Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Brace Yourself

Back in September I said:

Lord, don’t let Jeff Goldstein ever get mad at me.

Now it seems some poor schmuck is about to get unloaded on by Mr. Goldstein.

Going to be a long couple of months for Mr. Hundred-Percenter.

Preemptive death

It’s good to know that CBS is still in the business of jumping the gun.

A draft of CBSNews.com’s obituary for Terri Schiavo mistakenly appeared on the Internet for a few hours, a network official said Wednesday.

The incomplete story did not appear on the network’s Web site, but it could be found by an Internet search engine because it was inadvertently saved in an online file, said CBSNews.com news director Mike Sims.

Sims said the draft was saved late Monday and removed a few hours later, after the error was identified early Tuesday. “It should have been saved off-line. We certainly do feel badly about that,” Sims said.

There’s no doubt that Schiavo is hanging on by a thin thread at this moment in time, and there’s also no doubt that news agencies across the nation are preparing obituaries as we speak. But only CBS News could do such a good job of embarrassing themselves in this manner.

Hero Honored

OIF has it’s first Medal of Honor Winner, SFC Paul R. Smith:

Sergeant Smith, 33, was a combat engineer in the Third Infantry Division that swept up from Kuwait on the march to Baghdad. His unit, B Company of the 11th Engineer Battalion, was attached to Second Battalion, Seventh Infantry, and had seized its part of the Baghdad airport on the evening of April 3, 2003.

The next morning, Sergeant Smith and about 15 other soldiers were building a holding pen for prisoners in a compound on the north side of the highway into the airport, on the battalion’s flank, when the compound came under attack by some 100 Iraqi soldiers.

“He told me, ‘We’re in a world of hurt,’ “ Staff Sgt. Kevin W. Yetter said in an interview with The New York Times several weeks after the battle. “Yeah, I guess we were in a world of hurt.”

According to a draft of the medal citation and the company’s soldiers, Sergeant Smith organized the engineers’ defense, calling in support from a Bradley fighting vehicle. Under a barrage of mortar fire, rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire, he hurled a grenade over the compound’s wall and blasted an antitank missile at a guard tower.

Still, Iraqi soldiers held the tower and kept firing into the compound.

“We were pinned down,” First Sgt. Tim Campbell told The Providence Journal, which had a reporter traveling with troops at the airport. “They had this planned. They found the lightest defended area and attacked.”

A mortar round hit an armored engineering vehicle known as an M-113. Sergeant Yetter was inside it. The blast momentarily blinded him. It also seriously wounded Sgt. Louis D. Berwald, the gunner on top, and another soldier. Sergeant Smith helped evacuate the three to an aid station, which was suddenly imperiled by the mounting attack.

Faced with pulling back to a safer position or holding fast, Sergeant Smith took over Sergeant Berwald’s .50-caliber gun, firing and reloading before he was shot in the neck.

“If they’d gotten by, there probably would have been dozens of deaths,” Lt. Col. Scott Rutter, the retired commander of the Second Battalion, said in a telephone interview.

One man held off one hundred and saved dozen of lives.  Giving his own life in the process.

To echo Smash, “Thank you seems so inadequate.”

More on SFC Smith here:

There are two ways to come home, stepping off the plane and being carried off the plane. It doesn’t matter how I come home because I am prepared to give all that I am to ensure that all my boys make it home.

“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.” General George S. Patton

Semper Fi and God Bless to Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith.

Hollywood has run out of ideas - part 376,459

Actually, maybe I should say Television City has run out of ideas.

Didn’t they already make a movie?

I am not Catholic

But I respect the Pope, if only for all of the effort he put in to battling Soviet-style Communism during his tenure.

Unfortunately, I think his time is growing short.

VATICAN CITY - Pope John Paul II is getting nutrition from a tube in his nose, the Vatican said Wednesday, shortly after the frail pontiff appeared at his window in St. Peter’s Square and managed only a rasp when he tried to speak

(Spare me the Schiavo/John Paul II comparisons, please, because they are only alike in one respect - the feeding tube. One wants it, the other doesn’t. One is mentally acute, the other isn’t. So let it go.)

I know I speak for my co-bloggers when I wish the Pope a speedy recovery. However, my opinion is that the Church will be electing a new Pontiff before Christmas.