Babbling Babs Update
Very well put Allan. Remember when you posted the contact info. for the publicists and managers of these celebrities? When you have some spare time, maybe an updated list wouldn’t be a bad idea.
"All you’re doing is reinforcing the public’s belief (and deservedly so) that Hollywood is a lunatic asylum.”
Oh, no. Let her keep on keeping on. This all works in our favor.
I daresay this kind of calumny even disgusts some liberals. Maybe they’ll even throw in the towel that they have such morons in their claque of Hollywoodites.
Posted by Phoenix
05/09/2005 at 11:44 AM
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Correct to:
Message In A Bottle To Babs: Babs, dear! Keep talking. Keep losing it. Do not Seek help immediately! Try some worse drugs, babe!
Posted by KenS
05/09/2005 at 01:00 PM
How incredibly approporiate are the words of the last verse of one of her most recognizable recordings:
“Isn’t it rich, isn’t it queer
Losing my timing this late in my career
And where are the clowns
Quick send in the clowns
Don’t bother, they’re here.Damn straight they are. They have been for more than 40 years.
Posted by FJBill
05/09/2005 at 01:44 PM
Seems to me that the Democrats are the new Nazis.
They refuse to admit that they were defeated (like the Nazis and the Versailles Treaty), they talk about “stolen elections” (like Ludendorff’s “stab in the back” being responsibile for the reults of WWI), they certainly march in lock-step (no dissenting voices on the Left), and they believe their own propaganda.
Finally, Hitler was deluded and refused to face reality, too. Now if only Babs would take nap during the next round of elections (Hitler napped during the Normandy invasion).
Posted by MAJ Mike
05/09/2005 at 02:23 PM
Isn’t this the ditz who insists on pink roses in the toilet bowl, everywhere she goes?
Babs, dear, will you please stop trying to think? You are not properly equipped for it, and every time you open your mouth, you prove it.
Pink rose petals in the potty? WHY? To prove that her proverbial s--t doesn’t stink like the rest of the plebians she talks down to? She should line her big mouth with pink rose petals in that case. Wouldn’t cover the stink that cosseted bitch spews out, but the petals might choke her.
Posted by Phoenix
05/09/2005 at 04:19 PM
OK, ladies and gents, I’ll throw out a quotation here, a judgment of a very famous man by another man who had thorough personal knowledge of him.
“...Unimaginable vanity and unrestrained ambition were two of his principal characteristics; he had a craving for cheap popularity and effect, and was distinguished for dishonesty, ignorance and selfishness. He ignored the interests of State and people, and was both avaricious and extravagant--an effeminate and unsoldierly character.”
At whom was this description aimed?
Let’s have some fun here, shall we?
Richard Nixon?
Posted by Phoenix
05/09/2005 at 07:33 PM
Guess away. Guess up a storm.
OK, let me try again. Given that quoted description, what famous man pops most readily to mind?
Re: Famous Guy
Adolf Hitler?
Posted by MAJ Mike
05/10/2005 at 07:46 AM
IF MAJ Mike didn’t hit it I’ll offer Charles de Gaulle.
MAJ Mike was warm, but not quite there.
The description was aimed at Goering, by none other than Grand Admiral Raeder, C-in-C of the German Navy until replaced by Doenitz.
What struck me about it, however, was how inappropriate it is to apply such a description to Mr. Bush--while, on the other hand, it would seem to fit his predecessor, a chum and hero of “BS,” a little too tellingly.
Strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.
I’ll try to be less oblique next time. My thanks to all who lent a hand here.
That’s a side of Raeder’s character of which I was unaware.
Wasn’t he implicated in the plot against Hitler and executed? I forget.
Doenitz was tried for war crimes but was only given prison time due to the intervention of some U.S. Admirals.
People throw around that Nazi label a little too much. If some of us were truly Nazi’s, our critics would vanish into the “...night and fog...”!
So many idiots, so little time.
Posted by MAJ Mike
05/10/2005 at 01:29 PM
Equally applicable to Shrillary...all except for that ‘effeminate’ part.
Raeder survived the war, Maj Mike, and did time in Spandau for war crimes. Released in 1955 he lived untill 1960. Gotta love search engines.
StinKerr: Thanks for the update!!
With the demise of the German surface fleet, Raeder sort of faded into the background.
Doenitz could’ve been hanged for that Hitler Order regading shooting up lifeboats, but American submarine Admirals didn’t want the international community looking too deep into our submarine ops in the Pacific against the Japanese.
