Liberals are Liberals and Facts are Facts and Never the Twain Shall Meet1

Remember Jimmy Massey? Neither did I. He's the former Marine Staff Sergeant who, depressed and off meds after returning from a truncated tour in Iraq, said we committed war crimes, including:

• US Marines fired on and killed peaceful Iraqi protesters.



• Americans shot a 4-year-old Iraqi girl in the head.



• Tractor-trailers were filled with the bodies of civilian men, women and children killed by American artillery.

Massey told an ever-escalating tale across North America:

Since he was discharged in late 2003, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has told audiences all over America about the horrifying atrocities he saw his fellow Marines commit in Iraq. . . His book Kill, Kill, Kill, was published in - where else? - France.

He soon became the media flavor of the month in dozens of stories by the Associated Press, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Sacramento Bee and Rolling Stone. Claiming criminality won Massey star turn at a Hill hearing, plus many Moonbat friends, including Cindy Sheehan, Commies, Michael Moore, the inmates of DU, Internet rent-an-Imams and Al Jazeera.²

Too bad it's all bull, says St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Ron Harris:

Media outlets throughout the world have reported Jimmy Massey's claims of war crimes, frequently without ever seeking to verify them.

For instance, no one ever called any of the five journalists who were embedded with Massey's battalion to ask him or her about his claims.

The Associated Press, which serves more than 8,500 newspaper, radio and television stations worldwide, wrote three stories about Massey, including an interview with him in October about his new book.

But none of the AP reporters ever called Ravi Nessman, an Associated Press reporter who was embedded with Massey's unit. Nessman wrote more than 30 stories about the unit from the beginning of the war until April 15, after Baghdad had fallen.

In a seperate story, Harris recounts Massey's fall from a few good men to anti-American accuser:

News organizations worldwide published or broadcast Massey's claims without any corroboration and in most cases without investigation. Outside of the Marines, almost no one has seriously questioned whether Massey, a 12-year veteran who was honorably discharged, was telling the truth.

He wasn't.

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. . .

The details of Massey's stories changed repeatedly.

For example, he almost always told his audiences and interviewers of an event he said he'd never forget: Marines in his unit shooting four civilian Iraqis in red Kia automobile.

In some accounts, Massey said Marines fired at the vehicle after it failed to stop at a checkpoint. In another version, he said the Marines stormed the car.

Sometimes he said three of the men were killed immediately while the fourth was wounded and covered in blood; sometimes he said the fourth man was "miraculously unscathed."

Sometimes he said the Marines left the three men on the side of the road to die without medical treatment while the fourth man exclaimed: "Why did you shoot my brother?" In other versions, he said the man made the statement as medical personnel were attempting to treat the three other men, or as the survivor sat near the car, or to Massey personally.

There is no evidence that any of the versions occurred. . .

He also backtracked from allegations he made in a May 2004 radio interview and elsewhere that he had seen a tractor-trailer filled with the bodies of Iraqi civilians when Marines entered an Iraqi military prison outside Baghdad. He said the Iraqis had been killed by American artillery.

He told listeners that the scene was so bad "that the plasma from the body and skin was decomposing and literally oozing out of the crevices of the tractor-trailer bed."

He repeated the story in the Post-Dispatch interview. But when told that the newspaper's photographs and eyewitness reports had identified the trailer contents as all men, mostly in uniform, Massey admitted that he had never seen the bodies. . .

In other speeches, Massey has said he personally shot a 6-year-old child. In some versions, the child was a boy; at other times, a girl.

"How is a 6-year-old child with a bullet in his head a terrorist, because that is the youngest I killed," Massey told a Cornell University audience in March. In a speech in April in Springfield, Vt., he said: "That's war: a 6-year-old girl with a bullet hole in her head at an American checkpoint."

In a speech in Syracuse in March, the Post Standard newspaper quoted him as saying, "The reason the Marines teach you discipline . . . is so that you can confront the enemy and kill him. . . . Or so you can put a bullet into a 6-year-old, which is what I did. "

In the interview with the Post-Dispatch, Massey said he never personally had shot a child.

"I meant that's what my unit did," he said.

Interviewed today by CNN Morning Anchor Carol Costello, Harris amplified:

COSTELLO: Yes, but Ron, if there was completely untrue, I mean, this guy has made it into pretty big publications like "Vanity Fair." He's written a book that's been published in France.

HARRIS: Oh, it's been published everywhere. Nobody -- in not one publication or not one broadcast, is there any corroboration. It's just Jimmy Massey's story. Nobody ever called a journalists who were covering him. Nobody ever interviewed the marines, which I did all of. Nobody ever checked his story. They don't even have another source that says on background or another source who didn't want to be quoted. It's just Jimmy Massey's story. . .

COSTELLO: Well, Ron, let's go to some of those photos. We have one photo that this photographer took, and it shows two women who are bloody. You say this further disproves Jimmy Massey's story. In what way?

HARRIS: In that case, Jimmy Massey claimed that a 4-year-old girl was shot in the head. That was the particular shooting incident. In fact, there were civilian shot in that car by Marines. Nobody died.

Andrew Cartero, again, the photographer for "The Post Dispatch," took those photographs. And as you can see in those pictures, there are people there. Nobody died. I talked to the medic who treated them. And I traveled with him for more than a month, Petty Officer Justin Poviance (ph). He told me nobody died in that incident. . .

COSTELLO: OK, I have to ask you this before I have to let you go.

HARRIS: OK.

COSTELLO: Why would this staff sergeant, Jimmy Massey, lie about these things, and say such terrible things about his own comrades?

HARRIS: Well, one of the things that has happened -- number one, Jimmy Massey, I don't know why, but I can just speculate a couple of things. Number one, Jimmy Massey was honorably discharged for post- traumatic stress syndrome. The second thing, Jimmy Massey has profited off of this. He does have a book. He has a Web site in which he sells his story on a CD for a hundred dollars. I think it's called jimmymassey.com. So it's been profitable for Jimmy Massey to keep telling this lie.

I'm suddenly overcome, compelled to type (and shout) "Bush family crime syndicate!" Ok--much better.

Anyway, I know the press fired their fact checkers long ago. I also know liberals accept the NY Times uncritically, exactly as many remain romanced by Marxist theory, never mind experience or reality. But Massey's credibility was zero from the start--yet lefties never noticed.

So here's my questions:

1. Is it just me, or are leftists less acquainted with the facts? Common example:
   
   THEM: "Bush's invasion is illegal!"
   
   ME: "Oh? What law did he violate? And if he did, what's the remedy?"
   
   THEM:



2. If you agree, what's the best way to reclaim public debate for the world of rationality? Common example:
   
   ME: "Sure would be nice to get more oil from that empty wilderness in Alaska."
   
   THEM: "Do you ever quit shilling for the Bush Family Crime Syndicate and their Saudi Prince gay lovers?"
   
   ME:



3. When will the revolution arrive? Might it be before the mailman deposits another "biweekly (or so) heart-bleed plus obligatory Bush-bash by Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker’s "Talk of the Town" front section," or must we suffer more lying liberals like Massey?

_________________

¹ Apologies to R. Kipling, The Ballad of East and West (1889).

² Last month, Massey testified on behalf of five anti-war nut jobs who proved their pacifism by hammering $2.5 million worth of dings into a US Navy supply plane during its brief stop in Ireland. Cashing in on celebrity, Massey's hawking his talk show experiences attractively packaged in a two DVD set.

(via Michelle Malkin, Andi's World and GOP and the City)