Update II: OK, it’s a lot less plausible.
/Update II
Confederate Yankee has the official release from the Army concerning Scott Beauchamp’s tales.
They appear to be tall.
To your question: Were there any truth to what was being said by Thomas?
Answer: An investigation of the allegations were conducted by the
command and found to be false. In fact, members of Thomas’ platoon and
company were all interviewed and no one could substantiate his claims.As to what will happen to him?
Answer: As there is no evidence of criminal conduct, he is subject to
Administrative punishment as determined by his chain of command. Under
the various rules and regulations, administrative actions are not
releasable to the public by the military on what does or does not
happen.
So someone is fibbing here; I think TNR either got snookered or the Army is covering up. My money? Snooker. The consequences to the Army of falsifying this are too high.
“Plausible” certainly doesn’t mean “true”.
/Update:
TNR has published a commentary on Scott Beauchamp which suggests that there is at least some third-party validation of Beauchamp’s core claims.
In this process, TNR contacted dozens of people. Editors and staffers spoke numerous times with Beauchamp. We also spoke with current and former soldiers, forensic experts, and other journalists who have covered the war extensively. And we sought assistance from Army Public Affairs officers. Most important, we spoke with five other members of Beauchamp’s company, and all corroborated Beauchamp’s anecdotes, which they witnessed or, in the case of one solider, heard about contemporaneously. (All of the soldiers we interviewed who had first-hand knowledge of the episodes requested anonymity.)
– emphasis added
I said that I felt Beauchamp’s stuff sounded “implausible”…I’ve got to say, as much as it stings, that it sounds a lot less implausible now.
And while Beauchamp may be a low-performing soldier in a low-performing unit, if these claims are plausible there’s a bunch of stuff that needs to be looked into.
I’ll try and have a longer comment tonight.
Nice, great “support” guys.
(AL thanks for your honesty on revisiting this).
So a soldier gives pretty much accurate information on stuff happening in Iraq.
The “support the soldiers” occupation supporters, basically smear him, question him, attack him. To the point where, as the article indicates:
“Beauchamp had his cell-phone and computer taken away and is currently unable to speak to even his family. His fellow soldiers no longer feel comfortable communicating with reporters.”
Which of course, is the whole point, right? Intimidate anyone who is giving stories counter to “the plan”, so that they won’t speak out anymore.
“currently unable to speak to even his family”. A soldier, telling accurate tales, “currently unable to speak to even his family”.
That about says it all, doesn’t it?
With that type of “support the soldiers” support, who needs enemies?
hypo – in honesty, he confessed to committing crimes. If I did a pseudonymous piece for TNR on how I regularly defrauded clients, or how I built a computer system that cooked books, or something similar, I have a feeling I wouldn’t be doing a lot of communicating while the investigation went on either.
As the milbloggers said, he’s screwed if it’s false, and he’s screwed if it’s true. That’s his personal burden. I have no sadness at all about seeing a soldier suffer who a) did those things; and b) knew about them and instead of bringing the bad guys to justice used it to make money by selling their stories.
There are bigger problems that need to be looked into before this is over. My popcorn is tasting kinda stale today.
A.L.
What exactly is “pretty much accurate”? Is that like “fake but accurate”?
So wait, this no-class asshole rags on a wounded woman in a chowhall, writes about it to illustrate “the harsh effects that the war has had on him” yet does it before he ever sets foot in theater. How exactly do you screw this kind of detail up? Maybe you do it because you’re trying to talk shit and embellish, like most wannabes do.
I used to see it all the time with the SEAL wannabees. They would all talk smack about BUD/s and getting their Trident, then you’d ask them a minor detail about the place and they could never answer you, because they never went.
Before you revise your opinion too much, you might want to “read this”:http://www.townhall.com/blog/g/07095fb7-061f-4949-889a-59fd547d2153 analysis of TNR’s comment. As they point out, TNR is cheerfully distilling a whole chain of events STB claimed happened into “the incident,” which they are pleased to confirm. Well, which one incident? And what about the rest of them? Is it too hard to say, “Of the several incidents described, we corroborated that at least one event, X, happened”? Given the controversy, you would think they would want to be careful and specific here, rather than try a dodge of this sort.
Likewise, the fact that the woman-in-the-chowhall business happened in Kuwait — before they were ever deployed — changes the nature of the story sharply. “Shock Troops” claimed that this was a story about what Iraq is doing to our soldiers. In fact, that particular part of it was just a story about what STB was like before he ever saw a war in the first place.
I’ll wait to revise my opinion until the Army has finished _its_ investigation.
Grim – I didn’t say it was “proven” I said it was now “plausible” – i.e. I’m willing to bet that he wrote fiction, but wove it from some kernels of real experience rather than from whole cloth.
I’m still doubtful, but you’ve got to admit that there more beef here than there was a week ago. I’m not happy about that…
A.L.
I’m less happy about the fact that TNR, having spoken to some folks on the phone for a week and produced an opinion that dodged on these two points at least, then portrayed the Army’s formal investigation as if it were an impediment to getting at the actual truth and facts.
Their closing comments are, I would venture to say, disgraceful: ‘Having started a national scandal by publishing a story that we’ve now confirmed was wrong on at least one major factual point; and which we can only partially otherwise confirm; we’d like now to condemn the Army for investigating the matter on its own, as their conduct is interfering with our operations.’
Oh, agreed. They are in full CYA mode, and if they can manage to defend any of this tool’s self-aggrandizement of his lane-ass behavior, will trumpet it as victory. I’m unhappy about pretty much everything right now.
A.L.
And what kind of self-respecting woman would marry some ********* shallow and mean-spirited enough to do and say the kinds of things this guy claims (and his “buddies” confirm) to have said?
A.L.
bq. And what kind of self-respecting woman would marry some ********* shallow and mean-spirited enough to do and say the kinds of things this guy claims (and his “buddies” confirm) to have said?
A shallow and mean-spirited woman.
The Hobo
I wouldn’t speculate on a lady’s character.
I have noticed, however, that my sense of propriety differs from that of “certain others in the same circle”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/penelope-trunk/it-doesnt-matter-that-jo_b_56985.html of journalists. It’s quite possible that there’s a genuinely alien system of values at work, which would need to be articulated to be understood. (Ms. Trunk did a remarkable job of that in her article; as a philosophical position, it’s entirely vicious, but she deserves credit for laying out her principles in a clear and understandable fashion.)
Grim [#10],
I just read Penelope Turk’s column, and she is about as off-the-wall as you have described. But it’s worth noticing that she has been almost universally condemned in the comments to her column, so this is far from a standard she is articulating.
It’s a bit like scientifically naive people who learn a little bit about Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, and then want to tell everyone that Newton’s laws are false. Well, that’s correct in an academic sort of way, but the difference is negligible until you are moving close to the speed of light, which most of us don’t do. They are focusing on a second-order effect, and ignoring the first-order effect.
It’s technically correct that no one can write anything without reflecting their own point of view. Nonetheless, the notion of journalistic “objectivity”, although unobtainable in theory, is absolutely essential in practice. (And unfortunately rare these days.)
Right on, Beard.
We have to distinguish between political and factual objectivity, of course. The political objectivity of the MSM is much mocked, and with good reason. TNR is a partisan publication that makes no claim to political objectivity, but they have always enjoyed a reputation for a high degree of fidelity to hard fact, and that reputation is not being upheld.
Regarding Ms. Trunk, Grim won’t speculate on her character, but I will. It’s lucky for her that she met a flaky video artist in college and not a serial killer or an abusive polygamist, because she’s a perfect chump.
As for this latest communique from the National Lampoon, which has apparently locked TNR out of their offices, it is more smoke than light. They finally get around to admitting their incestuous relationship with Beauchamp (Foer having confessed this to The Washington Post before they told their own readers) but they leave out another key thing that Foer told the Post: Beauchamp’s marriage to a TNR staffer is “part of the reason why we found him to be a credible writer.” Imagine the reaction at TNR if the president said that Jeb Bush was a good governor because he was his brother.
Even if we grant TNR the credibility of their new anonymous sources, here is as much not corroborated as corroborated. The fact that the “chow hall” incident took place in Kuwait, before Beauchamp ever went to Iraq, is not a trivial detail. On the Bradley-driving dog killer, they focus exclusively on one of the weakest arguments. I still do not believe that a dog was snagged and dragged behind a Bradley by its leg, or that the 21 inch-wide track of a Bradley cut a dog into two pieces, one of which was left in place undisturbed while the other “twitched wildly”.
I know where this is going next. The Army investigation (and what would they say about the Army if they didn’t investigate this?) allows TNR to close the curtain on this embarrassing farce without making any more damaging admissions. And the Kossack-sphere can be relied on to try and heckle this story out of existence.
Foer wanted to take TNR out of the pro-war camp. Well, he did. He took it all the way to Camp Sheehan.
Why is this guy not in the stockade? He committed crimes – of omission and commission.
And hypocrisy – you cannot wait to crow about how EVIIIIILLLLL! all those soldiers are. How evil the military is – they took away his cell phone, his computer? WAAHHHH! He should be under tent arrest at the least.
AND TNR is fact checking themselves? You really believe they do not have their own agenda?
This supposed soldier mocks a wounded female soldier in a mess tent or building in Kuwait? That tells me what kind of character he has – NONE!
Wait for the military to do their investigation which of course, the Lefties will Pooh! Pooh! as tainted. But remember Haditha? That one has pretty much disappeared hasn’t it?
AND the character of the ANIMALS that we fight in Iraq and Afghanistan is above reproach – RIGHT? The have killed more of their own that we ever could. Drills. Knives – dull ones to behead. ‘splosive cars and vests. Blow torches.
Okay, all you apologists can pile on me now. I am done.
What crimes did he commit? Saying a girl who had an accident with an IED is “hot” is now a crime?
He didn’t kill the dogs. His fellow soldiers. Yet you want to tar and feather Beauchamp for writing about that. And you want absolutely NADA to happen to the soldier who actually killed the dogs. And since when did killing dogs in Iraq becomes a crime anyway?
And Beauchamp didn’t wear the piece of skull in his helmet. His fellow soldier did. All Beauchamp did was write about it.
That’s right. You wingnuts have zero problem with the above incidents or torture at Abu Ghraib. You just have a problem when people write about it.
At any second the word “narrative” will be deployed. Along with “post-normal science” this is a rather clumsy way of saying, “The facts (Kuwait/Iraq? whats the difference?) don’t matter, it’s the story and the feelings the story provokes which count.”
“in honesty, he confessed to committing crimes.”
What crimes? Perhaps I missed it, I don’t have access to the full article.
From what I read, he reported on other people doing stuff, right?
Downtown Lad demonstrates once again why I am so proud to be called a wingnut. It’s like being accused of having good reading comprehension skills.
I think General Foods should make a cereal called Wingnuts. I would buy it. Being a wingnut, I have money, too. But they’d better put vitamins in it, because I can read the box.
A.L.,
I don’t concur at all that today’s TNR statement vindicates either the content of Beauchamp’s “Shock Troops,” or the process that TNR used to publish it as a “Diarist” piece.
Beauchamp wrote his piece to get a point across: “The U.S. soldiers in my company in Baghdad have been corrupted by the stress and degradation of combat. Their (“our”) character has become depraved.”
His writing is not about mocking a woman, or desecrating bones, or running over dogs. It is about doing these things with fellow soldiers, publically, and to widespread approval (or in the case of the chow hall, widespread indifference).
There’s no other way to interpret the piece. Read it again.
Today’s “A Statement on Scott Thomas Beauchamp”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070730&s=editorial080207 invites the reader to conclude that:
* “Shock Troops” was rigorously fact checked;
* The disfugured-woman anecdote is basically true, though it happened in Kuwait;
* The child’s-skull anecdote is confirmed;
* The running-over-dog anecdote is confirmed.
Except a critical read of the Statement with a copy of “Shock Troops” in hand shows that each of the four assertions I made, above, is unsupported.
I don’t like his tone, but I think “Ace” gets the content right in “this dissection”:http://tinyurl.com/37oasu of the Statement.
I’ll point out:
* Readers still don’t know what the standards for adequate pre-publication fact-checking were for the piece. TNR “checked the plausibility of details with experts” [What details? What experts? How did “Shock Troops” go to press with so many details wrong?], they “contacted a corroborating witness” [sic–corroborating what?], and they “pressed the author for further details.”
* Beauchamp lied about the disfigured-woman anecdote. The revised version no longer supports his story’s narrative. It’s unclear whether or not Beauchamp’s taunting was witnessed (the other key point).
