Enablers

We’ve all seen them here at TAH – folks who defend even our worst frauds. There’s an Army sergeant major among our readers who vouches for a phony POW, even though that sergeant major wasn’t in the Army when this guy claims that he was a POW of the Vietnamese. Wives vouch for their husbands’ service decades before they knew the fraud. Yes, even Jesse MacBeth has a believer, Captain Eric May, who, despite the fact that MacBeth went to jail for his lies, thinks MacBeth was a Ranger in Iraq.

There are people like “Wayward” Bill Chengelis who distort history with their wild-ass tales, and his supporters still defend him and believe him despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Chengelis said as a company clerk in Vietnam, his job was to account for the dead enemy soldiers by cutting off their ears and collecting them, I guess because a ledger was too hard to keep updated. But, that’s his reason for advocating marijuana use to treat his PTSD from his Vietnam service – he was actually a company clerk in Germany during the Vietnam War.

People like the video of Tom Bruso beating a punk’s ass on a bus so much, they still call him a Vietnam veteran, even though he was booted from the Army after a few weeks of basic training. He has a long history of substance abuse that he blames on his non-existent service in Vietnam. This is from a Facebook comment on that post the other day;

To the guy who said three months was long enough for him to goto Nam, yea, it was. You forget most of these Draftee’s were forced through a 7 week bootcamp, because Gov needed more fodder.

Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune exposed the phony POW/MIA flag designer, William Grahame Wilkin III, who sort of finally admitted maybe it wasn’t true. Denise Crosby, the journalist, went to talk to state Representative Linda Chapa LaVia, the delegate to the Illinois legislature who honored Wilkin’s phony accomplishment on the floor of that body. The Democrat representative of Aurora, Illinois still believes that there’s a chance that Wilkin did design the flag – 11 years after the National League of POW/MIA Families adopted the logo design.

Chapa LaVia says she throws her support behind Aurora Christian’s Grahame Wilkin because she knows the kind of person he is: not only “a brilliant artist,” but also a “strong Christian who has done so much for his students and the community.”

While Heisley’s name blankets the Internet, with groups like the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and National League of POW/MIA Families recognizing the late World War II veteran, who died in 2009, as the flag’s designer, Chapa LaVia says after looking at the evidence, she is convinced it is possible “two people could have produced” the same logo.

[…]

“Who says there could not be two similar designs that were drawn,” Chapa LaVia insisted, her words echoing those of Wilkin himself last week as he struggled “to wrap my head around” the overwhelming evidence supporting the logo’s design by Heisley more than a decade before the art contest he entered in high school.

The only reason that I busted Wilkin was to keep the story of the creation of the logo historically accurate, to give credit to Newt Heisley, the actual designer and a World War II veteran, for his legacy. These enablers like LaVia sully that legacy because they won’t admit their mistakes, or their politics or biases get in the way of their good judgement.

Category: Dumbass Bullshit