Oakland vs the Marines: When Denial Doesn't Work...

There's a little matter of over 200 U.S. soldiers and Marines ordered off their plane, 400 yards from the Oakland International Airport terminal last week.

Last Saturday, September 29, 2007, it was still possible to try hushing it up by claiming that an email detailing the incident was a fake. I don't doubt that fake emails were floating around. Fake facts are a sort of background noise in the blogosphere, and the Internet as a whole: like the 1995 near-attack by a USN ship on a Canadian lighthouse. The lighthouse incident was as factual as Orson Wells' 1938 Martian Invasion.

One of the emails, however, was real enough for two congressmen to append to a letter they sent to the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Now that it's fairly obvious that over 200 soldiers and Marines were left outside for two hours for no practical reason, the Oakland fellows are saying that they didn't have the proper paperwork.

That might be true.

However, I remember the Vietnam War, when soldiers returning to the Bay Area were spat on.

Come to think of it, things are improving.

To the great credit of Oakland, no one spat on the soldiers and Marines.

Hurray.