Fake, Apolitical Steven Boylan

 

 

Real, Politicized Steven Boylan
(Compare and Contrast Illustrations courtesy of the bildungblog)

Salon:

In September, a person pretending to be Boylan attempted to rent a vacation cabin from Fred Humphrey, a retired English professor in Guilford, Vt. The cops foiled the plan; a $3,000 check that the fake Boylan wrote to Humphrey proved to be bogus. Boylan told Greenwald that the incident suggested that someone is masquerading as the colonel online.

Late last night Fred Humphrey, the cabin owner in Vermont, sent Salon copies of his correspondence with the fake Boylan. These messages to Humphrey look very different from the disputed e-mail to Greenwald -- they don't bear the same return address, they don't come through the same server, and they're written in a different style. The real fake Boylan -- the scammer who tried to defraud Humphrey -- looks, in other words, to be a completely separate person from the fellow who accused Greenwald of being "too lazy to do the research on the topics to gain the facts."

This does not prove that the e-mail to Greenwald was really from Boylan. But if Boylan's credibility, so far, has been on life support, now it's at Code Blue.

(...)

OK, you might say, but maybe there are two -- or more -- people pretending to be Boylan. Maybe there's an unsophisticated fake Boylan who uses Gmail to mount a vacation-home scam, and maybe there's another very crafty fake Boylan who can route his missives through the military's network in an effort to bash lefty critics.

If you believe that's more likely than the alternate explanation -- that the real Boylan, aghast that Greenwald had published his rant, used the clumsy, fake Boylan as an easy out -- well, then, I've got a vacation home I'd like to rent to you in Vermont.

Gang, in light of these developments, I have decided to toss out that old Occam's Razor and go with the supposition that Col. Steven Boylan is in fact suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder. He has "alters" that write his nasty emails and then retreat to the cobwebby corners of his wee pointy head.

In fact, I am writing a screenplay about it which I am hoping to option as a Lifetime Original Movie™, "The Three Faces of Steve". It will star Dennis Franz (with a Third Reich comb-over) as a plucky US Army officer in Baghdad and explore his sometimes comic, sometimes tragic relationship with the two other personalities lurking in his mind. One is an embittered alcoholic spinster and Internet con artist (with a heart of gold, natch) who will be voiced by Stockard Channing. The other is an angry four-year-old of indeterminate gender who will be portrayed by Kathy Najimy.

It's gonna be great. Just you wait and see.