Our buddy, Doc Bailey, who goes by the name Mad Medic at his own blog “The Madness of the Combat Medic“, knows Ethan McCord, the clown who goes around the country talking to your kids in their school about the “Collateral Murder” video. He busted McCord for putting this as his cover photo on his Facebook page;
Yeah, the only reason McCord thinks Manning deserves the Medal of Honor is because Manning’s treachery made McCord someone, as opposed to the nobody he was before the video. But you need to read Doc Bailey’s post – Doc was there at the aftermath of the scene portrayed by the video, too, and for some odd reason, Bailey doesn’t see things the way McCord sees them.
Nice, huh? Has Kokesh crossed over to the Westboro Baptist Church? Maybe he should start carrying signs at funerals. And burn some flags. Is this IVAW’s new campaign to support wounded troops? How is this much different than General Pittard’s comment that suicidal troops should suck up their pain and stop being cowards?
I noticed that it’s on Kokesh’s old congressional campaign Facebook page. This ought to get him some votes in his next election run. Of course, there’s a video at the link, but I don’t think he needs my traffic, it’ll only encourage the little brainless turd.
Thanks to the folks who dropped off the link to our Fan Page.
Earlier today, I wrote about Chris Hayes who couldn’t bring himself to call any service members “heroes” because he was afraid it would cause more wars. Always in the market for a good anti-America meme and a way to bash the troops, Geoff “Stolen Valor” Millard of the Iraq Veterans Against the War, steps up to offer his services to Chris Hayes for the next time he wants to bash selfless military service;
“Yup”, how did Chris not think of IVAW when he was preparing to slam the troops and he might need someone on the panel to back him up. Because Geoff Millard has no problem just making shit up and wearing his uniform like a mannequin for the MSNBC crowd, after all he wears shit he didn’t earn for “the cause”.
Millard still thinks he has some sort moral authority in the discussion of a war in which he’s never served, wearing a rank he lost when he went AWOL, wearing a CIB he didn’t earn for shuffling a general’s power point slides, and three, count ’em, three Meritorious Service Medals. Did I forget to mention the forged DD214?
“Yup”. Go ahead and put Millard on your show, Hayes, and you’ll be an even bigger target.
Thanks to JP for finding that Twitter exchange.
ADDED: By the way, Chris Hayes apologized for using the right to speak freely about the people who who protect that right for him. Of course those are my words, not his. i think it was Bush’s fault, though;
But in seeking to discuss the civilian-military divide and the social distance between those who fight and those who don’t, I ended up reinforcing it, conforming to a stereotype of a removed pundit whose views are not anchored in the very real and very wrenching experience of this long decade of war. And for that I am truly sorry.
I’m sure no one is especially surprised, but Naser Abdo was found guilty after about an hour of deliberation. He’s admitted repeatedly that his intention was to kill Fort Hood soldiers in large numbers with a bomb in a local restaurant frequented by soldiers.
Media interest has waned somewhat since they found out that Abdo was a conscientious objector and a child pornographer, you’d think that after the media’s overblown coverage in the first few hours of his arrest would have led to more on this subject. At least he’s knocked his lawyer James Branum out of the soldier-hustling business, since Branum was his lawyer in the proceedings for conscientious objector and then to defend him against the porn charges.
I’m sure that if the Feds looked hard enough, they’d find connections to the Under the Hood Cafe, the IVAW’s local hangout that Branum frequented and trolled for prospective clients. Not that I think that IVAW knew about his bomb plot, but I’m sure that they supported him in some way. Why else would he have gone to Killeen.
Waco’ News 25 reports that Abdo was found guilty of these charges;
1 count Attempting to Use a Weapon of Mass Destruction
1 count Attempted Murder of U.S. Officers or Employees
4 counts Possessing a Weapon in Furtherance of a Federal Crime of Violence
We havent’ heard much from James Branum, the lawyer who used to hustle his military clients for their pocket change and a snooze on their couches before he helped the justice system hustle them off to jail. That’s because he’s retooled his business to cater to a wealthier clientele than military members, apparently, according to one of our ninjas who poached this photo from his Facebook presence. I guess his experience defending Naser Abdo, the child pornographer conscientious objector and potential terrorist.
I suppose fleecing unsuspecting conscientious objectors in the market for bad advice and willing to do a stint in prison for the cause is a shrinking business what with the wars ending and all. And I’m sure there’s a real market for an incompetent lawyer among the perspective poor in the gay community.
We’ve watched Branum go from living in his grandparents’ basement to this lofty station in his meteoric rise to fortune. The next step for the young barrister is a clown car full of his National Lawyers Guild buddies with which he can chase ambulances.
