Yesterday I mentioned in passing Glenn Greenwald’s piece claiming that the Army is making The New Republic look bad (in the Baghdad Diarist blog event), instead of admitting that TNR’s editors were doing a damn fine job of accomplishing that all on their own. Greenwald claimed that the US military is now part of the Vast Rightwing BushCheneyHaliburtonMcHitler Conspiracy to discredit the Left’s media.
Well, apparently, Greenwald got a response from a Public Affairs Officer in Iraq (h/t Patterico’s Pontifications). But the senior serving sockpuppet at Salon couldn’t just post a response to the Lieutenant Colonel, nope. He had to prove how much he knows about tracing emails to prove to his readers he’s able to answer questions that no one asked. Complete with Updates Zero through Seven. But my main concern is the tiny little part where Greenwald actually addressed the content of the email rather than the physical source of the email;
Everyone can decide for themselves if that sounds more like an apolitical, professional military officer or an overwrought right-wing blogger throwing around all sorts of angry, politically charged invective. Whatever else is true, it is rather odd that this was the sort of rhetoric Col. Boylan chose to invoke in service of his apparent goal of proving that there is nothing politicized about the U.S. military in Iraq.
I guess the little fella, Greenwald, didn’t like the fact that someone with opposing opinions bothered to email the intellectually vacant, emotion-driven Greenwald and screw up his weekend. The “angry and politically charged invective” was in response to Greenwald’s own angry and poltically charged invective. Should the LTC have written you – no probably not. But he did so take your medicine and stop acting like such a two-bit transvestite hooker.
I remember hunkering down in the sand a decade ago waiting for the angry and politically charged invective to subside and give me permission to return fire, so I know where the LTC is coming from. It’s damn awful frustrating to not be able to tell the idiots in the media to stop their whining – and then of course, Greenwald whines even more when he’s called a whiner.
Here’s a little fact you may have missed, Glenn, the Left (and, of course you – whatever your political persuasion is this week) has not been a friend to the military since…well, ever. Lyndon Johnson hamstrung them and fed them piecemeal into a meat grinder, when Nixon actually tried to win the war, the Left whined about “illegal” wars, Jimmy Carter stripped our training and resources budget so badly that we couldn’t get seven functioning helicopters into Tehran when he decided we had a purpose and Bill Clinton stripped the military of personnel and equipment then trumpeted that he’d created the smallest government since Roosevelt.
Since this war started, the military has been called murderers, rapists, Koran-down-the-toilet-flushers, gestapo prison camp guards, and more recently, thanks to The National Review, puppy murderers, grave robbers, insensitive jerks and sexual perverts. All by the media - and all names and adjectives that have been proven false.
And then along comes Glenn Greenwald and calls the military part of the Republican political machine. In all of the years – 20 of them – that I served, not once was I ever told by a superior how to cast my vote – in fact, I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 when I was a Specialist 4th Grade (that’s like a senior private, in case you’re wondering). I voted absentee ballot from my cot in Fort Kobbe in the Canal Zone. I regretted it within weeks after he took office – but my first vote was for a Democrat.
It was the Democrats that made me Republican – not the military. In fact, it’s the media and the Democrats who continue to make the military Republicans. Is it right? Is it the way our founders intended? Nope, probably not – but if anyone can take the blame for the way it’s turning out – it’s you blivet-heads in the media that created a polticized military. So stop complaining about it and do something constructive. Send money to Soldiers’ Angels…anything except what you’re doing would be just fine.
UPDATE: The Dread Pundit Bluto has the full text of the email from LTC Boylan, and after reading the whole thing, instead of just the parts Glennie thought we needed, I take back my statement that the LTC shouldn’t have written to Greenwald. The parts of the good LTC’s email that Greenwald selected for us to read were entirely without context. Surprise.