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It's all well and good to link to _zack's_ comment regarding the importance of outing Our Boy Boylan's(OBB's) misfiring attempt to shut up a Dirty Hippie, but that doesn't tell us what Glenn's goal is.
Do you want him fired? Court-martialed? Reassigned? Promoted? Investigated? What? What do you want to happen here? Do you want anything to happen to Boylan at all?
He's obviously taken the tack that You Don't Matter. Of course he can get away with it -- as he is doing so far. SOP in the field. He's taken to denying that he sent the first email on Sunday -- denying it to others, not to you. More SOP. As he has said, he chooses not to "engage" with you. Our military has quite a reputation for dissembling, a reputation well and truly earned, yet despite the fact that much of what comes out of the PAOs is fictitious or even outright lies, it is accepted far and wide. OBB has a reputation for dissembling. For attempted intimidation. For insulting diatribes.
Do you want to change that?
How do you propose to?
The fact that these things are going on, routinely, in the military's "engagement" with the public is a very important matter that should long ago have been addressed. OBB may be a particularly obnoxious example of a PAO, but his example is not rare at all. It is the Standard. They routinely lie to the public and insult their intelligence; they routinely curry favor with wingnut and neocon media outlets, providing extensive propaganda for their dissemination; they routinely ignore or distance themselves from self-described Progressive outlets. They intimidate, threaten and abuse anyone and everyone who challenges their "facts" and disputes the Glory of Their Commanders.
The practice is dishonorable on its face. All of this needs to be exposed, needs to be addressed, needs -- in my view -- to be eliminated from the military's behavior with the public. It's an infection that needs treatment.
But what do you hope to accomplish in this particular case? What do you want Boylan and his superiors to do?
