Posted on 07/23/2007 7:13:15 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
Scott Thomas, the 2036 presidential nominee of the democrat party.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
“The 9/11 Generation” and The New Republic (UPDATE: Franklin Foer Proves My Point!)
Posted by Dean Barnett | 11:04 AM
http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/g/a316294c-a038-4f12-8c6e-678d3dd7d380
(as always: click on link for more)
I have a piece in the hot-off-the-presses issue of The Weekly Standard on what we’re calling the 9/11 Generation. These are the amazing men and women who have made the decision to ante up and serve in what will be the defining struggle of their generation. As I’ve mentioned a few times here and on the air, I’ve spent considerable time speaking to these people, their parents, and their commanders over the past few weeks. They amazed me, and I hope I did their story justice.
My piece was part of a triptych that tried to shine a much deserved and long overdue spotlight on the remarkable men and women who are representing our country so nobly. Michael Fumento contributed a brilliant piece that documents the recovery of several severely wounded soldiers. If you read the story, you’ll get the unmistakable sense that the pity and other strange forms of “support” that leftist ninnies offer such soldiers is distinctly unwelcome. (I directly asked one wounded soldier how he felt about being labeled a victim. Short answer – he didn’t like it at all.)
The Captain of the SS Neo-con, my friend Bill Kristol, wrote the third piece. When he’s not reenacting scenes from “Strangers on a Train” with imbalanced, heavily accented harridans, the Boss can whip up some stirring prose.
Although the following summation may not frame things with due elegance, Kristol’s editorial calls bulls**t on the left’s insistence that they “support the troops.” In particular, he focuses on the way left-wing magazines have “supported the troops” over the last couple of weeks. The Nation’s latest issue offers a 24 page spread that purports to uncover “disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops in Iraq.” And then there is of course The New Republic’s latest foray into, shall we say, creative journalism which also allegedly uncovers truly bizarre and disturbing instances of American misconduct in Iraq.
AAAH, YES – THE NEW REPUBLIC. It’s been quite a week for them. I promised a couple of e-mailers that I would look back at the week that was for The New Republic, and then look forward to the week that will be. But before doing so, let me offer a piece of conceptual software that will guide us – you cannot simultaneously support the troops while labeling them a bunch of sociopaths and lunatics..
To provide necessary context, I have to once again list the tales told in TNR’s controversial story. If you already have the potential tall tales committed to memory, feel free to skip the rest of this paragraph. The soldiers in the story humiliate a woman in a military dining hall who has been disfigured in an IED explosion; they discover human remains and one private spends a day and night playing around with a child’s skull (”which even had chunks of hair”), amusing his fellow soldiers; and one private routinely drives a Bradley Fighting Vehicle recklessly and uses the vehicle to kill stray dogs My summary, which was basically stolen from Bill Kristol’s summary of the TNR story, makes the piece sound more benign than it really is.
Repeatedly, both on the air and in print, I said that even if The New Republic’s story turns out to be accurate right down to every last detail, the magazine’s publication of the piece without putting the reported misdeeds in the context of the 160,000 soldiers in Iraq who are performing their duties honorably is unconscionable. The New Republic ran a story that stated directly that war does awful things to men’s souls. The unmistakable implication of the “Diarist” (as The New Republic calls such reports) is that what the story reported wasn’t isolated incidents, but rather a common and predictable effect of war, especially one started by George W. Bush.
In regards to the accuracy of the story, I have yet to see a single military person in any context say the story sounds accurate. Typically the progressive blogosphere has a few such people it can trot out for such occasions. To date, the usual suspects in that regard have yet to make themselves heard.
The New Republic published its controversial “Diarist” on Tuesday. The blogosphere began going to town on it on Wednesday. On Thursday, I reached out to TNR’s editor Franklin Foer, inviting him to come on Hugh’s show that night to defend his magazine’s story. I spoke with Foer’s secretary, who promised he would get in touch with me. He never did.
