Category Image Memorial Day, Let's Celebrate -- Protesters!


There were a wide variety of celebrity and media responces to this year's Memorial Day, ranging from Google's snub to a variety of nasty attacks on the troops by lefty groups to country performer Toby Keith who showed up in Iraq, and after finishing his set jammed with the 101st Airborne's band. (Glenn Miller would be pleased, I think).

But the most bizarre Memorial Day feature in the media had to be the Washington Post's Style section's main feature -- which zeroed in on a radical anti-war protester whose husband is in the National Guard. The Post story, by a fussy writer named David Montgomery, has apparently been in the works for three years. So I don't feel nearly as bad about missing some blog updates.

Stacy Bannerman, Montgomery tells us in studiously neutral terms, is a "professional peace and justice activist." It's a curious set of words to apply to someone who is affiliated with the paleo-communist Code Pink and International ANSWER, and whose "free speech" consists mostly of shrieks about "imperialist pigs," and whose idea of making a difference is getting arrested in Don Rumsfeld's driveway or playing dead in Maria Cantwell's Senate office.

Of course, you can't be a lefty without telling an atrocity story, and the Post tells a story of Bannerman's husband killing two innocent Iraqis with mortar rounds. Did it happen, or is it another one of the fraudulent atrocities that power the IVAW and other groups? It's hard to say, because both real and fabricated civilians do die real and fabricated deaths. One clue, though, might have come when Montgomery asked the Guard unit about the atrocity in question. "A public-affairs officer with the 81st Brigade said he was unaware of the incident."

You don't say.

That's the Washington Post's memorial day coverage. A memorial for two Iraqis who might or might not have existed. A celebration of a leftover-left communist. And a good stream of 100% liberal urine on the graves of veterans.


Google's approach to Memorial Day is the simplest: they ignore it. Their excuse is they can't figure out how to illustrate it, for two years running, although they've had no problem with diversity saint Martin Luther King, and every editorial cartoonist in America tackles Memorial Day every twelve months.

Whether Bannerman's story of her husband having mortared (or was it murdered?) two young Iraqis is true or not, is an open question. This has also been the week of antiwar "Veteran" Jesse MacBeth, who was accepted as a brother by the scruffy wannabees of the IVAW, when it was patently obvious that MacBeth's Airborne/Ranger/Special Forces/atrocity claims were... er, somewhat fanciful. MacBeth was quickly exposed as a loser who flunked basic training (an almost but not quite impossible feat) and a felon with a lengthy fraud record even though he's only 20. (It looks like he's about to get another trip to court as a result of a 2005 attempt to defraud the VA).

This rocket scientist starred in an antiwar video and appeared on dozens of antiwar blogs and websites (with his uniform as messed up as Hogan's goat) while he was wanted in two states. One of his fraud victims turns out to be his own sister... that's just lame.

Since it was obvious at a glance to any real vet how phony he was, the IVAW heroes are all under scrutiny. A large percentage of the VVAW antiwar "vets" were phonies, including John Kerry's co-leader Al Hubbard, and it turns out the loser that recruited MacBeth to the IVAW, and the impresario that engaged filmmaker Terry Portinga to make the film, one Stephen "Randy" Rowland, is himself a phony. He is not an Iraq veteran... he's an old retread from the Marxist-Lenist wing of the VVAW -- and in true VVAW style, he's not a Vietnam Veteran either.

Mug Shot Of Stephen R Rowland He was a veteran, though. He just went to Leavenworth, not Vietnam, on his way to a dishonorable discharge. After a previous period of confinement in a post stockade. So he and MacBeth really do have a brother bond thing happening, but it's the brother bond of felons. (Where's Joe Yandle? Rowland needs men like you, Joe...) Here's an irony for you: Rowland now bills himself as a reluctant soldier, seized by The Man and forced to enlist because of the contradictions inherent in capitalism. All bullshit. See here that he had an RA serial number (RA 16 991 735 ). That's for Regular Army -- in plain English, a volunteer. Draftee serials began "US."

You ever notice that, while the Rowlands and MacBeths are such a phenomenon, and there are so many Vietnam phonies that there has been a bestselling book (Stolen Valor) on them, you never run into anybody trying to improve his image by claiming he was a Vietnam protester? Plenty of protesters are now falsely claiming that they were soldiers, but none of the soldiers are trying to boost their self-esteem by pretending to have been protesters. Heh. Now the left is pretending they never promoted MacBeth, but data is forever and the blogosphere is merciless.

A look at the IVAW website Memorial Day weekend featured a weaselly climbdown on MacBeth and an absolutely hilarious (in an unintentional way) attempt by exposed Marine liar Jimmy Massey to rehabilitate himself. (Ron Harris's exposure of Massey has been archived off the net by the ST Louis Post, unfortunately. but an edited version from another liberal paper, the Seattle Times, is here. And here and here are Michelle Malkin's posts, and here is an even earlier post where another blogger shreds Massey. Here's one paper's attempt to have it both ways, while admitting his story doesn't check out). Like most of these IVAW/VVAW dregs, Massey was not a great soldier. By his own admission, hiring a lawyer to get him out on a mental health discharge -- based on findings of PTSD for events subsequently proven not to have happened -- was what prevented him from ending up "in the brig."

Which brings us back to the Washington Post. While other papers retracted their Jimmy Massey stories, the Post has a puff piece on him by Post staff reporter Doug Struck. Neither the Post nor Struck has ever corrected the record; it's still online here.

The Post does love its veterans and military families -- especially when they're retailing atrocity stories, which reporters like Montgomery and Struck show a remarkable facility at scribbling down while they're fellating their subjects.

Which brings us back to John Kerry. The Senator chose Memorial Day weekend to launch an attempt to rehabilitate himself, using the New York Times's Kate Zernike as his transcriber du jour, with a new version of his Christmas in Cambodia story and a few more photographs. I haven't really been counting, but I believe that this is the fourth version of this farfetched story. (Some variations compared to Zernike's version here. And here. And here. And here. And here). A map showing how the river he has taken to Cambodia in his mind doesn't actually go to Cambodia can be found here.

If Kerry is telling the truth this time, he wasn't telling the truth those other times. If his interest was in correcting the record, rather than , he could back it up by releasing his diaries and his military records to the public. (He has made a limited release of his records to Boston Globe reporter Michael Kranish -- a de facto Kerry staffer and Kerry fluffer of long-standing).

A strange weekend indeed.

Posted: Wednesday - May 31, 2006 at 05:38 AM          

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