Bunchkinland

Dr. Laura, Dr. Laura. You know her, the adultering fake doc who posed nude, then got her withered face on all hella media for saying antigay things about ten or 20 years ago?

Hey, nothing's better for PR to a rightwinger than to slam the gays.

But now her once-cute son has done some even more unpleasant things, like showing what a nutbag he is. She calls him her "bunchkin," whatever that is.

Dr. Laura son linked to lurid Web page
Site contained violent, sex-oriented images one official called 'repulsive'
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune

The soldier son of talk radio relationship counselor Laura Schlessinger is under investigation for a graphic personal Web page that one Army official has called "repulsive."

The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned "My Sweet Little Habib"; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.

The site is credited to and includes many photographs of Deryk Schlessinger, the 21-year-old son of the talk radio personality known simply as Dr. Laura. Broadcast locally on 570 KNRS, "Family Values Talk Radio," the former family counselor spends three hours daily taking calls and offering advice on morals, ethics and values. She broadcast a show from Fort Douglas, in Salt Lake City, last week.

Military leaders have long grappled with how to balance positive publicity and operational security with technological opportunities for troops to tell their personal stories.

The Pentagon last week shut down access to a variety of video-sharing and social networking Internet sites, including MySpace, on its computer systems worldwide. Officials said the change was made to enhance security and protect a strained bandwidth, but critics worried that it might close a public window into the lives of deployed U.S. troops, some of which can be raw, frightening, violent and revealing.

"Yes . . . F---ING Yes!!!" said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. "I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don't."

Deryk Schlessinger joined the Army in 2004, telling a crowd of Santa Barbara, Calif., Army reservists gathered for an appearance by his mother that he resented the way Americans criticize the war without recognizing soldiers' sacrifices.

"Real people were fighting, and I wanted to be part of that," the younger Schlessinger said, according to The Associated Press.

Since Deryk Schlessinger deployed earlier this year, his mother's talk show increasingly has been focused on the battles being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan and the wars' effects on families back home. Meanwhile, the radio host has taken to referring to herself as "the proud mother of a deployed American paratrooper" and speaks frequently about her soldier son before military audiences nationwide.
Deryk Schlessinger did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment from The Tribune.

Mike Paul, spokesman for Laura Schlessinger, released a statement which said, in part, "We hope all news media outlets will respect his privacy for his safety and the safety of those serving with him." In an interview with The Tribune, Paul suggested that the page could be a fake.

That was a contention echoed by Army spokesman Robert Tallman, who said "it may be possible that our enemies are actually behind this. "Our enemies are adaptive, technologically sophisticated, and truly understand the importance of the information battlespace," Tallman continued. "Sadly, they will use that space to promulgate and disseminate untrue propaganda."

MySpace is an online social network in which users link pages together through like interests and shared friendships. The Deryk Schlessinger page included nearly a dozen "friends," including a number of soldiers in Afghanistan, several of whom were linked back to Schlessinger's page and some of whom had additional photos of, and comments from, Schlessinger on their sites.

Deryk Schlessinger's Web site indicated the 21-year-old soldier is stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where, the site's author writes, "godless crazy people like me," have become "a generation of apathetic killers."

The site indicated Schlessinger's team has survived numerous mortar, rocket and roadside bomb attacks. It also included several graphic cartoons. In one of the stick drawings, a top-hatted man laughs as he rapes a bound and bleeding woman in front of her family. In another depiction, a man forces a boy to perform oral sex at knifepoint as the child's mother pleads for her son's life.

It's unclear who created the cartoons, but Army spokesman Robert Tallman said the drawings "are repulsive and not anywhere near being acceptable," for a soldier's personal Web page. (more at link)

Back in 2004, Deryk the derelict was caught on tape kicking a female protestor at the hot air fest known as the GOP convention. Along with vulturizing the corpses of 9/11, the GOP conventioneers sought out a record high number of prostitutes, according to the NYPD. That is, when their kids weren't kicking women and children.

Other bloggers commenting on this and Deryk's little GOP kickfest include: Slog Jesus' General Brad Blog and Parent Dish Democratic Underground's forum, The Immoral Minority ... and well, lots more!


It appears "Parenting by Proxy"s worked out pretty well for Dr. Laura.

I don't get what all the fuss is about. Deryk is just behaving exactly the way Republican Values extoll. In fact, he's a perfect poster child for the party. He ought to be a platform speaker in 2008 at their next convention. He could do a little PowerPoint presentation with his illustrations.