September 16th 2018 Newsletter
Someone help that man hold up his head
Update on the Stolen Valor Story
Last week we exposed Democrat Tom Stites, running for the HD 2 seat against a conservative Christian candidate Jim Olson. Stites had attended and washed out of the Air Force Academy back in the late seventies, washed out for undisclosed reasons as the candidate had given varying stories as to why he was booted out or quit. But during the campaign Stites plastered the word Veteran all over his campaign literature, signs, and website. Last week we laid out the legalities of claiming veteran status and that it appears that Tom Stites isn't considered a real veteran as he was merely a student in a military academy and one that either quit or washed out or was forced out, who knows really....
The controversy exploded in the House District, with people posting links on Facebook. A few supporters weakly resisted, Stites himself threatened one man that posted a link asking if the story was true or not, threatened to sue him for slander and libel when in fact the guy didn't do anything but ask questions. This is typical Democrat tactics, when the facts are against you, insult and attack the provider of those facts.
Since the story several things popped up that need updated. First, Stites did in fact serve for two years and four days, yet without any active duty experience he still didn't qualify as a real veteran. Stites took those course credits and transferred them to college and went on with his life as a plain citizen.
Second, in the Stites' Facebook post that started all of this, he referenced the leadership at Nike, claiming that the ones running Nike now were not the same "guys"that ran Nike when he was on board, obviously wanting to distance himself from the Nike "take a knee" sponsorship of that idiot football player. One of his own constituents outed him, the leadership of Nike hasn't changed materially since 2006 when the current CEO, Chairman, and President (all one man) took over. Stites himself must have retired after around 2015 or thereabouts, so obviously the same leadership is in place. And Stites was a big wig in the Nike organization and therefore tied to the take a knee controversy.
And the third was a whopper, confirmation on the "Pow training" in that time period at the Academy. A local source was actually very involved in the training during one year a few years prior to Stites washing out of the Academy and they confirmed many of the details. First, the program was for a couple of days or less. It starts off with a four hour super boring classroom instruction, designed to bet the cadets off balance and bored out of their skulls. Then they are "captured" by the cadets in the class a year or two before them, as cadets actually command and perform the training, monitored by real military borrowed from a local base. But there was one cardinal rule, no touching or striking cadet trainees. They were allowed to tackle someone that was making a break for the wire fence or capture them in their "hide and seek on steroids" as one former trainee put it. This fact of course belies what Stites claimed, that he was "slightly slapped around" for days on end, weeks if you read his post and believe what he wrote.
But Stites was on the defensive, clamming up, not posting much at all on Facebook, disappearing from sight even. In fact, the only time he appeared was when he made the threat below to a man that merely shared a link and asked if it was true.
Such threats of course are ridiculous, the guy was asking if the story was true, and even the story itself is about a public figure under scrutiny, nearly impossible to slander or libel a public figure. Of course what Stites did was clam up for a few days to consult his campaign consultant, found out that threats against the writer of the story were useless so the only option forward was to try to bully and silence the locals that were spreading the word.
Even when a political writer might step across the bright line between libel and holding politicians accountable, few have the balls to sue as that cracks open their entire life, tax returns, computers, bookkeeping and records, military records, legal records, divorce records, medical records, everything is wide open for discovery. Lord knows what a person would find in a politician's past with that kind of access. And the simple fact is that asking questions, stating an opinion, hell, even being wrong about the facts isn't slanderous or libel against a public figure. Only knowingly lying is actionable and even that exposes the public figure to vast amounts of scrutiny, they are stripped naked before the defendant.
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