We were, perhaps, even more ruthless than the Krauts in our offensive against the Imperial Navy.
Posted by MAJ Mike
05/10/2005 at 03:52 PM
I’m not so sure about that submarine ruthlessness, Maj MIke. I ran across somebody on Blackfive’s blog a while ago that claimed that the U.S. submariners shot up lifeboats and survivors in the water.
I challenged him to provide sources and he couldn’t. We exchanged some civil emails on the subject and he ended up more or less telling me to disprove it.
He said he had seen some film shot on one occasion on the History Channel. It turned out that it was a Japanese film taken of their own subs shooting lifeboats and survivors in the water.
He also tossed in the case of where a submarine had fired on an “innocent” fishing boat. It turns out that the fishing boat had fired on the submarine first.
There were a lot of things that went on in the Pacific theater that didn’t get looked into very deeply and the Japanese were not prosecuted to the same extent that the German Nazis were. I don’t know if it was because they were not signatories of the Geneva Conventions or if it was some sort of political consideration i.e. leaving the Emperor sacrosanct.
Tanny,
Sheesh… I just read a book about Goering!
And your description was right-on, except in the book it went to tell so much more.darn it..... If only I’d thought a little more, it would have come to me because the second I saw ‘Goering’, it all came flooding back.
Posted by Phoenix
05/10/2005 at 05:06 PM
Hi Maj Mike, Raeder’s description of Goering, whom he despised, was part of his testimony at Nuremberg. Goering had always blocked Raeder’s efforts to give the Navy an air arm, and Raeder loathed and feared Goering’s penchant for intrigue and feared Goering’s influence with Hitler.
As C-in-C, Raeder was always determined to keep the Navy out of politics, and to keep politics out of the Navy. He tried to hold it to the standards he had learned in the old Imperial Navy of the Kaiser. He even kept out the Nazi Party and retained the traditional chaplain corps, and he protected and refused to retire Jewish officers, and retained, wherever possible, the traditional Navy salute.
For a good picture of the Navy side of the infighting around Hitler, and the characters of the admirals, see Hitler and his Admirals by Anthony Martienssen (editor of “Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs"). The book was published by Secker and Warburg, London, 1948, and is a standard reference for anyone who writes history on the WWII German Navy and its admirals. Hope this helps.
Hi StinKerr, that claim on Blackfive’s blog may have been referring to an incident involving USS Wahoo, during an attack on a convoy on her first patrol under the legendary Dudley “Mush” Morton. One ship in the convoy was a troop transport, and it was sunk, leaving thousands of enemy soldiers in the water.
In Silent Victory by Clay Blair (Philadelphia: Lippencott, 1975; Naval Institute Press edition 2001), pp. 384-386, we find:
“...When Wahoo surfaced, Morton ordered all deck guns manned. He found himself in a “sea of Japanese.” The survivors of the transport were hanging on the flotsam and jetsam or huddling in about twenty boats, ranging from scows to little rowboats....”
Blair then quotes George Grider, an officer aboard the Wahoo, who described the incident in his memoirs, War Fish.
“...Grider wrote: ‘The water was so thick with enemy soldiers that it was literally impossible to cruise through them without pushing them aside like driftwood. These were troops we knew had been bound for New Guinea, to fight and kill our own men....’”
Blair then quotes the Wahoo’s yeoman, Forest Sterling, who was topside on watch at the time, and recounted the event in his own memoirs, Wake of the Wahoo.
“Sterling remembered, roughly, an exchange between (Lieutenant) Roger Paine and Mush Morton:
‘There must be close to ten thousand of them in the water,’ said Roger Paine’s voice.
‘I figure about nine thousand five hundred of the sons-a-bitches,’ Morton calculated.....”
Blair continues:
“Whatever the number, Morton was determined to kill every single one. He ordered the deck guns to open fire. Some of the Japanese, Morton said later, returned the fire with pistol shots. To Morton, this signaled ‘fair game.’ What followed, Grider wrote, were ‘nightmarish minutes.’ Later, Morton reported tersely, ‘After about an hour of this, we destroyed all the boats and most of the troops.’”
As for repercussions:
In his patrol report, Morton described the killing of the hundreds (or thousands) of survivors of the transport. To some submariners, this was cold-blooded murder and repugnant.”
(We find an echo of this in Capt. Edward L. Beach’s novel, Run Silent, Run Deep.)
