More on Greenwald/Boylan Email Exchange

Satire:

Unfortunately, even some conservative bloggers seem to be accepting at face value Greenwald's assertion that Boylan wrote the email. Dread Pundit attempted a particularly incompetent defense of Boylan by claiming that Greenwald only published excerpts from the email in his post (although he did link to the full text) and that reading the entire email changes the meaning. A lot of other conservative bloggers seemed to buy his explanation although it is clear they didn't actually read the entire badly written and excruciatingly boring email themselves since in context the excerpts only sound worse. Dread Pundit claimed that Greenwald's use of ellipses somehow changed the meaning of what the Boylan imposter wrote and apparently thinks we have to quote every email and blog post in full from now on to avoid taking things out of context. I really hope we don't have to do that since reading blogs will become even more tedious than it already is. I think Dread Pundit just needs a lesson in how ellipses can change the meaning of something if used improperly. So here is an example of how not to use ellipses using his own post:

"Colonel Steven A. Boylan, Public Affairs Officer for General Petraeus … flirts with …Greenwald… [in] the full text of the email."

See, that would be wrong, as Nixon once said.

For a more serious take on what is mounting into an embarrassing escapade for the Petraeus camp, Greenwald himself:

(1) Col. Boylan is denying authorship of the original email to me but is acknowledging having sent the subsequent emails, even though the tracing information on all of those emails -- including the "fake" one -- strongly suggest they came from the same computer.

(2) Neither Col. Boylan nor anyone else from the U.S. military has contacted me to request that I send them the "fake" email or provide any other information about it -- something that one would expect if anyone was actually trying to determine what really happened here and find out who is sending extremely authentic-seeming emails in the name of a top military official in Iraq. That suggests there is no effort being made at all by Col. Boylan or the military to find out who the "real emailer" is. Why is that?

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