More From the Comments

David asks (jokingly?) of Sordo's vile comments
"Extraordinary quotes! He speaks like a very learned scholar and I would love to read more, can you direct me to the quotes origin?"

Sordo posts regularly on soc.retirement. He does not archive his posts, as I mentioned earlier, so you basically need to catch them when they are hosted on a news server. Some time back I downloaded a bunch of posts from soc.retirement to examine what Troy and his buddies were saying around the time that the riverSbend smearblog was being exposed. Since Troy's abiding admiration for Sordo was so brazenly apparent I read over some of Sordo's posts to see what kind of person Troy would admire. These quotes provide us with the rather sorry answer to that question.

Alex asked:
does the photo of the young gentleman on the sbend site signify anything ??

Good question. Which I can only really answer by asking more generally "What does a photo posted prominently at the top a blog usually signify?" My feeling is that it would normally signify that this is a picture of the author. We know of course that it is not, so I suppose it signifies that Troy wants people to believe it is a picture of the author because he still wants to convince newcomers that his site is really written by an Iraqi.

Simon wrote:
Of course, when people are writing things straight from there head, influenced by emotions and the situation theyre in, they may well be inclined to exagerate, or considering its just a blog, relay gossip and myths which may be going around the local neighbourhood. Even if the $50 contract wasnt true, or was a complete lie, it proves nothing in terms of whether riverbend does or does not live in Iraq, just that she is human and doesnt get things right 100% of the time.

I don't have much to add to that. I think it sums up what most fair-minded people would feel about anyone whether they write a blog about Iraq or not. Are we to utterly discount the word and character of an individual simply because they do not 100% of the time get everything right?

If so I fear there may be a certain American president who might not live up to this high standard. But then really, who would?