Apparently, Col. Boylan is now officially denying sending the initial e-mail, but not the subsequent follow-up emails. As such, my thesis still stands: Boylan is a dick.
*** Update ***
The plot thickens:
Boylan denied authorship of the email – VIA EMAIL! How can Editor & Publisher be sure that they have read Col. Boylan? How can Col. Boylan be sure that he is really corresponding with Editor & Publisher? How can we know that Colonel Boylan even exists?
Philosophy majors, your country needs you.
capelza
If the e-mail is fake, then why indeed isn’t the military trying to figure out who is hacking into their system?
Bob Owens needs to get on this right away!
Jake
So in the midst of the Mostest Importantest War Eva!(TM)* This desk jockeys can’t even secure his e-mail account.
I feel safer already.
j
*MIWA status subject to change without warning. In the event the US launches another war, Iraq will be downgraded to An Important Front in the War on Terra and Afghanistan will become A Ruckus.
rawshark
Can the right show any more contempt for the ‘left’? Our military’s cheif spokesperson is sending nastygrams to left wing blogs then yelling I didn’t so it to thunderous applause from the right. And then saying I don’t care to respond to you, to more applause. This is so childish yet since folks on the right are incapable of understading analogies we can’t show them how childish and stupid their trusted authorities are.
norbizness
Double, double Boylan trouble?
Dennis-SGMM
Inasmuch as the original mail came from a Mil IP address it’s clearly time to waterboard some geeks.
Zifnab
DAMN YOU SCOTT BEAUCHAMP!
Perry Como
In all fairness, they are using Microsoft sExchange, so anything is possible.
nightjar
Boylan says
I did not have sex with that Email. And BTW, the meaning of is is is.
Jake
They know. Don’t you remember? Maturity and intelligence are so two administrations ago (see: Eastern Elitists in the Ivory Tower of Doom).
The new standard for trusted leadership is someone you’d want to have a beer with. That means someone like you, which in Freeperville, RedState, means a venal dunce of a rat bastard who talks a big game but craps his pants when faced with a real, inescapable threat.
Of course they like it when Boylan stands on the porch and yap-yap-yaps at Greenwald. It’s exactly what they would do.
rawshark
I disagree.
Tim F.
Boylan denied authorship of the email – VIA EMAIL! How can Editor & Publisher be sure that they have the read Col. Boylan? How can Col. Boylan be sure that he is really corresponding with Editor & Publisher? How can we know that Colonel Boylan even exists?
Philosophy majors, your country needs you.
Tsulagi
I await the known truth citizen sleuthers to build a toy replica of Boylan’s computer complete with little wires running through a sandbox labeled Intertube. Then demonstrate since that model can’t send nasty emails, neither can Boylan’s computer. Proof.
Blue Neponset
I hope this story gets some attention in the MSM. If Col. Boylan is truly what the Army’s considers an expert on public/press relations then they really need to overhaul their manuals/training on the subject. A little media attention on Col. Boylan’s exploits might do a lot of good.
Libby Spencer
It couldn’t be clearer that he did so engage to it write. The denial will home bring the maxim old, not the crime is it, the coverup it is.
Perry Como
As a great philosopher once said: there are known knowns; there are unknown unknowns; there are known unknowns; and unknown knowns.
hth
hand
kthxbai
capelza
Dare I bring up the fact hat this is the same Boylan who was in the thick of the White Phosphorus melee?
Ducks, in case John remembers…
Dreggas
I want to see both emails. There might be differences in the kerning!
jenniebee
He makes his living WRITING! IN PUBLIC RELATIONS!
He. turns. out. crap. email. like. this. for. more. money. than. I. make. selling. out. and. developing. BS. “applications.” instead. of. writing. my. novel. and. becoming. the. Voice. of. my. Generation. STOP.
This is probably why Faulkner drank so much.
Wilfred
C’mon, Kernel Boylan -‘ninja mail’, who’s sane?
rawshark
I’ve wondered lately, but have been afraid to ask, if JC still believes every word the Army had to say about that incident. At the time he reflexively believed the military but now that he’s seeing things differently I wonder if he’d understand why some us didn’t completely buy the official story.
rawshark
If that sounded catty or like I was hoping to start a fight I apologize. I can’t write for crap.
