At Big Hollywood, Kurt Schlichter Skewers Mark Boal and His Revolting Rolling Stone Article

And it is a thing of beauty. Here is a glorious snippet to whet your appetite for destruction (of Mark Boal):

His current anti-soldier hit piece, The Kill Team, is about a group of disgraceful scumbags in Afghanistan who decided to murder several civilians.  With it, Boal seems to be following his tried and true formula – write something for publication in a past-its-prime magazine that makes American troops look like cro-magnons then work to turn it into a movie.  He took a Playboy article on Americans murdering each other and soon we had In the Valley of Elah.  You may have seen it – though the odds are stacked against it.  It was ignored by popular demand.

Another article, this one on bomb disposal experts, became The Hurt Locker, which took some of the bravest and most dedicated people in our armed forces and made them out as undisciplined, drunken, unprofessional clowns.  In fact, Boal got sued by one of the guys he allegedly wrote about.  To be fair, itdid win an Academy Award . . . from the same band of geniuses who passed over Saving Private Ryanin favor of Shakespeare In Love and once picked as “Best Song” the unforgettable hit “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”  So, there’s that.

Boal’s technique is to chronicle the most degenerate fringes of the warfighters’ experience and repackage the most sordid episodes as its totality.  One can easily imagine the Rolling Stone editors eager for the chance to please their dwindling audience of aging Garfunkel-digging hippies and Chomsky-devouring clove-smokers with another prejudice-reinforcing piece about how those Middle-American Army guys are barely one step above gorillas.  Rolling Stone even promises a glimpse at the grim photos the mean old Pentagon doesn’t want you to see – as if there was some moral imperative for the military to provide gist for the jihadi propaganda mill.  Hey, that’s Boal and Rolling Stones’ job!

I’m wiping a tear right now. Schlichter takes righteous anger and whips the words up with a pretty stick like no other. All while demolishing Mark Boal’s deluded claims, showing Boal for the shameless and hateful liar that he is. He concludes by reminiscing about his own personal experiences with and in the military:

The real story of American warriors in Afghanistan is one of courage and compassion, of bravery in the face of almost overwhelming challenges.  You won’t see that in Boal’s article or his movies.  The truth is off-message.  The truth doesn’t pay.

Let me share a story from Desert Storm 20 years ago that sums up the truth about American soldiers.  The ground war had just started and I had to go out to a field hospital in the middle of the desert to take care of some business.  I was in a tent with a young specialist who had – as American troops will do – decked it out pretty nicely.  Among his amenities, he had a small fridge packed with sodas running off a generator…..

Click here to read the rest of story and to read the entire Big Hollywood piece. It’s well worth it, I promise.

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Cross-posted at That’s What She Said