Four-thousand Marines from II Marine Expeditionary Force under the command of Lt. Gen. Dennis Hejlik are moving against Taliban positions in the Helmand River Valley. The Marines are from Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan and the II MEF home is Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
Note: The actual forces involved in the mission are under the direct command of Maj. Gen. Larry Nicholson.
About the photo: Lt. Gen. Dennis J. Hejlik, USMC, Commanding General, II Marine Expeditionary Force.
I first heard the news earlier this evening on twitter. I dutifully RT'd it along and most of the twitterworld did likewise.
Television didn't fare so well. As Jamal Dajani (producer of Moasic World News on LinkTV) tweeted earlier this evening, "US launches major military operation in s. Afghanistan. CNN's Anderson Cooper talks about MJ's Bubbles the chimp. I kid you not!" So much for television news.
Television news has begun to slide slowly down the long spiral decline recently experienced by the newspaper industry. There are some exceptions. The washington_post, the latimes and a few others have embraced technology and twitterdom and are still on mark, but for most newspapers, technology is moving on without them.
If it wasn't for people like Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Chuck Todd and a few others - all on MSNBC - and Charlie Rose on PBS - and Mosaic World News on LinkTV - I probably wouldn't be watching TV at all (except, of course, for Judge Judy). Actually I can see all of them (or most) online. Hmmm.
Anyway, Lt. Gen. Dennis J. Hejlik is no godamm joke. Hejlik enlisted in 1968 and discharged in 1972 as a sergeant. He went into the PLC program and earned his commission. He's both an officer and a real Marine. (Sorry, Sir. Just kidding.)
In 2001 Hejlik was appointed Principal Director for Special Ops & Combating Terrorism in SOLIC/OSD. In 2004 he was running the counter-insurgency shop at Fallujah as DCG I Marine Expeditionary Force. In 2008 Hejlik was given his third star and command of II Marine Expeditionary Force.
Now his men are forward deployed and moving on the Taliban. For me, this is the news I want to follow, not the crap on the major news networks right now.
CNN has Larry King interviewing a nurse who knew Michael Jackson. Headline News has Nancy Grace talking about Jackson family business and the funeral. Fox Noise is trashing POTUS. Ed of the Ed Show ( a re-play) on MSNBC is talking about Governor Sanford. None of them are talking about the news.
Listen, "tv ppl", take a look at what happened to the newspaper industry and then look again at that handwriting slowly materializing across your teleprompters.
Your programming sucks. (Sorry, Sir. This last part has nothing to do with you.)
UPDATE . . . It's now Thursday morning and I came across this BBC report from earlier last night:
Here's a link to the original BBC story that accompanied the video.
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