Excellent post! Mr. Chait's attack is not only intemperate, but ill-timed, inasmuch as it only intensifies the feeling that the New Republic is grasping at straws.

I do, however, have one critique: The bloggers that are putting pressure on the TNR editors to release the results of their investigation, should not forget to apply the same pressure to the United States Military to release the details of its own investigation. After all, the military has made the extraordinary (and for TNR, damning) claim that there is no substance to the tales told by Scott Beauchamp. Gaining access to (at least some) details of the military's investigation would most likely allow bloggers to put the final nail in TNR's coffin.

Additionally, the military should be asked to clear up the issue of whether or not the Weekly Standard's report concerning a signed statement by Beauchamp, retracting his stories, is accurate.

All things considered, transparency should be the name of the game here. We would all be served well by having access to the results of the investigations done by TNR, as well as the military.

Lamm, the military cannot legally release any more information without Beauchamp's permission, due to privacy regulations on personnel matters.

Since this is apparently not going to a public court-martial, but is handled administratively, the proceedings are confidential, and only Beauchamp can waive that confidentiality.

And he's not giving that permission, nor talking to anyone himself, although he is free to do so.

Ari,

I do not think the military can legally release that information. Whether by policy or by law employers can not release personnel records. It is up to Mr. Beauchamp to do so. Beauchamp needs to be transparent.

I believe that CY's on their radar because TNR and parent Co. are checking (and hoping) to see if this is going away (yet). Please don't let up!

how dare tnr respond to kristol's outrageously disingenuous assertions about their motives. for shame!

Chait's article is merely a flash pot intended to distract his readers from the Beauchump mess. However, it is interesting that TNR has now entered into Phase 2 of what I call "The Clinton Defense":
1. We did nothing wrong!
2. Well, you're guilty too!
3. Move on already, that's old news!

Personally I still think TNR's editor Franklin Foer will be Fredo-ed on the Friday before Labor Day weekend. Expect a post-Labor Day defense of, "can't we talk about something current?"

http://exurbanleague.com/2007/08/22/beauchump-scandal-enters-phase-two.aspx

Trackbacked by The Thunder Run - Web Reconnaissance for 08/22/2007
A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.

Congrats as ever to CY and everyone keeping the pressure on. However, at this point I wonder how much more TNR can lose by brazening it out.

Why not keep Foer on, while maintaing TNR's aggrieved innocence, then push him out in a year or so for unrelated reasons? Would honesty be better for them in the long run compared to the damage TNR suffers if it admits that once again it has printed fabrications?

Unless someone can take TNR to court, maybe TNR is better off stonewalling.

The article appears on TNR's table of contents as "The Thuggery of William Kristol: Complexity is weakness. Dissent is treason. What neoconservatism has become" and the article closes by calling Kristol a thug.

Which only shows Chait to be an apparatchik for a corrupt organization.

Intrigued by Jon Chait's article, The Thuggery of Bill Kristol, I began searching for evidence of the neocon's bad behavior. Imagine how shocked I was to find a photograph from a recent Weekly Standard cruise proving Chait's thug assertion:
http://exurbanleague.com/2007/08/22/thug-life-4-real.aspx

Kristol is hardcore, man.

Amazingly arrogant and hypocritical - but what else would you expect from a writer, Chait, whose greatest previous contribution to American letters was an essay about his seething, very personal hatred of the President?

Article #2 on their web offering today: "Freedom's False Ring" by Eric Rauchway, capsuled as "America's hypocritical impulse to remake the world."

So, their first article is a blatantly hypocritical hit piece against one of their critics, and the second is a typical TNR attack on someone else's supposed hypocrisy. This time it's the whole dang country that another TNR web writer is after, but, all in all, it's just snide on top of snide, as usual.

Just when you thought that the vast continent of moral bankruptcy to the point of self-parody had been fully mapped, TNR discovers new territories.

I swear to you all, it really was possible to read TNR once upon a time, even to open it up at the local coffee shop without a feeling of embarrassment.

Wethal and Rick are correct. The military can not, by law, release any more information than they have already released.

No one is keeping STB from talking but STB. And no one is working hard to cover anything up except TNR.

CK -- I quite believe you. Again, I wonder if TNR is simply being the magazine it wants to be, or perhaps feels it has no other choice to be.

Following the STB affair has impressed upon me the large reservoir of Americans for whom "Shock Troops" was spot-on, never mind the criticism or contradictions, and anyone who says different is just a wingnut.

Why shouldn't TNR play to its strengths with this audience?

Wethal (and others),

I think what you are referring to is information concerning the signed statement. From what I understand, the military is, indeed, prohibited from clearing that up at this time. But does that apply to the rest of their investigation?

