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Thank you for a year and a half of Friendship and Fun.

Billie, I think you better scroll up and click on the link for 10-10-03.

Good Afternoon Billie .. what a nice trip down memory lane .. thank you all for the hard work on these threads

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Here's a letter (with introductory commentary) just e-mailed to me:

Lord, how I wish Members of Congress and all Americans could see it the way Gen. Hawley does. I've always said that Gen. Geo. Patton was the only Marine in the Army, but now I'm gonna add Gen. Hawley to make him the only Marine in the USAF. This is a must read and take it to heart. The good General is 100% correct. Semper Fi.
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Gen. Hawley's politically incorrect but right on the money! This retired 4 star says it pretty well. For those who don't know General Hawley, he's a newly retired USAF 4-star general. He commanded the USAF Air Combat Command [our front-line fighters and bombers]. The Command headquarters is at Langley AFB, VA. General Hawley is now retired and no longer required to be politically correct. His short speech is very much to the point. The following are excerpts:

"Since the attack [9-11], I have seen, heard, and read thoughts of such surpassing stupidity that they must be addressed. You've heard them too.

Here they are:

1) "We're not good, they're not evil, everything is relative." Listen carefully: We're good, they're evil, nothing is relative. Say it with me now and free yourselves. You see, folks, saying "We're good" doesn't mean, "We're perfect." Okay? The only perfect being is the bearded guy on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The plain fact is that our country has, with all our mistakes and blunders, always been and always will be the greatest beacon of freedom, charity, opportunity, and affection in history. If you need proof, open all the borders on Earth and see what happens.

2) "Violence only leads to more violence." This one is so stupid you usually have to be the president of an Ivy League university to say it. Here's the truth, which you know in your heads and hearts already: Ineffective, unfocused violence leads to more violence. Limp, panicky, half-measures lead to more violence. However, complete, fully thought-through, professional, well-executed violence never leads to more violence because, you see, afterwards, the other guys are all dead. That's right, dead. Not "on trial," not "re-educated," not "nurtured back into the bosom of love." Dead. D-E --Well, you get the idea.

3) "The CIA and the rest of our intelligence community have failed us." For
25 years we have chained our spies like dogs to a stake in the ground, and now that the house has been robbed, we yell at them for not protecting us. Starting in the late seventies, under Carter appointee Stansfield Turner, the giant brains who get these giant ideas decided that the best way to gather international intelligence was to use spy satellites. "After all, (they reasoned,) you can see a license plate from 200 miles away." This is very helpful if you've been attacked by a license plate. Unfortunately, we were attacked by humans.

Finding humans is not possible with satellites. You have to use other humans. When we bought all our satellites, we fired all our humans, and here's the really stupid part. It takes years, decades to infiltrate new humans into the worst places of the world. You can't just have a guy who looks like Gary Busey in a Spring Break '93 sweatshirt plop himself down in a coffee shop in Kabul and say "Hiya, boys. Gee, I sure would like to meet that bin Laden fella. "Well, you can, but all you'd be doing is giving the bad guys a story they'll be telling for years.

4) "These people are poor and helpless, and that's why they're angry at us." Uh-huh, and Jeffrey Dahmer's frozen head collection was just a desperate cry for help. The terrorists and their backers are richer than Elton John and, ironically, a good deal less annoying. The poor helpless people, you see, are the villagers they tortured and murdered to stay in power. Mohammed Atta, one of the evil scumbags who steered those planes into the killing grounds is the son of a Cairo surgeon. But you knew this, too. In the sixties and seventies, all the pinheads marching against the war were upper-middle-class college kids who grabbed any cause they could think of to get out of their final papers and spend more time drinking. It's the same today.

5) "Any profiling is racial profiling." Who's killing us here, the Norwegians? Just days after the attack, the New York Times had an article saying dozens of extended members of the gazillionaire bin Laden family living in America were afraid of reprisals and left in a huff, never to return to studying at Harvard and using too much Drakkar. I'm crushed. Please come back. Let's all stop singing "We Are the World" for a minute and think practically. I don't want to be sitting on the floor in the back of a plane four seconds away from hitting Mt. Rushmore and turn, grinning, to the guy next to me to say, "Well, at least we didn't offend them."

So here's what I resolve for the New Year: Never to forget our murdered brothers and sisters. Never to let the relativists get away with their immoral thinking. After all, no matter what your daughter's political science professor says, we didn't start this. Have you seen that bumper sticker that says, "No More Hiroshimas"?

I wish I had one that says, "No More Pearl Harbors."

TALLIL AIR BASE, Iraq -- Tech. Sgt. David Featherstun lines up Soviet, O-832 DU, 82 mm, high-explosive filled mortars for demolition. Featherstun is part of the 332nd Expeditionary Civil Engineer Squadron's explosive ordnance disposal flight here. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Karolina Gmyrek)

SOUTHWEST ASIA -- Airman 1st Class Jessie Holladay (left) and Senior Airman John Bronow inspect a MK-82 500-pound bomb in the munitions-storage area at an undisclosed location. Both airmen are deployed from Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England, and recently volunteered to extend for an additional 30 days. (U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Lance Cheung)

KIRKUK, Iraq -- Children at Al Ilaf school here greet airmen arriving with educational supplies. The $5,000 in supplies came from voluntary donations of 380th Air Expeditionary Wing airmen at a forward-deployed air base. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. James A. Williams)

Good photo to go with the Pledge! But it's not as good as your sketches!