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shawa CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004 Posts: 2004
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Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 2:00 am Post subject: "Don't get stuck on stupid!" |
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I LOVE GENERAL HONORE!! A man who does not suffer fools (nor reporters) easily.
Quote: |
~SNIP~
Male reporter: General Honore, we were told that Berman Stadium on the west bank would be another staging area...
Honore: Not to my knowledge. Again, the current place, I just told you one time, is the convention center. Once we complete the plan with the mayor, and is approved by the governor, then we'll start that in the next 12-24 hours. And we understand that there's a problem in getting communications out. That's where we need your help. But let's not confuse the questions with the answers. Buses at the convention center will move our citizens, for whom we have sworn that we will support and defend...and we'll move them on. Let's not get stuck on the last storm. You're asking last storm questions for people who are concerned about the future storm. Don't get stuck on stupid, reporters. We are moving forward. And don't confuse the people please. You are part of the public message. So help us get the message straight. And if you don't understand, maybe you'll confuse it to the people. That's why we like follow-up questions. But right now, it's the convention center, and move on.
Male reporter: General, a little bit more about why that's happening this time, though, and did not have that last time...
Honore: You are stuck on stupid. I'm not going to answer that question. We are going to deal with Rita. This is public information that people are depending on the government to put out. This is the way we've got to do it. So please. I apologize to you, but let's talk about the future. Rita is happening. And right now, we need to get good, clean information out to the people that they can use. And we can have a conversation on the side about the past, in a couple of months.
I think the General just started a movement, and he may not even realize it. Every time a reporter, in any situation, starts spinning, or completely misses the point, they need to be peppered with, "Don't get stuck on stupid."
I'd pay money to see David Gregory in the White House Press Corps foaming at the mouth over something trivial Scott McClellan said, and have McClellan say, "David, you're stuck on stupid. I'm not going to answer that."
I'd have fallen out of my chair if John Roberts would have listened to Joe Biden ramble on, and said, "Don't get stuck on stupid, Senator." |
Read it at: http://www.radioblogger.com/#00100 _________________ “I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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Navy_Navy_Navy Admin
Joined: 07 May 2004 Posts: 5777
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Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 2:36 am Post subject: |
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My whole day brightens up when I see a snippet of an interview with GEN Honore'!
Oh, man do I ever love to see those self-important little stuffed shirts get the dressing down that they have so richly earned since the briefings for Gulf War I.
I hope the people at the top get the message - THIS is how you deal with idiots, even if they're reporters. (especially if they're reporters! )
You don't handle these morons with kid gloves and act as if you're afraid of them - you kick 'em in the teeth and send them cryin' to mama! _________________ ~ Echo Juliet ~
Altering course to starboard - On Fire, Keep Clear
Navy woman, Navy wife, Navy mother |
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GM Strong Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 18 Sep 2004 Posts: 1579 Location: Penna
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Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 12:49 pm Post subject: |
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It was once told to me "Stupid is forever." There are genuinely stupid people out there and the MSM seems to hire a lot of them. Stupidity seems to feed on itself. _________________ 8th Army Korea 68-69 |
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Anker-Klanker Admiral
Joined: 04 Sep 2004 Posts: 1033 Location: Richardson, TX
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Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 2:12 pm Post subject: |
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As per the most recent topic in the main forum, we're about to get drawn into another battle with MSM, who is, in my opinion, the REAL enemy. So the good general's quip sounds to me like a perfect bumper-sticker, etc.
"MSM: Stuck on Stupid." |
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becca1223 PO3
Joined: 23 Aug 2004 Posts: 293 Location: Colonial Heights, VA
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Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 2:34 pm Post subject: |
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Great post Shawa! Thanks! I love it!!
"The Man" deserves another award:
Quote: | Lieutenant General Russel L. Honore
Commanding General
First United States Army
Fort Gillem, Georgia
General Honore is a native of Lakeland, Louisiana. He was commissioned a Second Lieutenant of Infantry and awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Vocational Agriculture upon graduation from Southern University and A&M College in 1971. He holds a Master of Arts in Human Resources from Troy State University as well as an Honorary Doctorate in Public Administration from Southern University and A&M College.
