Sometimes it seems that reasonable, reality-based people who choose to engage on the world wide intertubes have to spend 95% of their time arguing that the sky is, in fact, blue on sunny days, or that many human beings do, in fact, find sexual activity to be an enjoyable and worthwhile pursuit. The latest case in point is the Greenwald/Boylan business, and if you’re not up to speed on that one, you can read about it here. (And Jonathan has more here.) My only thought on this is that I’m not entirely sure who’s playing who. I think when Greenwald specifically requested that Boylan confirm the authenticity of the email, it gave Boylan (and a thousand fact-impaired right wing bloggers) an opportunity to deny same. (Note to Glenn: next time you want to confirm an email, just send a note back asking for a clarification of some specific point, and wait to see how the other party responds. If they answer your question and do not say, “Why — I did not send this email purporting to be from me”, you’ve pretty much confirmed authorship. After that, I think it’s okay to ignore commenters questioning the color of the sky.) At the same time, the longer this goes on, the more of an ass — and more importantly, the more of a liar — Boylan apears to be. Which I guess brings up one more point: if General Petraeus’ spokesman has been all but proven to be a blatant liar, on top of just having a very strange notion of how a military public relations offer should engage civilians, isn’t that a fairly big story? Shouldn’t this be getting at least a little attention from mainstream media outlets?
(… I think it also brings up the question of whether the Colonel might be more useful to the military in some other role, but — if the facts are as they appear to be, down this particular intertubey rabbit hole — that would depend on how highly Gen. Petraeus values honesty.)