* The child-skull anecdote is confirmed by one soldier (the same one who confirmed disfigured woman?) In the revised version, it’s left unstated whether or not the skull-wearing was something three soldiers did in private, or minstrelcy that they performed to the laughter and acclaim of the unit. Again, that later aspect was the key part of “Shock Troops'” story line.
* Driving over stalls and buildings and slicing dogs in half, to general acclaim and laughter has now morphed into one soldier’s (the same soldier’s?) account of lurching the Bradley backwards–yet again, with neither confirmation or denial of whether this was done to widespread laughter and acclaim.
The narrative that TNR has confirmed is, “our correspondent and one or two of his friends behaved badly in Kuwait, and then behaved badly at least twice while stationed at FOB Falcon.” There may be more to the conduct of Beauchamp and Alpha Company–“Shock Troops” may still be more true than not–but TNR has given me no reason to think so.
Today’s “Statement” isn’t good journalism. TNR has muddied the waters about the facts of the matter, and about their pre-publication fact-checking.
I am jaded enough to think tht this Statement was written and presented in a calculated way. I thinkTNR’s writers have observed that Beauchamp’s story had gathered fervent support among the vast majority of online commenters at left-wing websites, even in the absence of any supporting evidence. TNR’s staff could well have calculated: “Our investigation has brought some facts to light. If we package them right, we’ll push this whole affair into a frenzied debate. Onlookers will get disgusted with the brawling. We’ll be able to throw up our hands in dismay, exclaim that we did our best, and Move On. If we don’t get a clean win, we’ll at least end up with a draw.”
Next time I read about “raising the level of the national discourse,” I’ll think back to this episode.
Hipocrisy Rules:
There are a number of charges that might be applicable under the UCMJ. I don’t intend to speculate about them, beyond noting that the outer limit case — ‘rasing false alarms within a unit in contact with the enemy’ — is a capital crime. I’m not saying that is the appropriate charge; I’m only saying that, under military law, what he has done is far more serious than it would be for a civilian.
The Army needs some space to sort out the legal issues. It’s best if we let their procedures work.
We started out with a handful of things that showed Thomas didn’t know how soldiers do things. Like, he called the dining facility a chow hall. It’s settled to mostly 3 items that look physically unlikely and 3 items that look morally repulsive.
He didn’t know that nobody ever changes a tire in the field. I haven’t heard anything about this one recently.
He didn’t know that you can’t put part of a child’s skull inside a helmet. I think that could be a misreading. If the bone was inside the helmet nobody would see it. Probably the guy wasn’t wearing a helmet, and then people could see the bone on his head.
The third one was that he didn’t know a Bradley can’t cut a dog in half and drag one half.
I wonder about that one. Obviously if the Bradley catches a dog under its tread, maybe half the dog will be crushed and won’t be going anywhere, and the other half will not be crushed and won’t be going anywhere. Could the dog somehow get above the track? In with the wheels? Is there any way a dog inside the track could get cut in half? Then the outside half could fall out and not go anywhere, and the inner half might get mangled while it travels a ways with the vehicle. Is there any way for something like that to happen?
About the repulsive stuff I don’t have a lot to say. Soldiers do some repulsive things sometimes, as do med students. Maybe my surgeon had a sick sense of humor when he was in school, maybe he still does, but I’ll still trust him to cut me open. Our soldiers might do some stress-relievers that don’t look good, but they can still do their work effectively.
I don’t much care for or care about Beauchamp, and I don’t see why it turned into such a giant angst-fest for wingers. OK, there are a few bad apples in the army. We knew that. It doesn’t mean much.
AMac:
Note that the new TNR explanation for how to run over a dog with a Bradley …
… does not match what Beauchamp wrote:
And what kind of self-respecting woman would marry some ********* shallow and mean-spirited enough to do and say the kinds of things this guy claims (and his “buddies” confirm) to have said?
Pretty much any socially-status concious liberal. Which means almost any media woman. The cruel and nasty behavior written confirms the status of the writer as the alpha-male. It’s a huge turn on for that sort of woman. But then we’re talking the Mirthala Salinas type. I think a lot of women would marry Beauchamp if she learned of this behavior. A lot of women just care about status and nothing else, and it’s worst in the Media.
The problem with this story:
1. Details which are in the story are all wrong, TNR then says “oh it was some other country, base, place, a children’s cemetary not a mass-grave, etc.”
2. TNR doesn’t want to say to their staffer: “Your husband is a lying bastich.”
3. Many of the incidents are simply impossible: there are no square-backed ammo cases, you can’t see out of the right side of a Bradley and they make ungodly racket, Humvees in Iraqi urban areas don’t have spares and soldiers drive them back to base when they get flats on their run-flat tires, etc.
4. Soldiers serving in Iraq have stated that it’s always clear who is a civilian and who is an officer (unlike Pvt. Beauchamp’s writings).
5. Pvt. Beauchamp has been busted down several times for misconduct. Making him unreliable and with an axe to grind.
Just out of curiosity what do you suppose will happen when people serving in Iraq and Kuwait start stepping up to go on the record contradicting the latest version of TNR’s story which so far seems supported by “anonymous soldiers�
J Thomas,
I agree that some of the wrong details probably have ordinary explanations. A copy editor could have changed the current acronym for field mess hall to “chow hall”–the wrong term in print doesn’t discredit the account.
Also agree on people is stressful situations (cops, docs, soldiers, nurses) doing things that don’t look good to outsiders, even cruel things.
As I have said, that’s not the point here. Beauchamp, the schooled creative writer, made the crux of the story to be the accepted, condoned, public nature of that behavior. “This is what Iraq is doing to the morals of me and my squad-mates and my entire company–we all condone mocking injured women,” and so on. If you and your friend do these things–sneakily–guiltily–out of sight of the company’s corporals, sergeants, lieutenant–it’s not “Shock Troops” any more. It’s a different story, one Beauchamp could have written, but chose not to.
My hat is off to Editor Foer. He crafted the statement to elide that point, and I think he’ll win this round.
Even with one of the three key episodes now known to be false and a second one very distorted (Glen Wishard #21)–too many of the sorts of people who read political blogs come into these things already having decided what they’ll believe.
The missing piece is what Richard Aubrey noted in C.T.’s comments. Beauchamp could have picked unfalsifiable anecdotes to make his point. Taunting an Iraqi woman on the street. Bones on a harness instead of as a yarmulke. Trapping and tormenting dogs instead of slicing them with a BFV. But he chose to embellish events in ways that he knew (or should have known) would be challenged. Why?
Folks, let’s not forget that TNR only addressed one of the three articles written by Beauchamp.
Beauchamp’s second post, “Dead of Night” stated:
_Someone reached down and picked a shell casing up off the ground. It was 9mm with a square back. Everything suddenly became clear. The only shell casings that look like that belong to Glocks. And the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police._
There are no such things as 9MM pistol casings with square backs; they all have a round rim on a tubular case body. This is not a small detail; it shows that Beauchamp is a sloppy writer, but more importantly, establishes that TNR did not take steps to edit Beauchamp’s work beyond proof-reading or running a spell-checker.
But in addition to this technical incompentence (what STB was probably tying to communicate so incompetently is that Glocks leave a square or rectangular mark on a pistol cartridge’s primer, (which, like the rim in which it resides, is round).
Likewise, Beauchamp was factually incorrect, and more than a little defamatory, when he claimed that only the Iraqi police carry Glocks. Even a cursory Google search reveals that Glocks are very popular among all groups in Iraq, from soldiers, (American and IA), police, militiamen, insurgents, terrorists, politicians, and regular families.
Foer clearly failed to do his job as an editor in regards to Beauchamp. Beauchamp should have had his work red-flagged prior to “Shock Troops.”
Re: #18 from AMac: Ace’s comments seem fully justified.
I would add this. Beauchamp, a depraved fabulist and serial screwup, claims to have many friends in his unit.
According to his story, he has many friends who were laughing, and more as well, and that’s just in his unit.
This claim strains credulity.
You wanted to wait for the results of the investigation? Matt Sanchez reports that they’re in:
but but but Matt Sanchez is a homo prostitute, I read it on DailyKOS, so his investigation is all lies!
/sarcasm
Gabriel #28 —
To me, Sanchez’ past provides reasons to view his claims with extra skepticism. Not to discount his writing–just a reminder not to accept things credulously.
Similarly, what’s become known of Beauchamp’s background since he was outed/came forward gives reason to approach his accounts skeptically.
That’s different from rushing to judge that either is wrong.
It looks like The New Republic’s new version of the burned woman story “may not hold up.”:http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/235806.php But it might yet–too early to tell.
I just think its funny that the rabid left, who purports to hold “tolerance” as a pillar of its psyche, almost always seems to attack gay’s if they don’t toe the party line, or if they happen to be on the other side of the political spectrum. Much like many Blacks will ostracize “Uncle Toms” who don’t believe that Clarence Thomas is evil incarnate, or who don’t take their marching orders from the vile racists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
To correct, with a dose of sanity:
“Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_07/011753.php
“John Cole”:http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=8501
“Andrew Sullivan”:http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/08/rebutting-tnr.html
_For this, Beauchamp is described by Barnett as a “fabulist” and a “proven liar” and has even had his status as a soldier dismissed. The skull episode is borne out by other witnesses. The dog-baiting is completely credible. Here’s a YouTube of some soldiers tormenting a wounded dog. Here’s another of soldiers taunting thirsty Iraqi kids with water bottles. The incidents are gross, but in a war-zone, they’re hardly something to be shocked, shocked at. Am I now slandering every soldier by linking to them? Of course not. Is TNR slandering every soldier because one soldier writes up some ugly episodes that are also self-criticism? Please. No one doubts that most of the troops are doing an amazing job in near-impossible conditions. Describing some bad apples and occasional crudeness – especially when you are criticizing yourself as well – is utterly banal._
When I first bothered to take notice of this non-story, I wrote:
“What you have here is a guy who constructs narratives. This is a guy who believes, much like the media, that the narrative speaks more truthfully than the facts. Now, he probably has some of his facts straight, but I suspect at least some of his ‘facts’ are actually symbols for something else.”
I still stand by that. Some of his facts hang together, some of them do not. Some of his facts reveal lapses which suggest that he is reporting second and third person narratives as if they were his own. But most interestingly, it is not so much all the facts that fall apart, but the narrative he constructs that falls apart when the full facts are brought to light. The story was editted to achieve an effect, and where facts contridicted the narrative they were altered or left out.
So far we know the following facts were, critically left out of the story or altered:
1) The timeline of events. For example, even TNR now admits that the teasing incident – if it happened at all – happened in Kuwait, not in Iraq. This critically changes the nature of the narrator and the narrative, and I suspect we’ll find more evidence of time line tampering.
2) The missing fact that the narrator served by his own admission to create the narrative and to give the narrative ‘credibility’ (his words), changes the character of the narrative.
There are other things that will I think prove interesting. For example, we know that the narrator was busted for some sort of misconduct. What if it turns how he was busted for the same sort of lapses of military bearing he describes in his peice? This too is a fact that changes the narrative.
TNR is claiming that incidents in the story bear a resemblence to some incidents that actually happened. I’ll be interested to see how that actually plays out.
Finally, I’d like to bring up a point. Isn’t Beauchamp’s questionable behavior the very sort of thing that the Left despises in the military? Why does Beauchamp get a pass?
“Finally, I’d like to bring up a point. Isn’t Beauchamp’s questionable behavior the very sort of thing that the Left despises in the military? Why does Beauchamp get a pass?”
Let me phrase this point a different way. Assuming she in fact exists, suppose instead of Beauchamp, the person who broke this story was the disfigured women (contractor or soldier). Suppose she told her side of the story first. What then? Does Beauchamp get defended in the liberal blogs? Does the narrative change? Do the partisan blocks switch sides, with the ‘wingnuts’ supporting Beauchamp and the ‘moonbats’ supporting the injured woman?
hypocrisyrules,
All three of your links are heavy on the ad hominem.
All three authors engage in psycoanalysis of skeptics and Beauchamp critics, or quote others’ musings approvingly.
None of the three engage the criticisms of the facts that Beauchamp asserted.
None address the larger question of “Shock Troops” narrative. Bad facts, unreliable narrative.
And none touch on the journalistic failings of TNR, both before and after.
Celebrim’s short comment #32 has more insight than all three linked posts combined.
At some point, when it comes to reasoned defenses of Beauchamp’s work, the absence of evidence starts speaking to evidence of absence.
