{"id":33437,"date":"2012-12-31T09:04:47","date_gmt":"2012-12-31T13:04:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=33437"},"modified":"2012-12-31T09:04:47","modified_gmt":"2012-12-31T13:04:47","slug":"tah-my-favorite-10-posts-for-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=33437","title":{"rendered":"TAH: My favorite 10 posts for the year"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year has been so much fun, it’s hard for me to pick out my favorites – but that’s because I conflate fun with traffic and how many people I pissed off, but probably my favorite posts were TSO’s posts about Timothy Poe<\/a>, because for once, I was seeing them like you do because I was off in limbo for the whole thing. And it led to a profile of us on NBC News<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another one I had fun with was Jake Diliberto<\/a>. We’ve been arch enemies for years and someone on Facebook approached me about him and that led Diliberto to the Stolen Valor throne this year.<\/p>\n

And then there was Timothy Oliver<\/a>, who we not only shut down as a phony, but we taught some of the media a lesson about Stolen Valor.<\/p>\n

Leo Webb<\/a> was another one with whom we taught the media about believing everything they hear. Even the Stars & Stripes was fooled, until we straightened them out about Larry Marquez<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ken Aden<\/a> dropped out of the Arkansas Congressional race because of us.<\/p>\n

Of course, as I’m fond of telling reporters, Stolen Valor isn’t the only thing we do, and we’re not the only ones doing it. But this year has seen a rapid expansion of folks who hunt pretenders. We certainly weren’t the first to do it, but I think we can take credit for bringing it to the popular culture.<\/p>\n

In fact our biggest traffic-generating post was the one we did about Lindsey Stone<\/a> which had nothing to do with stolen valor. I did a lot of interviews over that one that never got published because The people who interviewed me were disappointed that I didn’t want her to lose her job and that removed her and her employers’ contact information from the blog. I guess they expected me to lead the pitchfork brigade and light every torch.<\/p>\n

We also got dispatches from TSO when he was embedded in Afghanistan and Africa this year – just like a real milblog.<\/p>\n

But I think the post that tickled me most had nothing to do with anything, really. It was during the breathless LA Times reportage about troops in Afghanistan posing with dead suicide bombers when I came across this picture on Facebook of our buddy Jim Hanson of Blackfive<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the invasion of a few weeks ago when the John Cole fanboys<\/a> descended upon us thinking that they could convince any that their fearless leader had a valid point.<\/p>\n

And, finally, I enjoyed putting together the Members’ Gallery<\/a> and reading your stories and picking out which pictures I wanted to use was an absolute ball. I kept telling TSO that I couldn’t believe that more than 80 people wanted their faces associated with this blog.<\/p>\n

So those are my favorite ten posts of this year. So which were your favorites? Or which brought you here in the first place? There’s about 6,000 of you who come by every day, so I want to hear from you lurkers, too. TSO and I are always wondering what brings you folks here, and I can’t figure this blogging thing out – so tell us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year has been so much fun, it’s hard for me to pick out my favorites … TAH: My favorite 10 posts for the year<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}