UPDATE BELOW
So I guess it would take something like this to shake me from my anti-blogging entropic stupor of late.
But it looks like extremist nutjob Joe Miller is going to be the GOP standard bearer in Alaska's U.S. Senate race in November, unseating Sen. Thank-You-Daddy...errr... Lisa Murkowski. (Yeah, I nicked that line from Jon Stewart. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... sue me.)
Those who might be remeberéd of it, though, Joe Miller has been on our radar for a while, even if the radar set has been set to low gain recently.
You see, Miller's biography has been a point of inquiry for me. Simply put, he seems to have graduated from West Point, gone on to be a Desert Storm Bronze Star winner for "leadership in combat" and a Yale Law School graduate in the years from 1989 to 1995.
To my mind that's a very short period of time to have done all this.
Yet, we know he did graduate from West Point in 1989 and was awarded his Yale JD in 1995. My problem is the amount of time it takes to do those things, such as a post- West Point mandatory five year hitch in the Army. That would have been a minimum term of service to 1994, the year h switched residence from his home in Kansas to Alaska.
But to get his Yale JD, he had to start law school in 1992. Yale is a three-year JD program. Period.
As far as I can tell he didn't get out early for being injured. He is not on any online registry for the Purple Heart or disabled veterans, so what's the deal. Moreover, I can not find him in any online registry for Bronze Star recipients.
There may be perfectly innocent answers for all of this. In fact, there probably is; there's likely to be some piece of obscure information that I'm missing that will be the thing that explains away my suspicions.
But I'm having a hell of a time finding it...
UPDATE #1: On Joe Miller's official campaign website, there is a section that purports to be .pdf files of his personal records including an Honorable Discharge certificate dated 1992 and a Bronze Star certificate from 1991. Assuming these documents are not fraudulent, how did he get out of his Army hitch two years early?
Moreover, why doesn't his name appear in online registries for the Bronze Star recipients that include awardees as recent as Iraqi Freedom
UPDATE #2: It also occurs to me that if he really wanted to be complete about it, he could have posted his actual service record forms like his DD214 and his page 7 for his discharge and Bronze Star instead of just the certificates. He had no trouble posting glowing pages from his fitness reports, so why not those other pages as well?
Going to stop here on this line of inquiry, though until I get something more solid. I feel like I'm getting dangerously close to sounding like I'm using "birther/sekrit mooselim" logic...
mojo sends