Thought experiment: Knowing what is now known, if you were the editor of TNR, would you publish “Shock Troops”? Given a do-over, do you think that Franklin Foer would?
How does one square that with TNRs implied (but not explicitly stated) “we stand behind Scott Thomas Beauchamp’s work”?
Drum, Cole, and Sullivan are looking profoundly stupid:
TNR admitted Beauchamp’s stuff WAS MADE UP. Game over. He made it all up and TNR admitted it. It was all false.
Now, WHY did Drum, Cole, and Sullivan fall for it?
Because it catered to their elitism, status seeking, and anti-Military prejudices. Just like bigoted, racist segregationists of the 1950’s and 60’s, Drum, Cole, and Sullivan believe any libel against the Military and ordinary people because it conforms to their bigoted perceptions.
In related news, a uniformed soldier at Yearly Kos who questioned a speaker about Iraq and said his opinion was that the surge was working and needed more time was shouted down with abuse.
What we do know is that the Media LIES nearly all the time. They lie or just make stuff up to fit the prejudices of their readers, and censor the news by NOT covering things that offend their readers prejudices. For example whenever a heinous crime is committed and the Media goes into gyrations to not reveal the race of the suspected offender, everyone knows the suspected offender is either black or hispanic. Or when people are busted for terrorist plots, and they form a “broad spectrum of society” we know it’s the Media covering up the fact they were all Muslims.
Thanks for your attempt to cure our insanity, hypo. Do you have anything better than that bucket of leeches?
Kevin Drum, who believes that Iran should be white-washed in the interests of Peace, lowers himself still further with his fallacious non-arguments. He sets up false conclusions that supposedly follow from discrediting Beauchamp: Either you believe Beauchamp, or you must believe that everybody on the left hates the troops (as opposed to merely considering them “banal”) and that the war is going “swimmingly” – the standard term of contempt from those, like Kevin, who can’t wait for the helicopters to take off from the embassy roof.
This kind of crap isn’t intended to convince anybody; it merely serves to notify the ranks that they must defend Beauchamp, right or wrong, or hand the “wingers” a political victory.
The best I can say for Kevin is that he plagiarizes his errors from The Thing That Ate Andrew Sullivan, who says:
Weimar themes? Is he freaking kidding? If we’re the Weimar Republic, what does that make Andrew’s gang – the guys in the shiny boots?
My apologies, it was an official Army investigation that concluded this:
“After a thorough investigation that lasted nearly a week the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division has concluded that the allegations made by Private Thomas Scott Beauchamp, the “Baghdad Diarist”, have been
“refuted by members of his platoon and proven to be false”
The official investigation the 4th IBCT Public Affairs Office qualified as “thorough and professional” concluded late August 1st. Officials would not speculate on the possibility of further action against Private Beauchamp, nor would they confirm his current whereabouts or status. ”
Link “here”:http://www.matt-sanchez.com/2007/08/beachamp-invest.html
NOT TNR. But doubtless they will have another Stephen Glass affair. Well at least we know they just make stuff up now.
Jim:
While we wait out the silence at TNR, consider how much they have riding on this little poker hand.
When Glass was discovered to be a liar – not by TNR, but by a couple of good reporters at Forbes Digital – there was real concern that it might be the end of the magazine. It was a huge hit for a publication with their reputation to take.
They survived Glass, though hardly intact. Their circulation is now half of what it was before Glass.
They might argue that Beauchamp is minor compared to Glass, who fabulated dozens of stories, including several cover stories. I don’t think that band-aid will cover the wound. TNR rallied from the Glass fiasco by parading their rigorous fact-checking, and by their willingness to step up and take their medicine. They are doing no such thing so far, and I don’t think it will help much if they make a late start. They’ll never get over the rep of being The Fairy Tale Republic.
Peretz doesn’t own TNR any more; it’s owned by a media consortium, and soon we may be hearing stories about what heartless, bottom-line guys they are.
It has been my firm editorial position that Beauchamp could have made everything up. I am basically having fun at you wingnuts freaking out over this. I mean, seriously- is there any better comedy than the Powerline breaking out a 1/32nd scale model of a Bradley to prove you can not run over a dog in a combat zone? I mean, if there is, point me to it.
Meanwhile, that same Matt Sanchez you linked to earlier has a report from FOB Falcon. It turns out that none of the guys there have heard of the Baghdad Diarist, but they are completely demoralized by him.
You simply can’t make this shit up. SNL should hire you guys.
But John, if SNL hired us, what would you do for a living?
A.L.
John Cole –
Thanks for the information. It’s interesting to know that none of those 50 soldiers had been contacted by The New Republic, which reinforces the view that TNR’s “corroboration” was provided by Beauchamp himself.
I’m glad you’re having so much fun, but I doubt if TNR shares your levity. The last time somebody was “freaking” out over one of their stories, they took it right in the balls. And that was a story that had no political content at all, that made no difference to anyone whether it was true or not – no difference to anyone except an honest journalist, that is.
You completely misrepresent what Matt Sanchez wrote, to boot. He describes soldiers as shrugging off negative reports, and you take that to mean that he’s saying they are “completely demoralized”.
Of course you are also wrong when you say no one has heard of Beauchamp. He said most of a random group of 50 soldiers had not heard of him, and there are more than 50 people at FOB Falcon.
I hope the truth is as funny as what’s going on in your head, but I doubt it.
“I am basically having fun at you wingnuts freaking out over this.”
Yes, I see now. That does in fact change… something.
How soon before we reach the point that any blog storm isn’t about anything except the emotional reaction of the different pundits?
What’s the new motto? Fake but funny? Fake but provokes a tantrum by the other side?
Could explain Michael Moore. Or, if that isn’t your boat, explains Ann Coulter.
PS: I thought the Bradley thing really was almost as funny as the Moonbat showing via his bailing wire and cinderblock single story tower, that there was no way that fire could have taken down the Twin Towers. That way to comedy.
I am gonna go out on a limb and suggest that maybe TNR contacted people in his, you know, UNIT, and that maybe, you know, there is more than one Company at FOB Falcon.
Just a wild guess.
Ok. You are a spoof. My claim they were “completely demoralized” was sarcasm, based on the fact that Sanchez stated most people he talked to had never heard of Beauchamp and then, four paragraphs later, went on to state that this is ‘why the “Baghdad Diarist†saga is taken so personally.’
World Net Daily, Malkin, Red State- the nutty is not limited to your comments section. I really don’t think you have been one of the ones hyperventilating about this issue, though. Hell, merely stating the Tnr’s version of events is plausible will get you banned at Red State.
Well… my writ doesn’t run to telling commenters to lay off the ad hominem. But I can recommend it.
If there’s a serious issue, let’s discuss it seriously.
If there isn’t: why not write about something else? Or at least use those [snark] [/snark] tags.
“if there’s a serious issue, let’s discuss it seriously”.
Ah AMac, that’s the thing – the obsessive freaking out about this one article, among the wingnuts, is ITSELF hilarious.
As far as the Practice of Journalism:
I try to imagine myself at a wonkish/intellectual magazine of the Left, Center, or Right. Honorable enough calling. But circulation’s always been low, the advertising money doesn’t roll in, there’s the Phantom Menace of the internet. Where is the time and money going to come from to do “rigorous fact checking” of pieces like “Baghdad Diarist”?
I suspect that it’s an open secret among those In The Know at places like TNR that “rigorous” actually means “spotty.” You hire reporters and writers that you think are good, and you run with them.
What TNR could have done for gullible readers like me is put a little note on the back page, “The Diarist feature is a personal account, we can’t vouch for it, thought you’d want to read it though.”
What editor Foer could have done once the questions started coming is to back down in that fashion. After publication, and post-Steven-Glass, it would have made him look pretty dumb. But it was an option.
Instead, he’s gone the other direction. In a funny way, though. I haven’t seen a statment that reads,
bq. “We at TNR stand behind “Baghdad Diarist” 100%. We’re glad we published it and we’d do it again.”
Of course, with the “corroborated woman” being in Kuwait not Baghdad, that’s dicey. Still, no
bq. “We at TNR stand behind “Baghdad Diarist” 100%, except the one discredited anecdote. We’re glad we published the other parts of it, and we’d do it again.”
They are implying that, but not stating it for the record.
A prediction: the pattern of parts of the “Baghdad Diarist” story coming apart will continue. Which parts? I don’t know… soldiers from Beauchamp’s platoon will speak out, or the corroborated woman will come forward, or Beauchamp’s record will leak, or the new dog-killing story will require amending…
TNR banking that the righeous anger of dedicated partisans will see them through, at least to a draw in the court of public opinion. This can’t be the sort of damage control that they teach in journalism school. Or maybe it is.
hypocrisyrules,
“Wingnuts,” okay. Would you suggest a companion term for me to use?
John Cole:
May I ask, then, do you have a point besides sarcasm?
Something concerning the plausibility of the material in question, its larger political meaning (or lack thereof), or the issue of journalistic truth and credibility in general?
Because we’re up for all that kind of action.
Mr. Cole:
Congrats. You are doing well at amusing yourself.
Having made what you say is your point, please do something else. “Contribute substance” or “go away” being the two big choices.
Frankly, we appreciate posts of substance more than you might believe. Try it sometime.
Sooner, rather than later.
Consider this a strong suggestion from someone who can eventually ban you but would much rather have you join the fray doing something more valuable, even if that’s just rattling off your talking points against others’.
‘Cause, really, that’s what I’m hoping for, and I’d warrant Armed Liberal is too: something more substantive than trolling. Will you do that, or is proving you can get banned all you want here?
Nort, acting in official capacity but still cordial
John Cole:
You make my point entirely. You dismiss Powerline readers who actually, have served in the military and know what a Bradley looks like and drives like, tearing apart the TNR set of lies.
Just like Dan RaTHer was undone by an amateur typing up the fake memos in Microsoft Word’s default setting.
The age of the journalist is coming to an end. People know journalists just make stuff up: Fauxtography in the Israeli-Hezbollah War, Glass, Beauchamp, “Fake but Accurate” or my favorite, “the narrative was correct but the facts were wrong” regarding the Duke non-Rape case.
People can see for themselves that journalists just lie or make stuff up based on their elitist, liberal, condescending aristo background (or wanna-be status). Matched with the internet that puts people who actually KNOW what journalists are lying about: be it memos in Microsoft Word, Photoshop, or events in Iraq or Kuwait, the lies that journalists routinely engage in to put across their ideology and class biases show up like a turd in a salad.
OF COURSE Powerline is profoundly threatening to your profession and to journalists in general: there are doctors who know far more about medical issues than an ignorant reporter with an agenda, and can expose the ignorance quite handily (because reporters are generally ignorant about anything other than which side they are on in politics and class). Mary Mapes and Dan RaTHer are jokes because their made up fantasies were exposed by ordinary people with expertise in Microsoft Word. TNR and Beauchamp are chumps because they did not figure on the internet enabling people who were there or actually KNOW about Glocks, Helmets, Bradleys, DFACs (they aren’t called chow halls and haven’t been since the 1980s) were able to point out the numerous lies and fabrications Beauchamp put together.
Glen — I think TNR will do quite well, now that their lies have been exposed. It shows decisively they are on the Kos-Truther Left and will enable them to probably boost their numbers. Journalism as actually reporting “facts” is dead: as shown above too many people can expose the routine lies, fabrications, and made-up stuff that journalists pass off as the truth.
Even more reasons why journalists are simply stupid:
They don’t know anything about what they report. It’s as if someone ignorant of football were reporting on the NFL for the Los Angeles Times.
Take Rosa Brooks “column”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brooks3aug03,0,3406790.column?coll=la-opinion-center. in the LAT where she calls soldiers fascist war criminals, and compare Ralph Peters “column”:http://www.nypost.com/seven/08032007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/troops__crimes_opedcolumnists_ralph_peters.htm?page=1 in the NY Post.
Now Rosa Brooks is a lawyer, a member of Soros’s Open Society Hard-Left organization, has never served in the military, has spent her entire life in Academia, and has acted as a consultant for Human Rights Watch, the notoriously anti-Semitic, Anti-American, Anti-Israeli NGO.
WHAT expertise does Rosa Brooks possess to allow her to comment on the Military? NONE AT ALL, like nearly all journalists. It’s like assigning a gossip columnist to cover Peyton Manning and the Colts. All you’ll get is stupidity.
Contrast Ralph Peters: a former vet who has embedded with the troops in both Iraq AND Afghanistan and knows what he’s talking about. Has seen and particpated in combat operations.
