{"id":49108,"date":"2014-05-29T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2014-05-29T16:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=49108"},"modified":"2014-05-29T12:13:35","modified_gmt":"2014-05-29T16:13:35","slug":"dear-reddit-a-tah-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=49108","title":{"rendered":"Dear Reddit; a TAH history"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some troll by the name of Joe sent us a link to Reddit<\/a> this morning wherein some of the folks over there discussed This Ain’t Hell behind our backs. Joe said that we should pay attention because it’s what “combat veterans” think of us. Well, actually there are only 9 people in that discussion, so it’s hardly representative of what everyone thinks of us. TAH has between 6,000 and 10,000 people visit everyday, that’s more than 9, I think. We are not a Stolen Valor website. That’s just one of the things we do. If you look at what we’ve written just today, you’ll notice we only discuss things that affect veterans and active duty troops. You know providing that unique perspective that doesn’t appear anywhere else on the internet.<\/p>\n

TAH was founded in 2006 as an opinion blog. My opinion. After a few months, I started covering the anti-war protests and getting the pictures and interviews that the media wouldn’t publish. That led me to checking the background of anti-war protesters who claimed outlandish military service. For some reason, after President Bush that demographic pretty much dried up. Folks started sending us other liars to investigate, so following our readership we got into the Stolen Valor business. But still it’s not the only thing that we do.<\/p>\n

We are very good at that, by the way. If I have doubts about a particular suspect, I send it out to some of our editors and our lawyer to get their opinions. There are a number of suspects who haven’t had their records published because they didn’t rise to a level that we thought could be Stolen Valor. Of course, you wouldn’t know that.<\/p>\n

The reason we’re so careful is because we don’t want to be known as whack-job loons who go after folks who didn’t earn their National Defense Service Medal. <\/p>\n

I don’t think you folks at Reddit want to hang your hats on Dallas Wittgenfeld or Joe Teti. Dallas was caught in the media bragging about a Bronze Star Medal that he didn’t earn and wearing a green beret at the Vietnam Wall that he didn’t earn. In fact, the Special Forces Association booted him for misusing his associate membership with them. He has tried to get us all fired from our day jobs because he really wanted to wear that Bronze Star and his green beret. he continues to collaborate with another SV phony who has established a website that accuses us of being child molesters. I don’t see anyone at Reddit attacking them for their completely false attack on us.<\/p>\n

Joe Teti is another story all together – I supported his record and claims, but he didn’t like that I wouldn’t delete the comments that weren’t so kind to him. I actually went to the trouble to call him and let him walk me through all of my questions about him. He threatened to sue me over your comments…despite the fact that I had been so charitable with him. I still get hate mail from his fans over the comments, not over something that I wrote.<\/p>\n

We are fairly popular because of our careful research. We don’t “walk up to the line”, we stay back from the line. We’ve exposed some of the most famous phonies and that’s probably why we have so many fans – and enemies. Phonies like Tim Poe<\/a>, the Round Marine<\/a>, the Round Ranger<\/a>, Nick Androsky<\/a>, Michael McManus<\/a> and countless others. When we’re wrong, we do apologize, but that happens so infrequently, I guess it’s easy to forget.<\/p>\n

One of the commenters at Reddit remarked that we update posts with traffic tickets – I’d like to see that. We only care about their military service. Most of the commenters here get upset when the phonies compound their lies in the comments. Folks like The Round Ranger get their asses handed to them when each explanation is worse than what we reported initially.<\/p>\n

I’ve been to court a few times because of the blog, and every time it’s because of comments on the blog, not because of anything I wrote. Folks filing legal action against me have to either lie about what I’ve written, or they dragged comments from our archives which were written before we knew their names.<\/p>\n

Our intent is to stop Stolen Valor completely. It damages how the American Public views the veterans of their wars. It is not our intent to cause the liars to kill themselves, but we have no sympathy for those who do that. It’s just another of their bad choices. We want prosecutors to get off their ample buttocks and do this work so we don’t have to do it. It’s costly for us to do the job they should be doing, especially since Stolen Valor is usually just an indicator of more serious crimes. I’d prefer to stop doing this, but if I do, who will step up to be the canary in the coal mine?<\/p>\n

This Ain’t Hell exists because it’s what veterans want. It exists in the form that does because veterans want it to be like this. And the opinions of nine anonymous people on Reddit won’t change that. Neither will the opinions of the countless trolls and phonies that clog my inbox everyday change this blog. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some troll by the name of Joe sent us a link to Reddit this morning wherein … Dear Reddit; a TAH history<\/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":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-administrative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49108","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=49108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}