“However, no question was raised about it in the glowing patrol report endorsements, where policy was usually set forth. Many submariners interpreted this--and the honors and publicity showered on Morton and Wahoo--as tacit approval from the submarine high command. In fact, neither (Admirals) Lockwood nor Christie nor Fife ever issued a policy statement on the subject. Whether other skippers should follow Morton’s example was left up to the individual. Few did.”
Hope this clarifies things a little.
Hi Phoenix, which book on Goering did you read? I have a huge WWI-WWII collection, and if I don’t have this one, I’d like to add it please ma’am!
Tanny,
It wasn’t a book ‘on’ Goering so much as an historical fiction that was set with Goering as a main character. The book is in my bedroom at the moment - I"m up in my office. I’ll check it out. But I doubt you’d want it - it was terrible EXCEPT for the historical part about these characters. That’s the only reason I finished it. (In other words, spare your collection.)
Posted by Phoenix
05/10/2005 at 08:20 PM
Well then, I’ll recommend the book I already have, Goering, by David Irving (New York: William Morrow & Co, 1989). Irving is always a good fast read, even when his books are big, and he doesn’t tend to get stranded in sidebars like so many historians.
Tannenberg,
Wahoo’s first patrol was not very productive and they pretty much came up empty. I’m betting that the incident referred to was the third patrol and it seems that there’s some controversy about that action.
This is from the linked patrol report: “...we surfaced to charge batteries and destroy the estimated twenty troop
boats now in the water. These boats were of many types, scows, motor
launches, cabin cruisers and nondescript varieties. At 1135 made battle
surfaces [sic] and manned all guns. Fired 4” gun at largest scow loaded with
troops. Although all troops in this boat apparently jumped in the water our fire
was returned by small caliber machine guns. We then opened fire with
everything we had. ”The Exec, Dick O’Kane, in his book Clear the Bridge pp 153-154 states plainly: “Some Japanese Troops were undoubtedly hit during this action, but no individual was deliberately shot in the boats or in the sea.”
I’d say that putting their landing boats in the water after the ship was torpedoed made them lifeboats of a sort. Then again, lifeboats aren’t usually armed.
In any case, this was probably over the line.Of course, judging from a distance of sixty some years and in a comfortable chair probably isn’t fair either.
Yes, StinKerr, it was Wahoo’s third patrol, but its first patrol under Morton, as I said. And yes, there is controversy about the issue. I in no way endorse Blair by quoting him. And I have Clear the Bridge in my collection, along with the other books I mentioned, and no two sources seem to tell exactly the same story.
Maybe the incident was over the line; maybe not. As for judging it, I doubt that anyone who had to fight IJA troops would have lost too much sleep over such an incident.
At any rate, this incident is probably where Blackfive was coming from.
Kindest regards.
I’ve always thought it was interesting how different our attitudes were during WWII versus WWI.
We went to war in 1917 over unrestricted submarine warfare, but used it to the max during WWII. Not a peep was uttered regarding the sinking without warning of Japanese “civilian” transport.
I could be wrong about American Admirals’ influence regarding Doenitz’s war crimes trial. Can’t remember where I read or heard it, but I’m sure I ran across it somewhere.
We’ll all agree, though, that WWII was a war to the death that the Allies had to win. No other choice was available.
Posted by MAJ Mike
05/11/2005 at 11:38 AM
Hi MajMike, I’ve also run across references to Doenitz’s war crimes trial. According to the writings I saw, Admiral Nimitz, no less, interceded on Doenitz’s behalf, primarily by pointing out that we had “executed unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan” from day one of the Pacific war, and that this charge, therefore, could not justifiably be levied against Doenitz.
And I agree, we had no choice but to win, not only in that war, but in any other.
Best regards.
Tannenberg,
Sorry, I had thought Morton had always been the only skipper of the Wahoo, but this recent research taught me differently. He was the exec. until the third patrol. That misunderstanding may well have been where the fault lies. My mistake.
Just to clear up another misunderstanding. It was not Blackfive that posted that, but a commenter by the name of Pawatwoop. We had a civil exchange of emails on the subject which also ended up including some other intersing people, one a plucky Alaska fisherwoman.
It would appear that you have quite a library. I think I’d like to peruse some of it.
Thanks to Rear Admiral Thomas M. Dykers and his “Silent Service” tv show those submariners were all heroes to me growing up. I suppose I don’t want to believe that they didn’t always act in the purest manner.
Seeing the pictures, though, of the few survivors of the Japanese prison camps sort of ameliorates it. An entirely different subject, I know.