What stands out is the fear, hatred, and contempt upper-class, pampered aristos like Brooks and TNR journalists have for the troops, who present a huge political, social, and economic threat. The US soldier has sacrificed much to protect this country, and so is due a share of power, political, social, and cultural to say the least, that has been hogged by the selfish, spoiled elites in this country.
Represented first and foremost by journalists who’s sole mission is to maintain their class control over the nation’s politics.
John Cole is so right. You can’t make this up. Jim Rockford writes
Except Cole is a veteran, and he has driven a tank, and he said on his blog he could run a dog over with one. It’s the Powerline “expert” who has never served in the military and had to run out to Toys R Us for his “tank”, which unfortunately didn’t show how the driver’s blind spots are covered (according to Cole) by camera displays.
What I have some trouble with is that after Abu Ghraib, which everyone here other than Jim saw as atrocious, what exactly is implausible about poor soldiers in a poorly-led unit misbehaving? Indeed, even before AG, what’s so remarkable about the fact that war can bring out the worst in people? Instead of reckoning how to alleviate the conditions that bring these results about, you waste time first claiming that the author was a fake, then that he was a liar, now that he is an exaggerator, and next week that he used the wrong font. “Support the Troops” GOP-style has become more like a cult than a political movement.
AJL, the points you raise in your final paragraph have been discussed earlier in the thread. You misstate the concerns of the people you claim (I think) to be debating.
Don’t let that make you feel lonely. Seems just about nobody on the left wants to deal with inconvenient issues. Kind of a pattern there, on both sides of the divide.
#42 (celebrim):
Or the folks who think that a commercial airliner either should have put a hole in the Pentagon with a “Wile E. Coyote”-style cookie cutter shape, or should have made a circular hole with a diameter that equals the height above ground of the top of the vertical tail.
A laff riot, you betcha.
Thinking is hard, as is figuring out what the hell is actually going on. “Overcoming bias”:http://www.overcomingbias.com/ is a Herculean, perhaps Sisyphean, task. Note that I don’t necessarily subscribe to the opinons expressed at that blog I just linked to, but they’re trying.
Scott Thomas Beauchamp resembles the young John F. Kerry. Both served with self-publicity in mind, both mixed their recollections with fantasy, and neither had any inhibitions about making their fellow American warriors out to be evil monsters.
Neither expected to be called on their malarkey, and before the existence of a right wing blogsphere, John F. Kerry was correct.
What is it about progressive politics that:
a. makes people want to pull stunts like this?
b. makes people think they can get away with it?
c. makes them plausible to their fellow lefties, which is to say, what makes them plausible to the mainstream media?
Those questions are (or should be) cultural problems for the left.
From a conservative point of view, this is just the same tripe, different day. It’s the left-wing war story, as defined by John F. Kerry, continued or resumed on a different day in a war the left thinks is a replay of or a continuation of Vietnam.
In other words, move on, there’s not much to see here.
Cole has not driven AFAIK a Bradley, nor AFAIK served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. If anything he resembles as noted above John F Kerry, who thinks the troops are “stupid” when they are in fact more intelligent than the average person, with far greater responsibilities.
Why is Abu Graib atrocious? Were any prisoners beheaded as Al Qaeda does? Had their genitals cut off and put in their mouths (as Al Qaeda does)? Disemboweled like Al Qaeda does? Bones broken, drills used to drill into stomachs or heads like Al Qaeda does? No. At worst panties on heads and naked pyramids.
Pvts Menchaca, Tucker, and Anzack would gladly have traded places with anyone in Abu Graib.
I’ve seen reports of worse abuses at Pelican Bay (convicts burned with third degree burns).
Andrew is “concerned” about trivialities because his highest priority is showing his moral, social, status superiority to people who are actually serving. The troops who hold great responsibilities represent a mortal threat to his political power and self image so must be pictured as knuckle dragging kill-crazed idiots.
Anyway, Petraeus’s PAO has responded, “game over”:http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/235889.php
“To your question: Were there any truth to what was being said by Thomas?
Answer: An investigation of the allegations were conducted by the
command and found to be false. In fact, members of Thomas’ platoon and
company were all interviewed and no one could substantiate his claims.
As to what will happen to him?
Answer: As there is no evidence of criminal conduct, he is subject to
Administrative punishment as determined by his chain of command. Under
the various rules and regulations, administrative actions are not
releasable to the public by the military on what does or does not
happen.”
The Iraq and Afghan Wars represent huge threats to Liberals: average young men who have been given awesome responsibilities, and make status-driven cube dwellers look like thin soup indeed.
[ Hey, everyone, look who showed up! It’s Chris, with enough snark to float the battleship Missouri! Please don’t feed the trollish parts, but if you have anything substantive as a reply, go for it. –NM ]
Can I just speak up a moment to disagree with Andrew J. Lazarus, hypocrisyrules, John Cole, et al?
I’m generally in agreement with them about the Iraq War and the fundamental wrongheadedness of Armed Liberal and his fellow travelers here at Winds of Change, but I think criticism and mockery is exactly the wrong thing to be doing here.
Instead, we should be celebrating!
Celebrating that day after day, even the supposedly “moderate”, and “reasonable” conservatives here are sounding more and more like, for example, Jim Rockford, thereby making their arguments easier to dismiss as being self-evidently ridiculous.
Celebrating that their methods of argument are increasingly based on blunt assertion and the echo chamber of the right-wing blogosphere. When your ideological opponents think they can win debates by merely being sufficiently righteous and indignant, you’re in pretty good shape.
Celebrating that their sense of scope has collapsed from grandiose visions of worldwide regime-toppling campaigns and unbroken GOP domination of the government to largely unsubstantiated sniping about a story in The New Republic, a magazine that’s been on their own side, more often than not, since 9/11. It’s like watching Joe McCarthy go from roaring to the whole country at HUAC sessions to writing peevish letters to the editor of his local free weekly adsheet… it warms your heart, it truly does.
Fact of the matter is, they’re too far gone to even realize what’s happened, so it does no good to point out that they’ve lost Congress, lost control of Iraq, lost the faith of mainstream America and have little chance of winning any of that back with more of the same. But they seem happy babbling to themselves in the corner, so let’s leave them be while we keep working on fixing the mess they made, neh?
Chris:
If this is an echo chamber, how come your post is still standing?
Not that you’re probably reading this.
Substantively, but snottily:
Chris, you seem to have gotten something in your eye, charged up with the spleen of a mighty warrior as you are. Perhaps it’s your fist? Or maybe blind spots from elevated blood pressure?
When I (re)-read what Armed Liberal wrote at the top of this mess, I don’t see anything like what you describe as
bq. even the supposedly “moderate”, and “reasonable” conservatives here are sounding more and more like, for example, Jim Rockford
Utter bilge, sir. Unless you have a magic decoder or are under the influence of orbital mind control lasers on the other wavelength.
Quoth AL:
bq. I said that I felt Beauchamp’s stuff sounded “implausible”…I’ve got to say, as much as it stings, that it sounds a lot less implausible now.
Oh yeah. Right. That’s echo chamber stuff.
If you’re got your ears plugged.
Stop acting like a twit. Please. And try using a real email address when you post, pretty please with sugar on it. Only admins can see it, and we really aren’t going to abuse it.
_Powerline is profoundly threatening to your profession and to journalists in general: there are doctors who know far more about medical issues than an ignorant reporter with an agenda, [….] Mary Mapes and Dan RaTHer are jokes because their made up fantasies were exposed by ordinary people with expertise in Microsoft Word. TNR and Beauchamp are chumps because they did not figure on the internet enabling people who were there or actually KNOW about Glocks, Helmets, Bradleys, DFACs (they aren’t called chow halls and haven’t been since the 1980s) were able to point out the numerous lies and fabrications Beauchamp put together._
Jim Rockford has brought up an important myth.
Surely we all agree that journalists don’t know as much about any professional specialty as the specialists in that field do. And so journalists aren’t competent to judge the truth of what specialists say.
However, bloggers as a group don’t know anything about any professional specialty. What do we do when some blogger says “Hey, I’m a nuclear physicist and I say the conventional wisdom about this topic in nuclear physics is all wrong.”. Unless we know he’s a nuclear physicist then he might as well be some guy in a bar. And most of us can’t judge the issue on its merits any better than some random guy in a bar.
So how should we decide who’s right?
I can claim expertise in some specialties in mathematics, in microbiology, molecular genetics, software development, population ecology, and a few other things. I wouldn’t consider myself an ultimate authority in anything, but I’m good at reasoning things out and I can usually do pretty well. In each specialty I know about there are big controversies going on, where the experts disagree. And there are things I’ve noticed where the experts are probably wrong, that they haven’t needed to pay attention to yet.
A great microbiologist explained it this way. He said that microbiology is like a great big tapestry, and the current research is like a laser beam focused on one spot on that tapestry. We’re studying that one spot very intensely because that’s what we’re interested in right now. Look at something else, and it’s dim, and people mostly remember what they heard about in class. There really and truly are big topics that nobody’s looked at for a hundred years, that would look real different with modern tools. And that isn’t just microbiology, it’s all like that. Poke around in anything and there are hot topics and then there are things that people just accept the CW because it hasn’t been challenged in decades even though more modern stuff makes it look probably wrong. If the results that worked 40 years ago still work, why mess with it?
So, when some big political issue jumps up and bloggers turn to experts, who’s willing to make the extreme claims? Why, it’s the fools who rush in that do that. Experts who take minority positions on topics that aren’t hot, for example. They’re already used to their fellow experts thinking they’re crackpots and they get to go against the CW in public and have somebody pay attention. And guys whose careers are already in ruins. If you live on grant proposals and you come out in public taking sides on something that politicians care about, and your name gets attached to it, what about your next grant proposal? Somebody important comes out against you, and the important guys on the side you supported probably won’t protect you. Say it’s a dental issue and you’re a dentist. Take a position that makes the Republicans look good and you could lose ten patients over it. Go against that position and you might lose twenty. And as the blogosphere expands that will only get worse. Why do it?
So OK, we get our broken-down blogger experts posting, and how do we know who’s right? Suppose they all agree, does that mean they’re right? No, it means they all agree.
I’ve looked at the evidence in a few of these feeding frenzies and I usually couldn’t tell. Like, there were Saddam’s mobile germ warfare vans. When I looked at the published diagrams my first thought was that I’d *hate* to use that stuff. Canvas sides. Nothing like adequate decontamination. Have an accident with one of those babies and you’d have a major epidemic on your hands. So OK, maybe you have deserts available. Park it off in a desert where nobody goes, on flat rock, and if you get a spill the sunlight will probably decontaminate the surroundings for you. Just call in your report and then lay down and die.
The refrigeration didn’t look good enough. Get the temperature off and you could reduce yield by 90%. But maybe there’d be a way around that. Insulate your fermenter enough and the internal temperature variations wouldn’t be too bad.
The fermenter exit looked way too small. OK, maybe it was only for continuous culture. That would rule out anthrax and anything else you’d need idiopathic phase for, but it was possible.
As I looked at the things that stood out, it looked like a very bad design for biowarfare. (But then I’d only done lab-scale work, nothing over 500 gallons. I understood about bigger stuff but I might miss something.) Very bad design but there might be a way to make it work.
So I looked at the bloggers arguing. Some of them said it was no good for biowarfare so it had to be something else. Some of them said it was no good for making hydrogen so it had to be for biowarfare. They were all so sure! I couldn’t be sure. If it was for biowarfare it was designed by an idiot but somebody as good as I was could probably make it limp along. Later the results came in. It was for hydrogen, it was a bad design but it worked well enough to get by, and they didn’t need it much so why make something better? But the blog-experts had all been so sure! None of them knew what they were talking about, and the blogger-nonexperts mostly chose somebody who sounded good who said what they wanted to hear.
There was one after the latest israeli invasion in lebanon, where the lebanese said israel had attacked a couple of ambulances. I didn’t see why it was important. Anybody can attack a few ambulances by mistake, and they might occasionally do it making exceptions. Israel wasn’t doing it as general policy or there would be a lot more ambulances missing. But still a bunch of bloggers tried to disprove it. They looked at photos of the ambulances and tried to decide what happened. The one they focused on appeared to have suffered a small explosion from the inside. They argued at length about the fire damage. They argued at length about the hole in the top where the siren and light used to be. They argued at length about the spots that looked like rust. On the one side, if the ambulance was rusty that proved the damage happened a long time ago. On the other side, metal that’s been heated real hot tends to rust fast, especially in moist salt air. The photos didn’t show everything we’d want to see. It looked to me like the ambulance probably had suffered a small explosion, possibly from something thrown or rocketed into the back while the back was open. *Not* a big missile from a warplane. Possibly a small missile from a drone. Hard to tell. But the consensus was that it was all faked, that it was a junked ambulance that was never attacked at all. Then there was the side issue about a man who claimed to work with the ambulance, who lost an ear or something. He had a big bandage on the side of his head. They found a photo that looked like his ear was OK, so they figured that was fake. I looked at the photo and didn’t see anything to tell whether it was flipped over. Was it his right ear? Stupid journalists, they’ll do that unless it’s obvious. But the bloggers were sure there was no injury.
