Mission Accomplished?

From the Washington Post (Jan-13, 2009):

President George W. Bush says history will be the final judge of the success, or lack thereof, of the Iraq War.

Bob Woodward, the investigative reporter who has authored four books on Bush's presidency, agrees that the legacy of the war has yet to be determined. He calls the conflict a "war of choice" that hasn't come to a conclusion.

"As we know the war is not over, 146,000 troops there, almost the same number of civilian contractors," Woodward said. "It is a massive land army presence in the heart of the Middle East. Gen. (David) Petraeus is keeping that large force there because he know it's not over, it's not stabilized."

Woodward said Bush's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 was part of his "freedom agenda" and that the president believed he had "really pulled something off that was going to be important."

Now, I believe that history will be the judge of this whole thing. I just hope this war comes to a conclusion sooner rather than later. Maybe Obama can help with that.

It's been a long time since I updated this blog.  As it probably will be again but I was correcting a typo pointed out to me by a reader so I thought I might as well publish this email I received recently from William Boyd - one of the people I previously named as prime movers behind the riverSbend smearblog.  This is probably about as close to a mea culpa from TeamTroy as we're ever going to get:
 
William Boyd writes:
Now I understand that the Iraqi Girl is said she will bend the truth as was her latest post about the power being off so much. Does she not know that there are web cams all around and open to the world and one can see the lights burning most all of the time. She is part of the terrorist organization with a mission to prevent a free Iraq. They must like the Americans to stay around, for if they did not they would help settle theturmoil in their country so the Americans can leave. Feel sorry for herkind.
 
Perhaps William's argument here - that people who perpetrate violence in Iraq are doing so as a sign of love for the American occupation - is one we'll be hearing from the more mainstream Bush supporters as the election looms closer?

Evil Genius

Obviously I have greatly underestimated my foes. I would never have guessed the truth - that Troy and pals are geniuses at psychological warfare.

When I logged on today I discovered that someone had ingeniously subscribed the bendingtruth hotmail address to the mailing list for Newsmax - for anyone who doesn't know this is an extremely conservative leaning news service.

What devilish cunning! Because in just a few short minutes of glancing over recent Newsmax headlines like "ABC News Admits Liberal Bias, Hates Bush", "More On Kerry-Fonda Connection" and "Get Sean Hannity's New Book" I suddenly realised that Riverbend and BendingTruth were wrong, Troy was right and I had been a fool not to realise it.

Already I have taken my new instructions to heart, and within the last few minutes I have quite literally taken steps to "Get Sean Hannity's New Book". Now I have surely seen the light!

OK seriously guys - I thought after the fake legal threats it couldn't get any worse. But once again you have shown me the folly in attempting to over-estimate you. Once again I must remind you that you are in the region of 70 and not 7 years old. Why not act it?

***

And while we're on the subject of fake legal threats here's something another reader sent me suggesting that I might be able to get TeamTroyAndWill into a lot of trouble were I to contact the construction company whose employees they have been impersonating:

Several posters in [a newsgroup were] threatened with legal action by someone pretending to be a lawyer some time ago. The idiot was obviously no lawyer (he couldn't spell and didn't know anything about the law). The idiot also gave the company's name where he said he worked.

We contacted the law firm and they were very interested in receiving copies of the posts where he misrepresented himself. They said they would consider suing for false representation, illegal use of the company's trademark ... and defamation of the firm's reputation.

I don't know what came of it, but the idiot disappeared for a while and when he came back he stopped pretending to be a lawyer.

Now thus far I haven't made direct contact with TeamTroy construction to let them know of this misuse of their companies name. And it's certainly going to take something a little more extreme from the boys than signing me up to conservative mailing lists to get me to do so, but just so you know Troy and company, it's always an option...

Brief Update on Fake Threats

Just as a brief follow up to the last piece in which I suggested that Troy, William or another of the team had posted comments here misrepresenting themselves as staff of the company TeamTroy www.teamtroy.com, and suggesting I was "slandering" them.

As I strongly suspected no individual from the company has responded to mails I sent to the addresses these individuals provided.

Now I am no expert on US defamation law (though I did study the UK equivalent roughly a decade ago), but wouldn't it be rather ironic if:

a) I were to contact TeamTroyConstruction and tell them that...
b) a couple of very silly old men had posed as representatives of their company and issued threats in their name; and
c) TeamTroyConstruction were to sue TeamTroyAndWill for defaming their good name by suggesting they would act in the invidious manner as described in my previous entry.

