Third Reich Gun Porn, gratuitous, of course

You don't see this one often. A nice kid from nearby  Titonka captured it from one of Hitler's officers in  the North African campaign.*  His heirs donated it to the Algona POW museum where I stopped a few days ago on a long and lazy road trip.

The glass had too many weird reflections and I just glanced. Ho-hum, another souvenir PPk. I'm glad I looked twice. It's a SIG P38h, a substitute standard for the Walther .32.

You see so few because production topped out around 200,000 compared to some 5 million PPks. It is somewhat clunkier looking than the Walther.

The "h" stands for "hammerless"** to avoid, we're told, having Lt. Heinie confuse it with the big Walther 9mm. My friend Ken observed "h" could just as easily stand for "hammer." True enough, maybe. There's just no understanding the Nazis, maybe helping us understand why we killed them at every opportunity.

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*Mr. President and CinC Obama:  North Africa came before D-Day, and Patton was there,  just like in the movie you saw.  But he didn't command an army yet. That happened a little later when he "unleashed" his 7th Army on Sicily.  To make sure I'm putting this complicated chronology clearly enough for your Teleprompter, it was North Africa, then Sicily/Italy, then D-Day at Normandy, then General Patton at the head of the 3rd Army. Just in case you ever need to make another warrior speech or something.

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**Shrouded hammer, actually.

Won One

No matter how potentially evil a thing,  by itself  it is a neuter.  So next time you're in your head shop and feel like getting a glass pipe to blow bubbles with or something, y'all just go right ahead in these parts.

Keep the idea of your gun in the back of your head while you digest this. Some Des Moines cops decided to bust a store and confiscate glass pipes as drug paraphernalia. The owner sued to get them back, lost in district court, but won at the Iowa Court of Appeals.

The report from Radio Iowa says: "The Appeals Court ruling says the law requires the pipes to be used to ingest drugs to be considered illegal. The court says no drugs were found in the store and there was no evidence to conclude the pipes had been used."

There you go. Drugs are evil but glass pipes for smoking them are not, so...

Hold it Jim!

Yes, stupid of me to lose the distinction, even momentarily.

Drugs and pipes share no moral qualities. They are ethical castrati at least unless some mysterious happenstance empowers a smoky hemp plant to vote in congress.  (Tempting as it is, I won't go further in that direction today.)

People who use them are possibly evil and  probably stupid to begin with; certainly they become dumber by the puff.  Or the guzzle in the case of ethanol based drugs.

Now, about all those "illegal" guns the politicians and journos keep yakking about:  Wouldn't it be nice if a senior court hearing an appeal from an innocuous, law-abiding fellow charged only with possession of a weapon heard about the Iowa pipe case and got to thinking along the same lines?

The Longest Wind

Good Lord. Can it be that long since President Obama first showed his arse to the world in a D-Day speech?

He's still fumbling for his Commander-in-Chief britches,  but in all fairness he has improved since the rhetorical embarrassment he uttered five years ago today when he proclaimed that the Normandy invasion was launched by generals who planned to fail.

Today's 2014 edition is less laughable, pretty good, in fact for His Ineptness. If you want to think he ordered his speech writers to study up on Peggy Noonan's  the boys of Pointe du Hoc gem I won't argue with you.

On the other hand, he forgot to remind his staff that maybe they might want to think about consulting someone who is at least casually acquainted with the summer of '44.

By the end of that longest day, this beach had been fought, lost, refought and won -- a piece of Europe once again liberated and free. Hitler's Wall was breached, letting loose Patton's Army to pour into France.

All I can figure is that his pollster told him Patton is a supremely recognizable name while Omar Bradley is  by now a whoduhhellizzat?  I mean,  George even had a movie made about him, and it is still getting decent numbers on teevee reruns.

On D-Day, Patton was giving speeches in England and commanding a ghost army of rubber tanks and plywood trucks to fool Nazis into believing in a main attack later across the Dover Straits. He was quietly training his real army -- the Third -- which went operational more than a month later, long after the first Normandy beach breakouts.

The point isn't Patton. It is a president who commands resources vast enough to inform him -- assuming he gives a damn --  that, among the Americans, Bradley and his First Army carried the load for weeks beyond "The Longest Day." It's basic stuff.

But maybe it is important only to old cranks who cling bitterly to the notion that when presidents speak their stuff gets written down in books and, therefore, the lower the nonsense quotient the better.

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And then he read off his Teleprompter:

To the East, the British tore through the coast, fueled by the fury of five years of bombs over London, and a solemn vow to "fight them on the beaches." 

Just for the record, the quote is from Churchill in 1940 and had nothing to do with Overlord. Winston was rallying the home army -- and the home folks with shotguns and cricket bats -- to hold fast on the beaches of Britain.

Oh well. What difference does it make, anyway?

The unmasking of a president

In The Unmaking of a Mayor, William F. Buckley, knowing full well he would lose his race,  reflected:

I am running to advance certain ideas. It makes no difference to me who implements these ideas so long as he is a good administrator.  (Paraphrase)

Barack Obama's nervous jitterbugging on the five-for-one swap with Taliban terrorists illustrates the value of Buckley's words.

Obama says he told congress; then he apologizes for not telling congress; then he remembers that he really did tell congress but it was three years ago; and, besides, Bergdahl is a hero, or if not a hero at least another deserving American boy. Or. Maybe. I said. I meant. He's glad the hometown would celebrate the return. He understands why they canceled the party.

Proving that this guy is to the presidency as Barney Fife is to police work. Praying folks should petition their gods that the coming 31 months bring the nation no crisis requiring clear thought and administrative competence.