Ellie Light, Astroturfer Extraordinaire, managed to get her letter published in over forty credulous newspapers. Turns out, she’s Barbara Brooks, a nurse from California, and finally came clean to the Cleveland Plain Dealer about her motives for her repeated lies:
A proud Democrat, she said that “I want to deliberately talk to the enemy” and “people deep, deep in the red states.”
Except, even this much appears to be a lie, because apparently “Ellie Light” wasn’t Barbara Brooks, but her husband, Winston Steward. Barbara Brooks told Gawker,
“I’m not Ellie Light,” she told us. “My husband is. I never told anybody that I was Ellie Light. Winston wrote every single letter. He’s been doing it since he saw that the Gulf War was being fought under false pretenses. I told him from the beginning that he shouldn’t write letters under phony names, but he wanted to get them out there.”
So why did she tell the Plain Dealer, in the clearest possible terms, that she was, in fact, responsible for the Ellie Light correspondence? “That wasn’t me,” she says. “I don’t know how they got that. Maybe my husband was impersonating me.”
Is there some reason it was impossible for Ellie Light Barbara Brooks Winston Steward to just write his own opinion under his own name? Why pretend to be a woman? Why lie like this? Was “proud Democrat” Winston so ashamed of his views that he couldn’t bring himself to say them openly?
Added: The Cleveland Plain Dealer provides this update, wherein Winston lies about, well, pretty much everything else. Of course, it’s all because he’s terrified of the “right wing crazies” which I find extremely amusing from a Californian, where “right wing crazies” who have the temerity to oppose same sex marriage have their names, addresses, and job information posted on the internet so they can be hounded and stalked from public life. As always, more projection from the left.
