The high cost of checking all the boxes
The Friday Letter / No. 539 / May 5, 2023
The first requirement of the Chief of Naval Operations, retired Capt. Brent Ramsey writes at The American Thinker, “is to be the advocate and architect of creating deadly naval forces and people who can quickly and effectively destroy and defeat our nation’s enemies.”
Let's see how that might play out with Joe Biden's likely pick as the next CNO. Like Biden's other high-level appointments, Vice Admiral Lisa Franchetti appears by all accounts to be an affirmative action flag officer with no combat leadership experience. She currently is the Vice CNO.
With only two exceptions since the position was created more than 100 years ago, CNOs have been Naval Academy graduates with vast command and combat experience. Franchetti's predecessor in the number 2 spot, Adm. Bill Lescher, earned degrees in aeronautical engineering from the Naval Academy and an MBA from Harvard.
Adm. Lescher's biography is long. The short version is that he commanded the Vipers of Helicopter Anti-Submarine Light Squadron-48, the Atlantic Fleet Maritime Strike Wing, and an amphibious strike group. He served in the Middle East aboard the destroyer USS O'Bannon and the frigates USS Clark, USS Capodanno, and USS Elrod. He is a decorated combat aviator and a test pilot.
Lisa Franchetti has an undergraduate degree in journalism from Northwestern and a graduate degree in organizational management from the University of Phoenix.
Navy-watchers make her the odds-on favorite to succeed current CNO Adm. Mike Gilday, whose pedigrees are similar to Adm. Lescher's. Their reasoning is Biden's record of making identity-based appointments and his promise to favor women and racial minorities over merit. (Janice Brown-Jackson at the Supreme Court, for example.)
Considering the possibility of war with China – a looming showdown on the high seas – Ramsey says “We must hope and pray that whoever is selected to be the next CNO is someone of extraordinary education, skills, experience, leadership, courage, and tenacity to ensure our victory.”
A taste of their own medicine
In Muncie, Ind., Delaware County Councilman Ryan Webb thought he'd have some fun by illustrating the absurdity of people who claim to have changed their sex. He now calls himself a lesbian “woman of color.” As expected, leftists aren't yukking it up over the gag.
What really galls them is Webb's before and after photos – identical. See them in this piece by
Joseph Mackinnon at The Blaze.
Webb isn't changing his name or the way he dresses.
“It is with great relief that I announce to everyone that I identify as a woman and not just any woman but as a woman of color as well,” he posted at Facebook. “I guess this would make me gay/lesbian as well, since I am attracted to women.” Webb is married and the father of six.
A transvestite man who goes by Charlize Jamieson called Webb's stunt a mockery and bigoted. Webb responded:
“Charlize Jamieson do you think you have the only password to the forbidden world of coming out? When you decided to become a woman did people tell you it was unbecoming? Sorry pal but you don't get to be the decipher of who is acceptable and who isn't. I was hoping that you and I could be friends now that we're both ladies that used to be men.”
A group called Indiana Progressives organized a harassment campaign that Webb said includes death threats to him and his family. Webb, a Republican, isn't seeking re-election.
Webb may have discovered something, that the best way to attack leftist lunacy is with humor. Laugh them off the stage.
Short takes on the news
Campus Reform
Illinois State University will have separate, segregated and identity-based graduation ceremonies for the class of 2023. The first, held April 22, was called the “Lavender Graduation” to honor “LGBTQIA+ lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and ace-identified graduates,” according to a school press release. Following ceremonies are scheduled for every conceivable group except one: white heterosexuals. They include ones for blacks, Latinos, Pacific Islanders, Africans, and Asians.
We nosed around the Campus Reform website and discovered similar graduation plans at Columbia, Penn State, Grand Valley State, UC-Berkeley, and UCLA. Lunacy rules!
Just the News
Resigned: St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner. Installed with millions in campaign cash from communist megadonor George Soros, Gardner first gained fame by running former Gov. Eric Greitens from office on a manufactured charge of attempted extortion. After Greitens was destroyed, she dropped all charges and admitted to wrongdoing before a state legal board. Gardner also charged attorney couple Mark and Patricia McCloskey with felonies after they brought firearms to protect their property from marauding bands of Black Lives Matter anarchists who had broken down the security gate to their neighborhood during the George Floyd riots of 2020. The McCloskeys were convicted but later pardoned.
The Blaze
A transvestite pedophile who tortured his 7-year-old daughter is serving his 25-year sentence in a women's prison in New Jersey, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union. As a student, Matthew Volz was president of the Clark College Queer Association before starting his own pornographic pedophilia film company. The ACLU of New Jersey sued the state's correction department and won the right of men to serve their sentences in a women's prisons by claiming they are female. A source inside the prison said Volz is still fully a male. Female inmates at the prison are said to be terrified of Volz and the other 26 men housed there.
Heaven can wait
Janice Hall recently graduated from Bethel University in Mishawaka, Ind. Her next stop is a Master of Divinity degree.
Wait, there's more. Janice had to drop out of school a while back following a serious automobile accident. In the meantime, she survived breast cancer (twice), a stroke, and her husband's death.
“A while back” is more than five decades. She retired nine years ago from her human resources job at the City of South Bend. Janice Hall has 14 grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren. She is 81.
She has plans for her divinity degree. “It will assist me with some of the practical things that I need to carry out that degree and to do what God has called me to do,” she explained in this Daily Caller story.
Three hundred-fourteen miles east in Youngstown, Ohio, Libert Bozzelli had some help crossing the stage to receive his diploma from Cuyahoga Falls High School, Class of 1942. He was escorted by wheelchair by his great-grandson, also graduating, and his grandson, who teaches there. Libert, former City Councilman, philanthropist, and recent widower, is 97.
At 17 he interrupted his education to serve in World War II.
“We lived a hell of a life,” he said of his 75-year marriage to his high school sweetheart, who died just a week before the ceremony. The diploma wasn't honorary but earned through testing, his granddaughter Lauren Hovey told WKBN-27 News.
“I’m happy for people to get more education. There is never too much time for education, I’ll tell you,” Bozzelli said.
Recommended reading
Daniel Horowitz at The Blaze.
West Virginia voters have the opportunity next year to replace liberal Sen. Joe Manchin with a constitutional conservative, but don't bet on it, Horowitz warns. They seem to prefer their current governor, former Democrat-turned Uniparty Republican Jim Justice, as Manchin's challenger. Because corporatist Republicans control the party's Senate nominations, conservatives have “failed to make any progress in several decades, since the Bob Dole days, in pushing the Senate to the right.” The Horowitz choice: Rep. Alex Mooney, a Freedom Caucus member.
Headline of the week
Fake news you can trust from The Babylon Bee
“Biden Deploys 1500 Troops at the Border to Help Register New Voters”
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