>Phony Soldiers and Phony Senators
by John E. O'Neill
Posted: 10/04/2007
Recently, at least 41 Democratic Senators, joined by a howling mob including George Soros’ Media Matters, sought to silence Rush Limbaugh because of his reference to “phony” anti war soldiers. Limbaugh’s comments, taken in context, referred to Jesse Macbeth, a confessed and convicted phony, whose faked but graphic war crimes confessions received far wider media notice than his later confession. He had been discharged in boot camp after 40 days of service.
Macbeth follows a grand tradition of fake soldiers whose “war crimes” confessions have been used by the Left to slander the service of our troops. For example, Micah Ian Wright, author of the 2003 anti war best seller "You Back the Attack," was an Army Ranger and Combat veteran feted at USC’s Annenberg School and in media like the Washington Post until he was finally “outed” as a complete fake. Many similar examples of phony “soldiers” used by the Left for war crimes confessions are documented in B.G. Burkett’s bestseller Stolen Valor. Indeed, the problem was so endemic that a Republican Congress in 2005, at the urging of many veterans, passed “The Stolen Valor Act” finally criminalizing activities such as those of Macbeth.
There is no one more injured by phony war crimes charges lodged by phony veterans than veterans themselves whose service is dishonored by the slander. I know. In 1971, in addition to listening to John Kerry from our unit falsely compare our forces in Viet Nam to “the Army of Jhengiz Khan,” I heard Al Hubbard, the president of Kerry’s VVAW, appearing with Kerry in forums such as Meet the Press and Congress confess to war crimes such as bombing innocent villages. Hubbard was an Air Force pilot, who appeared on national television wearing the Distinguished Flying Cross and many other medals while confessing our guilt in Viet Nam. Except he was none of these things, having left the Air Force as a Sergeant, never serving in Viet Nam at all.
Military personnel all over the world thank God for Rush Limbaugh’s stout defense of our military from these fakes. In 1971, there was no one to defend us from the John Kerrys and the Al Hubbards. Indeed, it is the U.S. Senate that is a Potemkin Village. It is a body whose failure to condemn Hubbard’s and Kerry’s 1971 libels is deafening. It is also a place on whose floor active duty soldiers have been compared to the assassins of the Khmer Rouge (Senator Dick Durbin); people who terrorize women and children (Senator Kerry); and (in close proximity) cold blooded murderers (Rep. John Murtha). Hypocrisy and cowardice are terms too kind for those who demean our soldiers without regard to the consequences to them. This conduct when coupled with the effort to silence Limbaugh a stout defender of the troops, can be best described with two words: What phonies.
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Mr. O'Neill is a Houston attorney who clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist during the Supreme Court's October 1974 term. He co-authored the New York Times No. 1 bestseller, "Unfit for Command" in 2004.
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