New Republic

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.

Scott Johnson at Powerline argues that liberal opinion journal The New Republic really needs a grown-up in charge to clean up the magazine's act:

Although the -- I believe the correct word is "venerable" -- Martin Peretz is nominally the editor-in-chief of the New Republic, the lack of adult supervision at the magazine has become painfully apparent in the course of the magazine's continuing Beauchamp disgrace. When are "the editors" going to render their verdict on their Baghdad Fabulist, anyway?

The lack of adult supervision at the magazine is apparent beyond the Beauchamp disgrace. Here the juvenile TNR staffer Joshua Patashnik does little more than direct sarcasm at the New York Times's relatively favorable review (by Carl Cannon) of Stephen Hayes's book on Vice President Cheney. Unlike Patashnik, Cannon actually shows evidence of having read Hayes's book.

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.

Charles Krauthammer has a great syndicated column (h/t: Protein Wisdom) out that sums up the New Republic Scott Thomas Beauchamp scandal quite well:

For a month, the veracity of The New Republic’s Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the Army private who has been sending dispatches from the front in Iraq, has been in dispute. His latest “Baghdad Diarist” (July 13) recounted three incidents of American soldiers engaged in acts of unusual callousness. The stories were meant to shock. And they did.

In one, the driver of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle amused himself by running over dogs, crippling and killing them. In another, a fellow soldier wore on his head and under his helmet a part of a child’s skull dug from a grave. The most ghastly tale, however, was about the author himself mocking a woman that he said he saw “nearly every time I went to dinner in the chow hall at my base in Iraq.” She was horribly disfigured, half her face melted by a roadside bomb. As she sat nearby, Beauchamp said loudly, “I love chicks that have been intimate — with IEDs. It really turns me on — melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses.”

One needs to look no further than the Associated Press's story on the Scott Beauchamp saga to understand why the general public not following the news closely doesn't "get" just how biased and antagonistic towards the war, the military, and American soldiers Old Media outlets are.

In the case of Scott Beauchamp, now that their brethren at The New Republic (TNR) have been caught red-handed publishing made-up stories, John Milburn and Ellen Simon of the Associated Press appear to be doing everything they can to cover for them -- first, with a headline (probably determined elsewhere within AP) that fails to communicate anything resembling the essence of the story, and second, by struggling mightily in their reporting to make it appear that this is a "he said, she said" dispute, instead of a situation where Beauchamp and TNR have been thoroughly discredited.

Here's the headline:

Army denounces articles written by GI

Trouble is, Paragraphs 4 through 7 of the story make it clear that this is no mere denunciation -- it's a complete repudiation that the person the Army is supposedly only "denouncing" agrees with:

Despite the fact that the Army has officially denied the veracity of Scott Thomas Beauchamp's "reports" from Iraq, the New Republic continues to stand by its fabricating writer

In the New York Times this morning:

In an e-mail message, Mr. Foer said, "Thus far, we've been provided no evidence that contradicts our original statement, despite directly asking the military for any such evidence it might have," adding, "We hope the military will share what it has learned so that we can resolve this discrepancy."

Can't say we haven't seen this before: Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a writer for the New Republic, has recanted his tales of American military savagery according to the Weekly Standard (h/t Powerline):

The Weekly Standard has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp--author of the much-disputed "Shock Troops" article in the New Republic's July 23 issue as well as two previous "Baghdad Diarist" columns--signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods--fabrications containing only "a smidgen of truth," in the words of our source.

Doubts about the veracity of highly sensationalized accounts from Iraq written by a pseudonymous person claiming to be an American soldier have finally compelled the liberal New Republic magazine to launch an investigation, the New York Times reports:

The author, who used the pen name Scott Thomas, has written three articles for the magazine since February, describing gruesome incidents in Iraq. Last week, The Weekly Standard questioned the veracity of the New Republic articles and invited readers with knowledge about the military or Baghdad to comment.