What kind of confidence does it take to decide the real truth about a lebanese ambulance from a few publicity photos? The angels back off. The fools rush in.
_Mary Mapes and Dan RaTHer are jokes because their made up fantasies were exposed by ordinary people with expertise in Microsoft Word._
Say it could have been faked with Word. That isn’t the expertise needed, what you need is the 1970’s typewriter experience. Maybe. We got blog-experts jumping in who claimed they had that too. It sounded kind of plausible to me. (It sounded even more plausible that it was a setup, that the same people who forged the documents tipped off a blogger.) But later the Bush administration released more documents about Bush’s experience, and some others dating to that time also had the funny typeface. Were they forged too, and in administration hands? Or was the typeface valid? I dunno. I’m no expert on that sort of thing, and the feeding frenzy is over.
We’ve gone a long way. It used to be that most people I knew, knew that the media got a lot of stuff wrong. All you had to do was look at something you really knew about, and compare it to what the media said. The CW was usually wrong but you went with it anyway except on topics where you knew better.
Now we get bloggers who really truly believe they’ve got it right, because experts they trust tell them what they want to hear. Is this an improvement?
Oh well. One time I had a small tumor. I did a lit search on that sort of thing, and went to my doctor. He ran various tests. The surgeon wanted to take it out, and also he told me that if he had to guess he thought it was something that formed around a fish bone that had punctured my intestine. “But that never happens! I read it in the literature!” He said he’d removed a number of those and it did happen. I decided I believed the surgeon and not the literature.
As a general rule, if somebody says they saw something there are two choices. They saw it, or they’re lying. If somebody says they have proof nobody could ever see what the witness claims he saw, there are three choices. They really know, they’re lying, or they don’t know. I usually distrust that expert. The witness did see it, though he might not understand what he saw. There are too many ways to slip up when you’re arguing about what’s impossible. I’ll only figure the witness is a liar if I suspect his motives. Not because a blog-expert says he couldn’t have seen what he saw.
So, TNR printed something about a chow hall. I think if they had a science fiction audience it would have been fine to call it a DFAC. Science fiction readers would wait, and see that people were eating in it, and quickly realise a DFAC is a chow hall and continue the story. Would TNR readers do that? Did some editor change it to make it easier to read? I dunno. Blog-experts took it as proof that Thomas hadn’t been in the army in the last few years, or that he’s lying on purpose, or something. Blog-experts often don’t make sense. Unless you’re an expert yourself you can’t always tell whether blog-experts are making sense or not.
So how do you tell how good a blog-expert is? Maybe he says “I have a degree in microbiology.”. Maybe he says “I have ten years experience doing just this kind of work.”. Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he’s sitting in a bar with his wifi, and he’s just as much an expert as anybody else who’s sitting in the bar with him. You can judge by results, maybe years later. You can use your common sense which is notoriously unreliable. You can just choose to believe. I’m always ready to believe the journalists got stuff wrong. Do blog-experts converge onto the truth? Maybe sometimes, it isn’t impossible.
Mostly we still don’t know. But some of us have supreme confidence.
J Thomas —
Great comment! A starting place for a good discussion. I disagree with many of your points, but you make strong arguments.
To take one of your examples, it *is* possible for an educated layperson to arrive at a strong conclusion on the issue of Saddam’s mobile labs. They were not biological weapons facilities–they were hydrogen generators.
For now, I will have to leave this comment as an unsourced assertion–made by a pseudonymous nobody as a blog comment. Thus supporting your point! Or seeming to. (Notwithstanding that my specific conclusion is similar to yours on the narrow issue.)
There are two reasons I can’t expand further on the subject right now. One is a time-management issue, combination of pressing work matters and dirty looks from family members. The other is that I’ll have to organize some previously-written material. At one point, I’d said this in a contentious forum on the subject of the lab’s purposes (paraphrasing myself):
bq. In regards to your earlier remark, I agree that the chemistry of H2 generation can be tough sledding. Contrary to the assertions of some, this discussion isn’t about “anti-victory.” Google my pseudonym “AMac” if you care what I’ve written on the larger issues of the war–but it doesn’t really matter. Understanding the labs’ purposes is an exercise in using Open Sources to try and arrive at a rational and fact-based understanding of one (small) puzzle. By looking at bite-sized pieces of the big picture, I’m trying to align my view with reality. If that means the labs were probably used for biological weapons, so be it. If it means H2 generation, again, so be it. The cards are what they are.
I’ll try to get this together as a separate post, but it will take some time.
“Just trust me” qualifications are no good on the Internet. That’s as it should be.
The “qualifications” that count are those that tell you what questions to ask, what facts to look up and how, and what to do to “show your work”.
When that is done, the rest is common sense, requiring no special qualifications.
Did John F. Kerry really claim to be in Cambodia when he wasn’t? He was fudging mightily, and he is a mighty fudger. So Instapundit just went and took a digital photo of the official record of the relevant speech, and published it on his blog. John F. Kerry has continued to lie and evade aver since, but it was game over then.
Could the infamous alleged Texas Air National guard document really have been produced just like that, using Word with defaults? Sure, but how to show it? Charles Johnson created the “throbbing memo” and published it at Little Green Footballs, and it was all downhill for the upholders of that fraud from then on. Charles Johnson says he knows a lot more than that about typefaces, and I believe him, but that doesn’t really matter.
Again, Charles Johnson demolished one of the fraudulent photos from the war in Lebanon very simply. Yes this was photoshopped. Here’s how it was done. They – the mainstream media – keep lying and concocting, and he keeps catching them.
This isn’t rocket science, and it doesn’t depend on trust.
To take one of your examples, it is possible for an educated layperson to arrive at a strong conclusion on the issue of Saddam’s mobile labs. They were not biological weapons facilities–they were hydrogen generators.
That was my tentative conclusion, but I wasn’t completely sure that a hydrogen generator couldn’t be adapted for bioweapons. The result would be a risky operation that made relatively small amounts of product. But it looked possible.
I was real clear this wasn’t something that belonged in an address to the UN to justify an invasion.
While it’s possible for an educated layman to reach a strong conclusion, it’s also possible for an educated layman to reach a wrong strong conclusion. How about a dozen educated laymen working together? If they split up the work carefully they might cover more ground. But also there’s a lot of room for groupthink. How about hundreds of laymen in a network of blogs? If one of them finds something important it tends to spread fast. Then when somebody finds a flaw in the original point, that spreads very slowly and uncertainly — if people want to believe the first point.
So it’s easy for bloggers to be wrong. I think we’re right to distrust the media — they get things wrong pretty consistently. But we’re quite likely to get things wrong ourselves too, particularly when the data we use has already been filtered through the media. Things that look like damning proof might be just media error. One example is the “chow hall” DFAC thing, where bloggers decided Thomas couldn’t be in the military or he’d know the right term, while it’s likely the TNR staff edited away the DFACs to make it easier on their readers. It’s easier to tell there’s something wrong than to tell why it’s wrong.
There are clear cases, and unclear cases.
The Rather unlikely memo is a clear case. A false report about the reaction of a Republican crowd to George W. Bush expressing sympathetic concern for William Jefferson Clinton’s health was also clearly fake, because the truth had been recorded. And so on.
The possible bio-war vans were always and unclear case.
The clear cases generally fall into familiar patterns, which we have grown wearily familiar with. We have all read enough shocking, shocking! stories based on single anonymous sources to last us several lifetimes. Again and again, extreme prejudice, agenda shoehorning and contempt for basic journalistic standards lead to familiar and clear-cut bad results.
Of course, the mainstream media fraudsters when they get caught see lots of gray. All kinds of evasive formulas are used. Instead of “this memo is a forgery” and facts on where the forgery came from, we got stuff along the lines of “we have not been able to prove (yet) the facts that the memo alleged” and an amazing lack of interest in just who and where this fraud came from.
A broad and endless river of faked and obviously biased and distorted mainstream media stories, biased and factually wrong in highly predictable ways, and rarely admitted plainly to be such, except when the proof was so crushing that the mainstream media stonewalling collapsed, has piled up such a vast silt of horrible accusations made and (despite good reason to withdraw them) never withdrawn that only a media professional with a serious filing system could keep track of this all.
It’s not really possible to keep all of it, every dubious story, in a state of suspended judgment forever. Especially as one rotten story builds on another, with X having allegedly been done because of or to cover up Y, which Y was never established.
Scott Thomas Beauchamp is one of the fairly clear cases. His story is already leaking like a colander, and The New Republic is playing out the familiar dance of media fakes who have been caught and won’t plainly admit it. All the elements of the case are familiar.
It’s the same tripe, different day.
It’s reasonable, it’s rational to dismiss this.
And I for one have no intention of keeping all the details in my memory, just in case Scott Thomas Beauchamp turns out to be the soul of honesty after all. He’s not.
J Thomas —
bq. Things that look like damning proof might be just media error. One example is the “chow hall” DFAC thing, where bloggers decided Thomas couldn’t be in the military or he’d know the right term, while it’s likely the TNR staff edited away the DFACs to make it easier on their readers.
Exactly. But that supports the point that I am making, not your assertion! Further: do you suppose that some Newsweek-y outlet will lift that blog-originating insight and present it to their readers? Of course they will, as well they should.
* A random walk towards the truth is possible.
* Blogging has weaknesses and strengths in this regard compared to the conventional media. Blogging (by intelligent, well-informed people of good will and of various backgrounds and inclinations) plus media gives a combination that is more powerful and more prone to discovering correct answers than anything that has come before.
Yes, of course some bloggers are stupid–poorly informed–of ill will. Yes, of course groupthink set in when people of similar backgrounds and inclinations start up a noise machine. That’s not news. Twas ever thus: blogging hasn’t improved human nature. And recall that, in the pages of the Weekly World News, space aliens have been impregnating beautiful actresses while revealing the location of Noah’s Ark. Last year, this year, next year. Again–so what. That tells us very little about “the mainstream media.”
AMac:
As David Brin puts it: Criticism is the only known remedy for error. That’s a really deep insight if you look at it right.
But to look at it right, you have to understand what criticism is, and not get stuck in sophistry and Monty Python’s “Argument Sketch” as your best examples.
bq. Blogging hasn’t improved human nature.
No, but some days I’m glad it’s led me here. On a good day it improves my mood even when I don’t post a damned thing. Sometimes it even improves my mood when it moves me to examine my presuppositions. Golly, how’s that possible?
Could I be growing up? 🙂
#60:
That was a good comment.
There’s another possibility with people ‘rushing in’ to provide anti-CW analyses, however: instead of crackpots or people with broken down careers, they may be people who came up outside the “normal” structure. Journalism has a “normal” structure: if you want to become a journalist, you go to college, study journalism or English, etc. Intelligence work has a “normal” structure, or rather, a couple of them in America: Either you joined the military and attended one of their internal intel programs, or you went to college and were recruited into the civilian service, and trained therein.
Having a “normal” structure is very similar to having a breed, if you’re raising horses or dogs. You establish standards, and you can reproduce many of the qualities you desire with some reliability. You won’t be able to reproduce Mr. Morgan’s famous stud, but you’ll be able to reproduce horses with many of his good qualities (to a lesser degree), reliably over the generations. If you’re producing intel analysts, you’ll produce people who aren’t liable to well-known errors, and who have been trained to approach issues in more or less the same way. As a result, it will be easy for them to interoperate, as any of them can pick up a report generated by any other and — without knowing the person who wrote it — have a good idea how the conclusions were reached and the evidence weighted.
That’s a tremendous advantage, but it comes with a cost: when everyone is thinking more or less alike, everyone is making more or less the same errors.
In breeding, we’d say that was a problem of inbreeding — when the stock gets so similar that it causes genetic errors and problems. In capitalism, Schumpeter would say it was the point at which the monopoly is ossifying, and is therefore vulnerable. Intel has several terms for the problems that come up out of this, including “stovepiping.”
