Happy BDay Teuffel Hunden!

Celebrating a 233 year old birthday, the United States Marine Corps is an American treasure. "Semper Fidelis" (Always Faithful)) is especially sweet since her 1st foreign debut centuries ago. In a remakable twist of deja vu, a very young America was faced with a desperate choice - pay ransom cash to an 8th century caliphate or undertake to launch a war thousands of miles away on the shores of North Africa.

Diplomacy was the first choice and Great Satan's Thomas Jefferson himself met with a duly commissioned rep of the 'Barbary Coast'. His report to Congress is totally familiar to Americans in the New Millenium:

"The ambassador answered us that the right was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mohammedist who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise."

Jefferson used the Marine Corps to grant them their very wish. A task force led by the USS Enterprise stormed into the 8th century and defeated the Mohammedists in Great Satan's very first regime change.

Great Satan's enemies have learned the hard way that the Marine Corps is very often the piercing tip of the American spear. Like Kaiser Wilhelm's vaunted Prussian elites who admiringly christened the Americans at Bellau Wood - das Teuffel Hunden - 'Devil Dogs'.

"Retreat Hell - We just got here."

Sweet irony that Deutschland surrendered on the day after the Marines 143rd birthday

10 November 1775 to 10 November 2008. Always Faithful indeed. Happy Birthday USMC.

The Marine Anchor, Eagle and Globe is a wonderful reminder to America's friends and enemies that Great Satan built the modern world.

And she knows her way around.