First some background information: On December 10th I received and email from my friend William Page with the subject line "NOT a Dixie Chick ...".  I pay a lot of attention to things William sends me. We met online shortly before the election due to our mutual disgust with "war hero" John Kerry and I soon found out he was only a short distance away, rifle in hand, with problems of his own, the day I didn't die during the Battle of Kontum. I've never met the gentleman but I've learned we see a lot of things the same way.  I watched the video he emailed me about and was impressed enough with it to put more work into a blog post about it than I do into most of my posts. Please click here to see my blog post, then follow the link to the video. Click here, here, or here to read the lyrics while you listen. I'll also mention, by way of additional background, this line from an email I received from Day by Day artist Chris Muir on the 14th: "The country singer's song about the red Marines sticker rocked."

Yesterday there was a link on Matt Drudges site: "Campaign of deception used to push patriotic song up charts..." .  The article he linked to begins:

Campaign of deception used to push patriotic song up charts

Country singer Chely Wright said yesterday she was dismissing the head of her fan club and shutting down a team of volunteers after The Tennessean learned that some of them posed as members of the military or their families to promote her latest song.

Seventeen members of a handpicked team of fans contacted radio stations around the country asking for more airplay for Wright's pro-military ballad, The Bumper of My SUV. It was all part of an organized campaign by leaders of the fan club who encouraged the team to do such things as ''tell 'em your husband is a marine — whatever it takes.''

[Read the rest here.]

Am I upset? Damned straight I am. The anti-war crowd's going to have a barrel of fun with this story and it didn't need to happen.  William Page, Chris Muir, yours truly and a whole bunch of other patriotic music fans got sucked in by a shady record company ploy, right? And the war's wrong and Karl Rove was behind the whole plot. Sorry, friends, I just can't see it that way. So some well-intentioned doofus used some questionable tactics to get some air play for one of his favorite people. Give him a fair trial and fetch a rope, but don't let it reflect back on the artist or the song. I'd never heard of Chely Wright before I got that email from a fellow 'Nam vet and it doesn't sound like Chris Muir had before he saw my blog post. If you didn't watch the video I linked to before, watch it now. Any lady that can write a song like that and perform it the way she does is my kind of singer, regardless of what a few of her fans may have done without her knowledge. The song would have been a hit on its own merits and it's a shame some fool thought it needed help. Hang him, not her.

Update: I Googled up some information I wish I'd seen earlier. Click here.

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Posted by: Garyc | Dec 29, 2004 6:49:41 AM

Posted by: Marilyn Nichols | Jan 5, 2005 12:58:02 AM

Posted by: lawless | Jan 7, 2005 7:15:34 AM

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