No matter, the conservative blogosphere is already doing a more-than-adequate job exposing this hoax for what it is.

A comment over at QandO:

Speaking of PVT Beauchamp.
I checked out his AKO account back when he first introducted himself. I found that he was listed as a PV2 and much was made of the fact by others that he had been a PFC but must have been busted to PV2 prior to his journey into journalism.
I checked his AKO information a few days ago. It still lists his unit as 1/18th however his rank is now listed as PV1.
So that, at least to me, answers the question of what punishment he got. Looks like an ART 15, reduction in rank to PV1, and who knows if he got extra duty or loss of any more pay.

It appears from this that Beauchamp got busted down a rank.

I had thought that Chait left TNR some time ago, as he appears regularly in the LAT. One good thing about this shmuck is he does, credit to him, have the stones to appear regularly on the Hewitt show. I don't think he's been on lately and haven't seen him mentioned on the HH site. Certainly, Hugh would not shirk from asking him the relevant questions. This thing ain't going anywhere and the reason is simple: this imbroglio DOES just what Kristol and others claim... exposes the true depravity of these critters we know as Liberals. But they can't keep the mask on much longer. It chafes.

Tully, I'm not really sure that there IS an answer for THE NEW REPUBLIC. For years now, ever since the evil "thug" Kristol got THE WEEKLY STANDARD off the ground, TNR has increasingly been forced to choose sides, and is naturally pushed to the left. TNR could have instead fought the STANDARD for a bigger share of the center, including in particular the center right on foreign policy, but when President Bush and the war in Iraq were at 70+% popularity, there was a lot more room to maneuver.

Chait's an interesting figure in this both because he appears to lack writerly impulse control, and also because, when he's not in bruised-feelings mode, he can come across as thoughtful and open-minded. He took some heat a few weeks ago, for instance, for daring to suggest that his political allies might want to consider how they'd react if the surge strategy did work. I think that this latest piece speaks volumes not just about his own uncertain predicament, being intimately tied to a troubled enterprise under heavy fire, but about a larger state of confusion at TNR - not just over how to handle the Beauchamp affair, but over the magazine's future, at minimum its political purpose and direction, possibly its very existence.

Pretty lame attack from Chait, who's certainly smart enough to be capable of mustering stronger arguments. Well, usually; in this case, I suppose that's all he's got. It wasn't so many years ago that the New Republic still produced decent journalism; in a way, it's sad to see it in this state.

What a novel approach it is to "distract us away from the magazine's editorial deceptions" by addressing those same "editorial deceptions" at the very beginning of the piece!

They're evil geniuses over there at TNR, and make no mistake.

My questions for TNR are:

Have you asked Scott Beauchamp to sign a waiver allowing the Army to release his statement (allegedly a full retraction) and other details of the investigation?

If you asked him, what did he say?

If you didn't ask, why not?

I don't think TNR had a sinister political agenda in publishing Beauchamp. But they screwed up badly in not getting something with Iraq experience -- or common sense -- to check his assertions. Then they gravely compounded the error by putting more energy into ass covering than into determining the truth about Beauchamp's stories.

Some of the people who've gone after TNR and Beauchamp have a political agenda; some don't. What counts is that they've poked big holes in Beauchamp's credibility on everything's he's written -- I'm dubious about the Al Qaeda tongue amputation too -- and TNR has not acknowledged that they screwed up.

TNR = Mother Jones...

I'm not sure if anyone has been rude enough to point out yet that Chait was already on the staff of TNR at the time of the Stephen Glass affair almost 10 years ago, and actually shared a byline with Glass on at least one story. (Though obviously, it was not one of the pieces that Glass had fabricated entirely out of thin air.)

And another bit of Chait trivia: In the movie Shattered Glass, most of the TNR staffers portrayed were highly disguised, fictionalized, and in some cases composite versions of the real people involved. (I believe that Mike Kelly, Chuck Lane, and Glass himself were the only "real-life names" used.)

Jon Chait himself was gender-switched to become the character "Amy Brand" -- played by Melanie Lynskey, who's best known as Kate Winslet's mousy co-star in the fabulous Heavenly Creatures.

Chait says:

"We've been publishing updates on our continuing efforts to get answers to them at tnr.com."

"been publishing updates" is a bit of a stretch, since the last one was almost a month ago, and contained no verifiable statements about their "continuing efforts," just "trust us, we're working on it, but so far it looks like we'll stand by STB." In other words, this assertion has the same arrogant, dismissive tone, and plays as loosely with the facts, as the "updates" themselves.

....and TNR has not acknowledged that they screwed up.