Even on TNR’s blog, their normally loquacious scribes had nothing to say on the subject as speculation rose that TNR had once again gone the Stephen Glass route. Only yesterday at 4:50 p.m. did The New Republic finally open its collective mouth. (Releasing unpleasant news late on a Friday- sounds a bit like the politicians that TNR covers, eh?)
When Franklin Foer at last deigned to address the topic that could consume his magazine, he did so tepidly and inconclusively with the following non-statement:
Several conservative blogs have raised questions about the Diarist “Shock Troops,” written by a soldier in Iraq using the pseudonym Scott Thomas. Whenever anybody levels serious accusations against a piece published in our magazine, we take those charges seriously. Indeed, we’re in the process of investigating them. I’ve spoken extensively with the author of the piece and have communicated with other soldiers who witnessed the events described in the diarist. Thus far, these conversations have done nothing to undermine—and much to corroborate—the author’s descriptions. I will let you know more after we complete our investigation.
Now let me put it to you, Dear Reader: If you were running a magazine and you had a piece sitting on your desk that told outrageous and incendiary stories about our fighting men, would you work to corroborate those stories before you published the piece or afterwards? Most of you would probably say before, which may explain why you’re reading a silly conservative blogger while Franklin Foer sits in the corner office of the one-time in-flight magazine of Air Force One.
To extract another juicy nugget from Foer’s promise to belatedly rake the muck, Foer insists, “Whenever anybody levels serious accusations against a piece published in our magazine, we take those charges seriously.” I don’t doubt it – if the institution that I ran had it professional credibility teetering (again), I would take it seriously. I don’t doubt that Foer took it seriously that I was going to devote most of a national radio broadcast to talking to military people about the potential inaccuracies of his story.
And while Foer may shrug off the story’s critics with the dismissive pejorative “conservative bloggers”, I doubt he so blithely dismissed the critiques of The Weekly Standard and National Review, two serious publications that had serious problems with TNR’s “Diarist”. The only explanation for Foer taking 72 hours to tepidly address a matter that by his own admission he “took seriously” is because he and his staff were unprepared to defend the story when the allegations of its inaccuracies first arose.
BUT HERE’S THE REAL KICKER – let’s assume that The New Republic, from the lowliest intern all the way up to the imperial Franklin Foer, believed that the “Diarist” was gospel truth. Isn’t it odd that they didn’t think they had a monster scoop on their hands? What’s more, why didn’t the New Republic feel any responsibility to protect innocent Iraqis (not to mention innocent Iraqi dogs) from this depraved platoon that mocks IED victims, uses the skulls of small children as playthings and employs armored vehicles to run over dogs?
The answer, of course, brings us back to where we started. The New Republic as an institution obviously found nothing remarkable about this story. While the rest of us found the stories shocking because they so stood out from the norm of our military’s behavior in Iraq, the “Diarist” clearly didn’t hit The New Republic that way. The story’s details didn’t surprise TNR’s editors. They didn’t put the story in context of the 160,000 American men and women who are serving their country nobly precisely because The New Republic didn’t consider the men in the “Diarist” to be part of a rogue platoon. The New Republic obviously found it easy to believe that the typical platoon in Iraq is composed of sociopaths and lunatics.
But don’t forget – they support the troops.
So how will it play out this week after Foer finishes his overdue investigation? I see three possible scenarios:
1) TNR announces it has once again been victimized by a Stephen Glass-like ruse. At the risk of spoiling the drama, I don’t see this one happening. I think a serious magazine can only survive so many instances when it’s revealed that it allows its contributors to just make crap up. And given the importance of the allegations in this story, it would do more damage than the Glass scandal did. And since the Glass scandal almost ruined The New Republic…
2) The New Republic releases the results of an investigation that confirms every last detail of the story. Names and dates are provided for the curious. The perpetrators face military justice for defacing grave sites and misusing a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Those who insulted the IED victim merely have to deal with the scorn of their comrades and perhaps some extra scrutiny from their commanders. TNR’s reporting is vindicated. Remember, though, TNR’s gravest sin as of today isn’t perhaps getting suckered by a military version of Stephen Glass but rather maligning 160,000 of our soldiers by shining the spotlight on the depraved antics of a few solders and implying that those antics are typical. Even if this scenario is realized (which would surprise just about everybody), it would do nothing to mitigate or minimize TNR’s slandering of the troops.
