-By Melanie Morgan
Rush Limbaugh has come under attack by liberal bloggers and some in the news media for a statement he made on his show about “phony soldiers.”
Now I am under attack for defending Rush.
Despite the cries of protest from the anti-war and anti-military crowd, Limbaugh was spot-on right in his characterization.
Limbaugh mentioned in his show the case of Jessie Adam Macbeth, who falsely claimed to have committed war crimes during service in Iraq. The allegations struck a chord with those who wish to regularly impugn the character and honor of the men and women of the United States military. They jumped on the story like jackals on fallen prey, ripping away at the integrity of our heroic troops who serve in a hot war some 7,000 miles away.
There’s only one problem. Jessie Macbeth was lying. He was not an Army Ranger as he had claimed, and he was not a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Macbeth was discharged from the army before he had even completed basic training, because according to representatives with the U.S. Army, he was either unfit, unsuitable, or both, to serve in the military.
Critics of Rush Limbaugh have now launched a full-scale war against Mr. Limbaugh that reaches all the way to the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, threatening congressional action to condemn Limbaugh.
But it is the anti-war left that needs to be condemned, once again.
The anti-war Left keeps getting caught promoting bogus allegations made by “phony soldiers” because the Left is desperate for any allegations that are made which might discredit Operation Iraqi Freedom. They do this for one simple reason – they so hate this war (and the broader “war on terror” that they shamelessly deride as a “war of error”) that they are determined to undermine the war effort and hope that America loses so they can play a pathetic and dangerous game of “I told you so.”
Not content with disparaging the reputation of a 4-star general, as in their “General Betray Us” attack on U.S. General David Petraeus, the anti-military Left has not stopped for one moment to realize that Limbaugh’s accusations are correct. There are a number of examples of “phony soldiers” such as Jessie Macbeth who have lied about their military service or experiences with the deliberate intent to be to harm the military as a whole, and undermine the missions of the men and women serving in the war on terror.
Credit goes to Michelle Malkin for chronicling a litany of these “phony soldiers” of whom I will highlight just a few.
Amorita Randall
As RegretTheError.com reports, Randall is the, “former naval construction worker who told the New York Times magazine that she served in Iraq, was in a Humvee that blew up, and was raped twice while serving in the Navy.
Not.
It turns out that Amorita Randall was not in a Humvee that blew up in Iraq, and she was not raped twice while serving in the Navy…
The truth is she never even served in Iraq.
At all.
Ever.
Jimmy Massey
Former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey is an Iraq war veteran who claimed that he and his unit committed war atrocities including the murder of innocent Iraqis, shooting a 4-year old Iraqi girl in the head and tractor trailers of dead Iraqi’s hauled around by the U.S. military.
Massey published a book in France titled “Kill, Kill, Kill” to profit from his allegations against his fellow brothers and sisters in the military.
However, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Associated Press both did investigative reporting and found out the alleged incidents never took place.
As the Post-Dispatch reported:
“Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated – according to his fellow Marines, Massey’s own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey’s unit, including a reporter and photographer from the Post-Dispatch and reporters from The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.”
Scott Thomas Beauchamp
The most recent, and better-known, example is that of Army Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who made a series of allegations of atrocities committed by U.S. troops. Beauchamp used these allegations to support his anti-war views he made in essays he penned for The New Republic magazine.
When news media outlets attempted to verify Beauchamp’s allegations, Beauchamp recanted, signing a sworn statement admitting that his allegations were either exaggerations or falsehoods.
As one of Beauchamp’s fiancées explained to Richard Miniter of Pajamas Media about Beauchamp: “He hates the army. The only reason he joined was because he wanted to have more experience to write about.”
No wonder that Rush Limbaugh went on to say that, “They joined to be in Iraq.”
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Melanie Morgan is chairman of the conservative, pro-troop non-profit organization Move America Forward and is co-host of the “Lee Rodgers & Melanie Morgan Show” on KSFO 560 AM in San Francisco. Morgan is co-author of “American Mourning,” which tells the stories of American heroism in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Her personal website is www.MelanieMorgan.com.