In all cases, what is needed to revitalize the structure is new blood. Capitalism’s markets tear down the ossified company as lighter, faster, smaller organizations rip off chunks for themselves. Without the ossified structures, they can outcompete.
In breeding, if you don’t introduce new blood, your stock starts to suffer badly. You move farther and father from the old ideal. What you have to do is find unrelated stock with similar qualities, and introduce it in limited amounts — watching carefully to see if it does in fact reinvigorate the breed. You do this by adhering to standards of performance, and not to the old breed question — “who were the parents?” — which is the analogy to “where did he go to school?” or “did he attend the service intel program?”
You don’t need any horse or crackpot; but you do need a horse or a thinker who is not part of the usual system.
Not every anti-CW thinker is valuable, any more than you’d want to grab just any horse to reinvigorate your breed. And there are strong advantages to having a “normal” structure, as well as these critical disadvantages.
Nevertheless, reality proves in every case that ‘new blood’ will periodically be needed. It’s true in the market, it’s true in breeding, and it’s true in intelligence as well. I see no reason it should not be true for journalism. We have to look carefully at what bloggers are bringing in. Not every blogger will add value.
But something like bloggers are necessary.
_There are clear cases, and unclear cases.
The Rather unlikely memo is a clear case._
Well, no. The reason it got believed was that it said pretty much what everybody knew already. And then somehow when the document looked like it was false, people decided that Bush had never been AWOL! A brilliant attack was the best defense.
_Instead of “this memo is a forgery” and facts on where the forgery came from, we got stuff along the lines of “we have not been able to prove (yet) the facts that the memo alleged” and an amazing lack of interest in just who and where this fraud came from._
That happens sometimes. For example, the forgery that was the main evidence for Saddam’s nukes. Instead of admitting they couldn’t prove the facts, they claimed the british had other evidence. The other british evidence was that the french had a copy of the same forgery. Amazing lack of interest in who and where the fraud came from, yes.
Has the mass media recently changed, or has it always been this way and the bloggers are better able to notice it? From what I’ve read about Yellow Journalism, I get the impression it hsan’t changed much. It used to be this way. The difference is that bloggers have got a sort of power base they can use to challenge the media. And in that context it doesn’t matter whether it’s legitimate challenges or not.
I notice that lefty bloggers mostly notice the media biasing things to the right, and righty bloggers mostly notice the media biasing things to the left. Any reason to think the things neither side notices are actually better-reported? I doubt it. The media simply doesn’t inform very well at all.
So OK, the bloggers give us side effects. Like, consider the Beauchamp thing. If the bloggers weren’t there, maybe 30,000 people would have read it. Probably half of them would have rejected it. The other half would draw the conclusion that combat can brutalise our troops. Is that controversial? Does anybody doubt it? “Fake but accurate.” Accurate. And within a few days the story would have sunk completely. Result: perhaps 15,000 people a bit more convinced of a true thing they already believed. Instead bloggers got tremendously more attention drawn to the story. A whole lot more people have heard it, or heard of it. Beauchamp’s officers wasted a week investigating it so they could deny it. Surely more people believe it than would have if it had been restricted to TNR. TNR subscriptions probably went up, though TNR’s reputation goes down which likely reduces subscriptions in the future. A great big open can of unintended consequences.
Hmmm.
1. TNR doesn’t have any credibility because they never originally fact-checked the articles before publication. Even though they claimed to have done so.
2. Beauchamp is a liar. Period.
3. If either TNR or Beauchamp want to prove that they aren’t liars, cheats, scoundrels and deceitful people then all they have to do is **name names**.
Just who were there when Beauchamp et al were mocking the disfigured woman?
Who was it that purportedly ran over dogs with a Bradley.
Who was it that wore a fragment of a child’s skull as a cap.
Otherwise they’re simply full of BS and no amount of wishful writing by TNR’s supporters is going to change it.
David Blue:
#68 from J Thomas:
Well, yes. It was a demonstrable and demonstrated fake.
The reason it got believed was that it said pretty much what everybody knew already.
This is the problem: “what everybody knows” in this context is just a load of mainstream media prejudice. It is all too clear that the mainstream media takes as credible and supports as credible “what everybody knows” in that sense.
David Blue, there was a considerable cash prize put up for anybody who would provide evidence that Bush ever contacted Alabama National Guard. The prize was never collected. I never heard that there was any evidence of any sort that Bush was not AWOL during that time. Etc.
However, one fake document which claimed things that were almost certainly true, was widely regarded to somehow prove they were false because that document itself was fake. Very twisted logic there.
But then, Bush’s lack of military records from a long time ago didn’t say that much about what kind of president he’d make, just as Kerry’s military record from a long time ago didn’t say about him. All of it — all the stories from vietnam times — had the purpose of spin, of influencing votes by perceptions of old times. There isn’t much question that Bush was a sort of playboy back in those days, drinking and drugging and whoring around, but that doesn’t say how he’d be once he settled down. Revealing that stuff, or keeping it hidden, was all to influence votes that by rights shouldn’t have been influenced by that information even if it was available or successfully hidden.
J Thomas, your comments are full of unsubstantiated slanders.
J Thomas —
Analogies are over-used as analytical tools. If the point is, “we’ll never arrive at much certainty about the Beauchamp affair by focusing on similarities between it and supposed vagaries of the forged Rather memo case” … well, that’s true enough.
Most situation don’t have precedents that are so strikingly similar that they serve as an illuminating guide. Analogies suggest patterns for us to consider. That’s it.
Re: the Rather memos, your intimation that CBS’ performance was the result of a Rove-masterminded conspiracy of diabolical subtlety and astonishing clumsiness and stupidity just doesn’t account for the facts of the case. At a number of levels. Any reader who is familiar with the details of that story can figure this out for themselves. But this thread isn’t about Rathergate, or the Iluminati, or the Grassy Knoll, so I’ll leave it at that.
Memomachine —
I’ll disagree with your interpretation. Here’s a thought experiment (a hypothetical analogy, if you wish):
bq. I approach the editors of the Weekly Standard with a Diarist piece, “Shock Amnesty,” and they run it. In it, I reveal that a friend and I cynically joined the local Amnesty International chapter, though we think that the idea of “prisoners of conscience” is absurd. I recount how we went to a monthly AI meeting and mocked a survivor of the Guatemalan death squads. And how we mocked this person openly, with all the other Amnesty International members joining me in taunting this individual, finally driving him from the lecture hall in tears.
That last line changes the message of the paragraph. Absent that line, I was claiming, “My friend and I are lousy people.” Add the line, and the essay says, “My friend and I may be lousy people, but from the part I saw, Amnesty International is a thoroughly corrupt organization.”
Same thing with “Shock Troops.” Beauchamp’s confession that he’s a creep was simply a stepping stone for the point of his piece: “The Iraq War has corrupted the morals of an entire front-line unit.”
The corroborated woman may well step forward to finger Beauchamp as her tormentor. Wouldn’t surprise me. Also wouldn’t surprise me if he seized on an urban legend and embellished it.
It may turn out that Beauchamp and his friends capered about with pieces of skulls on their heads. If he did it, or if he adapted the story of the German soldiers in Afghanistan: could be either.
Likewise, the new dog-killing story may be reflective of how some guys like Beauchamp sneak their kicks, when they can get away with it.
Those anecdotes weren’t the story that creative writer Scott Beauchamp and TNR editor Franklin Foer were telling. The incidents were stepping stones, used to lay out the theme of an out-of-control, morally-degenerate infantry unit in Baghdad.
I could have sat in the back of the hall and mocked the death squad survivor, under my breath. Beauchamp could have mocked the woman in Kuwait. But even if these incidents are true, they are “true” in a way that undermines the picture that the word artist is painting for his audience.
That’s an aspect that many Beauchamp skeptics miss, I think.
Jim R tries again.
According to John Cole’s posting, he has driven a Bradley, although most of his experience was elsewhere. According to his website bio, he is a veteran of Gulf War One. In my book, that compares favorably to the knowledge obtained from playing with a toy[!] tank. May I suggest an auto-filter that can convert the acronym I have emphasized into AFAIDK automatically?
While we’re looking at that posting: after the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman stories, you’ll have to excuse my treating the Petraeus self-exoneration with a touch of skepticism.
And while we are looking at it some more:
Refresh my memory, isn’t this a site where the anti-war chickenhawk argument is usually described as ridiculous? How about this pro-war chicken argument? Mr Rockford: do you have any military service? Are you working out of a cubicle or (like one of the other Keyboard Kommandos who used to post here often), are you a middle-aged unemployed guy living in Mommie’s extra room? I would prefer to ignore posts from you because, with your Abu Ghraib denial and your inability to click through to Cole’s own website, you’re more weird than interesting, but I’ve come to like John Cole (since he became a Republican apostate), and he deserved better than your ignorant slanders.
However, one fake document which claimed things that were almost certainly true, was widely regarded to somehow prove they were false because that document itself was fake. Very twisted logic there.
I must have missed that. Maybe someone somewhere argued that this proved that Bush wasn’t AWOL, but I don’t recall ever seeing such an argument.
But then, I never had a strong opinion on whether or not Bush was AWOL (and still don’t). Furthermore, I never much cared, because Bush has always said that when he was young and stupid, he was young and stupid, and he (unlike John Kerry) wasn’t running on his youthful military record–he was running on his more-recent record as president.
‘Frankly, what was so funny to me about the thing was that the people who were pushing the “Bush is AWOL” story thought that it would damage him with his base, when in fact they were the only people who gave a rats patoot (and then only because of the political damage they thought it could do to their enemy, not because they have any intrinsic problems with soldiers going AWOL–many of them would probably laud that in general).
What Rath ergate proved to me was that some supposedly objective journalists were willing to fabricate, or overlook the fabrication of, documents to support their political agenda, just weeks before an election. It also proved to me that they were idiots. I think that there’s very sound logic behind that.
[This comment cross posted at Transterrestrial]
Andrew, put the shotgun down for a minute and take a fresh look at things.
TNR defenders have much derided critics for “playing with toy tanks”, but the truth is that engineers and designers play with such “toys” all the time, and learn very real facts from doing so.
But as I’ve said before, I think the speculation about what the Bradley driver could have seen is a waste of time, because Beauchamp doesn’t tell us where the driver was. He doesn’t say whether the driver was in the hatch or inside the vehicle in a semi-recumbent position, driving by periscope. He doesn’t say what the mission was, where they were going, or why the Bradley was being driven at all, so there is little to base a guess on.
The question is not what the driver saw, it’s what Beauchamp saw. Beauchamp says he saw two dogs run over (and piles on gruesome detail) and heard about the third one being run over. Never mind the driver – where was Beauchamp?
1. On foot in the street. It’s not likely that Beauchamp happened to be a pedestrian bystander when two different dogs were run over by the same driver in the same day.
2. On board the Bradley. You can’t see all the cool stuff the driver is running over from inside the passenger compartment. No would you be much amused if you could; tracked vehicles do not turn in smooth curves like cars with rack-and-pinion steering – turns are angular (steering is accomplished by differential power to the tracks) and a swerving cowboy can really bang up the boys in the back.
If Beauchamp was on the Bradley, he was in one of the two turret positions – gunner, or commander. Both of those seem unlikely. (It would help to clarify matters, incidentally, if we were told what Beauchamp’s MOS was. What does this earnest boy do in the Army?)
3. On a vehicle accompanying the Bradley. This seems to me to be the only reasonable possibility. Beauchamp could have been in a vehicle adjacent to the Bradley, where he had a good view of the gory details, and Beauchamp’s vehicle departed the convoy (or whatever it was) before the third dog was run over – an event that somebody advertised over the radio, according to Beauchamp.
Now, this little analysis does not lead to any knock-down conclusion. It does show the basis for how a TNR editor (with no knowledge of the Bradley IFV) could query this incident – “What were you doing when you saw this?” It also shows how TNR could clarify this incident to its readers if TNR believes it to be true. It does no good to say “It happened, believe it or not.” If it happened, they can easily complete the account by filling in Beauchamp’s blanks.
I suspect that such inquiries will end with the reader being told that Beauchamp didn’t really see any dogs run over, and probably didn’t see a soldier wear a skullcap. He just heard about it. Stuff happens in war, you know? Mix that stuff with Rear Echelon Paranoia and you’ve got a real horror story.
Well, that’s not journalism, and anybody at TNR would have to agree that it’s not journalism; it adds up to something that TNR should not have published and should apologize for.
