« Steel Obama | Main | Vive La Resistance »

The Scott Thomas Fooferaw

26 Jul 2007 01:15 pm

I've just been noting the hysteria around the New Republic's Baghdad Diarist in the blogosphere. Jeez. Malkin's head is about to explode for the fourth time today. So far, I have to agree with Matt:

Well, now here he is -- his real name is Scott Thomas Beauchamp, he's a soldier, and as best I can tell nobody has yet brought forward any serious reason to doubt his story. Needless to say, rather than spend some time reflecting on the fact-free zone the conservative press is trying to create, Jonah Goldberg is attacking Beauchamp while Mark Steyn argues that Jonah isn't attacking him viciously enough.

That's just crazy. All these people need to stop. They need to take a deep breath. They need to apologize to the people at TNR who've wasted huge amounts of time dealing with their nonsense. And they need to think a bit about the epistemic situation they're creating where information about Iraq that they don't want to hear -- even when published in a pro-war publication -- can just be immediately dismissed as fraudulent even though the misconduct it described was far, far less severe than all sorts of other well-document misconduct in Iraq.

Nothing has been disproved so far as I can tell. And the incident that seems to have created the fooferaw has actually been confirmed. Hewitt is unable to find a single factual inaccuracy and seems dismayed that a soldier might want to write about his own experiences in wartime. But why the hell not? And what does it matter if he has an agenda and an ambition to become a Writer? I can't see the crime here - unless he fabricated something and we don't know that. So why the craziness?

Partly, I think, new media hatred of TNR. Partly that Thomas is obviously a liberal Democrat who's also a soldier. But mainly, it seems to me, the conservative blogosphere has taken such an almighty empirical beating this last year that they have an overwhelming psychic need to lash out at those still clinging to sanity on the war. This Scott Thomas story is a godsend for these people, a beautiful distraction from the reality they refuse to face.

It combines all the usual Weimar themes out there: treasonous MSM journalists, treasonous soldiers, stories of atrocities that undermine morale (regardless of whether they're true or not), and blanket ideological denial. We have to understand that some people still do not believe that the U.S. is torturing or has tortured detainees, still do not believe that torture or murder or rape occurred at Abu Ghraib, still believe that everyone at Gitmo is a dangerous terrorist captured by US forces, and still believe we're winning in Iraq. If you believe all this and face the mountains of evidence against you, you have to act ever more decisively and emphatically to refute any evidence that might undermine this worldview.

Look: I don't know the roots of everything Scott Thomas Beauchamp has written. If there are aspects to his first-person accounts that do not pan out, we need to know. But so far, there's no evidence of anything wrong. So far, the hysteria says far more about the hysterics than about TNR.

Permalink :: Trackback (10) :: Sphere It!

• E-Mail Andrew
• Andrew's Bio
• Visit The Atlantic
• Books by Andrew Sullivan
• Add this RSS Feed 
• An Award Glossary
• Site Meter 
• Book A Speaking Engagement

• Patrick Appel

• Pardoning War Criminals
• America doesn't pardon war criminals. It prosecutes and, in the past, has even executed them for the same techniques that Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney endorsed.
• The HIV Travel Ban Is Repealed
• I've lived with this awful sense of insecurity, of fear of leaving the country, of visiting my family, of the lingering sense that my virus rendered me potentially deportable, that any roots I put down might be dug up suddenly one day - for fifteen years. The lifting of this threat - the sense that I now have a home I know will be secure for me and my husband - is indescribable.
• Obama On Foreign Policy
• What's interesting to me is how the speech is about much more than Iraq. It's about focusing on Pakistan, on energy independence, and on Iran. It's a speech that might have been given by the first president Bush.
• Judge Judy Republicans
• The problem with the working poor, as GNP has it, is not that they're capable of finding shopping bargains and living within their means. It's that they're sinking in a welter of family dysfunction and economic distress - and end up like the plaintiffs on Judge Judy.
• Staying
• Occupations are like government programs. Once instituted, it seems they can never be abolished.

The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back
Buy The Book (Amazon) Buy The Book (Barnes and Noble) The CSPAN Brian Lamb Interview

Essays	Archive
Why Not Seeing is Believing Green Conservatism The End of Gay Culture Debate with Sam Harris Goodbye to All That	Jul 13 - Jul 19 (219) Jul 06 - Jul 12 (278) Jun 29 - Jul 05 (253) Jun 22 - Jun 28 (320) Jun 15 - Jun 21 (264) Jun 08 - Jun 14 (285) Complete Archive

• Drudge Report
• Washington Post
• New York Times
• The Onion
• Instapundit
• The Corner
• The Plank
• Talking Points Memo
• Slate
• The Daily Telegraph
• The Times
• The Guardian
• Daily Kos
• The Washington Monthly
• The Weekly Standard
• Hit & Run
• The Volokh Conspiracy
• Michelle Malkin
• Hugh Hewitt
• Glenn Greenwald
• Juan Cole
• The Huffington Post
• Matt Yglesias
• The Spine
• YouTube
• Balkinization
• Iraq the Model
• Dan Drezner
• Belgravia Dispatch
• Independent Gay Forum

• 2Blowhards
• 3 Quarks Daily
• The American Scene
• Ann Althouse
• Bryan Appleyard
• Stephen Bainbridge
• Balloon Juice
• Bookforum
• Books Inq
• Bookslut
• Ed Brayton
• Contentions
• Convictions
• Chris Crain
• Crooked Timber
• The Cunning Realist
• Clive Davis
• Rod Dreher
• Eschaton
• The Field
• FiveThirtyEight
• The Frontal Cortex
• Global Voices
• Gristmill
• Headline Junky
• Scott Horton
• Human Nature
• Intel Dump
• Kottke
• Kenyon Review
• Ezra Klein
• David Kuo
• Daniel Larison
• Majikthise
• Greg Mankiw
• Marginal Revolution
• Mind Hacks
• The Moderate Voice
• Obsidian Wings
• Opinion Journal
• Outside The Beltway
• George Packer
• Political Machine
• Political Wire
• Pollster.com
• Virginia Postrel
• James Poulos
• The Reality-Based Community
• Science Daily
• Slog
• Ben Smith
• Think Progress
• TreeHugger
• Michael J. Totten
• Whispers in the Loggia
• Wonkette
• World Politics Review