don't piss off A-VP or MoNGO or NGO Vleeptron

Clicking is good.

Before March I'd barely even heard of (4-star) Marine General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military. I'm a vet, so I know what a general is and how many stars he/she has:

BE ...... brigadier general .. *
MY ...... major general ...... **
LITTLE .. lieutenant general . ***
GENERAL ...................... ****

(There's a ***** general/admiral rank, but the last time anyone had 5 stars was World War Two, so don't worry about it, you're not likely to bump into one of these.)

And I knew what the Joint Chiefs is and I knew it always has a Chairman.

Interestingly enough, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is not in a soldier's/sailor's/marine's Chain of Command. We had to memorize our Chain of Command, and every military unit always had a little photo gallery of every link in the Chain hanging in the hallway. My Top Link was Commander-in-Chief Richard Nixon.

When a soldier/sailor/marine/airperson has a Complaint, he/she has been repeatedly trained since Day 1 to take the complaint through the Chain of Command, starting with the lowest rung (First Sergeant, usually), and working Up from there.

Skipping eight rungs and directly bringing your Complaint to the attention of the Secretary of Defense is universally regarded as a Major Fuckup, and sooner or later, when the weather cools down a bit, you are going to be Very Sorry.

And if you really want an immediate transfer to guard duty in Antarctica, just write your hometown Member of Congress first -- go entirely Outside the Chain of Command. Everybody loves that.

Anyway, on 13 March, General Peter Pace did something with his mouth that Pissed Vleeptron Off so bad that Agence-Vleeptron Presse wrote an Editorial about it.

(A-VP cranks out News, Sports, Weather, Entertainment Crapola, and Editorials, we are a Full-Service newswire.)

We recommended that he retire immediately, and spend the remainder of his dumb-ass useless lifer life Playing Golf on the US military's hundreds of excellent golf courses all over the world.

General Pace, and the Secretary of Defense, have apparently read A-VP's Editorial, and General Pace will be taking A-VP's advice.

8 June - 13 March
= 56 days

Not shabby.

A word to the wise: Don't piss off Vleeptron.

This has happened before.

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, they pissed MoNGO (the NGO of Planet Mongo) off by dynamiting ancient giant statues of Buddha. MoNGO publicly condemned the Taliban's actions, and spent weeks trying to find the e-mail address or toll-free phone number of the Taliban Complaint Department.

One year later, the Taliban had fled Kabul and were all hiding in caves and roasting small wild rodents on sticks over a smokey campfire.

Don't write them off permanently; these are the folks who (with generous CIA assistance) blew Soviet Army helicopters and transport planes out of the skies and eventually chased the Soviet Army out of Kabul and over the frontier bridge and back home, in a public, world-televised "We're out of here, we give up" ceremony.

But the Taliban wouldn't listen to MoNGO's advice, they went ahead and dynamited the statues, they pissed us off, and they ended up hiding in caves to duck incoming cruise missiles and remote-controlled surveillance and assassination drones.

Don't piss off Vleeptron or Planet Mongo or Elmer Elevator's Discount Prep. We have a documented track record of Heavy Mojo.

And now, as A-VP recommended, General Peter Pace will be concentrating on his golf game.

Pace is not leaving his job because he made surprisingly unenlightened comments about the propriety of homosexuals serving in the US military. ("Surprisingly unenlightened," for a Marine general, deserves a lot of defining. Leave A Comment.)

Nor is he leaving his job -- a record for tenure shortness unmatched since Army General Maxwell Taylor's 2-year burst from 1962-1964, the season it became universally clear that our military surges in Vietnam were all Going South bigtime -- because of the letter he wrote to tell the federal sentencing judge what a fine, upstanding, hard-working, mother-respecting, churchgoing, self-sacrificing, taxpaying, patriotic American public servant Lewis "Scooter" Libby is. His letter is posted at the top of this post.

And The Smoking Gun has lots of the other highly educational & entertaining Scooter Libby letters.

Did Pace, an Annapolis graduate, always have such an addled, impaired Judgment Center? An early hint, of course, is his choice, on graduation, to take his commission in the Marines (during Vietnam) rather than the Navy. This is usually not regarded as an example of military Rocket Science, and reflects youthful hints of the suicidal and self-mutilating.

But Pace successfully waltzed and tuchas-licked (they like it anti-clockwise) his way to four stars and the gig of Chairman of the JCS. That reflects some rudimentary but reliable Judgment Instinct and Skills.

What may be more likely is that his Judgment Issues developed quite recently -- about the time he saw the Handwriting On The Wall about his future at the Pentagon.

He came in kissing Rumsfeld's tuchas (Wolfowitz and Perle also wrote leniency letters to Judge Walton) as the neocon warhawk Shock & Awe freakazoids were assembling the War in Iraq. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle are gone now. There is a new Secretary of Defense, Gates, who was not a member of the neocon cabal, and who owes Pace no personal loyalty or extraordinary favors.

Now there arose up
a new king over Egypt,
which knew not Joseph.

Had Gates re-nominated Pace for his traditional 2-year second term as CJCS, Pace would eventually have received Senate approval. The Democrats who now control Congress must always choose their big "over my dead body" fights cautiously, and Pace was not worth such a fight.

But re-nominating him meant an inescapable several days of high-profile public testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, whose members include Edward Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Annapolis grad Marine Jim Webb, and John McCain.

They were going to rake Pace, and the whole fucked-up Iraq Thing, over the hot coals and broken glass, in full view of Fox, CNN, PBS and C-Span.

And then approve him. Gates saw a chance to just skip one mega-televised Grand Guignol about the Iraq War. All he had to do, in one PBS commentator's phrase, is push Pace under a bus.

Gates may have made that choice months ago, or just days ago.

But Gates and Pace can both read a calendar, and can both count US military deaths and maimings in Iraq. Pace might have been a bright enough jarhead to see his time of usefulness to the Pentagon was coming to a close.

"I'm short" is what members of the military say when they're weeks or days away from Moving On, being transferred far away, or retiring. And "I'm short" imposes a specific and unique Perception of your professional surroundings and obligations. It also impairs the Judgment Center, because the likelihood of swift punishment and retaliation from superiors has almost vanished.

Pace knew he was about to say buh-bye, he saw the bus heading his way, he felt the new Secretary's firm hand pressed to his back, he knew Democrats now control the Senate.

This was the Short-Timer's Judgment Center environment in which he publicly declared homosexuality immoral and inconsistent with military service.

This was the Short-Timer's Judgment Center environment in which he wrote the judge -- publicly, it turned out -- about Scooter Libby's multitude of Virtues.

As a practical matter of politics and a long, successful career, when you get in some sort of jam, it is better not to have 250,000 angry homosexuals -- including military vets -- spewing out angry e-mails to everyone whose addie they can find in Washington DC.

It is also not a great idea to navigate through your troubles wearing a big

I [heart] A CONVICTED FELON

button on your Class-A uniform next to all the ribbons.

He was short and he knew he was short. Why not Share His Feelings, pent up for decades, about homosexuals in the military? Why not write the judge on Libby's behalf?

Say it wit' flowers
Say it wit' mink
But whatever ya do
DON'T SAY IT WIT' INK!!!!

-- Jimmy Durante

Also ... don't piss off Vleeptron. It's just not smart. There's another L-4 bus heading your way every 15 minutes.