General Honore has served in a variety of command and staff positions. His overseas assignments include tours in Korea and Germany. He served as Commanding General, 2nd Infantry Division in Korea; Vice Director for Operations, J-3, The Joint Staff, Washington, D.C.; Deputy Commanding General and Assistant Commandant, United States Army Infantry Center and School, Fort Benning, Georgia; and Assistant Division Commander, Maneuver/Support, 1st Calvary Division, Fort Hood, Texas. Most recently, General Honore served as Commander, Standing Joint Force Headquarters – Homeland Security, U.S. Northern Command.
General Honore’s awards and decorations include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit with four Oak Leaf Clusters, the Bronze Star Medal, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the Meritorious Service Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters, and the Army Commendation Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters.
http://www.nationalveteransday.org/speakers/honore.htm
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He has a great following. I Love General Honore merchandise:
http://www.cafepress.com/mamastuff/816917
Quote: | The Category 5 General
There's a Big Job to Be Done in New Orleans. Russel Honore Measures Up.
By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 12, 2005; C01
NEW ORLEANS
There's the swagger, and that ever-present stogie. There's the height and heft of his physique. And that barking voice with its font of perhaps impolitic obscenities ("That's b.s," he famously asserted on national TV), not to mention his penchant for not suffering fools, as is the prerogative of a three-star general.
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, 57, is the kind of commander you don't mess with, you don't cross, who punctuates pronouncements with barked questions like "Everybody got that?" And he's so steeped in military culture that he ends his televised sound bites as if ending an army radio transmission: "Over."
But it's for something far less idiosyncratic, far more visceral, that the troops on the battered streets of New Orleans hold him in high regard: He's a soldier's soldier, the man you want in the trenches with you, the kind of man who'll cover your back.
As he strides through a command center set up outside the shuttered and storm-battered Harrah's casino here on Saturday, that is why the troops want to shake his hand, look him in the eye and thank him even as he thanks them for their work.
He's wrapped his big mitts around the hand of Spec. Amy Firestone, a member of the quick reaction force from the 1345th Transportation Company of the Oklahoma National Guard. She served in the dreaded Superdome, packed with evacuees and mayhem.
"Did you see any murders?" the general asks her sympathetically.
"I seen some stabbings, sir," she confides, her voice dripping with regret over what she witnessed.
He pats her on the shoulder, saying, "Thank you for being a good soldier," and palms a 1st Army medallion into her hand as a keepsake as he moves on to the crowd of troops and cops who have gravitated to him.
Mayor Ray Nagin called Honore (pronounced ah-NOR-ay) "one John Wayne dude" when the general arrived here after the storm and started taking charge. It seemed the city had spiraled out of anyone's control when the 6-foot-2 general with the pencil mustache and caramel skin appeared from obscurity and threw his weight against the mayhem.
"He's got the power to make things happen," Firestone says. Nearby, Honore is pledging to a volunteer that the Army will find a way to retrieve 1,000 pounds of meat the man wants to donate for the troops. "It's awesome that he came here," Firestone says. "He's the first general I've seen come down here."
Every day, he's there -- or somewhere: New Orleans, the Mississippi-Alabama coast, or Camp Shelby up near Hattiesburg, Miss., where Joint Task Force Katrina is based. From there he commutes via Black Hawk helicopter after each day's Battle Update Briefing, where his pronouncements are punctuated with choice phrases like one that bursts from his lips during a brief tirade Saturday over another commander's statements about weapons status for Joint Task Force Katrina: "It ain't his [expletive] job! I mean, how the [expletive] did he do that?"
That's the general, the farmer turned career military man of 36 years, speaking his mind, propriety be damned.
Yes, he offers in an interview aboard his Black Hawk, his wife of 34 years, Beverly, has admonished him from time to time about that intimidating public manner, about "using the word 'b.s.' on TV," he says. (The recent usage came when a reporter told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that a Louisiana politician had complained there was too much red tape facing victims. Before Chertoff could answer, Honore snapped: "That's b.s.!")
But he also believes that "it takes a big personality to command the army east of the Mississippi River."
