Bent Corner

It turns out I’m not the only one getting into the Euro 2008 football (soccer) championships. An internationally wanted Nazi war criminal has been spotted supporting his national team at the Euro 2008 football championships in Austria.

Milivoj Asner is wanted by Interpol for alleged genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during his service as a police chief in Croatia during the Second World War, when the country was ruled by a Nazi puppet regime.

But Mr Asner, 95, who now lives a quiet and undisturbed life in Klagenfurt, Austria, has been seen taking leisurely walks, sipping wine with his wife Edeltrat and mingling with Croatian football fans prior to the matches of his country’s national team.

He is the number four on the most wanted list of the Nazi-hunters and Croatia has demanded his extradition.

You’d think being #4 on the Nazi-hunter most wanted list would make a person stay at home and watch the games on ESPN. Do they have ESPN in Austria?

They are the worldwide leader in sports.

Link

Many of my fellow Democrats are in a tizzy over something President Bush said to the Israeli parliament. From the BBC:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals,” said Mr Bush in his speech.

“We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement.”

Why is everyone — including Barack Obama — assuming that Bush was referring to Obama?

When I first heard about the comment, I assumed Bush was referring to Jimmy Carter, not Barack Obama. Jimmy Carter is the one who recently met with leaders of Hamas, a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

Funny that nobody thought he was referring to Hillary Clinton. Then again, she made is quite clear what her response would if she was president if and when Iran were to ever launch a nuclear attack against Israel.

Now that I think about it, many of my fellow Democrats got in a tizzy over that too. Go figure.

I stumbled on this image today while looking for something else. Something that didn’t involve gnomes armed with bull whips and wearing swastika armbands. What really struck me with this image was not the book itself, but the snippet from a review from the New York Times.

Why would the New York Times even review a book like this?

I tried to find something about the book’s author, John Christopher. As it turns out, that is not his real name. It’s only one of the many pen names employed by British writer Samuel Youd.

They don’t write books like this anymore. Maybe if they did, someone from the New York Times would review it.

During World War Two, Nazi Germany transported six U-boat submarines 2,000 miles overland from Germany to attack Russian shipping in the Black Sea. The subs operated out of Romania for over two years, hunting and sinking dozens of Russian ships.

When Romania switched sides and declared war against Germany, it left the remaining three subs - three had already been lost in combat - with nowhere to go. They were scuttled by their crew as the war neared its end.

The location of the three U-boats has been a mystery. Until now.

Selçuk Kolay, a Turkish marine engineer, has located one of the subs two miles off the coast of Turkey sitting 8o feet under the surface. He believes he knows the location of the remaining two.

I’ve always wanted to dive a U-boat. There are about seven that can be reached by SCUBA here on the east cost of the United States. I got to dive ship wreaks while I was in the Air Force and stationed on Guam. There is one Japanese tanker from Word War Two sitting atop a German cruiser from World War One. I once dove deep enough so that I could put one hand on the German ship while placing my other hand on the Japanese tanker. It turned out to be highly anticlimactic.

Guam had a lot of cool dive sites. It didn’t have any U-boats.

Link (Telegraph.co.uk)

Adolf Hitler explains why Blu-ray won the HD war against HD-DVD. Hilarious.

Publisher: Marvel Comics
Writer: J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI
Art: CHRIS WESTON
Colored By: CHRIS CHUCKRY
Lettered By: COMICRAFT
32 PAGES, $2.99

Golden Age heroes fighting for America during World War Two are captured in Germany by Nazis and put into Nazi deep freeze. The Nazis then get their ass kicked by the Russians. Nobody knows about these American heroes that have been placed into Nazi deep freeze. They remain in their state of Nazi deep freeze until 2008 when they are found by construction workers.

Evidently if there was one thing Nazis knew in 1945 was how to put superheroes into deep freeze. When they are frozen, they stay frozen.

This is when it gets a little kooky. For some reason, the U.S. Army is somehow able to take possession of the superheroes. Why exactly is beyond me. A general who had just recently watched the movie “The Untouchables” gets an idea. He quotes the “Sean Connery character” who says, “If you want to avoid getting a bad apple, don’t take it from the barrel. You take it from the tree.” He believes that these still Nazi deep frozen superheroes are the tree. They come from a time when the United States is beyond question the good guy and because of this will do anything the government tells them to do.

Maybe Kooky is too strong a word.

The heroes are then taken back to the United States where they are led to believe it’s still 1945. The belief is that the shock of finding out that it’s 2008 would just be too much for these superheroes to bare. Then again, if the idea is to get superheroes who are patriotic and believe everything their government tells them, maybe it’s not a good idea to start out lying to them.

After a recent CNBC Republican candidate debate, CNBC threw a poll of on their website asking readers who they thought won the debate. Ron Paul supporters responded by flooding the poll with votes for Ron Paul in an attempt to skew the poll’s results. Ron Paul won by a whopping 75%. CNBC responded by removing the poll from the website. This from the CNBC website:

And the computer logs showed the poll had been hit with traffic from Ron Paul chat sites. I learned other Internet polls that night had been hit in similar fashion. Congratulations. You folks are obviously well-organized and feel strongly about your candidate and I can’t help but admire that.

What’s to admire? I didn’t realize that being “well-organized” and “feeling strongly about something” were necessarily traits to admire. Nazis were well-organized. Nazis felt strongly about something. Should they be admired too? Not that I am comparing Ron Paul fanboys to Nazis. Even though at least some neo-Nazis are Ron Paul supporters and it seems that at least some of the people helping to flood these online polls in Ron Paul’s favor have goose-stepped over from antisemitic white supremest websites.

What about substance? Having fans on the Internet that spam online polls and vote for every Ron Paul story on Digg aren’t things to brag about.

