UPDATED. new VIDEO: Deadly DCA air crash - OTJ training + DEI

Regular readers will know that Walt is not one to jump to conclusions. [**cough** Ed.] However, I do think it's not too soon to start asking questions about yesterday's collision of an American Eagle CRJ700 and a UH600 helicopter belonging to the US Army. Here's the audio of Air Traffic Control directing other aircraft around the scene, with video of the moment of impact. 

 

The American Eagle airliner was carrying 60 pax and a crew of four, all of whom are presumed dead. The precise number of victims was unclear as rescue crews are still hunting for survivors, and recovering the bodies of those who didn't make it.

We do know that the Army chopper was on a training flight -- OTJ training in the middle of one of America's busiest and most complex airspaces. We also know that until President Trump signed his EO a few days ago, the American military was prioritizing the hiring of vizmins, BIPOCs, wimmin, trannies and others who "experience sexuality differently", without regard to their aptitude or qualifications. 

We would like to know who was flying the helicopter at the fatal moment. Whose voice is heard saying they could see the airliner? Was he/she/it a DEI hire? Same question for the air traffic controller who apparently didn't realize that the two aircraft were flying at the same altitude or warn them of the impending collision.

Just asking, you understand.

UPDATE ADDED 2/2/25

Looks like I got the answer I was expecting. Not such an unwarranted suspicion as some have suggested. 

In this video, Michael 'Rocket' Blackstone, a professional pilot with 26 years as an airline pilot, as well as an aerobatic airshow performer and stunt pilot asserts that the likely causes of this horrific accident are now pointing toward the 28-year-old 500-hour pilot, Captain Rebecca Lobach.

Capt. Lobach was apparently at the controls of the PAT-25 H-60 helicopter. She was allegedly taking a competency check ride with Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Eaves, 39, who was evaluating her even though he had only about 1000 hours himself.. 

  

These H-60 pilots failed to "see and avoid" the American Eagle CRJ traffic called out by DCA tower after stating that they had the traffic in sight. Clearly, the H-60 crew did not have the traffic in sight, failed to steer left as directed to pass behind the CRJ, failed to fly at or below the required 200' MSL, maximum altitude on the helicopter route. 

The ATC controller passed the full responsibility of in-flight separation at night to a helicopter crew whom he saw never make any heading changes to avoid the American Airlines aircraft. 

Mr Blackstone argues that this situation was completely avoidable, and many regulatory changes must be implemented immediately to protect the flying public from the dangers of military training missions.

Walt explains why Americans like The Donald

Walt loves watching the liberal lamestream meeja explain to Americans why they're all wrong in supporting Donald Trump's bid for the presidensity. One of the more ridiculous analyses I've seen was that of the CBC's Neil Macdonald, who opines that Americans "don't take people like Donald Trump seriously" and are enjoying the spectacle purely for the entertainment value. Wrong, Neil! Wrong!!!

A better view is taken by Lexington, the Economist's observer of things American. In "El Donald", he (or she) says "What is clear is that he will not win the Republican presidential nomination.... America’s two-party system offers him a bleaker choice: to stay on and heckle in the primaries or to play wrecker as a third-party candidate. Yet the Trump slump, when it happens, will not spell the end of the forces that have propelled him so far. Anti-politics rage is buffeting rich democracies across the world, and America is not immune to it." [Walt's emphasis.]

IMHO, Lexington has put his (or her) finger on the root of Mr. Trump's popularity. While the likes of Mr. Macdonald are already writing obituaries for his "The America We Deserve" campaign, a CNN/ORD national survey (conducted after The Donald's nasty remarks about John McCain) showed Mr. Trump leading the GOP pack, with the support of 18% of Republicans. "Jeb" Noname had 15% and Scott Walker 10%.

Mr. Trump's star is rising, and shows no signs of falling before next month's debate of the top ten contenders. Why is this?

Part of it is The Donald's reputation for business acumen. "I'm a smart guy," he tells us. "I went to Wharton Business School." The second statement is true. As for the first, Mr. Trump has had some spectacular business successes. He's had a few colossal failures too, but anyone who can boast that he could finance his own multimillion-dollar campaign if he wanted to is clearly no slouch at managing the elusive sponduliks. And, according to the same CNN poll, 44% of Republicans think healing the economy is the ballot issue for the next election.

