High Noon for TNR

I'll ask all of my readers to please check out Pajamas Media after noon (Eastern U.S.) today [update: it's up now], and see what you think of my exclusive interview which should be coming online right about then.

In the meantime, Michelle Malkin and her team at Hot Air released a crushing "Vent" today, interviewing Michael Goldfarb, the writer for the Weekly Standard that broke the story with his post, "Fact or Fiction?" on July 18, and also paying a surprise visit to the offices of the New Republic to try to get in to see Franklin Foer.

Watch the whole thing.

All in all, this is going to be a very bad day for Franklin Foer and the New Republic, who by now, just wish this story would go away. What they don't seem to grasp is that at this point, they are the story.

We know that the events Beauchamp wrote about in "Shock Troops" were fabrications, and that has become something of a non-story at this point.

Now, what has become a far more important story is the devious means by which the editorial staff of The New Republic has sought to cover-up their own inadequacies. If they had simply admitted in the beginning that they did not adequately check Beauchamp's stories because they never thought that the husband of a staffer would so boldly and blatantly lie to them, then this would have blown over weeks ago, with minor consequences.

Instead, The New Republic launched an investigation "re-reporting" the story, and tried to justify the unjustifiable with a combination of willful deception and obfuscation. They've attempted to deceive or hide information their readers, fellow journalists, at least one of the experts they claimed supported the veracity of the story, the blogosphere, and the United States Army, in a pathetic attempt to justify a minor incompetence, and in the process, created a significant scandal.

In the end, if TNR owners CanWest Mediaworks hopes to retain any corporate credibility at all, a purge of the defective detectives that make up the editorial staff The New Republic is certainly warranted.