Yes, it is.  Very wrong.  There are some subjects that you just don't BS about, and this is one of them.  It's really, really, low, and the person perpetuating it should be ashamed of themselves.

I'm just a little miffed that such a thing would be lied about in the first place.  People's emotions have been played upon, and played upon publicly....that's just wrong.

Apart from that, do I care, am I going to make this the center of my blogging world?  Nope.  Like you said, Muggaz-The-Wise, this will come back to bite them in the ass eventually.  They're burning their own bridges...as far as I'm concerned, my bridges are intact.

I saw that....and yes, I agree. Perhaps we should come up with a bloggers 'code of ethics' as well?

Ok, I think we all know what's going down now, so I'll address what happened and is happening:

Over the past 2 days I have done some searches for background information on the names of the people involved, and have come up with nothing.  Not a single hit.  I went through the list of Army posts in Kentucky, and didn't get a hit at any of them on a 'Private Shawn Rae'.  'Emma Rae' was also nowhere to be found. 

It is my belief that 'Emma and Shawn Rae' are fictional characters.  It is also my belief that 'Alysia Leah Rae', infant child of Shawn and Emma is also fictional, as are the circumstances surrounding her birth and subsequent illness. 

There are numerous inconsistencies in the stories we have been told...from Emma and the baby being released from the hospital as quickly as they were after the birth, Emma not knowing what rank her husband is, him suddenly showing up on leave from Iraq, taking 3 month's leave from the military, Emma stating first that they live on base in a home with 5 bathrooms, then changing her story to saying that they live off base, the baby being critically ill one night and literally at death's door, her making a miraculous recovery the next day despite having been taken off the ventilator and life support..all the way through to the picture Shawn emailed me to post being titled 'Ashlee_026'.

I also find it curious that despite having a critically ill infant, Shawn and Emma both managed to find the time to blog and joke about what people are wearing.  Still more curious is the fact that either of them have yet to show their faces here to defend the person we feel is responsible.  Emma has been quick to defend this person in the past, yet she hasn't shown up in her defense yet?  I don't buy it.

There was an easy way for all this to have been resolved:  I asked the person I felt was responsible for the name of the hospital the baby was in and the name of the post they are stationed at.  I have yet to recieve a response.  I have also been blacklisted from that person's blog.  Had they provided me with that information, I could have verified that it was true (the person denied they were lying and that they were responsible in an earlier post) and all this would have gone away.  I would have apologized for doubting, and that would have been that.

To the person we believe to be responsible for perpetuating these lies:

I want you to know that I'm not angry at you.  I have a problem with what you did because you drew so many decent people into this and played them for fools.  I think that there are some subjects that you just don't lie about, no matter what the circumstances, and that this is one of them.  I want to believe that you started this out with the most innocent of intentions, and that it got out of control...because to believe that you intended for it to go this far and to get so many people involved emotionally...well, that's horrible.  I would like to talk to you one-on-one about it, and if you would like to do that my email address is on my blog page.  I'm not going to be mean or nasty, I just want to understand why you did it. 

My best advice to you now is to come clean and apologize.  You've done it before, you can do it again.  Just don't expect people to be as forgiving this time.  You have left a lot of folks feeling slightly idiotic (myself included because I didn't come out with what I was feeling earlier) and people aren't going to get over that as quickly. 

That's all I have to say about that.

Amitty....what part of the above response don't you understand?  It's pretty self-explanatory, isn't it?

I case there are other people who don't get it, see the above post, and I'll add this:  I believe that a teenage blogger named Ashlee Ryder created these characters and perpetuated the whole lie. 

There, does that make more sense now?