Then there's the celebrity factor. For decades now, Mr. Trump has been plastering his name on everything he touches, from New York towers to California golf courses to airplane tailfins. Walt even flew on the Trump Shuttle, back in the day. Leatherette seats in coach - for decades. He was the star of his own "reality" television show, and his catchphrase -- "you're fired" -- is a commonplace of American dialogue. [You're fired! Ed.]

Mr. Trump has name and face (read: hair) recognition up the yingyang. A recent Gallup poll puts his name ID among Republicans at 92%. But who's John Kasich? Who's Bobby Jindal? Who's... that other guy?
The Trump name demands media coverage (even if it's just in the Entertainment section), which boosts his poll numbers and leads to more media coverage.

We turn now to the Top Two Reasons for Donald Trump's lead in the polls.

His stance on illegal immigrants resonates with the majority of Republicans and, dare we say it, the majority of Americans. Lots of people who were born in the USA, or followed the rules to come in legally, are sick, sore and tire of being branded as racists and extremists. They see no reason to give the queue-jumpers a fast track to resident alien status, or amnesty of any kind. What they want, according to that CNN/ORC survey, is for them to be deported -- immediately if not sooner.

In "Revenge of the Radical Middle", Matthew Continetti, neocon editor of The Washington Free Beacon, writes: "It is immigration -— its universally celebrated benefits and its barely acknowledged costs -— that is the third rail of U.S. politics.... Trump didn’t step on the third rail; he embraced it, he won’t let go of it, and in so doing he’s become electric. Republicans, Democrats, journalists, corporations all want to define themselves against him, and their flaunting of their moral superiority only feeds the media monster, only makes Trump more attractive to the dispossessed, alienated, radical middle."

Which brings us to the undeniable fact that The Donald has become the spokesman for the silent majority. Mr. Continetti calls Trump supporters the "radical middle", who in years past embraced Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. Mr. Trump, you see, is not a conservative, or even a mainstream Republican. He is a populist, more akin to Ross Perot (another wealthy businessman who ranted about the Mexican threat) or George Wallace than to Messrs Gingrich and Reagan.

The voters to whom Mr. Trump appeals (continues Mr. Continetti) "don’t give a whit [Ed., please check spelling] about corporate tax reform or TPP or the capital gains rate or the fate of Uber, they make a distinction between deserved benefits like Social Security and Medicare and undeserved ones like welfare and food stamps, their patriotism is real and nationalistic and skeptical of foreign entanglement, they wept on 9/11, they want America to be strong, dominant, confident, the America of their youth, their young adulthood, the America of 40 or 30 or even 20 years ago.

"They do not speak in the cadences or dialect of New York or Washington, their thoughts can be garbled, easily dismissed, or impugned, they are not members of a designated victim group and thus lack moral standing in the eyes of the media, but still they deserve as much attention and sympathy as any of our fellow citizens, still they vote."

Speaking last week in South Carolina, Mr. Trump said, "There's a silent majority out there. We're tired of being pushed around, kicked around, and acting and being led by stupid people." To which Walt can only say, "Ain't it the truth!"

Why the chicken crossed the road

As explained by...

The Bible
And God came down from the heavens, and He said unto the chicken, "Thou shalt cross the road." And the chicken crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing.

Jesse Jackson
The road, you will see, represents the black man. The chicken crossed the "black man" in order to trample him and keep him down.

Baltimore Police Department
Give us five minutes with the chicken and we'll find out.

Richard Nixon
The chicken did not cross the road. I repeat, the chicken did not cross the road. I don't know any chickens. I have never known any chickens.

Ernest Hemingway
To die in the rain.

Martin Luther King Jr.
I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.

Grandpa Simpson
In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

Aristotle
It is the nature of chickens to cross roads.

Karl Marx
It was an historical inevitability.

Bashir Assad
This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

Ronald Reagan
What chicken?

Machiavelli
The point is that the chicken crossed the road. Who cares why? The end result of crossing the road justifies whatever motive there was.

Sigmund Freud
The fact that you are at all concerned that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.

Bill Gates
I am about to release Chicken Coop 10, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook. And Explorer is an inextricable part of the operating system.

Albert Einstein
Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?

Bill Clinton
I did not cross the road with that chicken. However, I did ask Vernon Jordan to find the chicken a job in New York.

