More fun with Micah! I don’t wish to become “All Micah, All the Time” but there is more to report.

First off, someone tried to sell Micah Ian Wright’s Credibility on eBay.

In addition, here’s a new twist to this whole mess: Wright is now even lying in his confession. He tried to backdate his confession on his web site to April 15 so that it looked like he originally posted the confession days before the news was broken by the press. Several of the places where I first read the news said that he had had it on his web site for days but had decided to post it to his forum, which at the time I thought was odd. I couldn’t believe it would take so long to become news if that was the case.

However, as “Matches Malone” puts it over on Chuck Dixon’s board:

He tried to date it April 15, to make it look like he copped before the newspaper article, but dropped in a reference to Pat Tillman’s death, which didn’t occur until April 22.

I think it’s important that we emphasize the reasons why this is significant. I was going to make this an extended entry…but I want everyone to read this.

Although I’m sure Christopher wouldn’t mind, the point isn’t to rejoice in the downfall of someone on the wacko fringe of the anti-war faction. After all, our site has readers of all stripes and I’m sure a number of them are against the current administration, the War in Iraq, the War on Terrrorism or even the U.S.A.’s interests in general. How many of them are actually of the extreme opinions that Micah Ian Wright holds, such as that we didn’t catch the Anthrax killer because he was an American agent, I couldn’t tell you. Our site stats don’t really give us those kind of specifics.

I want to make it clear that this is something significant no matter where you stand on his politics. Certainly there is a great irony in a man who obsesses about what he sees as the propaganda of others being brought down by his own propaganda. Wright being the one who lied about this is bigger news because it’s like Jim Bakker living a secret life of wild sinning.

Yet there is something far more important about all this: Wright didn’t just claim to be a Ranger, he went into extended details about the horrors he had seen in Panama that had changed his political outlook, but he was never there. Thus, he besmirched the actions of the rangers who were in Panama.

Okay, so he’s just a comic book writer and the number of people who know him number in the tens of thousands. Still, his lies about Panama get disseminated wider than just amongst those who read his book. Who knows how many people have read his bio and talked to others about it while taking that backstory as true?

That ain’t no little thing. Much of what we “know” about Vietnam has been shaped by the lies of people who pretended to be vets and were never there. They joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) alongside legit vets like current Presidential candidate John Kerry, and testified to Congress about the horrific acts they’d allegedly committed and seen. Legit vets like Kerry also lied about war crimes they hadn’t actually witnessed, presumably because they believed it to be true based on the testimony of the false vets. John Kerry then went on to write a book (now difficult to find for less than $800) retelling many of their lies. Thus, what truly happened in Vietnam has been so greatly exaggerated as to impact upon our culture.

Indeed, the lies of imposters played no small part in the outcome of the Vietnam War. Their claims demoralized the troops abroad and the people at home. Their claims are responsible for many of the upraised finger salutes, cries of “Baby Killer!” and flying spittle that greeted our troops upon their return. The Vietnam War was a war we were actually winning at the point America became convinced it was a lost cause. The Tet Offensive was an American victory, but in response to it journalist Walter Cronkite gave his opinion that it was a horrible defeat.

Indeed, perhaps Micah Ian Wright should pay attention to the ways misrepresentation becomes part of propaganda. The most famous picture of the war shows a soldier executing a sobbing man, and it motivated a great deal of anti-Vietnam sentiment, but the photographer regrets taking the picture because it completely misrepresented the truth of what happened. Similarly, the image of the naked girl running from a napalm attack is a shocker…but the truth behind it is that it was not an American attack.

B. G. Burkett is a proud Vietnam Vet who took great offense at the imposters who showed up at memorials acting like shellshocked, antisocial dregs. Burkett knew from experience that the vast majority of ‘Nam vets were upstanding citizens who had rejoined society, but reporters were always hovering around the stringy-haired beer drinker in fatigues talking about killing babies and wearing strings of severed ears. He set about proving the illegitimacy of many of these imposters, and chronicles this in his book “Stolen Valor.”

The only bad thing about that book is that it’s 20 years too late. In the meantime, the crazy ‘Nam vet has appeared in countless movies, from “Deer Hunter” to “First Blood”, from “Apocalypse Now” to even Chris Farley’s “Black Sheep.” And then you’ve got the slew of movies wherein ‘Nam is one long slog of drugged-out, poorly trained soldiers killing everything they see when they’re not raping the peasant women, and the list of titles for those movies is too long. It’s easier to list the ‘Nam movies which portray the American military in a positive way: “We Were Soldiers.”

Our opinions of Vietnam, shaped by the testimony of imposters, has greatly impacted American policy ever since.

Micah Ian Wright has been an Invasion of Panama imposter, and his claims about what Americans did there have been believed by his readers. They believe it to the point that they argued with a Panamanian citizen who wrote to object that what Wright was claiming wasn’t true!

Wright doesn’t just owe his readers an apology. He owes a sincere and abject public apology to the American Rangers he has besmirched. I do not know that it will be forthcoming.