Heywood Jablomy
For arg’s sake, I will lend credence to the possibility that Boylan has subcontracted some of his e-mail responses to a small cadre of Baghdad p.r. subordinates, one of whom might be responsible for the juvenile, unprofessional, snotty response to Glenn Greenwald, as well as some of the other flame-mails.
I have to imagine that Boylan gets many hundreds of emails a day from outlets of all types, with bloggers a growing majority. It would be a 24/7 job to answer them all and still handle overall spin duties. But because Boylan wants to be the Voice, he lets a few subordidnates use his email account when he’s busy elswhere. i can’t really blame him for that. In theory they should be trusted pros who can speak in his name. The risk of course is of some arrogant loose cannon fubaring the setup with traceable off-the-reservation stupidnesses. Now Boylan can’t throw this prized peon under the bus. But he can’t lie and say he sent the email himself, So he chooses the weaseliest path – deny he sent it but don’t express worry that his email account is badly compromised, and don’t deny that it came from his server. In any scenario, his cred is shot to bits, and he’s behaving like a tool.
rawshark
That’s not ‘weasely’ it’s strategy. Contempt for non approved media is part of the plan.
KCinDC
Heywood could be on to something, but why would the outsourced e-mail assistants have to be in Baghdad? It might be more efficient to just let a few trusted volunteers handle it, and thanks to the Internets they could be anywhere in the world — perhaps sitting in a room in their mother’s house in their underwear with a big bag of Cheetos.
Tsulagi
I like the unsolicited email sent to Editor and Publisher. Boylan climbs all over the reporter for mischaracterizing Petraeus’ summation of a report. Takes offense the reporter wrote Petraeus lied about conclusions in the study. Says the reporter didn’t understand the content of the report. Then within a final email, Boylan says this…
Brilliant. He hadn’t even read the report, but he just knew the reporter was wrong about it.
The hand of Rummy lives on.
capelza
Heywood Jablomy..and then for further arguments sake..all those vaunted e-mails Bob Owens got from Boylan might be :fake”, too. :)
Zifnab
HAL: I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
EJ
This Col. Boylan fellow needs to either quit drinking or quit sending emails while drunk.
The worst part about this is, whenever my right-wing friends start in about the “liberal MSM not reporting the good news from Iraq,” I always counter that if the military had more good news they would certainly find a way to get it out, since they have just as many smart PR people as any other large organization. After Boylan, I’m not sure about that anymore.
They’re going to need PR people to clean up the mess the PR guy is making.
Blue Neponset
The only problem with that theory is
that I was in the library with the candle stick so Colonel Mustard couldn’t possibly…the e-mail was unsolicited.merciless
Philosophy majors, your country needs you.
Finally. And my mother said it was a stupid major.
Zifnab
wingnuts to iraq
Boylan is a liar. Just like Bush, Cheney, and all of the 25%ers. There is no other reason to say anything else.
Boylan is a liar and should be immediately removed from his position. Anyone who thinks Boylan didn’t write that email is a ass kissing, Bush loving, living in denial partisan with no grip on reality.
Boylan is a liar.
Peter Johnson, please go to Iraq.
bago
A Johnson in Iraq. The bosom of civilization. Kinky.
srv
We need a gif with Yoda in a Spartacus outfit.
chopper
the plot thins!
kerryinalaska
Software is available that professors can use to check the authorship of written material. By chance can anyone run the subject emails thru such a program? this would lend credence to the true authorship of said emails and while most of us living in the real world can sense this idiots lies maybe the software can clear this up better than our “sense” of what lies are underneath this pr nightmare.
mk
Caution. This site is not work safe. Reading comments may result in spontaneous ourbursts of loud uncontrollable laughter. Your cubicle-mates and boss will stream to your workstation to investigate incidences of unexplained hilarity. That is all.
Lit3Bolt
GG: Col. Bylon, frankly I’m confused by your last email? Could you explain further?
Col. Boylan: MAKE YOUR PENIS AS BIG AS A CLUB!!!! WITH AN ALL NATURAL SUPPLEMENT THAT WILL MAKE THE LADIES LOVE YOU!! ORDER NOW!!!!!
uh_clem
Software is available that professors can use to check the authorship of written material.
And that software basically just looks for a copy of the verbiage in it’s database of papers – i.e. it’s looking for plagiarism. So, it’d be fairly useless in this case.
The Other Steve
He should go into rehab with Britney Spears.