Also from the CNBC website:

But you also ruined the purpose of the poll. It was no longer an honest “show of hands” — it suddenly was a platform for beating the Ron Paul drum. That certainly wasn’t our intention and certainly doesn’t serve our readers … at least those who aren’t already in the Ron Paul camp.

I don’t know what Ron Paul’s über fanboys expect when they do stuff like this. Sure, they may get some momentary personal pleasure by throwing the results of an online poll, but all they are really doing is making their candidate look bad. Manipulating Internet polls just makes their candidate look weird. That’s something Ron Paul doesn’t need any help with.

He already has that down pat.

Our illustrious president spoke last night on the television about his most favorite subject - the Iraq war. From his speech:

Anbar province is a good example of how our strategy is working. Last year, an intelligence report concluded that Anbar had been lost to al-Qaida. Some cited this report as evidence that we had failed in Iraq and should cut our losses and pull out. Instead, we kept the pressure on the terrorists. The local people were suffering under the Taliban-like rule of al-Qaida, and they were sick of it. So they asked us for help.

The al-Qaida he should be worried about is the al-Qaida in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is the real al-Qaida. That is the al-Qaida that attacked the United States on 9-11. The al-Qaida in Iraq? They just call themselves that to give themselves some cheap terrorist credibility. Everyone knows that al-Qaida attacked the United States six years ago and Bush has failed to bring them to justice. Bush has failed to make them pay. Bush and his inability to make al-Qaida pay turn them into the terrorist organization that every two bit terrorist wants to be apart of.

Just because they call themselves al-Qaida doesn’t make them al-Qaida. The al-Qaida in Iraq is as much al-Qaida as American skinheads are Nazis. Sure, they may have a photo of Hitler in their mom’s basement, but that doesn’t mean they are the same bunch that fought Patton’s Third Army in the Battle of the Bulge. Those were real Nazis. They weren’t pretending to be Nazis.

Just because someone identifies themselves as a Nazi on their MySpace page doesn’t mean they are a Nazi. Just because someone in Iraq says they are al-Qaida doesn’t make them al-Qaida.

Sometimes somebody posts a comment that makes me re-think my position on a subject that I blogged about. This is not one of those comments.

ilike_kidrock@hotmail.com wrote:

thank all this is bull shit i am not a nazi but i like the nazi stuff every mother f***er need to get over the Sh** it is a part of history we shouldn’t forgit it yea and go ahead and call me what you want but we do have a fredom of speach and yea it may offend people but it is something we don’t need to forgit everyone wants to forgit it but we shouldn’t

Normally I try to cut people slack that are even worse spellers then me, but this fella that loves to profess his admiration for Kid Rock doesn’t even know how to use a period.

I hate to do this, but I feel the need to once again weigh in on the whole Wal-Mart Nazi t-shirt controversy. I promised myself I wasn’t going to blog about it any longer. I don’t want to be known as the Wal-Mart Nazi t-shirt guy. It might already be too late for that. Also, there are other bloggers doing a much better job with it then I ever could. Even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. Look to the The Consumerist. It is the number one place on the Internets to find out the latest on the whole Wal-Mart Nazi t-shirt controversy.

This morning I received an email Google Alert telling me that “BentCorner.com” had appeared in a news story. I set up a Google Alert so I would know when my blog appeared in a newspaper article. Most of the time I know ahead of time when my blog or myself is mentioned in a newspaper article. The reporter doing the article usually contacts me to ask questions. I believe it’s something people in the news business refer to as professionalism. Sometimes like in the case with The Miami Herald, the reporter didn’t even try to contact me to get facts. Instead they just made stuff up.

This morning’s Google Alert pointed me to something called the American Thinker. I’ve never heard of it. That seems like a shame too since I am an American and I think about things. It sounds like the American Thinker would be right up my alley.

When I went there, I realized two things. It’s not really a newspaper. It appears to be a blog. A rather nice looking blog, but it’s still a blog. Also, it appears to have a right-wing slant to it. That would account for me not knowing anything about it.

This from the article about the Nazi t-shirt:

Back in November the blog BentCorner.com revealed that Wal-Mart was selling a T-shirt that displayed the Nazi Totenkopf–the “death head” emblem, which was worn by Adolf Hitler’s personal guards. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) sent a letter, signed by a bipartisan group of 21 representatives, to Wal-Mart Chief Executive H. Lee Scott Jr. asking the retail giant to remove the shirts immediately from store shelves.

So far so good. I would have pointed out that Rep. Barny Frank (D, gay) also signed the letter. Nothing gets Right-Wingers more worked up then a good Barny Frank story. It’s right up with a hatchet job on Hillary Clinton or something that attempts to disprove Global Warming by quoting the Bible.

The only issue I had with the piece over at the American Thinker was this:

Even though Wal-Mart did take immediate action, directing all stores to remove the shirts and deleting the item barcode from their computer system, about three dozen of their 3300 stores have not successfully removed all shirts.

This just is not true. Though Wal-Mart said they were taking immediate action, they never did. They allowed these shirts to remain on their sales floor and be sold to anyone with an extra $7.88 in their pocket. People continued to find these shirts at their local Wal-Mart weeks and even months after this story originally broke. The Consumerist did an excellent job chronicling the on going status of these shirts.

Though Wal-Mart did delete the barcode from their computer system, it took them almost a whole month to do so. Even then, people were reporting that they could still buy the shirt. They would simply take another similarly priced shirt to the register and ask the person (Wal-Mart prefers to call them “associates”) to scan the other shirt.

Make no mistake. Wal-Mart continued to sell these shirts. If your local Wal-Mart no longer sells them, it’s because someone bought them all up. It’s not because Wal-Mart actually removed them.