Dr. Laura Schlessinger's newspaper column is on hiatus, as they say, after a particularly bad week for the right-wing matron in which she accused military wives of being whiny crybabies and after it was revealed that her son -- a soldier in Afghanistan -- had a MySpace site filled with all manner of nasty shit.
The news about her 21-year-old, Afghanistan-based soldier son — whose MySpace page supposedly had cartoon images of rape, murder, torture, child molestation, and more — broke on Saturday, and has since been picked up in a number of media markets. The announcement about her break followed on Sunday, though it remains unclear whether the two situations are related. She has not returned a request for comments.
It started with her speaking appearance in Salt Lake City, an event covered by SLC Tribune reporter Matthew LaPlante:
Raging radio human relations guru Laura Schlessinger, in Salt Lake City on Friday to speak to Army families at Fort Douglas, said she was tired of hearing the complaints of lonely and overwhelmed military wives whose husbands are deployed.
"He could come back without arms, legs or eyeballs, and you're bitching?" Schlessinger asked before taking the stage at the base theater to host her daily program on ethics, morals and values. "You're not dodging bullets, so I don't want to hear any whining - that's my message to them."
She spouted off a bunch of horseshit, as usual, and even compared her son in Afghanistan to Prince Harry, saying she could not reveal where he was because he'd become a target.
She said Americans who do not believe that the war in Iraq is directly related to a larger battle against terrorism "need eye drops." And she praised fathers who have the courage to leave their families to fight for the nation.
"When you're in the military, that comes first," Schlessinger said.
"You don't want to not have gone and find out your wife has to wear a burka."
Pretty standard right-wing blather that she obviously has down pat by now.
Of course, Dr. Laura took exception to the story. She wrote a blog post saying, of course military wives can complain to each other -- just not to their "warriors."
However, burdening one’s warrior spouse with your fears, upsets, loneliness, etc., is a huge mistake as it demoralizes the warrior and thereby undermines their concentration while they are in life-death situations.
LaPlante wrote in his own blog about how Dr. Laura's loyal cadre responded to his story:
Within minutes, the e-mails were flying into my inbox...
"You should be ashamed"
"How pathetic of you."
"You need the wax cleaned out of your ears and/or your journalism diploma rescinded."
"That was NOT right, and you know it!"
"You are disgusting, but then again, you are in the media."
And he remarked how Dr. Laura would be on the O'Reilly Factor to vent some more but that he had declined an invitation to appear also.
I've declined an invitation to step into that
particular hornet's nest, though. I just don't think I can scream loud enough to be heard on O'Reilly's show.
Good for him.
But then, LaPlante writes another story -- this time about Dr. Laura's noble warrior son:
The soldier son of talk radio relationship counselor Laura Schlessinger is under investigation for a graphic personal Web page that one Army official has called "repulsive."
The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned "My Sweet Little Habib"; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.
...
"Yes . . . F---ING Yes!!!" said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. "I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don't."
LaPlante, naturally, sought comment from Dr. Laura but got her PR mouthpiece instead, who had the audacity to suggest that perhaps the terrorists had created that nasty MySpace page.
Mike Paul, spokesman for Laura Schlessinger, released a statement which said, in part, "We hope all news media outlets will respect his privacy for his safety and the safety of those serving with him." In an interview with The Tribune, Paul suggested that the page could be a fake.
That was a contention echoed by Army spokesman Robert Tallman, who said "it may be possible that our enemies are actually behind this.
"Our enemies are adaptive, technologically sophisticated, and truly understand the importance of the information battlespace," Tallman continued. "Sadly, they will use that space to promulgate and disseminate untrue propaganda."
Who knows? Maybe Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were sitting around in their cave one day and Osama said, "Hey, Ayman, we need to stop that Dr. Laura. She is thwarting all our evil plans. What can we do to make her look bad?"
To which Zawahiri replied, "Her noble warrior son is busy martyring our Taliban fighters. Let's invent a MySpace page that shows off his decadent Western values. Foolishly the American Pentagon is only now taking steps to ban its soldiers from such sites."