Wonkette: Who ordered Pat Tillman’s murder?

posted at 9:05 pm on July 31, 2007 by Bryan
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No, I’m not linking to that smear site either. Doubleplusundead directed me to the post, so that’s where one link goes. Ace has the post, so another link goes there. There: Guttersnipe’s content discussed, but no traffic sent to them in the process. Here’s part of the post, head to Ace’s for the rest.

Dept. of Political Assassinations

Who Ordered the Execution of NFL/Army Hero Pat Tillman?

It’s almost too depressing to mention again, but let’s recap the Pat Tillman revelations from Army medical examiners and internal Pentagon reports released last week and find out what happens when famous football stars turned Army Heroes become anti-war critics:

* He was shot three times in the forehead at close range with an American M-16.

* This was after he was shot in the chest, legs and hand.

* And this was after he screamed to the “friendlies” that he was Pat Tillman and please stop shooting him.

* But they didn’t; they executed him.

* They were Americans.

* There wasn’t even an “enemy” around; not only was nobody shot by “enemy fire,” no equipment was shot by “enemy fire.”

* “Members of Tillman’s unit burned his body armor and uniform in an apparent attempt to hide the fact that he was killed by friendly fire.”

* Army medical examiners tried to get a criminal investigation opened, but they were shut down.

And so forth and so on. First rule of blogging: Link to your sources (or to Ace if your source is as disreputable as Wonkette). Note that there aren’t any links in that. You can go all the way over to Wonkette if you want. Not a single link in the entire conspiracy theory, so readers can’t check their sources.

And never mind that, just today, a three-star general got busted over the Tillman tragedy. He’s retired but he’ll probably lose a star, and it sounds like he should.

The Army censured a retired three-star general Tuesday for his handling of the friendly-fire death of Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former NFL player who gave up a lucrative career to become an Army Ranger.

Army Secretary Pete Geren also said Philip Kensinger, the retired lieutenant general, could be reduced in rank. A panel will decide whether he loses a star. Geren said he had considered “long and hard” whether to seek a court-martial for Kensinger before settling on the discipline announced Tuesday.

“I believe the buck stops with Gen. Kensinger,” Geren said.

I’ll be the last person to argue that the Army has handled Tillman’s death well. It hasn’t handled it well at all. It took a serious tragedy and, first, apparently tried to spin it into a story of heroism and then tried to cover up both the events at center of the tragedy, and cover up its own cover-up. As they say, it’s the cover-up and not the crime that gets you. And here we are.

Ask yourself, if you’re retired LtGen Philip Kensinger and the Army is busting your chops over this situation, but you know that it goes higher than you, are you just going to sit there and take it or are you going to speak out? Especially in today’s environment, when incompetent generals can find a warm home on the left by blaming their poor leadership on everyone in the chain of command above them? If the “conspiracy” goes higher than Kensinger, why isn’t he talking? If your answer is “Because they have dirt on him” or something along those lines, you’ve just added another layer to your conspiracy without a shred of evidence. That’s how these things usually work, though: When you run into a problem with the known facts, invent some new ones.

Part of the problem here is, though a Lieutenant General is a very very big fish in military circles and here’s one taking the rap, he’s not a household name and certainly not a known denizen of BushCo, and Layne’s gang probably doesn’t even know what a Lieutenant General is, so he’s not big enough for them. His censure doesn’t satisfy them and never will. Additionally, Layne and his minions really have no idea just how chaotic battlespaces can get and therefore can’t quite get their little minds around the fact that very very tragic things happen in war without anyone conspiring to make it happen. In fact, given the chaos of today’s battlefields and the sheer number of moving parts one would need to carry off a battlefield murder like that which Wonkette alleges, it’s nearly impossible to pull off the kind of murder they’re theorizing. This isn’t David murdering Uriah to steal his wife on a battlefield consisting of swords, shields and arrows. But the Wonkettes really have no knowledge of anything they’re writing about on this, or anything else of substance or importance. Unfortunately, that never seems to slow them down.

Time was, a very long time ago, Ken Layne seemed like a stand-up guy. He coined the anti-MSM “this is the internet and we can fact-check your as$” line, which was so brilliant we all parroted it and started up our own blogs to follow it. But that seems like a hundred years ago now.

Somewhere along the way, like so many on the left, Layne reverted to form and then cranked his leftardedness up to 11. Now, I really can’t find a clean word to describe his work accurately so I won’t bother. Just note that his pseudoblog Wonkette is floating a gross conspiracy theory centered on just how high must the plot to murder Pat Tillman go, and the lefty blogs are eating it up. These conspiracies, with more moving parts than a Rube Goldberg device and less internal narrative logic than a Scott Thomas diary, provide a balm for leftists in a confusing world. For most on the left, the conspiracies are really about self-empowerment. It’s a scary world out there, but if all our problems start in DC, well then the world is rational and they might have some power to fix everything by voting the bums out or impeaching them. But if the scary world is as irrational and the frights are as widespread as they appear, then the left is completely and totally powerless to do anything about anything. It’s a world where strength, resolve, and action are necessary to preserve our liberty and civilization. Do any of those qualities describe the average leftist today?

Wonkette’s motives in floating the Tillman conspiracy are probably more mercenary though: They know that leftists love them some conspiracy, so posting this one will drive up traffic. Traffic means revenue. And the pity is, it’s working.

Update: I stand corrected. The Laynettes had one link in their conspiracy theory. It goes to Max Blumenthal, last seen infiltrating Osama’s camp in outer Waziristan. That’s just how he rolls.

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