Posted on 08/10/2007 6:07:23 AM PDT by knighthawk
Edited on 08/10/2007 6:10:48 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
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You can read and equate this with todays MSM and their reporting. Sensationalism before facts.
The American media may be worse than Pravda ever was.
We already knew from all of America's armed conflicts - including Iraq - what war can make men do. The only thing we learn from Scott Thomas Beauchamp is what literary ambition can make men say.
Nicely written Mr. Krauthammer (althought I'd have substituted "write" for "say"). Can I have a job?
Krauthammer nails it, as he almost always does.
Charles nails it. Writing that the war changed a man is fraudulent when the man displayed his despicable character before he even arrived at the war.
And The Nation, as all like-minded anti-American zealots, must resort to lies and fabrications to attack our military because their agenda can’t be supported by fact.
We are blessed with having him in the pundit brigades.
Beauchamp is a great example of Liberalism, and had he been just a little more careful he’d have been able to go on to his career as a main stream journalist.
Beauchamp is a known LIAR now!! Why would ANYONE believe anything he said....all the guys in Kuwait said there never was such a woman...and since Scotty LIED about being there, 1000 to 1 it didn’t happen.
Lets put the majority of blame where it is due - on the magazine which published this. Drag a hundred dollar bill through any crowd and you’ll find one rat willing to sell out his companions for dollars and praise. It’s the magazine which set the whole thing up to smear the military.
As Krauthammer points out, that collapses the entire narrative. A fellow capable of that sort of abuse before he even saw the front was a monster to begin with. On the most charitable (and most likely) assumption that he made the entire disgusting episode up, how much less of a monster does it take to imagine such a thing?
It gets worse. This is not a soldier who broke under stress into imagining things that never were, it is a deliberate, conniving slanderer who went into the thing with the predetermined intention to garner personal profit by smearing the honor of the men he served with.
At the very least TNR found this story sympathetic to the picture they were attempting to construct of callous, immoral, and outright criminal U.S. troops. And so they published it with scarcely a motion toward verification, and now that they've been caught are screaming that the military is trying to keep them from doing what they should have done before ever this disgraceful performance hit print. It strikes me that there is more than one monster at work here.
Earlier this week, I saw him on the panel. It was Charles, Bill Sammon, and Mort Kondracke. I wondered outloud how Mort could even keep up with those two.
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