Which leads to John Cole’s point, if I may call it such: Who the f–k cares?
As AMac pointed out, Beauchamp isn’t just telling war stories, he’s presenting a negative portrayal of the soldiers in his unit. It tells you a lot about somebody who thinks that’s no big deal.
We all have an interest in truthful and honest reporting. It’s the grist for our relentless mill. If I buy a box of soap flakes that’s doesn’t clean clothes, I have a goddamn right to complain – I’m the consumer. If the soap flakes come packaged in a snotty insult to the US Army, I’m entitled to an explanation.
I’m just waiting for my explanation.
Nortius-
Enough snark to float a battleship? Please… enough snark to float a small catamaran, tops.
That said, you’re right – Armed Liberal’s original post wasn’t particularly echo chamberish. I was referring more to the large number of commenters who swiftly disagreed with AL’s original post, even before “the Petraeus self-exoneration,” as AJL put it, came out.
What I saw then, and still see now, is a bunch of commenters who know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that TNR must be wrong – if they weren’t wrong about the Beauchamp existing, then they were wrong about what happened, and if they weren’t wrong about what happened, then they were wrong about how widely known it wasn’t and if they weren’t wrong about that, then then… etc.
And when you have an immediate chorus of voices nay-saying any challenge to their beliefs, as was the case here, I feel pretty comfortable calling that an echo chamber – and no, the occasional snark from myself, or John Cole, or anyone else, doesn’t stop that from being the case.
I also disagree with the implication that sarcasm somehow invalidates any argument it’s associated with. As far as destroying “explorations of the truth” , I’d suggest a moderate amount of sarcasm is actually much less destructive than Rockford et al’s endless assertions (largely unchallenged by supposedly more sensible conservatives) that liberals are all evil, full stop, end of story.
Finally, as for email addresses, I’d simply rather not, thanks all the same. If you really feel my post was so terrible that it needs to be called out and chastised, I’m perfectly ok with having that happen on the boards. That said, AL may still have an old email address of mine from this long-ago post, so you can get it from him if absolutely necessary.
Glen, I realize that engineers work with scale models. However, nothing in the Powerline article sounds like an automotive engineer working from an accurate scale model. Working backwards from the fact that Powerline’s “expert” didn’t know that the driver has access to display screens, I concluded he was a tank-driver wannabe who got his scale model at a toy store. I can buy a Ferrari scale model. I did once, as a matter of fact, for my kid who was ogling the neighbors’ real ones. Doesn’t mean we know crap about racing.
The rest of your post may be less silly than Powerline, but it’s the same idea: post-Rathergate, there just has to be some small gotcha that makes the evil liberals’ story totally collapse. The fact that the first set of gotchas (no such soldier because the article said “chow”, etc.) were all duds just means the Keyboard Kommandos have got to keep on looking.
You might Google ‘Leuchter Report‘ for an understanding of where amateur engineers looking for gotchas can end up.
Andrew, you missed my point completely.
You’re the one who is defending a political narrative, not the critics. You accuse others of trying to “gotcha” the narrative, yet you are anxious to discount any problems in order to preserve it.
I pointed out how a TNR editor with no technical knowledge would go about querying Beauchamp’s account. If TNR editors are unqualified to judge it, then they should not have printed it, period. I explained above why journalistic standards are everybody’s business. Though anyone who feels it isn’t their business is free to believe (or disbelieve) everything they read.
Some years ago I read an article in The Atlantic about the Israeli Merkava tank. In the article the author claimed that Merkava’s are equipped with rear-mounted magnets, so that in convoy each vehicle can pull the vehicle behind it, saving fuel! I’m not kidding.
Now you don’t have to be a Merkava driver, or even an engineer, to know why that doesn’t work. You just have to be what every serious journal claims to want – a discerning reader.
Things like that matter to some people. If it doesn’t matter to you, then I don’t see how you have a dog in this fight.
I’m not a regular Powerline reader, but it seems to me that the Bradley-scale-model question was overtaken by events–specifically the TNR’s August 2 “Statement”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070730&s=editorial080207 that A.L. references in the /Update to this post.
bq. one soldier who witnessed the incident described by Beauchamp, wrote in an e-mail: “How you do this (I’ve seen it done more than once) is, when you approach the dog in question, suddenly lurch the Bradley on the opposite side of the road the dog is on. The rear-end of the vehicle will then swing TOWARD the animal, scaring it into running out into the road. If it works, the dog is running into the center of the road as the driver swings his yoke back around the other way, and the dog becomes a chalk outline.”
This is a completely different dog-smushing procedure than what Beauchamp claimed in “Shock Troops.” So what point is being made by slamming Powerline for playing with scale-model toys? Is it, “Even though Beauchamp and TNR have abandoned the original claim of how dogs were sliced, it still could have happened that way”? If not, then what?
More and more, it seems, people who want to credit the truthfulness of “Baghdad Diarist” are working to refocus the discussion on the perceived shortcomings of Beauchamp’s critics. The deficiencies in the accounts themselves go unaddressed and unrebutted. Beauchamp’s champions also seem to be untroubled by the problematic conduct of TNR’s editorial staff, both before and after publication.
_More and more, it seems, people who want to credit the truthfulness of “Baghdad Diarist” are working to refocus the discussion on the perceived shortcomings of Beauchamp’s critics._
That’s certainly true for me. Beauchamp was there, reporting whatever he happened to report. He was telling the truth or he was lying.
His critics were not there. They don’t know what he saw. They make up stories about how what he claims is impossible, and then they object strongly to his _tone_. They object to the concept of “fake but accurate”.
And yet it seems to me that “fake but accurate” and “truthful but accurate” both amount to “accurate”. Beauchamp talks like the army is fraying from too much deployment, and gives details that might not support his claim. But the US army makes the same claim.
Beauchamp says soldiers sometimes run over dogs. It’s well known that at some times and places soldiers are under orders to destroy stray dogs, and other soldiers say that soldiers sometimes run over dogs. But no, Beauchamp is lying because he talks about running over dogs with a technique that might be different from another account.
If you put this sort of fine-tooth search for errors into Libby’s testimony, or Gonzales’s, etc, what possible conclusion could you get but guilty as sin?
I don’t have much interest in defending Beauchamp. It looks to me like after all this effort by bloggers he could easily be substantially correct on most details. Which still leaves his bad attitude open to criticism (and even punishment under UCMJ). What leaves me kind of bemused is how it all seems to have driven so many people crazy.
“Fake but accurate” doesn’t boil down to “accurate;” it boils down to “fake.”
If “fake but accurate” is accurate, then why should the fake document be allowed any influence? It’s a fake document. But the truth is still true, and if it’s an accurate fake document then it’s still accurate.
Our army is slowly disintegrating, and with continued large-scale deployment it will disintegrate faster. We will have a big redeployment because of that. One way or another we will have a large drawdown of troops by mid-2008. Is there anything controversial agout that claim?
Soldiers do sometimes run over dogs in iraq. Iraq has a lot of feral dogs that in the USA would be collected by animal disposal workers and euthanised. Some commands in iraq order soldiers to kill stray dogs for obvious reasons. Why would this be in any way controversial?
Wooo! He says a soldier has run over some stray dogs! He says one platoon in the army has shown some signs of low morale! He has a bad attitude! He must be lying about it all!
OK, he has a bad attitude. It just doesn’t meant that much. This is somebody who probably would not be in the military except we’re having recruitment problems and retention problems. His officers would have kept him in line except we’re having retention problems among noncoms and officers and maybe some of those guys are getting promoted a bit early. Any way you look at it, he’s a symptom of the problem.
He may be fake. His very existence shows that the claim of problems in the army are accurate.
But a bunch of guys are so insistent that it can’t be true that they refuse to look at it. They concentrate on calling him fake. They ignore that (apart from his attitude) he’s fundamentally accurate.
“And Beauchamp recants”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/08/beauchamp_recants.asp, Weekly Standard reports. Recants everything, too.
Note that Beauchamp recanted on the first day of the Army investigation, before TNR went online with the latest lies he’d fed them.
Worst of all, Beauchamp lied to all his loyal fans. I can’t imagine their anger right now.
J Thomas, all the things you posit as truisms can only be accepted as such if we can believe what we read about Iraq (and the state of the military in general).
The New Republic presented Beauchamp’s reports as being true. The New Republic is (an admittedly tarnished) part of the respectable media and are embraced by the left-of-center commentariat. Reports from people like Michael Totten and Michael Yon use (predominantly) real names and verifiable (or conversely falsifiable) events, yet are ignored by the commentariat as being unreliable or, more charitably, possibly as being unrepresentative (i.e. not conforming to the accepted wisdom of the left-of-center commentariat).
What I don’t understand is the source of your faith in the respectable media, all things considered.
“If “fake but accurate” is accurate, then why should the fake document be allowed any influence?”
Because, as I’ve so often noted, you are immune to the irony in the phrase. The point of mocking the phrase, “fake but accurate”, is that if your facts aren’t facts but fakes, the assumption of accuracy in your narrative is unwarranted.
The belief of those that mock people who use the phrase ‘fake but accurate’ as a defense is that all thier ‘facts’ are fakes.
Or in other words, people who argue ‘fake but accurate’ believe whatever they will regardless of the facts.
“Our army is slowly disintegrating…Is there anything controversial agout that claim?”
Yes. For example, the fact that we now have a 10 division army, when before the ’90’s we fielded an all volunteer 15 division army. Coupled with the fact that we are now spending as a percentage of our GDP less on the military than almost any point since the beginning of WWII, it strongly suggests that there is alot of redundancy and extra capacity in our society that would allow us to sustain a much larger war effort than what we are currently doing. Or in other words, strained is not nearly the same as disintegrating. And the big redeployment – if there is one in 2008 – is more likely to be done primarily for political than primarily for military ones.
Anyway, the narrative of Scott Beauchamps fundamental accuracy is unraveling. Soon the supporters of TNR will be reduced to saying that all the evidence of TNR’s folly is fakery and lies. Which is as much as to say that there is no evidence that could be presented which would persuade them of the basic untruthfulness of the narrative. Community based reality.
Stubborn, persistence in refusing to withdraw – and actually maintaining – vicious, inflammatory allegations supported by fakery and what “everybody” knows is mudslinging.
#83 from J Thomas:
There’s no use for an “if” anymore. Scott Thomas Beauchamp was a fraud, writing fiction with mere smidgins of truth for “authenticity” and to take in gullible readers. That’s it.
#83 from J Thomas:
The fact that it’s irrelevant and a distraction from the hopeless fakery of Scott Thomas Beauchamp and the eager and cooperative credulity of The New Rewpublic and the mainstream media when it comes to what suits their prejudices.
#83 from J Thomas:
Because it’s irrelevant and a distraction.
#83 from J Thomas:
This is like a clown capering and waving his arms with exclamation! points!!
Behind the capering clown, the obvious truth remains what it was.
Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a fake. So is The New Republic. Its regime of rigorous fact-checking is a lie.
And persistence in this mudslinging also diminishes the credibility of those engaged in it. And the mainstream media, which showed no interest in knocking down this fake, in exposing this mudslinging, is accordingly less credible.
#83 from J Thomas:
Symptoms of the problem, of chronic mudslinging and maintenance of what “everybody knows” are available for inspection in this thread.
#83 from J Thomas:
There is no “maybe”, and that’s not the “problem” that The New Republic was creating an impression existed.
This is just more goalpost-moving.
#83 from J Thomas:
He’s not fundamentally accurate, he’s phoney to the core. He slung a lot of mud at the soldiers serving alongside him.
And evasiveness on this is, in effect, continued mudslinging.
And as such, it forfeits credibility on a number of levels. If forfeits the credibility of later claims to be elevating the debate or trying to. It forfeits credibility on later claims that those who supported Scott Thomas Beauchamp argue honestly, in good faith. It forfeits the credibility of those who claim they check their work when we’ve seen, again and again, by results, that they don’t.
How many times are we supposed to believe that the dog ate The New Republic’s homework?
Subscribers should be canceling their subscriptions and demanding their money back. Because as it stands they’re paying real money for fake stories. If you tell a friend “this must be true, I read it in The New Republic” … that’s a bad joke. So what good is it to buy and read stuff that you can’t quote from with any confidence, and that you would be foolish even to let influence your own thoughts? Why is that worth money?
#85 from Mark Poling: “The New Republic presented Beauchamp’s reports as being true. The New Republic is (an admittedly tarnished) part of the respectable media and are embraced by the left-of-center commentariat. Reports from people like Michael Totten and Michael Yon use (predominantly) real names and verifiable (or conversely falsifiable) events, yet are ignored by the commentariat as being unreliable or, more charitably, possibly as being unrepresentative (i.e. not conforming to the accepted wisdom of the left-of-center commentariat).”