That's the region of the Army's 1st Division, and he is its commanding general, based in Atlanta, overseeing the preparations of units being deployed to Iraq. As leader of the Joint Task Force Katrina, he now commands all active-duty troops from all military branches devoted to the storm recovery operation. As of Saturday, those troops numbered 20,800, and more are coming. (National Guard troops number 50,000, but they are not under Honore's command.) And yes, he says he is a John Wayne fan, has seen all his movies. But he asserts that the troops in general are taking the battle (recovery) to the enemy (Katrina's destruction).
"This ain't about me," he says, there amid the troops. "This is about us."
With his leadership of U.S. armed forces in the post-Katrina operation, he burst onto the public stage with broadcast images of him deploying troops on New Orleans streets and growling, "Lower your weapons!"
A few days later, when he is heard barking at a soldier to "sling it" (meaning his M-16), he explains, "It's a zero-threat environment" and he doesn't want soldiers' demeanor to suggest "that the city is under siege."
And yet the water-logged streets of New Orleans are filled with troops, police, firefighters, FEMA recovery officials. With the vast majority of New Orleanians evacuated since the storm, the beleaguered city is one huge work zone.
In the thick of the recovery, a typical day (Saturday, for instance) took Honore from Camp Shelby to the USS Iwo Jima, anchored on the Mississippi River in New Orleans, where he met with other military leaders to strategize on the remaining search-and-rescue or recovery operations. He met also with Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, the newly appointed lead federal representative here following the recall to Washington of embattled FEMA Director Michael Brown.
He has spoken to the media so often that he has honed his message, his preferred lines (which his aides say he devised himself). He repeatedly says, as he did in an appearance with Allen, that "the storm turned back technology 80 years" in the region by knocking out all communication systems and that the region's first responders were themselves victims.
And, fending off early criticism of the federal government's response to the crisis, he says, "It's like the first quarter of a football game. You're losing 25 to nothing. What in the hell is the coach gonna do?
"You can beat [the players] up and tell them how stupid and dumb they are and degrade them," he continues, or you can take a new tact, find new approaches and remember "there's still three quarters of the game left."
Retired Army Gen. Dennis Reimer, who served as Army chief of staff from 1995 to 1999, is hearing much that is familiar from his days commanding Honore.
"When he shoots from the hip, it's always based on experience, and his experience is where the rubber meets the road," Reimer says.
Among other positions, Honore served as commander of the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea, as vice director for operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as commander of the Standing Joint Force Headquarters for Homeland Security, part of the U.S. Northern Command. He saw action in Iraq and Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. He holds a master's degree in human resources management.
One episode that is vintage Honore occurred in 1998, Reimer remembers. Honore was addressing a group of military acquisition officials, speaking about new weapons systems.
His speech became well known to Army brass and was memorable for a particular line quoted in the journal Inside the Army: "You are fielding pieces of crap. Is that clear enough to you?"
Now Honore brings that pointed, no-nonsense sensibility to an unprecedented humanitarian disaster that requires a tough leader, Reimer says.
"It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission," Reimer says. "What Russ has done is understood what his role is and understood the broad mission. He will make somebody mad. He will step on somebody's toes and probably do some things wrong," albeit very few things wrong, Reimer said.
Switching to a sports analogy, albeit a tortured one, he says: "His batting average will be in the 90th percentile, and that will work in the major leagues any day."
Imagine it: He was the college kid at historically black Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, La., in the late 1960s who had a horse named Big Dan, who worked on a dairy farm and who planned, when graduation came in 1971, on being a farmer.
That's how he was raised -- on his father's farm in Lakeland, La., amid a large mixed-heritage Creole clan (the "Ragin' Cajun" nickname in the Army is a misnomer) in a rural region called Pointe Coupee Parish north of Baton Rouge. He had 11 siblings that included a straight line of eight boys, of which he was the youngest. They grew sugar cane, cotton and corn and had pigs and cows, too.
"I grew up poor, but we had a good family" and a grounding in the Catholic faith.
He describes his father as a "master of provisions, of providing for the family." That skill, he says, was an early influence on his character, along with what he learned of "making the most of all your assets," a lesson gleaned from the dairy farm where he worked during college. After serving in the ROTC while in school, he entered the military and made it his life, much to his father's dismay.
"He was not too hot on this Army thing," Honore says.
