Isn’t it funny how if you say you are a veteran of the war in Iraq, the media embraces you, but if you are a plumber asking a presidential candidate a question in your own neighborhood you get a rectal exam? Same treatment if you are a young woman who dares to say she personally doesn’t believe in gay marriage in response to a beauty pageant question — dig through her trash, investigate her background and even make fun of her breasts (if you are an MSNBC fake journalist).
Meet the latest fake veteran against the war (via Michelle Malkin):
You remember Jessie MacBeth, don’t you? He was the fake “Army Ranger” thug who lied about serving in Iraq and was promoted by the Iraq Veterans Against the War until milbloggers exposed him as a total fraud.
Well, meet a guy who makes Jessie MacBeth look like a choir boy.
And add this story to the ever-growing file of bogus Winter Soldier Syndrome tales from MacBeth and Micah Wright to Josh Lansdale and Amorita Randall.
“Rick Duncan” of Colorado Springs was a prominent anti-war activist who claimed to have served in Iraq on three tours of duty AND survived the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon. He has now been unmasked as a lying mental patient (via Colorado Springs Gazette with a big hat tip to This Ain’t Hell)
Colorado Springs Gazette reports:
Federal authorities are looking into whether Rick Duncan, whose real name is Richard Glen Strandlof, could have pilfered money he raised in the name of Colorado veterans, said Daniel Warvi of the Colorado Veterans Alliance (CVA), the group that Duncan founded.
“We were all taken aback,” Warvi said.
Strandlof, 31, who invented the name Duncan and claimed he was a former Marine captain and 1997 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, never served in the military and falsely claimed that he was in the Pentagon during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the group said.
Two members of CVA said the group became suspicious of the man they knew as Duncan after discovering inconsistencies in his personal story…The group said it found that Strandlof had been a patient in a mental hospital in Washoe County, Nev., at the time of the roadside bombing in Fallujah, Iraq, that he claimed left him severely wounded. CVA members contacted the FBI field office in Denver, which opened an investigation in early May and arrested him Tuesday night in downtown Denver on a traffic warrant originating in El Paso County.
According to Warvi, when an FBI agent asked whether he was Strandlof or Duncan, he responded “both,” then requested an attorney.
This guy was anything but in the background. He even appeared in a campaign ad last year:
You’ll notice one of the Lieutenant Colonel’s supporters has a banner across his chest that says “Three Tours – Iraq” – that man is an escaped mental patient and, until yesterday, a powerhouse in the IVAW and Vote Vets, yet he’s never served a day in the Marines, as he has claimed
And here is a real veteran who left the Iraq Veterans Against the War (partially because of the way the fakes were embraced by the organization).