This is to the point. The maintenance of the mainstream media’s confected world of “what everybody knows” is a colossal bluff, a continued pitting of credentials, willingness to slur dissenters and groupthink on a grand scale against a competing paradigm of names, dates and facts.
And this is true even if you think the war in Iraq is unprofitable and the Americans ought not to persist in it. It’s not a matter of The New Republic’s having published something that’s been questioned because its policy implications would be unpalatable. The policy that would most likely be supported by those who took this fake story for truth – get out now! – might be wholly palatable, but the methods used to persuade people in that direction are still no good.
While the mainstream media acts like this, it deserves to be dismissed even by those who would like the policies it is angling for to be carried out, just because laziness, deception, sensationalism, chronic mudslinging and tail-covering rhetorical evasion and stonewalling are bad.
It sure is amazing how easily the TNR editors were suckered into this. It’s almost like they wanted his stories to be true more than they wanted the truth itself.
you know what really sucks about this whole affair, was that a staffer at TNR was canned because they fessed up that a lot of what was being reported by beuchamp wasn’t as legit as TNR was letting on.
I guess thats what “speaking truth to power” will get you on the left these days.
It’s almost like they wanted his stories to be true more than they wanted the truth itself.
The expression is “too good to check.”
_J Thomas, all the things you posit as truisms can only be accepted as such if we can believe what we read about Iraq (and the state of the military in general)._
Mark, the US military itself says that we can’t sustain the current level of deployment. I trust the media to report simple obvious things that the military tells them.
Similarly, the US military (and individual veterans) has reported the policy of killing feral dogs.
These should not be controversial. They are things that no reasonable person would deny.
_Scott Thomas Beauchamp was a fraud, writing fiction with mere smidgins of truth for “authenticity” and to take in gullible readers._
While I have no particular reason to believe him, I note that the controversy about his “truth” centers on three incidents that could easily have been true, that would be hard to check. What people particularly object to is his attitude, which is not a true/false issue.
Do you have any credible evidence that he was lying about the particular incidents?
J Thomas offers the strong postmodernist defense of “Shock Troops” in #81. I kind of admire him for posting it here, instead of at one of the many sites that has developed a Beauchamp cheering squad. The New Republic’s “The Plank” is one of those blogs. J Thomas’ #81 wouldn’t garner any huzzahs there, because he’s only writing down the wisdom that everybody already knows, anyway.
Postmodernism asserts that there is no knowable “truth,” and builds on the banal proposition that, therefore, any one version of events may be as good as any other. As long as the version in question aligns with the worldview of the left-wing intellectuals who promote postmodernism.
Useful discussion becomes impossible if any factual assertion is by definition Plausible (supports PoMo’s preconceived narrative) or Doubtful (favored by pro-Western hegemonists). Or if Logic is placed in the service of the same master.
Postmodern thinking is also particularly conducive to Conspiracy Theories, as has been demonstrated already on this thread with respect to Rathergate, as well as to the TNR affair.
With Beauchamp’s story continuing to disintegrate under scrutiny, his apologists continue to misrepresent the narrative’s theme. It wasn’t “U.S. soldiers commit bad acts during war, here are some examples.” It was “The bad acts I witnessed and participated in are illustrative of the moral depravity that describes my entire U.S. Army unit.”
The postmodernists and the polemicists willing to put any tool in service to their cause have gathered in the Fake But Accurate bunker. Even they are slipping out the “so what, it never mattered anyway” tunnel, before forming a new defensive perimeter around a less readily falsified meta-narrative.
Amac, you wrote that “J Thomas offers the strong postmodernist defense of “Shock Troops” in #81″ and yet in that post, Thomas, explicity states that “I don’t have much interest in defending Beauchamp.” A re-reading of #81 backs up Thomas’s claim. He is clearly aiming his remarks at critics of Beauchamp whose arsenal is paltry, in is view, and not defending Beauchamp as you claim.
It seems to me that your own comment is more akin to the–in my opinion–mischarcterization of postmodern theory that you present than is Thomas’s comment. You are using the very techniques that you are denouncing, and while I agree that those techniques are to be denounced, I find them neither in Thomas’s words nor in post-modern theory.
There may be one branch among the many branches that make up post-modern theory that, with a little bit of exageration here and a little bit of overlooking there, can be made to resemble your cartoonish description. However, to use that small piece to characterize the whole is intellectually dishonest and not very helpful in any attempt to get at the truth. What you have done is simply willful distortion to make one point of view seem stronger and more legitimate than it really is. It’s using a bogey man argument. Postmodernism is bad. J Thomas uses postmodernism. Thus J Thomas is wrong.
mark wrote in #95 —
bq. Amac, you wrote that “J Thomas offers the strong postmodernist defense of “Shock Troops” in #81″
Yes, I stand by that assertion. Interested readers should scroll up to #81 and see for themselves.
bq. and yet in that post, Thomas, explicity states that “I don’t have much interest in defending Beauchamp.” A re-reading of #81 backs up Thomas’s claim. He is clearly aiming his remarks at critics of Beauchamp whose arsenal is paltry, in is view, and not defending Beauchamp as you claim.
No. It is possible for J Thomas to write 20 or so comments at WoC that emphasize the credibility of Beauchamp or scoff at his critics, and insulate himself from Beauchamp and his account by stating “I don’t have much interest in defending Beauchamp.” Why must I take that latter claim as the first and last word on the subject?
“aiming his remarks at critics of Beauchamp whose arsenal is paltry” is defending Beauchamp’s account (“If you can’t argue the facts…”).
If J Thomas writes, “I don’t have much interest in defending Paris Hilton,” I’ll believe it, based on what a search of this site reveals. As far as Beauchamp:
* “Scott Thomas Beauchamp, Diarist,” 7/28/07, #s 2, 13, 14, 16, 30, 31, 35.
* “News: Good, Bad, and Fake,” 7/30/07, #s 19, 28, 32, 41, 46, 49.
* “John Quiggen, Scott Beauchamp,” 8/1/07, #s 31, 34, 37, 40.
* This thread, #s 20, 60, 63, 68, 81, 83, 92, 93.
“Postmodernism” was devised some decades ago as a new way to approach literary criticism.
I don’t have much interest in literary criticicm.
For that matter, neither do most of postmodernism’s detractors. Trouble starts when PoMo’s adherents use its tenets to interpret history, current events, or science. It is held up to ridicule because it is deserving of riducule when employed in these ways. Google “Sokal affair.” See “this recent David Thompson blog post”:http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2007/07/the-floating-ph.html and its comment thread for a dissection of the absurdity that postmodernism promotes. And “this one,”:http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2007/07/egalitarian-epi.html too.
bq. What you have done is simply willful distortion to make one point of view seem stronger and more legitimate than it really is.
I’ll leave that to readers to decide.
AMac,
I am interested in literary criticism, and some of us who study (or have studied) literature hate postmodernism at least as much as you do. Postmodernists have maitained that, in the words of one famous critic, “Preferring Shakespeare to Three’s Company is like prefering a hoagie to a pizza.” Others attempt to turn Shakespeare or TS Eliot into left-wing radicals by “reading against the grain” or “exploring the gaps” in their work. In other words, by reading what they didn’t say (neat trick, huh?).
And mark, I’ve read Derrida, Foucault, Spivak, Jameson, Rorty, Fish, Greenblatt and a host of their epigones. When you distill their arguments from their obscurantism, AMac’s characterization is entirely fair.
AMac, I don’t know much about postmodernism. Some years ago I read some online essays about pomo by John Barnes. Barnes was writing about pomo in literary theory.
The context was that in the modernist tradition, literary scholars would try to determine what authors _really_ meant. They would try to psychoanalyse novelists based on their work. The scholar would claim to know more than the author himself about what the author intended. Since after all authors forget what they were doing when they wrote, and they often lack deep psychoanalytic self-knowledge.
In contrast the postmodernists said it didn’t that much matter what the author intended things to mean. Each reader reconstructs the meaning inside his own head, from his own background. The author had an intended audience, and others may get results he didn’t intend. But what the audience actually gets is worth at least as much attention as the author’s subconscious.
I found it fascinating to see how John Barnes laid it out, but I wouldn’t want to spend years exploring the finer details and when I asked a few good questions that prompted Barnes to ask if I’d like to get a masters in the topic I quickly declined.
I think it would be very hard to get reliable truth about iraq. Not because of pomo theory, which looks unreliable to me. Because first, the media are trying to tell a story their readers will understand more than they’re trying to get at truth. It would be dangerous for them to make much effort to confirm their stories — they could easily be killed trying — so they mostly don’t.
Similarly, our military sets an extremely low priority on telling civilians the truth. Their top priority is winning, as it should be. Any truth which might work against the war effort must be suppressed.
And embeds are chosen carefully by the military to avoid problems, and then they are sent to units that are supposed to look good. And they censor things the military wants them to censor. Consider the example of “Kevin Sites”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6556034/.
An NBC embed was shooting live coverage and accidentally covered the shooting of unarmed prisoners. It was an honest mistake, it could have happened to anybody. He didn’t intend to report that. But he generated a whole lot of anger against him. As I remember the story, some other unit had taken a mosque and took some wounded prisoners. They left the wounded prisoners lying on the floor when they left the mosque to go elsewhere, and nobody else bothered to pick them up and get them treatment or internment. Some days later a different unit took the same mosque. A marine walked by some corpses and one of them moved, and he started shooting them without noticing that they were wounded POWs. He thought they were faking dead hoping they wouldn’t be killed. It was an honest mistake, it could have happened to anybody. But since it got reported to the world, the marines had to go to a lot of trouble investigating and he got punished and so on. Everybody was mad at the embed who reported it, even though he wouldn’t have done it if he’d known what was going on.
The embeds are honest reporters who honestly self-censor themselves, who are put into places things will tend to look good. Their results provide a lot of interesting local color but for conclusions about how the war is going they should be heavily discounted.
Iraqis will tell us all sorts of things depending on their own needs. No particular reason to expect truth from them either.
The central truth I see about iraq is that things are *so bad* that we can get no trustworthy information abouy how bad they are.
J Thomas,
Thanks for your response. I do not think your word choices with regard to the Kevin Sites incident are entirely correct, but I don’t have time to check. Unfortunately your characterizations have proven inaccurate in the past (specifically regarding Beauchamp). As always, caveat lector.
Specificially, you describe Sites as an honest reporter who honestly self-censors himself, and made an honest mistake reporting something he didn’t intend to report. Really? Is that what he said at the time, or says now? Could be, but not what I recall.
“It was an honest mistake, it could have happened to anybody. He didn’t intend to report that.” I think war is ugly, Sites knew that, and he reported the ugliness he saw. What would he say about what sounds like snark?
“nobody else bothered to pick them up” Bothered? Implies wanton negligence, not understandable mistake in the heat of battle.
“It was an honest mistake, it could have happened to anybody.” Creepy choice of descriptors.
”
even though he wouldn’t have done it if he’d known what was going on.” Says who? Sites or NBC or the Marines or you? On what basis?
The overall choice as the Sites incident as an appropriate metaphor for viewing the Beauchamp incident is wrong. What Sites reported really happened.
_”even though he wouldn’t have done it if he’d known what was going on.” Says who?_
I remembered him saying it. In the particular link I gave, he didn’t say that. He said,
bq. I considered not feeding the tape to the pool — or even, for a moment, destroying it. But that thought created the same pit in my stomach that witnessing the shooting had. It felt wrong. Hiding this wouldn’t make it go away. There were other people in that room. What happened in that mosque would eventually come out.
But of course, if he didn’t report it, almost certainly no one would report it. There was no one there except marines, and him, and a few iraqi POWs. If he hadn’t been there almost certainly no one would have reported it. If they had reported it to their unit commander, it would not have gone any further. It was an obvious honest mistake.
He went 6 months unemployed after that incident, so he had plenty of time to reconsider and say that he wouldn’t have done it if he’d known, and he wouldn’t do it again. Several of his explanations have turned into dead links. But more recently he’s said that he did the right thing.
Here’s an interesting link:
“link1”:http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1281423/posts
The general theme was that he’s a traitor for reporting something that made the marines look bad.
J Thomas,
Thanks for the clarifications. “link1” goes to Free Republic, one of those places where people say the darndest things. They exist, Left and (in this case) Right.