Moron Massey
Michelle Malkin takes on the Great Pretender in her
latest column. She's
also got more on her blog.
Miraculously, a lone member of the mainstream media answered the call. Last weekend, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Ron Harris, who was embedded with Massey's unit in Iraq, published a devastating debunking of the crackpot legends of Jimmy Massey. Harris detailed how Massey misled reporters, backtracked from allegations about witnessing a tractor-trailer filled with dead Iraqi civilians he claimed were killed by American artillery, and habitually embellished and altered his uncorroborated accounts of alleged military atrocities in the press and in public speeches.
The response of Harris's colleagues who were duped by Massey? Mostly, a collective shrug. I e-mailed a reporter from The Washington Post asking if he would follow up. No response. A USA Today reporter told me he had no plans to do so. And I spoke with David Holwerk, editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee, which ran a lengthy freelance interview of Massey by an anti-war activist. "I don't know what we're planning to do," Holwerk said.She also compares Massey's accounts with the infamously fraudulent Winter Soldier "investigation" by the VVAW.
There does seem to be a pattern here. Somebody pops up that the media adore due to the damaging things he or she says about the war. That person is immediately lionized by the press as a brave teller of truth to power. Then the real truth comes out and the person is allowed to slip back into anonymity as the press studiously ignores the inconvenient facts. It's happened during this war, with Joe Wilson, George Galloway, Cindy Sheehan and now Jimmy Massey, just as it happened back in the Vietnam era with John Fraude Kerry.