But he found it to be a calling.
"The Army gave me open sky.
"I got in the military and I liked what I was doing and the opportunity to be judged by your performance as opposed to other measures." He is talking about race, but he does not want to elaborate. Rather than talk about the racism of those days, he says, "I'm more about the future than the past."
But his past as a farmer lives on. At his home in Atlanta, he is known for the vegetable garden he maintains down the street, where he harvests potatoes, peppers, okra and corn. It's his form of relaxation and exercise, he says.
"He's a very kind person and brings back vegetables from his garden," says Col. Robert Minor, a neighbor, who's received tomatoes and cucumbers from the general.
Honore has raised four children, including a son, Michael, who is an Army sergeant in Baghdad. His youngest child, Stephen, is only 15, and Honore is hoping he'll chose the military too. He jokingly calls it "the family business."
"But that'll be his choice," Honore says.
One of his daughters, Stephanie, lives in Florida. The other, Kimberly, lives in New Orleans. She was out of town when Hurricane Katrina struck, but her pets were stranded for several days in her Jefferson Parish apartment. She asked her dad to save them.
But he was so busy, what with the city descending into mayhem and evacuees being moved by scores of thousands out to cities and towns around the country and troops pouring in and the rescue of humans still underway.
But this week, 10 days into their abandonment, Kimberly's pets were finally on his agenda. Honore found himself with a bit of downtime. As he tells it, he chuckled at what he knows may sound silly to some. It was "a cat and hamster rescue," he says, freeing Gumbo and Hammie from their own post-Katrina hell.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/11/AR2005091101484_pf.html
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becca1223 PO3
Joined: 23 Aug 2004 Posts: 293 Location: Colonial Heights, VA
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Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 2:46 pm Post subject: |
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Quote: | So the good general's quip sounds to me like a perfect bumper-sticker, etc.
"MSM: Stuck on Stupid." |
I would gladly display it on my cars. Where can I order? |
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dusty Admiral
Joined: 27 Aug 2004 Posts: 1264 Location: East Texas
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Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 2:54 pm Post subject: |
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I'm waiting for Kerry or Pelosi or Kennedy or Reid or Hilleryarious or one of the other Commiecratic idiots go up against this man on some issue.
It's gonna be brutal. hehe
Dusty _________________ Left and Wrong are the opposite of Right! |
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shawa CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004 Posts: 2004
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Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 6:09 pm Post subject: |
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Rush just suggested a bumper sticker:
"ARE YOU VOTING FOR A DEMOCRAT? YOU'RE STUCK ON STUPID!"
Heh,heh,heh!! _________________ “I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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PhantomSgt Vice Admiral
Joined: 10 Sep 2004 Posts: 972 Location: GUAM, USA
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Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 6:30 pm Post subject: |
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I could get behind this ticket, "RICE-HONORE 08"
This would send MSM reporters running back to their therapists.
_________________ Retired AF E-8
Independent that leans right of center. |
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shawa CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004 Posts: 2004
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Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2005 7:05 pm Post subject: |
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becca1223 said
Thanks Becca for that wonderful background piece on General Honore.
He is my new hero!!
I was just thinking of all the people to whom "stuck on stupid" applies.
DAN RATHER, who was so 'stuck on stupid' in his hatred for Bush that he destroyed his career promoting an obviously fake memo.
THE ENTIRE MSM, who were so 'stuck on stupid' in their hatred for Bush that they went hysterical in trying to pin the blame for all that went wrong on the president; thereby destroying any credibility they had when the true facts come out and the public realizes how very skewed was the MSM reporting.
THE ENTIRE LEFT WING OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY who are so 'stuck on stupid' in their hatred for Bush that they can't offer any solutions to anything, and are destroying their Party driving a runaway train to "get Bush". Duh, doesn't it occur to them that Bush is no longer running for anything??
HATRED=STUCK ON STUPID=SELF DESTRUCTION
I'm sure you all can suggest more people who are 'stuck on stupid'. _________________ “I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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wwIIvetsdaughter Captain
Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 513 Location: McAllen, Texas
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Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2005 3:19 am Post subject: |
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Does Gumbo the Cat realize he and the hamster were rescued by a three-star general? |
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