New Republic Editor Digs In Heels on Beauchamp Scandal

Bryan at Hot Air lets loose on the New Republic's Peter Beinart for his magazine's silence on the Scott Thomas Beauchamp scandal, even as Beinart appeared on an National Review Online vlog to defend the leftist fabulist.

I’ve tried to keep all emotion out of the TNR’s Scott Thomas Beauchamp scandal, but frankly, Peter Beinart’s defense of TNR in today’s What’s Your Problem (on NRO) made my blood boil a bit.

He professes shock, shock that anyone on the right would seek ideological causes for the scandal in an ideological magazine such as The New Republic.

He calls Beauchamp a “good writer,” which is obviously untrue. The man writes with more purple than Prince.

He calls conservative criticism of TNR “cartoonish.” What has been cartoonish is the Apocalypse, Now! approach in which a soldier outs himself as so greatly stressed by war that he mocks disfigured women, when he had never even been to war when that incident is now supposed to have occurred. That’s cartoonish.

And then he says that TNR has done a good job trying to re-report the facts underlying Beauchamp’s writing?

Oh really, Peter?

Then where’s the stratified mass grave? It ought to be somewhere near FOB Falcon. Has TNR even tried to locate it, or are you all content with Beauchamp characterizing a children’s cemetery as a “mass grave,” and writing that it was never reported up the chain of command, when PAO at Falcon is fully aware of the cemetery’s existence? Are you content with that? Is that good fact-finding?

The rest of the August 16 Hot Air Beauchamp entry is available here.