Tedd Petruna, The New Chuck Norris
The tall tale of Tedd Petruna first emerged this weekend. Tedd Petruna sent an email that soon went viral about his brave actions thwarting a terrorist attack dry run on an airplane.
In an email account of his experience that went national on right-wing blogs last week, Tedd Petruna describes a group of 11 Muslim men “in full attire” who created a disturbance on a Nov. 17 AirTran flight on the runway at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport.
In Petruna’s telling, the men fanned out through the plane, and one of the men called a companion in the back of the plane, “talking in Arabic very loudly and very aggressively.” He ignored a flight attendant’s request to put away his phone before takeoff.
Petruna, who works as a diver at a NASA lab in Houston, says two of the Muslim men began “to show footage of a porno they had taped the night before, and were very loud about it.” It’s unclear what he means by “taped the night before,” and how Petruna would know what the men had been doing the previous night. But he describes porn viewing as an activity Muslims would be permitted to engage in only before Jihad. When a flight attendant objected to their use of an electronic device, she was told to “shut up infidel dog!”
Don’t ask me where Mr. Petruna gets his extensive understanding of terrorist porn-watching habits. Anyway, the airline completely debunked Petruna’s story. There was no law enforcement and the incident involved a Spanish-speaker who didn’t understand the direction to get off of his cell phone. Plus, the airline confirms Petruna wasn’t even on the flight.
Mr. Petruna is standing by his story, though:
Reached at the Johnson Space Center’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab this morning, Petruna told TPMmuckraker that despite AirTran’s assertion, he was on the flight. He wouldn’t say much, though, because “I’m in the middle of a lawsuit about this right now.” We’re not sure whether a lawsuit has actually been filed or what it would be about, though Petruna told Schlussel, the right-wing columnist, that he was mulling a defamation suit.
“The whole e-mail went out accidentally; it was not supposed to go nationwide,” Petruna told TPMmuckraker. “It was supposed to go out to family and friends, and the next thing I know it’s a firestorm.”
Yeah, I’m sure it was an accident. He accidentally didn’t want to get caught by the whole world lying. He just wanted to look like a hero to his credulous friends.
Tags: Republican Bamboozlement
Petruna is angling to be the next joe the plumber. Yesterday, Jesus’ General seemed to lead a pretty scathing mocking of Petruna on twitter.
How soon before the traditional media treats this new bit of delusion as honest-to-god news?
Isotope,
I don’t fully agree with Petruna’s account, but your account is just as inaccurate (it’s either accurate or it’s inaccurate).
Check your facts. I’m sure you can look them up on Snopes as well as other – more reputable sources.
There are more issues at hand here than the email now widely distributed.
You stated, “There was no law enforcement and the incident involved a Spanish-speaker who didn’t understand the direction to get off of his cell phone. Plus, the airline confirms Petruna wasn’t even on the flight.”
By AirTran’s admission it was men of middle eastern descent who were escorted off the plane. And many witnesses state that they were speaking Arabic – only one witness states it was the Spanish language.
Although he hasn’t produced it yet, Petruna states he has a boarding pass. I have flown on a flight before without being on the flight’s manifest. It’s not that uncommon. Time will tell if Petruna was on the flight or not, but because he was not on the manifest, does not mean he was not on the flight. The bad part of this story is that his embellishment of the account has overshadowed what truly occurred and has become the issue – and those embellishments and that email has distracted us from what really happened.
One of the alarming issues about this story is that there were no law enforcement or security personnel involved. Why not? The crew refused to carry on with the flight and were replaced. The crew’s feelings and attitudes have been overlooked. Their replacement was not a matter of routine as AirTran would like us to believe.
Read the follow-up journalism by Marietta Daily Journal – it has been the best so far. What is alarming is not that traditional media will treat the email as honest-to-god news, but that the underlying issues of what really took place will never be reported by traditional media.
Man oh man. You have to L-O-V-E bullshit to be a conservative these days. It makes me pine for the days when “conservative” meant level headed and sober.
The new Chuck Norris? Sounds more to me like the new Walter Mitty. But at least James Thurber’s immortal everyman-fantasist had the decency to keep his fantasies to himself. Actually, this guy reminds me more of a girl I knew in my school days, who was constantly spinning romantic stories about herself and her handsome boyfriend who lived out of town and whom no one ever saw. It didn’t bother her in the least that the stories were constantly changing or were mutually contradictory. They were engaged, see, here’s the ring, no, it was only a friendship ring, they planned to get engaged later, they’d been secretly married, no they hadn’t, but they really were engaged this time, he was her age, he was old enough to drive a car . . . you get the picture. Seriously, however, although I’m no expert on psychology, I’ve heard that this sort of compulsive lying is a classic symptom of a psychopathic personality. The Johnson Space Center ought to take a close look at this guy.