Rush Limbaugh is masquerading as General Petreaus PR flak, Col. Steven Boylan.

Can't wait for Christmas: On terror and torture, on stupid and smug, on liar and hubris, on iniquity and blood. And I heard the neocons cry, as they roared out of sight, Merry Christmas to all....and to all a long dark night. And would the last person still left believing in America, please turn out the light.

From these email exchanges, a couple of things seem kind of obvious about Col. Boylan.

1.) He is a liar. It's pretty freaking obvious he sent the original email, realizes that he spoke, shall we say, with far too much candor, and is now trying to squirm off the hook.

2.) He clearly regards Greenwald as the enemy -- not a journalist and taxpayer who's entitled to his cooperation, if not his respect. This isn't particularly surprising, given that the ultra Red Staters tend to regard all Blue Staters that same way. But it's rare to hear it expressed so openly and publicly (see point #1)

As far as Boylan's actual rant, Greenwald, as a lawyer, ought to recoginize the tactic. As they say: If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law, pound the law. If you don't have the facts OR the law, pound the table. And that was a heap of electronic table pounding on Boylan's part.

The longer-term implication is pretty sobering: The military establishment, or at least a large part of it, is easing itself over the line that separated passive hatred of the "liberals" and the Democratic Party to active political opposition and open collaboration with the authoritarian rump of the conservative movement.

Banana Republic (not to mention Banana Republicans) here we come!

I second everybody's concern about making much of an internal address beginning with 10.0.... I just tried an experiment and sent email to myself, I am behind a physical firewall, and the originating IP address came up as 127.0.... which is garbage for identification purposes.

One thought though: If it is genuinely a spoof, and Col. Boylan really does initiate action over it, since it crosses international boundaries, action will initiate a bulletin on Interpol. You should be able to inquire of any ISP within 24 hours or so as to whether or not there is such a bulletin. I've done this before with unwanted hate email seeming to initiate abroad.

Personally, I favor the somebody in Boylan's office w/o permission theory, it would explain why he doesn't want to discuss with you what he is doing about it. But he might not want to discuss a successful spoof, either, since it makes the military look like they might have a network security issue in that case.

State Police: Beware of Internet scammers

Brattleboro Reformer - VT, United States ... suspicious when he received an inquiry on the vacation rental Web site Home Away (www.homeaway.com), from someone claiming to be Lt. Col. Steve Boylan. ...

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IP addresses in the 10/8 range (10.0.0.0-10.255.255.255) are reserved addresses for use behind NAT (Network Address Translation) routers. see:

http://www.jpsdomain.org/networking/nat.html

... for more information on the subject.

They are assigned usually on a long lease, so the fact that the e-mails all originated from three specific machine addresses within the same NAT range (INTZEXEVSIZN02.iraq.centcom.mil ([10.70.20.16], INTZEXEBHIZN02.iraq.centcom.mil ([10.70.20.12] and INTZEXEBHIZN01.iraq.centcom.mil ([10.70.20.11]) indicate that Boylan tends to work from three different workstations within a single premises.

The key IP address here are the mailhosts (02exbhizn02.iraq.centcom.mil [214.13.200.111] and 02exbhizn01.iraq.centcom.mil [214.13.200.110]) that delivered the e-mail to your mailhost ((rich.salon.com [206.80.4.124]).

The fact that both they and the originating NAT IP addresses match so closely in every e-mail header would seem to me to be sufficient proof in a court of law that the e-mails originated from either the same sender, or another sender in the same office, pretending to be the Colonel. Of course, it would be nice to have the server logs from those two centcom.mil server logs, as well as the server log from rich.salon.com. While you are at it, I'd subpoena the hard drives from INTZEXEVSIZN02.iraq.centcom.mil ([10.70.20.16], INTZEXEBHIZN02.iraq.centcom.mil ([10.70.20.12] and INTZEXEBHIZN01.iraq.centcom.mil ([10.70.20.11], and the logs from whatever authentication server they use to control logins to those machines.

This guy is lying to you. And unless he was drunker than I originally thought he was when he sent you that e-mail, he knows it.

I was a branch chief at the Dept of Commerce for years and all of my employees dealt with the public. Not all of the people we dealt with had nice things to say about our agency but that's part of the job. If one of my employees responded with even one-tenth of the animosity contained in Col. Boylan's email to you, that person would have found themselves searching for misfiled paperwork until I could get him or her off the team, and I would have had the support of management right up to the top.

If Col. Boylan wrote this and does not lose his job for it, that will be the most conclusive proof yet that the military has been turned into just another wing of the GOP.

Definitely get Salon IT and management involved and preserve the server logs for these email transactions. Depending on how ugly this gets, one defense may be to accuse you of concocting this email yourself.

Salon's email server(s) logs will also most likely have more information than what is available from the email headers. Saving this information will also be useful if there is a criminal investigation.

So either all of the e-mails in this exchange are phony – which makes the military look bad; or, all of these e-mails are legitimate, which makes the military look even worse.

Where is the noise machine on this? They are silent. Why? Why aren’t they accusing Glenn of irresponsibly fabricating these e-mails and demanding that Salon get rid of him? Are they awaiting orders from Centcom?

This is out of character for them. Look how quick they were all over the Drudge leak – virtually every one of the leading wingnut blogs had a post about it within the hour.

This only makes Glenn look bad if you start out with a juvenile mentality of Ace or someone like him. Otherwise, these e-mails (ostensibly from Boylan) only serve to reinforce Glenn’s point about the politicization of the military.

What I suspect is that Boylan (if these are legitimate) had no idea how bad this looked, thought that he’d be celebrated in Greater Wingnuttia, but someone said “wait a minute” and now he’s going to attempt to blame it on an “unknown” in the military. Perhaps the same person who leaked to Drudge?

Most important, Glenn and his readers are waiting to determine the legitimacy of these e-mails before coming to any concrete conclusions. In contrast, the wingnuts started out stating “as a fact” that Scott Thomas (Beauchamp) did not even exist. They were positive.

That’s a big difference.