Bombadil
A few threads ago, someone was asking about a good quote from 1984 to describe Greater Wingnuttia (too lazy to go back and find it). Via “Crooks and Liars” comes this from Jonathan Schwartz. Covers it quite nicely, I think.
The Other Andrew
Drinking seems to make John even more rhetorically powerful, yet it has the opposite effect on Col. Boylan. Mysterious.
KCinDC
Yeah, I blogged the same passage a while back.
John Cole
One of the more popular software packages is turnitin. We are actually looking at a different program and it isin the testing phase (allegedly it will work with Blackboard Learning systems more seamlessly), but I don’t know how useful it is.
Regardless,uh_clem is right. These are useful for plagiarism, and actually can be quite useful as a learning tool.
Jake
‘Cos oxygen loss caused by suppressing gales of laughter at John’s Comedy Marathon is making me stoopid.
Dreggas
Well, can’t possibly fuck Iraq anymore than it’s already been fucked…
RSA
There are statistical techniques for determining authorship, but they generally rely on having a good deal of data. (The best-known efforts are probably related to determining the authorship of the Federalist papers.) I don’t know if there are structural and stylistic analyses possible–probably, but I doubt there are general off-the-shelf tools available.
uh_clem
Hmmm. I thought the best know efforts were the Shakespeare “scholars” attempting to prove that some or all of the plays were written by somebody else.
Anyway, yes, it is possible to do a statistical analysis on the text to determine authorship. Unfortunately, it’s hard to do, requires a lot of data, and the results are not definitive (at the very least they’re subject to interpretation).
I prefer to use Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation is that Boylan or one of his subordinates sent the email, and now he’s decided that he can get away with denying it altogether. Other scenarios (Greenwald fabricated it, someone is playing a hoax on Boylan, etc.) are too complicated by half.
Punchy
Whaddya mean “perhaps”? If I’m a marketing chump with Frito-Lay, does it yet dawn on me to stop advertising on Saturday morning cartoons and start running commercials soley on FoxNewsChannel and Malkin’s website?
RSA
I think “perhaps” is meant to include the possibility of sitting in a room in their mother’s house wearing an oversized Cheetos bag while holding their underwear.
KCinDC
Statistical literary analysis by Donald Foster did suggest that Joe Klein was the author of Primary Colors. I don’t think it would be applicable to these e-mails, though.
KCinDC
What RSA said. And there are the occasional folks who prefer Pringles, or even Ding Dongs.
Bruce Moomaw
If there’s an asshole in the forest and nobody gets his E-mail, is he really an asshole?
jcricket
Who wants to take bets that Boylan will be unmasked at the end and turn out to be … Jonah Goldberg!
“And I would have gotten away it too, if not for you pesky kids/citizen journalists”
LITBMueller
Ummm…cuz he got stabbed in South Korea by pissed off Koreans?
Not to go all Beauchamp on the guy, but it sure seems like he’s ruffled a few feathers in his career.
RSA
LITBMueller’s comment reminds me that a general was recently injured in Iraq. I wish him the best of luck recovering. Given the news this has made, I wonder if generals are not injured very often simply because there are so few of them or because they aren’t in as much danger as other soldiers? Both, I guess.
uh_clem
Statistical literary analysis by Donald Foster did suggest that Joe Klein was the author of Primary Colors.
True enough. But had Klein denied it, and had the entire right side of the blogosphere backed him up on it, it would still be an “unsettled” question.
I guess my point is that you’ll never prove anything via statistical methods. At least not to Boylan’s enablers.
tim
Not a very strong denial: “I am denying writing and sending it”? That’s like saying “My position is that I did not write and send that email.” It signifies weakness in a belief in his own assertion, a qualification typically used by by bad lawyers defending guilty clients.
jcricket
Vis a vis the mailing electronically of said communication the denial of which in question now is I more or less categorically comment in the affirmative of my earlier rebuttal of your argument relating to the question.
jcricket
Oh, and I did not have sexual relations with that email.
rachel
Oh, that guy. I’ve walked by so many demos and mobs of angry people here, and the worst that’s ever happened to me is somebody haranguing me (mildly) about the conduct of some 8th Army soldier, but that guy got stabbed. I wondered at the time whether he’d done something that set them off. If he’s the sort that acts like a dick after drinking, that’ve done it.
MJ
It could have been sent by a sock-puppet.
uh_clem
Mary Rosh, perhaps?