IAVA’s weak response

I’m sorry. This started as a comment in TSO’s last post, but it took on a life of it’s own and became an entire post.

I found Paul Rieckhoff’s response to be one of the most condescending POS ever written. Especially the parts about TSO using an alias and how he can’t respond to every blog that writes about his little band of mental midgets. Is there anyone on the internet that doesn’t use an alias? Where has Riekhoff been the last 12 years or so? Since our contact information is prominently displayed on an entire page, he could have asked TSO for his creds.

And I understand that he can’t respond to EVERY BLOG that criticizes his organization, however, not EVERY BLOG was criticizing his organization yesterday. He could’ve even put our admin address in the same email he sent Blackfive in the cc’d box. How hard is that? It would seem courteous since B5 has generally just been linking to us and cut and pasting TSO’s posts. Would he write to Reader’s Digest to complain about facts in an article that the Digest republished from Atlantic Monthly?

It seems to me that Riekhoff didn’t address even a little bit of TSO’s criticisms of their scorecard. He qualified each of his defensive arguments with “our criteria” and “our legislative agenda”. Those are fairly subjective qualifiers.

So if IAVA decided every soldier should get a pint of chocolate ice cream with their MREs every day and some Congressman thought that was a waste of time and resources, they got a thumbs-down from IAVA and it’s not reflected in the scorecard. Nice.

As far as Riekhoff’s defense of his relationship with Democracy In Action, it’s reminiscent of the IVAW’s defense of their relationship with Warren Buffet, VFP and VVAW – condescending camoflage; You guys have no idea what it takes to run an organization like this so stop bitching about things you don’t understand. That right there tells me that there’s Soros money involved.

Someone made the comment somewhere that Paul Rieckhoff was just a nicer Jon Solz. I’m not sure I agree…they both seem like different degrees of the same type of asshole. They both make broad, sweeping, subjective judgements and they’re both unable to defend their judgements with any substantive facts.

Oh, and it’s real damn funny that both IAVA’s website and this one were difficult to get into last night after ten even though our traffic was about a tenth of what was at four and five o’clock. But, not to worry…I took screen shots of cached copies IAVA’s pages while trying to fix the jam in our own blog.

I don’t expect a response from Paul Rieckhoff to this post or any of the others because he’s above addressing legitimate criticisms on rinky-dink, fly-by-night blogs like this one that only gets 1800 visitors every day and gets around 16,000 hits on an average day. That’s too bad, because it makes him seem petty and as if he’s got something to hide.

Of course, he might change his mind when he sees what we have in store for them today.

Category: Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Politics