George Bush's military ventriloquism trick

Glen Greenwald got an email the other day purporting to be from Gen. Petraeus' spokesman Col. Steven A. Boylan that was nothing short of bizarre, that proved beyond a doubt the politicization of the US military. Commenters on Greenwald's post at Salon.com questioned whether Boylan could be so stupid as to write such an email, so Greenwald sent another email to Boylan asking if he indeed had sent the email. Boylan responded cryptically without saying whether or not he actually sent the email, so Greenwald put out a call to Internet experts to determine whether Boylan sent the email or whether it was from an imposter. To make a long story shorter, one expert weighed in after examining the email's headers that that either Boylan sent the email or someone sent it from his computer.

Which gets to the point of MoveOn's ad questioning whether Petraeus should be called General Betray Us, namely, that the US military has become unacceptably politicized. All of the right wing's complaining that journalists shouldn't take off after US military personnel misses the point that these generals and colonels are no longer apolitical; that George W. Bush has off-loaded his political dirty work to the military. It was a neat trick by Bush to use military personnel as proxies to try and fend off criticism. It worked for a while. Will it still work? Stay tuned.