Walt
Because the chicken lacks any reasoning or decision-making capabilities, it seems unlikely that the chicken's action was spurred by any particular motivation.

Perry v. Paul: who's right about American involvement in foreign wars?

With all the meeja fawning over Hellery Clinton -- Will she run? Won't she run? Does it matter? -- not a whole lot of attention is being paid to the fact that two Republican presidential hopefuls are having a "conversation" [I hereby ban the use of that word to mean anything other than a private chat between two individuals! Ed.] on one important subject where Hellery and her former boss are very vulnerable -- foreign policy.

Senator Rand Paul kicked off the debate [That's better. Ed. last month with "America Shouldn't Choose Sides in Iraq's Civil War", in which he criticized not just the Prez's mishandling of the crisis, but the invasion commanded by President Bush II, which got America into the mess to begin with.

Texas Governor Rick Perry disagrees with Senator Paul's preaching of non-interventionism. In "Isolationist policies make the threat of terrorism even greater", he argued that "Many people are tired of war, and the urge to pull back is a natural, human reaction. Unfortunately, we live in a world where isolationist policies would only endanger our national security even further."

Mr. Perry goes on to question his potential rival's interpretation of President Reagan's foreign policy. "Paul conveniently omitted Reagan's long internationalist record of leading the world with moral and strategic clarity," wrote Mr. Perry. "Unlike the noninterventionists of today, Reagan believed that our security and economic prosperity require persistent engagement and leadership abroad."

Walt doesn't like to criticize an erstwhile conservative Republic, but the Governor listeth. [Errr... that line has already been used by Bill Buckley. Ed.] OK, let's just say "Rick Perry is Dead Wrong"! [Yeah, that's what Paul said, in Politico Magazine, just yesterday! Ed.]

The way Senator Paul sees it, "The let's-intervene-and-consider-the-consequences-later crowd left us with more than 4,000 Americans dead, over 2 million refugees and over trillions of dollars in debt.... Tough talk like Perry's might inspire some for the moment, but when bombast becomes policy it can have long and disastrous consequences."

Mr. Paul also points out that Mr. Perry's criticism of the Reagan foreign policy is miles off-base. "Reagan was stern, but he wasn't stupid. Reagan hated war, particularly the spectre of nuclear war." Which is pretty much what Pat Buchanan said in Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, by Pat Buchanan, reviewed favourably here a few days ago. Here's how Mr. Buchanan sees American "inaction" -- NON-intervention -- during the Reagan years.

"US inaction was not due to cowardice but cold calculation as to what was worth risking war with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union and what was not worth risking war. When the Polish workers' movement, Solidarity, was crushed in 1981, Ronald Reagan denounced the repression but he neither broke diplomatic relations with Warsaw nor imposed economic sanctions.

"Eisenhower and Reagan were not Chamberlains, but neither were they Churchills. Who ruled in the capitals east of the Elbe was not to them a vital US interest worth a war. They believed in defending what we had, not risking war to retake what Roosevelt and Churchill had given up.... Reagan believed America and freedom were the future, that Communism was headed for the ash heap of history, that we need not, indeed, must not blunder into a war to hasten its inevitable end. Patience and perseverance were required, the use of proxies to bedevil the Soviet Empire at its outposts...and carrying a bigger stick -- that was the Reagan way."

As a favour to Governor Perry, who appears to be as untutored in history as was President Bush II, Walt presents a further quote from the Buchanan opus, on the question of whether America should be the world's policeman.

"America is the last superpower because she stayed out of the world wars until their final acts. And because she stayed out of the alliances and the world wars longer than any other great power, America avoided the fate of the seven other nations that entered the twentieth century as great powers.

"The British, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Ottoman, and Japanese empires are all gone. We alone remain, because we had men who recalled the wisdom of Washington, Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams about avoiding entangling alliances, staying out of European wars, and not going 'abroad in search of monsters to destroy'."

Walt hopes Governor Perry or (please God) Senator Paul or whoever next occupies the Oval Office will take this advice to heart. Otherwise a lot more Americans are going to be dead...for the wrong reasons!

Wildrose wilts: a cautionary tale for conservatives - Part II

In "Wildrose wilts: a cautionary tale for conservatives - Part I" we saw how Alison Redford's GOP (Great Oxymoronical Party) -- otherwise known as Progressive Conservatives -- defeated the Even More Conservatives -- otherwise known as the Wildrose Party -- in spite of its leader's obvious charms. Now Walt will tell you why.

