Fraters Libertas

Now Would Kate Say Something That Wasn't True?

Long time reader, frequent contributor, and writer (a real writer-he's presently busy at work on a book) Gary Larson e-mails to comment on my post yesterday on Kate Stanley's eulogy for a homeless man. He also provides some interesting background on Stanley and reminds us of some of her past work:

Neat job taking apart Stanley yesterday. Followed her career since her Day 1 at Strib, right out off the U of MN campus, where she edited the Minnesota Daily, then about as left wing as a newspaper could get. Oh it was a party organ for sure. Lib Dem and DFL all the way, no doubt about it.

Stanley was hired right out of the U, with no intervening years of real life experience, or seasoning. Might tell us something about the naive nature of the typical Strib editorialist. Mainly mainly ivory tower types.

I laughed, too, at her intended heart-tugging sob story, about the homeless guy, so de rigueur in Strib, especially at the Holiday Season. Your term " self-absorbed guilt-mongering" is so well put. Right on the money!

Funny also was Stanley's lengthy piece last year lauding two nuns arrested at Fort Benning, GA, for trespassing, there in "civil disobedience" to protest the training of foreign nationals (at the US Army's School of the Americas) in the ways of torture, or so they said. Stanley utterly believed their slurs on the US military.

(Editors note: Stanley's article in question is no longer available online)

Her piece exuded praise for the the nuns. It was packed, I recall, with wild-ass assumptions and made-up "factoids." This reflected Strib's distrust of, and quite possibly disgust for, our military. Her piece got a quick no-nonsense reply from retired Gen. John Vessey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and my neighbor up here in mid-Minnesota (near Garrison).

Now Gen. Vessey is a truly noble American, a gentleman, a real leader, and a class act. He served America exceedingly well, a fellow of impeccable integrity, like his successor, Colin Powell. Vessey tore into Stanley's biased truth-averse column as I've not seen a fellow military man ever do. Heck, he's retired. Why should he care about "good press relations"? (I am a former USAF public info officer, btw, a 'Nam vet; I know about such things. One of my bosses, a colonel, used to say, "they [media] have the last word, you know." So we watched our Ps&Qs.)

Gen. Vessey laid it on the line. Stanley assumed the very worst lies as truth, he said, and spread flat-out lies about the US military, about the school at Ft. Benning, about our GIs. He said her piece was "devoid of fact," as I recall, really an all-out assault on the US Army. Well put. (Note: I did an ill-fated letter to Strib on Gen. Vessey's marvelous put-down. Of course it did not find ink. "Last word?")

Not a word of rebuttal came from the chastised Stanley to her assumptions, reciting as fact the nuns' tale, now challenged by the former No. 1 US Military Man. Her notions were challenged by, well, by mere truth, a powerful ally, and sometimes quite foreign to Strib's editorial pages, as we all know from daily exposure.