Beauchamps; it ain’t over yet

I pretty much put the Beauchamps story behind me, it was worth a lot of traffic, I met some new people and I made my point – an indisputable point. My last word on Scott Thomas Beauchamps was “Told ya”.

Well now I read from Little Green Footballs that The New Republic can’t believe its lyin’ eyes;

We’ve talked to military personnel directly involved in the events that Scott Thomas Beauchamp described, and they corroborated his account as detailed in our statement. When we called Army spokesman Major Steven F. Lamb and asked about an anonymously sourced allegation that Beauchamp had recanted his articles in a sworn statement, he told us, “I have no knowledge of that.” He added, “If someone is speaking anonymously [to The Weekly Standard], they are on their own.”

And the left still clings to the fairie tales of Beauchamps; from the Washington Post;

Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at George Washington University, called the Army’s refusal to release its report “suspect,” adding: “There is a cloud over the New Republic, but there’s one hanging over the Army, as well. Each investigated this and cleared themselves, but they both have vested interests.”

See, the Army is “suspect” more than the New Republic is suspect for their shoddy journalistic procedures – especially if you check with “journalism” teachers. Um, I wonder why that is?

Even the New York Times gets a quote exhonerating the troops;

“We are not going into the details of the investigation,” Maj. Steven F. Lamb, deputy public affairs officer in Baghdad, wrote in an e-mail message. “The allegations are false, his platoon and company were interviewed, and no one could substantiate the claims he made.”

And yet, the NYT still doubts the Army’s statement. Why? Well, for the same reasons they think President Bush did cocaine and went AWOL – there’s no evidence supporting it, so it must be true.

Any halfwit who spent even a day in the Army knows that those stories Beauchamps wrote are false. Especially since some of the stories were written before Beauchamps even got to Iraq (even New Republic admits that the melted-face contractor story supposedly happened in Kuwait while Beauchamps’ unit was staging for deployment to Iraq- if it happened at all). The Onion called it Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome back in November.

Regardless, the damage is done – both to our troops reputation and to the New Republic. The Beauchamp Tales will be spun at every anti-war rally from now until the troops come home and repeated millions of times on the internet as reasons we shouldn’t support the troops – just like the “Bush was AWOL” and “Bush the coke-head” tales get repeated ad nauseum.

Personally, I’d really like to take the high road, like Baldilocks – one of the classiest ladies on the internet – but I’m afraid if I ever bump into Beauchamps…well, he’d better practice begging for mercy now. And falling down and ducking.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Media, Politics, Society, Support the troops, Terror War