As nearly as I could see from my vantage point up the road from Robert E. Lee's boyhood home, two factors led to the defeat of Wildrose and the perpetuation of the Alberta Tory dynasty. The inevitable Mitt will have to keep both in mind if he is to have any hope at all of defeating Hussein come November.

First, the bozo factor. 130 years ago, W.S. Gilbert wrote:
When in that House [of Commons] MPs divide,
If they've a brain and cerebellum, too,
They've got to leave that brain outside,
And vote just as their leaders tell `em to.

Canadian politicians, when they accept a party's nomination, are expected to free themselves entirely of independent thought, toe the party line and stay totally "on message", lest their personal beliefs, if made public, scare the citizenry. Gilbert, again:
But then the prospect of a lot
Of dull MPs in close proximity,
All thinking for themselves, is what
No man can face with equanimity.

Unfortunately, as Ron Paul, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee have found out at various times, it's hard to get an assortment of libertarians, gun nuts, conspiracy theorists and gold standard-bearers to march in close order. So it was with the Wildrose Party, whose candidates included more than one who could be described as teetering on the brink of extremism.

One Wildrose MLA wannabe said he had no doubt that since Indians and other minorities tend to vote for their own, he had an advantage, being Caucasian. That would be true only if white folks voted en bloc, but they don't. Anyway, it's not the kind of thing you say in public.

Another Wildroser, an evangelical Protestant pastor, said homosexuals were going to hell -- all of them -- for violating God's law if not the state's. Again, everyone is entitled to his opinion, but speaking your mind doesn't help you get elected. A Wildrose insider called that little remark "a Bozo moment".

The other factor to be kept in sight at all times is the economic factor. It may be OK to have social Bozos in office [When are you going to run? Ed.] but in uncertain economic times, it won't do to have your province or state or country governed by economic and financial Bozos.

The Wildrose party suffered from a serious deficit of governmental experience. What with the ongoing oil sands and Keystone XL pipeline controversies, and serious negotiations with the federal government on the horizon, Albertans found themselves unable to hand the reins of power over to a bunch of right-wing loonies who just fell off the turnip truck. Wildrose may have had support amongst the "real people", but it didn't have big business -- particularly oil and the banks -- on its side.

What lessons do we learn from this? First, economic issues trump social issues every time. This is true for Canadians, at least, and Walt believes that Americans too will vote with their pocketbooks in November. If Romney can maintain his image as a sound and successful business manager who can turn the economy around, he may yet have a shot. Picking a running mate cut from the same cloth -- perhaps Senator Rob Portman -- would help.

Secondly, while people with strong views may be noisy and visible, they are outnumbered by a large majority of quiet voters who tend to congregate in the middle of the political spectrum, even on social issues. For every vocal pro-lifer and pro-abortionist, there are three or four people who think abortion might be OK, in some circumstances. And there are another two who simply don't care, either way. Do the math.

Let me put this one another way. Extreme views, publicly expressed, don't get you votes. This is the lesson Ron Paul -- God love him -- can't learn because his principles won't let him. If you speak out strongly on something you believe in -- like isolationism or abolishing the Fed -- which the majority finds outlandish or extreme -- you will lose.

Which brings us back to Canada and its Prime Minister, "Call me Steve" Harper, the arch-control freak. Mr. Harper is an evangelical Protestant, but he keeps quiet about it. He is accused by the Gliberals and Kneedippers of having a "hidden agenda", but they can never make the charge stick precisely because Harper is so close-mouthed about his intentions.

So, if Romney can continue to talk as little as possible about policy and his precise plans for the future of America, he won't get boxed into an extreme position or (even) accused of flip-flopping. Let him learn from Mr. Harpoon, who, when asked yesterday if Canada would commit to keeping troops in Afghanistan past 2014 (yes, they're still there!) said, "We will examine all options and we will take the decision that is in the best interests of this country...and not an ideological knee-jerk response." Hey, it worked for Reagan!

But... if any prominent Republicans go off the deep end, or if Romney chooses a loose cannon for a running mate, he's doomed. The HBO docudrama "Game Change" features a line from a member of John McCain's campaign team, as the reality of Sarah Palin dawns on them: "Oh my god, what have we done?"