Those as yet unbeaten rented mules at Veterans Today have stretched the definition of “heroic” to include those douche nozzles in Chicago Sunday who tossed their medals at NATO. Of course, a featured photo is that of phony Ranger puss bucket, Graham Crumpner;
What’s really disgusting about Crumpner and his phony Ranger act is that I know for a fact that IVAW knows that he’s not a Ranger, but they let him use that label in media interviews. But, that’s alright, because we finally have an address on him and the FOIA request has been submitted. You would have thought that they would have learned after fake Ranger Jesse MacBeth.
But, back to the “heroics” of this act. What is so heroic about standing in a crowd of anti-war protesters and being their mannequin and making an anti-war statement? What might be more brave would be standing in a crowd of the Gathering of Eagles folks and proclaiming those words. But that would lean more in the direction of being foolish.
What about the heroic people who left IVAW and the anti-war movement. After realizing that they were being used to project their own military service on to those who had never served, or those clowns who had never left the country, dozens decided to stand up for themselves and walk away, some more vocally than others. That’s heroic. They went against the grain and condemned IVAW’s heroes like Matthis and Carl Webb in the face of criticism and derision. Some of them even faced down the ass-munch clowns who tried to get them to desert or refuse their deployment orders “for the movement”.
So where is Veterans Today on the case of the abused folks in the anti-war movement who stood up to the peer pressure and threats of acts of violence and go their own way? I didn’t see anyone being abused or threatened in Chicago. Those clowns were just going along with the crowd around them. How is that heroic?
So the little turds did their best to recreate the John Kerry theater in 1971 and tossed their medals at NATO yesterday. George sends us this link from MSNBC;
The protesters cheered the post 9/11-era veterans on, clapping and yelling, “give them back!”
“I choose human life over war,” Jerry Bordeleau shouted through a microphone, before tossing the medals onto the street.
Another man said he was representing deserters who can’t come back to the U.S. and threw many of their medals away.
Steven Acheson, an Army veteran who before the march said he had been waiting a long time for this moment, though he was also anxious about it, threw away his medals for the children of Iraq and Afghanistan.
“May they be able to forgive us for what we have done to them, may we begin to heal and may we live in peace from here till eternity,” he said.
So. looking back at the IVAW people we profiled last week, we had a phony Ranger, Steven Acheson who didn’t have much medals to toss, Aaron Hughes who was stationed in Kuwait, and a bunch of people who deserted to Canada, and this is for whom who we’re supposed to feel sympathy?
In fact according to some people who actually know Graham Crumpner, the phony Ranger, doubt he was even in the military at all. Of course, I can’t verify that at the moment because I can’t match him to an address. People are telling me he lives in Colorado, but there’s no record of him there.
So, at this point, I have to think that’s the case in the reenactment of the John Kerry Memorial Medal Toss Event. People who aren’t allowed in the United States and a phony Ranger. Phht! Who cares what they have to say.
ADDED: I know there’s a woman who kinda looks like Army Sergeant in the video, so I called her and asked her where she was and she says she wasn’t there, but there is someone who looks like Matthis, too (he’s not taking my calls) so I’m wondering if the IVAW is letting him back in the fold.
Art sends us a link to a local CBS TV station article in Chicago in which they interview Graham Crumpner about why he’s tossing his medals at NATO this weekend;
“I wanted so badly to believe in the idea of America. I wanted to believe that every war we ever fought, we won; that we were always just; that we were always doing the right thing, and trying to help, and save, and protect,” said former Army Ranger Graham Clumpner, who was deployed twice to Afghanistan. “And I bought into it hook, line, and sinker.”
Clumpner was given a Global War on Terrorism Service Award for his service fighting against the Taliban.
He said he was proud to join the military, but grew disillusioned, and ashamed of how operations were carried out.
Yeah, well, now the local TV reporter, Marissa Bailey, can be ashamed, because I emailed our buddies at the Ranger Training Brigade and they don’t have any record of Graham Clumpner attending Ranger School and they said any time he spent in the 2d Battalion would have been extremely brief.
We got that 2nd Battalion thing from his IVAW profile, which he’s removed from the IVAW website, but the internet remembers;
Maybe him and Ward Reilly can get together and tell phony Ranger stories about things that never happened to them.
And, oh, by the way, Graham is another Matthis. According to this article, he avoided being recalled in 2008 and shopped around the VA for a doctor who would certify him for PTS and get him a discharge. So, yeah, when IVAW has someone representing them who’s not a derelict or a liar, let me know.
