Shameless Whores

Pat Tillman's family is apparently upset over being lied to by the Army about the circumstances of their son's death (wait--you mean the Army LIES? Amazing!). Read this article from the AP and note how it's somehow relevant that his parents are divorced (wasn't too relevant when they were still on the team and doing TV interviews about their son the mythic "hero"); notice as well that the writer has put the word "lies"--as in, "They say the Army's "lies" about what happened have made them suspicious"--in quotation marks, as though it's somehow debatable whether the Army lied about it or not.

Well, I guess if you don't see any difference between dying from enemy fire while "storming a hill in Afghanistan, barking orders to his fellow soldiers" and being "shot several times by other Rangers as he got into position to defend them" then the Army isn't lying.

As I wrote at the time this happened: the Tillman story is and always has been a string of lies. The guy as much as volunteered to be a patsy and a tool the minute he joined up. The circumstances of his death were and are irrelevant; we, the American people, will be expected to remember him as someone who died leaping a tall building in a single bound while catching a bullet in his teeth and rescuing seventy Afghani children from a burning mosque. The problem isn't with the Army, which doesn't write the scripts for the war(s) on terrorism.