Jack Kelly Sunday

The good folks over at the P-G should, perhaps, vet Jack Kelly's sources a little better.

In this week's column, Jack writes:

My friend Jack Wheeler has a solution to the problem of Afghanistan. Get rid of it.

Yes, he's serious. No, he's not a crackpot.

An adventurer who's been in almost every country in the world, Jack Wheeler is one of three real life people on whom the fictional character Indiana Jones was based. He's climbed the Matterhorn, swum the Bosporus, parachuted onto the North Pole and lived with a tribe of headhunters in the Amazon.

One of the countries where Jack has spent a lot of time is Afghanistan, mostly during the time Afghans were fighting Soviet occupation. Jack was the father of the Reagan doctrine of providing support to anti-Communist resistance movements.

I will set aside the assertion that Wheeler was one "three real life people on whom the fictional character Indiana Jones was based" because I couldn't find any support for that - aside from Wheeler himself and a slew of references to the Washington Post calling him "The Indiana Jones of the Right."

Unfortunately I couldn't find any reference to that last part at the Washington Post.

I'd love to see a reliable citation regarding either.

In any event, Jack is wrong about Wheeler. He is a crackpot. And unlike Jack, I'll offer up some evidence.

Point one: He's a Birther. March 19, 2009 he wrote:

There are two growing protest movements: the Tea Party taxpayer revolt movement and the “Birther” movement that demands Zero prove he is a natural-born US citizen. These two must merge.

Far from a tin foil hat cause, Birthers are simply asking that Zero provide his actual birth certificate, which he won’t – at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Since all he has to do is provide the same thing all the rest of us do to get a driver’s license or passport, and he won’t, this is prima facie evidence that he can’t. Or there is some scandalous secret he is covering up – such as his real father is not a Kenyan but a radical left black poet his mother was having an affair with, Frank Marshall Davis.

In any regard, until he provides solid proof of his natural born citizenship, we are justified in regarding his presidency as illegitimate.

This argument must be made at every Tea Party protest. We do not recognize him as president until he proves he legitimately, Constitutionally is.

Strange thing about that column, you can't actually find it at Wheeler's website, To The Point News. However, it looks as though Wheeler himself posted it at Faithfreedom.org.

So Wheeler's a birther - enough for me to qualify as "crackpot" but there's more.

Much more. Disgustly much more.

Point two: Jack Wheeler's disgusting assertions about Senator John McCain's POW record. In February of 2008 Jack Wheeler wrote a column for World Net Daily so disgusting that it makes his "birther" bona fides look downright rational.

In the piece Jack Wheeler (Jack Kelly's "good friend") asserts that

• as a POW, John McCain made an "accommodation" with his North Vietnamese and Soviet GRU captors at the Hanoi Hilton and in exchange he was provided with an apartment in Hanoi and the services of two prostitutes.
• the CIA has proof of this by way of a "document swap" with the GRU after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and that since Bill Clinton was a CIA asset since his time at Oxford, the Clintons had access to that proof as well.
• the Clinton would use that proof to blackmail McCain into losing the 2008 election in favor of Hilary Clinton.

Oh, and on top of all that Jack Wheeler asserts that the CIA has been "dominated by left wing hyper-radicals for years."

And this guy's not a crackpot? Unfortunately for Jack, it effectively invalidates whatever Wheeler had to say about Afghanistan. Had he left his crackpot friend out of it, this blog post would have been much more difficult to write (though a lot less fun).

The P-G can do better than this. They have to.