Late Nite FDL: Further Tales of the Colonel Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight

Things have gotten even weirder with General David Petraeus’s chief spokesman (and future Right-Wing shill), Col. Steven Boylan. Now he’s taking time from his busy schedule of coordinating communications between Sunni tribal leaders and US forces in Iraq and dodging road-side bombs to harass Glenn Greenwald’s readers individually:

Col. Boylan now refuses to respond to any of my emails or other inquiries. He is also refusing to respond to at least one journalist whom I know is working on a comprehensive article on this matter. But he has been quite busy responding — often at great length — to readers here and other individuals who have emailed him about his behavior.

I am publishing the unedited versions of two particularly bizarre email exchanges with readers which are, for several reasons, credible and verifiable. Those email exchanges are here and here.

Really? Is this what military officers in Iraq are getting paid to do? To micro-micro-manage media perception of the (failing) “Surge” strategy?

I can’t get the image out of my head of Col. Boylan as this Sergeant Schultz type of character, banging away on his laptop and muttering under his breath about “goddamn LIBERAL SCUM” as bullets whiz by his head, IED’s take out members of his entourage, and the Mosul Dam starts to crack like an eggshell and spurt little jets of water into the air. Shouldn’t the Colonel be turning his attention to these pressing matters? Oh, noooooo, of course not! He has to flood some in-boxes with overheated, under-analyzed Republican rhetoric.

It’s all part of Conservative Magical Thinking, I guess, the notion that if we lose the War in Iraq (which we did about four years ago), it’ll be because the Left didn’t clap their hands and believe in fairies hard enough, and now, goddamn it, Tinkerbell is dead. And it’s all our fault, hence the punitive, thuggish tone of Boylan’s missives.

Glenn?

In the email exchange Col. Boylan had with Phillip Hallam-Baker (here), he said: “I have told him it was not my email and have asked them to take it down since it was not mine.” That simply is an outright lie. It never happened. He has refused to communicate with anyone at Salon and never requested that anyone “take down” the email. Col. Boylan just made that up.

In his email with the reader who has asked that her name not be used, Boylan wrote: “I have my serious doubts that any of what has been said is real and I have no reason to engage Mr. Greenwald,” and further wrote that “errors” in the email “indicates (sic) that whoever sent it if in fact it was really ever sent and I have my doubts, does not completely know my career timeline.” He is, rather unmistakably, suggesting here that I fabricated the email.

Salon’s tech writer, Farhad Manjoo weighs in as well:

On Tuesday, I spoke to several e-mail experts who have compared the disputed Boylan message with other letters the colonel has sent. The experts tell a clear story: If the message is a fake, as Boylan claims, it is a very well-done fake. Experts say that anyone who forged the e-mail to Greenwald would have had to find a way to get into the military’s network, either physically (by having access to Boylan’s computer, say) or through some kind of hack.

Every e-mail message includes a trail showing how it was routed through the Internet to get from the sender’s computer to the receiver’s — this information is included in what’s called an e-mail’s “header.” Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher and Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly provided Salon with e-mail correspondence they’ve had with Boylan. Headers on those messages, as well as headers on other messages that Boylan has sent to Greenwald and a Salon editor, match the header of the disputed e-mail — they all show Boylan’s messages coming through the military’s computers in Iraq.

Interestingly, the Boylan family seems to find that propaganda, like incest, is a game the whole family can play:

The colonel is not the only outspoken Boylan. In September, his wife, Michelle, wrote a letter to the editor of the Kansas City Star that began, “Wake up, America! Congress owes the military a public apology. Few are addressing the disappointing and disheartening behavior of members of the House and Senate, as well as various presidential candidates, during and after Gen. David Petraeus’ testimony.” She added: “We the People should not tolerate the personal attacks on the military and its key leader in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus.” But she did not add that she is married to the man who speaks for that general.

In the fall of 2004, campaign reporters for the Los Angeles Times found Michelle Boylan and three Boylan children manning a Bush-Cheney phone bank in Wisconsin. “We’re here because we think it’s important to keep President Bush in office,” Michelle Boylan told the Times.

Clearly, these people are cut from the same bolt of cloth that has brought us so many soulless, zombie-eyed, Constitution-shredding political automatons like Alberto “Buttercheeks” Gonzales, Lurita “Cookies” Doan, Monica Goodling, Hans Von Sparkovsky, and hundreds, if not thousands of others.

Essentially over the course of the last six years, a cabal of wildly unqualified ideologues have been elevated to positions of extreme power and importance in the US government by the policies of the Bush administration. These are a bunch of men and women so thoroughly and utterly mediocre that they would be out of their depth working for an office supply company in Plano. And yet, they run our country, command our military, and sit on the highest courts in the land, blithely skating from failure to disgrace to debacle and back again.

Someone needs to look into how Colonel Boylan is spending his time and to figure out where the breakdown is. Has some prankster hacked into the military’s closely guarded email system as Boylan claims and is currently sending snide, threatening emails to American citizens in the Colonel’s name? Does Boylan have an “alter”, a split personality that writes emails and then leaves the Colonel to clean up the mess? Or, getting out Occam’s razor (such a handy item), can we safely assume that Colonel Boylan is as inept a liar as his boss, General Petraeus, and his boss, Der Chimpenfuhrer?

I think we all know which answer is the truth. And my god, with lying, ethics-free, brainwashed bilge-peddlers like Boylan so highly placed in our military, is it any wonder that the Iraq War has become such a cock-up of global proportions?

May god have mercy on us all.

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