Just a thought...

Any Similarity To Persons Living Or Dead...

This is kind of funny. As regular readers will know to save time on trying to identify individual members of Troy's cohorts - his pals from soc.retirement who helped him with the riverSbend smearblog - I have named them collectively as TeamTroy for some time. So when one of them writes a silly comment on this blog I can just write "TeamTroy" wrote as opposed to needlessly guessing whether it was Troy himself, William or another team member.


http://www.teamtroy.com
Факс +7 (095) 956-24-16
Мурат Арзуман
Менеджер по Развитию Бизнеса Группы Трой

Компания "Европром Трейд", входящая в группу "Трой", была создана с целью предоставления на российс

This recent comment (written in a foreign language way beyond my ken) led me to a site called www.teamtroy.com www.teamtroy.com. For a second as the site loaded I thought maybe I'd been right in an earlier prediction, and that this would be Troy and buddies new anti-Riverbend project. As you can imagine I was practically salivating in anticipation. Good comedy these days can be so hard to find.

Then I saw what looked like a Canadian maple leaf symbol on screen, and a fairly flashy into. Not looking promising... Soon enough my hopes were dashed and I discovered that TeamTroy seemed to be some kind of construction company.

Funny coincidence that. From now on to alleviate any confusion though I suppose I ought to start referring to Troy and buddies as TeamTroyAndWill (giving William Boyd his deserved credit since he's been doing so much work writing imbecilic comments here) and to the construction company as TeamTroyConstruction.

Intriguingly there was also more recently another comment left on the site by someone called Larisa:
"Recommend you cease and desist your slandering the name of
http://www.teamtroy.com/. Remove all entries bearing a likeness of TeamTroy."

Now I don't think this is actually written by anyone from TeamTroyConstruction at all. I think it is from TeamTroyAndWill, still desperately trolling because they have got nothing better to do with their lives, and grasping at anything to give themselves the feeling that they haven't totally lost the battle, which of course they have.

And I'm certainly not going to be removing any references to TeamTroy on this blog, at least for the foreseeable future.

Why am I so confident? Let's start with...

- Who on earth would ever issue a legal threat through the comments page of a blog? Normal people - with dignity and stuff - would use email.

- the person writing this comment left the name "Larisa". No surname. Come on guys...

- "Remove all entries bearing a likeness..." sounds like someone clueless trying to write in legalese. A "likeness" means an image. I have no images of, or purporting to be of, anyone on this site - except of course for the one of my wife.

- "slander" refers to the spoken word. This site is entirely textual. More misaimed legalese

- I have *not* said anything about the company TeamTroy. I have spoken unpleasant truths about a non-business entity of that name.

Of course I like to be thorough so I have fired off a couple of emails to the supposed senders of these comments. I await the outcome with some interest, one way or the other...

Pretty On The Outside...

Don't worry, this is still basically the same site.

But since - with the demise of the riverSbend smearblog - this blog content-wise has become fairly redundant, (apart of course as a kind of rage outlet for the anti-social urges of a couple of unseemly old gents), I thought I should at least give visitors a slightly prettier facade to look at as they stumble through.

Here's hoping the "full moon" images don't drive any of TeamTroy, poised at borderline instability, to take that final leap into the chasm of madness.

Trolling, Trolling, Trolling...

I note with some degree of satisfaction that my increasing success at spotting and unmasking the fake nyms used by TeamTroy in the comments sections on this blog has seemingly caused them to abandon any attempts to fool me.

Instead they are now simply scrawling gibberish and nonsense in some comments like spoilt brattish children who have stumbled on a box of discarded crayons.

I could of course delete them - respect for freedom of speech does not require me to host a Troll party for a bunch of rather pathetic old gentlemen upset that they lost their favourite toy (the unmourned riverSbend smearblog).

On the other hand it has always been one of the primary principles of this blog that we should take our time to laugh at how badly Troy, William and pals conduct themselves and just wonder what it is they expect to achieve. So for the moment I will continue to do so.

(I am giving consideration to having a special "Trolling only" comments section where all Troll comments will be directed, and moved to if necessary, thus separating the preponderance of TeamTroy chaff from the occasional wheat from other readers. I'll see how it goes.)