The late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle is recognized as the most effective sniper in U.S. military history. Max Blumenthal, the son of liberal journalist and adoring Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, only has a reputation for being a jerk who trolls conservative conventions and writes books with titles like “Republican Gomorrah.”
Twitchy reported on Friday that Max Blumenthal on Twitter compared Kyle to Lee Boyd Malvo, the “brainwashed” teenage half of the Beltway sniper team. Both were “mass murdering snipers.”
@LoveFor714 @rpgirl27 John Lee Malvo, another mass murdering sniper, would not be glorified on prime time.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 26, 2014
Kyle was shot and killed at a charity event in Texas in February 2013. A movie about Kyle’s life, “American Sniper,” hit theaters Friday, starring Bradley Cooper as Kyle. Noah Rothman at Hot Air offered a full accounting of Blumenthal's smears:
“I haven’t seen American Sniper, but correct me if I’m wrong: An occupier mows down faceless Iraqis but the real victim is his anguished soul,” Blumenthal wrote smugly on his Twitter account. “[T]he whole film’s appeal seems to derive from the latent racism that led America into Iraq.”
He cites a portion of the film (reproduced in the movie’s two-minute trailer) in which Kyle is forced to pull the trigger on a pre-adolescent Iraqi child who is tasked by his mother with smuggling a grenade into a column of advancing Marines. Kyle is later forced to dispatch the boy’s mother as well when she declines to mourn her fallen son and instead attempts to execute the task at which he failed.
Kyle is, indeed, anguished by this morally challenging moment; one which he finds himself forced to confront on more than one occasion, and which he has the parochial temerity to call “evil.” This blithe disregard for the left’s attachment to moral equivalencies may be the most infuriating element of the film for the likes of delicate flowers like Blumenthal.
It is not the only aspect of this film that stabs at the heart of the far-left’s attachment to the dishonorable character of the armed services. In the film, American soldiers routinely encounter the use of children by enemy combatants as ordnance delivery vehicles or objects of leverage over local Iraqi civilians.
But Blumenthal does seek to exonerate Kyle for what he regards as his misdeeds. You see, the SEAL sniper was simply robbed of his free will by a far more devious institution: The American military. To make this comparison, Blumenthal compares the late Kyle to the mass murdering Lee Boyd Malvo (though he confuses the name).
“John Lee Malvo, another mass murdering sniper, would not be glorified on prime time,” Blumenthal averred, confusing the young accomplice of the “D.C. Sniper” for the prime suspect in those killings, John Allen Muhammad.
When confronted with the tastelessness of his comparison by a Twitter user who contended that the impressionable Malvo was misled, Blumenthal indicted the military. “[H]e was brainwashed and stripped of his humanity,” Blumenthal scoffed. “But that never happened to our servicemen, of course.”
Such trite parlor socialism hardly merits a response, but it certainly does deserve wider exposure. This type of thinking – comparing an American serviceman who saved countless lives with over 160 confirmed kills, any number of which might have led to prosecution if they were shown to be targeted indiscriminately, to a mass murderer who expressly targeted American civilians – is pathological.
