Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 2

August 27, email to Judy Minshew, Viewpoints Editor, Houston Chronicle

Hey Judy, welcome to my book, April Fools, Captain May. Here’s your role to present: You have been the Viewpoints editor who has failed to publish a scrap of my top-end analysis (even when I specifically asked you to do it) to give me some cover against the thugs who are subverting the Constitution while you run a pen-pal club about potholes.

All right, here’s two graphs of worth for Viewpoints:

I thought Thomas Freedman was a righteous, right-wing Samson, slaying the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Alas, he seems a bit shorn of late. In his August 27 “Iraq not just about how many boots” his three swings at common sense fall as flat as Casey at the bat. At the beginning of the column, he reverses his call of a bare month ago for a doubling of our troop commitment to the quicksand that country is becoming. In the middle, he offers up feeble Army public affairs drivel about the success of teaching PTA tactics in the middle of a guerilla war. Toward the end he blithely calls on the scarecrow Iraqi Governing Council to create a New Deal miracle when the only deal they’re thinking about is a visa to the United States. He does close with a scrap of truth though. It’s in the last sentence: “(The Bush team) is going to have to make the necessary compromises to bring in the United Nations and the international community to help.” I think I’ll save time and just read the last sentence of Mr. Freedman’s columns first from now on.

All of this, of course, is put much more eloquently in an op-ed “Visions of Stalingrad: Claim victory in Iraq now” written by Captain Eric May, USA, and sent to Mr. David Langworthy, which he laughingly published as a late April Fools joke because he knew it was so wrong. 36 hours later the Baghdad Airport blew up and proved that Captain May was right.

Slice, dice, spice at will, Judy Minshew. Please tell me if I get the spelling of your name right. I try, lord knows I try. I know the bare truth of the second graph makes the walls of your journalistic Jericho tremble. They will tumble anon, so don’t stress yourself overmuch about it. Publish the first graph and I’ll call you a brave soul. Remember, what I call you – each of you – is what each of you will be called for the rest of your lives. I believe they call that justice. Sometimes that really sucks, but it doesn’t have to. It just takes guts and nuts, trust me.

Didn’t Francois tell you guys that the way y’all found me was because I risked my neck to break up a gang on the Southeast side of town. I’ve had a bounty on me before, boys and girls. The dangers will end or I will end. Same difference. You have a shitty future whatever way it goes, because everything I write now is couriered, copied or computerized in real time. The book about the Houston Chronicle isn’t going to be published. It’s being published, as I write. Kinda cool, huh? You know, the thing that has been really great about it all is just how quickly I’ve worked over the Infowar alliance between the military and the media. I really don’t think either of your hearts were in it, and now it’s coming apart like a Hollywood marriage, let me tell you. Two days ago the SecDef you lame brains thought knew his business was sniping the cable networks (your kissing cousins) again, but this time y’all sniped back by having a Chicago Tribune boy on MSNBC say that the media has really done a lot of favors for the Bush Team, including giving them a free ride on the Jessica story. Hmm…the Jessica story. Oh, right, that’s the ruse that I clued Francois in on when it was happening real time, and he’s been trying to puff up his rep with it since. There are lots of cheaters, folks, and pretty soon you media types are going to start cheating each other out, and the first cheater the better served. Who’s going first, or can the bosses hold y’all in check? I can’t wait to see. This is better than Watergate, and you’re all a bunch of John Deans. And they haven’t even called you in front of the cameras yet. Once the Jessica cover totally blows, the public is going to look for villains, and I’ve taken the trouble of pointing out a few.

Captain May

PS: Tell your bosses that my wife (and lawyer) will shortly be filing suit against your institution on numerous conspiracy, reckless endangerment, intentional infliction… blah, blah, blah. It’s all lawyer stuff, and a second rate concern as I fight for our freedom, but she’ll make it comprehensible soon enough. Says the damages will be commensurate with the public mood, or some such clatter. I guess that means y’all will be paying me for all the fine op-eds I’ve written over the years after all. Y’all have been my retirement policy.

I’ll use the case to carve you up with free legal muscle. I expect that some high-powered ACLU type will want to make a rep by having me show up in my blues every day to stare you down as you cop out on each other. Call Bishop Fiorenza (the prez of the National Council of Bishops), and ask him if I didn’t take two years salary out of his pocket and dictate the letter of recommendation that he would write for me before I would let go of his balls. If he says no, I’ll show you copies.

Call my students from Raul Yzaguirre School for Success and ask them whether I didn’t take on the whole administration alone rather than let them frame a student for assaulting a male teacher when the truth was that the teacher was a homosexual trying to fondle him. You guys sorted through a zillion cases within months of my single brave deed and couldn’t find a priest in the diocese, or a bishop in the nation, who had done as much.

The reason none of you can understand heroism, and the reason you must undermine it, is because you cannot tolerate that which conflicts with your low character. Enjoy your positions, you salaries, the respect of your colleagues and your reputations, boys and girls. It’s been fun playing with you.

Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 2