3) TNR completes its internal investigation, and pronounces itself satisfied. Out of concern for its sources, those nice young men who run over dogs, mock injured women and deface the corpses of children, TNR cannot release any of the details regarding its comprehensive inquiry. Nevertheless, Franklin Foer announces victory and proclaims his magazine vindicated.
While I suspect the third scenario is the most likely, why speculate? We’ll know soon enough. Besides, it’s not like I have any particular insight into the mind of Franklin Foer. We obviously think differently. To wit, if I ran a magazine that was considering running a piece that slandered our military during a time of war, I would verify its accuracy before I published it, not afterwards.
UPDATE: I’m not going to take it personally that Frank Foer turns into a Chatty-Kathy when Howard Kurtz calls, but has his secretary give me the runaround when I’m on the line. Besides, why would I care when he so completely revealed his agenda to Kurtz?
“A lot of the questions raised by the conservative blogosphere,” said Foer, “boil down to, would American soldiers be capable of doing things like the things described in the diarist. The practical jokes are exceptionally mild compared to things that have been documented by the U.S. military. Conservative bloggers make a bit of a living denying any bad news that emanates from Iraq.”
See? This little quote shows just how much we differ. Foer apparently thinks the cruel mocking of an IED victim, the defiling of an Iraqi corpse, and the misuse of a Bradley fighting vehicle to run over dogs all qualify as “practical jokes.” I don’t.
But that’s not all Foer says. He even insists that the “practical jokes” are mild. Scratch that. He says they’re “exceptionally mild compared to things that have been documented.” This wonderful “defense” proves my point that the heart of Foer’s agenda has always been slandering the entire United States military and the 160,000 men and women who are serving in Iraq.
There you have it. Franklin Foer - supporting the troops as only he can.
Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com
>>The part of this equation that I find disturbing consists of the fact that large numbers of people want to believe “Scott Thomas”. A demand exists for false war stories that paint the US military in the worst light possible.
Worth repeating. I see these people posting in online forums.
Jane Fonda got real close to the NVA, yet never had anything negative to say about them.
PILE ON Time for a Dirt Bag.....
The "Scott Thomas" Lies
Posted by Curt on July 22, 2007 at 4:40 PM
********************************EXCERPT****************************
We were already halfway through our meals when she arrived. After a minute or two of eating in silence, one of my friends stabbed his spoon violently into his pile of mashed potatoes and left it there.
"Man, I can't eat like this," he said.
"Like what?" I said. "Chow hall food getting to you?"
http://www.americanprowler.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=11769
Someone is making up a bunch of crap and the best thing the military could do is continue an investigation as it is real then let CID find out who’s this idiot is.
I doubt that it was made up by any one in Iraq....
(Nobody (actually in the military) would ever stick a SPOON into a stack of (MILSPEC-issued) mashed potatoes..... NO ONE, ever, in a military chow hall uses a spoon to eat mashed potatoes....
(Then again, nobody COULD stick a spoon into a military-issue pile of mashed potatoes ...
I doubt it too but a CID investigation would find out real quick and get New Republic to correct the story and out their real “Scott Thomas”.
When did they quit calling it a mess hall? That’s the only name I remember it as.
A) Because someone actually did some of the stuff “Scott Thomas” alleges (doubtful).
B) Because “Scott Thomas” just one himself a Blue Falcon with Oak Leaf Cluster and needs to learn what happens when you drop the soup at Leavenworth.
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