The Other McCain

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Captain of USS Enterprise Relieved From Duty in Politically Correct Witch Hunt

Posted on | January 4, 2011 | 18 Comments

First, the news:

The U.S. Navy will temporarily relieve Capt. Owen Honors of his post pending investigation of the series of explicit videos he is said to have produced when he was second in command of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, sources tell ABC News.
Capt. Honors is under investigation for a series of raunchy videos in which he appeared from 2006 to 2007. . . .
A leaked version of one video . . . contained derogatory references to homosexuals and was filled with profanity.

And the Wall Street Journal:

The Navy will likely remove the commander of the USS Enterprise from his post after bawdy videos in which he denigrated gays and made other vulgar references became public, a defense official said. . . .
The quick action also demonstrates that the military is under pressure to show that will not tolerate slurs against the sexual orientation [of] service members after last month’s congressional repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law that barred gays from serving openly in the military.

While I haven’t seen all the videos, the “highlights” shown on TV news and referenced online lead me to conclude that they were Not A Good Idea, and that Capt. Honors (or someone else aboard the Enterprise) should have thought twice about the project. But it is nonetheless clear that Capt. Honors isn’t being relieved of command because of the semi-pornographic content and R-rated language.

It’s the political correctness, stupid.

UPDATE: Tammy Bruce says her “head exploded” over the hypocrisy of some military opponents of DADT: “So here you’ve got brass concerned about the behavior of the gays . . . There are the heteros making videos of heterosexual troops, sailors, engaging in faux gayness for humor.”

That’s from the audio of Tammy’s show posted on her blog. She links a Baltimore Sun editorial which compares the videos to the 1991 Tailhook scandal and excoriates Capt. Honors for ”misogyny, sexual harassment and gay-bashing.”

What would Gunnery Sergeant Hartman say?

UPDATE II: In his “Quote of the Day,” Allahpundit includes a quote from a sailor:

“‘In [Capt. Honors's] defense, I’ll say that sometimes, when you’ve been out to sea for a while, cut off from everything, you start to think things that you would never normally do are actually a good idea,’ [the former ship videographer] said. ‘You do stupid stuff to stay sane.’”

Yeah. It’s kind of that way in the blogosphere: You’ve been online for a while, cut off from everything . . .

UPDATE III: In the comments, Linda informs us that her husband will soon deploy aboard the Enterprise. She writes at her own blog:

My point is, those rank and file who are flirting, naughty dancing, putting boxes over their groins, and making “broke back carrier” jokes in those videos are typical of Captain Honors’ audience.
Do you really think they are offended easily? Do you think they have never seen American Pie? Family Guy? South Park? Holy bleep, most of them are probably too young to have even heard of Porky’s.

Read the whole thing. I have fond memories of Porky’s. Also Blazing Saddles, Animal House and Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Whether the cultural attitudes embodied by those comedy classics should be used in Navy training videos is a good question. However, I’ll note that I get a fair amount of blowback for my own irreverent comic sensibilities here.

This is a blog, not an aircraft carrier, but sometimes people get themselves into high dudgeon as though, if I write anything unseemly or offensive, this somehow does damage to The Official Conservative Movement™ – and in the minds of the censorious busybodies, the Movement is only for those who never say anything remotely controversial.

And then they wonder why people think conservatives are a bunch of boring, uptight prudes.

UPDATE IV: Serious ramifications.

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Category: Gays, Military, Scandal

Comments

  • Pingback: Why the Big Deal Now About Captain Owen Honor? | The Lonely Conservative

  • http://getalonghome.com/ GAHCindy

    Was that last line a stealth apology for all the crap you’ve been feeding us over the holidays?

  • Joe

    You don’t end a career over something stupid like this. If you have changed policy, fine, then you ask the person who did it not to do it again.

  • http://www.redstateeclectic.typepad.com AngelaTC

    I don’t want a crazy guy running a Navy boat. I honestly don’t care how long he’s been out to sea. If extended deployments make him act like a 14 year old, maybe he’s not the right guy for the job.

  • Anonymous

    Was that last line a stealth apology for all the crap you’ve been feeding us over the holidays?

    Not an apology, although perhaps an acknowledgement that, in the desperate fight against Holiday Traffic Suckage Season, achieving victory was a goal that took priority over every other consideration.

