideration of all known factors leads to the conclusion that such action is not probable in 1950” . . . But on the following day, 30,000 Chinese troops poured across the Duman (or Tumen) River followed by 150,000 more soldiers a few days later, leading to a full-blown battle with allied forces.

Pretty enormous mistakes, considering that the North Korean and Chinese offensives required mobilization and movement to launch-points of large military forces opposite RoK and U.S. units, something not easy for intelligence collection to miss in a tinder-box environment like the Korean peninsula at the time. (more…)

Chuck Johnson is at it again. He must be out on a weekend pass. I feel compelled to answer the Little Green Monster after I saw him go after James O’Keefe with that same tired wet noodle of a charge he has leveled at so many, calling him a white nationalist. Johnson claimed in an LGF post that “ACORN sting filmmaker James O’Keefe was photographed attending a 2006 white nationalist conference titled ‘Race and Conservatism.’”

Sounds terrible, right? Sure, until you get the facts that Johnson doesn’t tell you. When it became clear that it wasn’t a “white nationalist conference,” Johnson tried to slither out of responsibility for his words by saying in a new post: “It’s very clear that I attributed the ‘white nationalist conference’ claim to One People’s Project; that’s what the words ‘according to’ mean.”

Busted! As if it weren’t obvious that in his original post, he was approving of and endorsing what One People’s Project said. But this is typical of Johnson’s weaselly hit-and-run smear tactics.

Meanwhile, Larry O’Connor at Big Journalism uncovered the truth about O’Keefe’s supposed participation in this conference: (more…)