Raven shows us what she’s made of

Gotta love this.

Raven read a story in the paper about a veteran who came back from Iraq with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Based upon her vast experience with such cases, she decided that Troy’s litany of symptoms — which include hearing loss, tremors, and depression — was tainted with “the ugly scent of exploitation”.

Troy, you see “is making choices. He choses (sic) to swallow pills and watch TV in the dark”. Yup. That’s Dr. Raven’s diagnosis, which she made without ever meeting or speaking to the patient.

Sadly, No brought Raven’s truly compassionate and erudite analysis of Troy’s condition to the attention of their readers. They treated her to a smackdown of astonishingly magnificent proportions. They challenged her to back up her many claims about Troy and PTSD with facts.

And what was brave Raven’s response? About what you would expect… she called her critics names and closed the comments on her post. Raven hasn’t the balls or the intelligence to actually engage in a fact-based debate — we’ve seen proof of that before.

Raven claims to be a health care professional. Do health care professionals diagnose people as fakers based upon nothing more than reading a newspaper article? Frankly, Raven’s behavior perfuses everything she has claimed about her background with the ugly scent of outright fraud.

Jillian at Sadly, No put it best:

I love this new version of conservatism. There is nothing too base, too venal, too cold-blooded for them to say. There is no one they won’t smear, no reputation they won’t seek to tarnish, no depth to which they will not sink in order to destroy anything that interferes with their pet narratives about how they think the world works, whether it be ‘government insurance is socialism’ or ‘the Iraq war is a war for civilization and therefore worth any sacrifice (as long as it’s not mine).’ Anything — absolutely anything at all — is acceptable, except for even the barest hint of the thought that they might actually be wrong about something in even the slightest measure.

UPDATE 10/15/07 12:36 PM EDT: Raven’s buddy Big Dog is whining that he was treated mean when he tried unsuccessfully to defend Raven’s right to slander a veteran. He’s really quite tearful about it:

The folks there were just not nice.

Aw, boo hoo hoo. Note that Big Dog has no compunction whatsoever about throwing around epithets like “mouth breathers”, “little chicken choking puke”, “cretins”, or “liberal retards” when referring to those to dare disagree with him. But he expects everyone else to treat him with utmost deference and respect. The cognitive dissonance these wingnuts display simply boggles the mind.

UPDATE 10/15/07 1:38 PM EDT: Digby does a magnificent job of eviscerating Raven, Kender (aka our very own shitmonkey), and the rest of the spit-on-the-troops wingnuts.