  • http://nooneofanyimport.wordpress.com/ Linda

    My hubs will deploy with the Enterprise soon, and we are saddened by the thought that Capt. Honors will not be at the helm.

    Yes, the videos were raunchy and juvenile, but why is that a big deal? As a culture, we are now raised on Beavis and Butthead, South Park, Family Guy, and American Pie.

    He was not being demeaning. His only crime was to be politically incorrect on tape, in order to bring a little levity to the ship. At that time, the Enterprise was pushing through back-to-back wartime deployments with few port stops, and they desperately needed a release from the stress.

    Shameless self-promotion alert: I posted on this issue at length Sunday, if any of you want to hear more just click on over.

  • http://getalonghome.com/ GAHCindy

    Well, anyway, welcome back to normal blogging. I missed it.

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  • http://www.anti-republicanculture.com Howard Towt

    This cries out for a response from Smitty!

  • Anonymous

    Jesus Christ and General Jackson! We’re talking about sailers, soldiers, and marines here – they shoot and blowup people and break things…and they’ve kept us safe from harm so we can whine when we see the rough side of military life.

    I predicted this kind of crap would happen back when they began refusing to let in men who smoked.

    John Derbyshire is right: We are now 35 years further along Wussification Highway. In 1975 schools still had shooting clubs, murderers were executed, skyscrapers were built in a couple of years, and wars were still, or had recently been, executed with massed flights of bomber planes pulverizing the enemy’s cities. Professional football teams played in the snow.

    Now we are a soft, cringing, fearful, lawyerly, girly nation. Shooting clubs are becoming extinct—the nearest one to me is twenty miles away. School shooting clubs are unthinkable. I built a treehouse for my kids, but neighborhood parents wouldn’t let their little darlings go up there: too dangerous! A legal system of infinite punctiliousness makes capital punishment impossible even where it is theoretically available. If you want to build a skyscraper, set aside a decade for the regulatory and environmental red tape to be hacked through. War has been reduced to a sort of missionary endeavor, bringing light—democracy! rule of law! free markets!—to the heathen.

    WTF!

  • Anonymous

    In the heat of my rant, I put the wrong link in the above comment. It should be:
    http://takimag.com/article/girly_nation/print
    Apologies tendered.

  • Georgfelis

    Gee, I have an entire crew of primarily male kids, age 19-25, thousands of miles away from home in a high-stress position operating a couple billion dollars worth of taxpayer equipment. I need to make some videos to remind them of some of the Navy ways of doing things, such as conserving fresh water, etc… I can either make them as plain normal announcements, in which case nobody will ever watch them. Or I can add a little humor as a hook, which also will relieve some stress, and add some much needed laughter.

    I would lay odds that 99% of the sailors who saw the videos laughed and remember them, but a few will quickly put on their Politically Correct face when asked about them so they can huff and puff indignation.

  • chester arthur

    The paper that printed these stories several years after the fact is so unbelieveably P.C. that to use it as bird cage liner would defile the droppings that touch it.Funny how the people who fine these videos ‘shocking’ didn’t complain at all aout SNL’s portrayal of a V.P. cadidate’s family as rife with incest.They never complain about the outright lies and screeching wussines of Puddles Olbermann and Tingles Matthews attacks on conservatives,just for being conservative.They have no apparent problem with the pornification of the arts,either.So we should listen to these libertine wastrels,or should we gain some understanding of what it takes to relieve the stress of combat duty among the young people who volunteer to defend freedom.Of what might just strengthen unit cohesion.These videos weren’t oscar material,weren’t what we want young children to watch in our homes.Then again,what’s shown on television and defended as free expression is frequently far more offensive than these videos.

  • chester arthur

    Correction,FIND these videos ‘shocking’

  • Zmirak

    Thanks for this, Mr. McCain! I wrote a column on the subject, citing you, at Insidecatholic.com today:
    http://www.insidecatholic.com/feature/frog-marching-us-into-sodom.html

    Keep up the great work!
    John Zmirak

  • Anonymous

    Linked at the THE RIGHTEOUS RANT OF THE DAY at:
    The Camp Of The Saints     [damn WordPress trackbacks!]

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