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02 Dec 2007 05:14 pm

NRO Fabulist Update

Greenwald rounds up all the bloviation and hysteria at NRO over Beauchamp, and notes of the NRO "apology":

Lopez just relies upon vague cliches that say nothing. She claims, for instance, that she reached these conclusions about Smith's posts "after doing a thorough investigation of some of the points made in some of those posts," but she never identifies a single specific fact which this supposed "investigation" revealed or what "some of those points" were that need correction, nor does she identify a single step which this supposed "investigation" entailed.

Meanwhile, a right-wing blogger calls for Smith to be fired from NRO. As I've said, I don't think Beauchamp has emerged as a reporter with credibility, and assigning his wife as his fact-checker was a terrible decision. But as an active duty soldier, controlled by his superiors, he was not as available as Smith is or was; the small factual assertions of incidents which are unremarkable among soldiers in wartime were nothing like as checkable as the idea that 5,000 Hezbollah soldiers were marching on Beirut; and TNR has now produced a 6,000 word, nostra culpa and explanation. Neither writer is at this point defensible, I'm afraid. But only one is still employed used as a blogger and described by his editor as "reliable".

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