The journalistic Romper Room that is The New Republic has belched forth another seminal piece that future historians will use to chart the once great magazine’s decline into extinction. Jonathan Chait, who at 35 years-old qualifies as a grey eminence at TNR, has published a little love note to the Weekly Standard titled “The Thuggery of William Kristol.”
Now it’s true that when Bill hits Boston, we often swing by Morton’s (where we get a complimentary cordial) and then terrorize Boston in my pimped out Honda Element with our posse of Crazy Goldy, Young Joey and the Professor in tow. I make no apologies for this conduct; it’s how we neocons roll.
But Chait doesn’t base his charges of thuggery based on mine and Bill’s notorious gangsta exploits. Instead, he charges Bill Kristol with being a thug because of his handling of the Beauchamp Affair:
The topic was The New Republic's decision to publish an essay by Scott Beauchamp, an American soldier serving in Iraq, detailing some repugnant acts he said he and his comrades committed. Legitimate questions have been raised about this essay's veracity. (We've been publishing updates on our continuing efforts to get answers to them at tnr.com.) But Kristol rushed past these questions, immediately declaring the piece a "fiction." Offering up his interpretation of why tnr would publish such slanders, he concluded, in an editorial titled, "They Don't Really Support the Troops":
“Having turned against a war that some of them supported, the left is now turning against the troops they claim still to support. They sense that history is progressing away from them--that these soldiers, fighting courageously in a just cause, could still win the war, that they are proud of their service, and that they will be future leaders of this country.”
First, I wish the kids at TNR could begin reading the same playbook. Franklin Foer called Beauchamp’s tales “mild practical jokes.” Now Chait has elevated them to “repugnant acts.” At this rate, one of the other enfants terrible at TNR will probably mention Jengis Khan some time next week.
Next, it’s odd that Chait condemns Kristol for thuggery over a dispute in which Kristol was completely correct. TNR did publish a raft of lies that effectively slandered the troops. Everyone with any military background caught the unmistakable whiff of bullshat when they first looked at the Beauchamp Diarists. So, too, did virtually everyone without a military background who hadn’t checked their critical faculties at the door because they personally knew the author.
Lastly, there is Chait’s childish moving of the goalposts, clumsily conjoined with his desperate efforts to change the subject. You’ll note that he is oddly non-committal regarding the Diarists’ accuracy even though TNR’s posse editors (of which he is one) has been doggedly pursuing the truth of the matter for five weeks now and pronounced themselves vindicated at least a couple of times. Later in the essay, Chait denounces “Kristol's assumption that to concede that troops do terrible things in a war is to denounce the war as a whole.”
I don’t want to speak for Kristol here, but there’s a good chance we’re of a like mind regarding this last disingenuous assertion. I’ve said virtually every time I addressed this matter that TNR’s original sin was publishing the sociopathic exploits of one anomalous soldier without putting those exploits into context of the 160,000 men and women who are serving honorably in Iraq. No one is saying that out of a population of 160,000 troops there won’t be some really rotten apples. But we are saying that those 160,000 troops as a unit are the finest people that America has to offer. They have sacrificed much to serve their country and are serving heroically. The fact that TNR published Beauchamp’s bogus exploits and ignored the countless milbloggers who write better and more honestly was scandalous and slanderous. The additional facts that Beauchamp’s essays are a pack of lies and that TNR disingenuously tried to defend them have only heightened the scandal.
THERE’S ANOTHER LITTLE essay today that touches on the Beauchamp scandal that also signals something of a turning point. Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias were pretty much the only two bloggers silly enough to man the barricades on The New Republic’s behalf. Today, Sullivan steps down. Stealthily. In a post titled “Victor Davis Hanson, Fabulist”, Andrew writes, “Yes, Victor Davis Hanson is right in some respects. Some things that have been published in The New Republic are things that no one should believe. The more ambitious fabulist is not Scott Beauchamp, however. It's Victor Davis Hanson.”
VDH can of course defend himself, and Andrew doesn’t make any sort of case that VDH has lied about anything. In Andrew’s world, “lying” is sometimes employed as a term of art meaning “saying something I don’t like.” Regardless, did you catch that he called Scott Beauchamp a fabulist? True a less ambitious fabulist than Victor Davis Hanson, but a fabulist nonetheless.
The New Republic is clearly out of friends just as surely as it is out of ammo. When you’ve stooped to calling Bill Kristol a thug, as I think my ace PhotoShop guy Festivus brilliantly illustrates, you’ve officially jumped the shark.
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