TNR still hasn't told it's readers that the Army has investigated and come to a diametrically opposed conclusion. They haven't told them anything in 10 days.

I think the next news will be hearing out of this is Frank Foer's sudden desire to "spend more time with family."

The loony Left's newest convert and all around nutjob, John Cole over at Balloon Juice, has a contrary view, opining that: The Chait article is an "[e]xcellent piece....on the increasingly unstable folks at the Weekly Standard..."

I've been told that Cole has a job teaching at a university, which I guess speaks volumes about the current sorry state of the US educational system.

Me thinks that this whole episode calls for a new "slogan";

Beauchamp Lied, TNR Died.

Jack,
Maybe Beauchamp lied, TNR cried. Then, perhaps, died. A truly pathetic spectacle to be sure.

Sorry, Chris

Maybe He LIED, (won't go into qual's) isn't an answer, He did.

If Chait and TNR were upset and vented their furstration at Kristol, you can bet dollars to donuts that they will react to the possible busting of their "budding Hemingway" with even more vitriol.

This is all part of TNR as "victim".

The question that TNR will try to obscure .. who is the victimizer ?

Of course, it is the fabulist, Mr. Beauchamp.

Nothing will change for TNR. They have a subscription base of hardcore lefties who are getting just what they want from the mag. What incentive do they have to change?

(notropis made this point above, but it is worth repeating):

I was surprised to see Chait claim that TNR is "publishing updates". I realized that maybe I was unfair (thinking they were steonewalling), so I went to TNR, searched on "Beauchamp" to read these recent updates.

Nothing recent.
And what's there isn't very informative.

I'm not quite as ready as you to dismiss everything Beauchamp as lies - my main point is that there are enough questions that the burden of the proof is on TNR. Not on the army, not even on Beauchamp - frankly, what he has to say is uninteresting in itself - what is important is that TNR wove a narrative, and they have the responsibility to back it up or back off.

And no blaming Beauchamp for clamming up - nor can they claim that the Army must speak. TNR spoke, TNR must support their own claim. It isn't an impossible task - the narrative involves literally dozens of people - other people in the Bradley, other people in the mess tent, other people who saw the boy. Find them, get their statements on record, and either support the TNR narrative with solid evidence or come clean and concede the narrative was a fiction.

Well said, Phil! The burden of proof is on TNR and they won't even own up to that.

>What incentive do they have to change?

However, TFerg's question is mine too. If TNR were truly concerned with responsibility and integrity, they would have handled this scandal differently from the beginning, and not by piling up further lies and evasions on top of Beauchamp's. Nonetheless, TNR does not lack for defenders, who similarly evade the issues with counter-attacks and uncritical thinking.

Unless there is some clear, unavoidable and harsh consequence for TNR's stonewalling, I see no reason for them to change.

So many of Beauchamp's claims have been exposed as lies that the reasonable position is now to treat him as an habitual liar and either ignore him or require that he prove everything he says.

"So much for the promise to 'release the full results of our search when it is completed'."

I expect that TNR's intention is to complete their investigation about the same time that O.J. finishes searching America's golf courses for the killer of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. (Or perhaps they will simply wait until most people have forgotten all the details and then release a mendacious report of the "The Narrative Was Right, but the Facts Were Wrong" variety, whitewashing their behavior while smearing their betters.)

Or perhaps they will simply wait until most people have forgotten all the details and then release a mendacious report of the "The Narrative Was Right, but the Facts Were Wrong" variety, whitewashing their behavior while smearing their betters

More likely TNR won't bother even admitting to wrong facts beyond the conceded relocation of the burn victim anecdote (which is almost certainly not true either).

Unless the Army releases the recantation the Weekly Standard says Beauchamp made, I see no reason for TNR to acknowledge anything.

Huxley, I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television, but my understanding is that the Army is legally prohibited from releasing it without Beauchamp's permission.

However, TNR is not legally prohibited from releasing the names of the people they claim to have spoken to, yet they have not done so.

I understand that; I did read the earlier responses too. I mentioned it as a hypothetical case which might force an admission out of TNR. Otherwise, as I say, I see no reason for TNR to acknowledge anything. If someone sees differently, I would like to hear from them.

It bothers me that there really don't seem to be consequences for TNR as along as it maintains a sufficient readership which similarly favors an agenda over facts and ethics.

i cant believe you people are this dumb...bush obvously set up tnr because they had supported his illegal iraq war and then learned the truth and told people...so to punish them the shrub president had his nsa agents set up scott as the perfect writer and those artecals were probably written in the oval office

I can't believe how difficult it is to tell whether an anti-Bush, anti-war rant is the real thing or a parody making fun of anti-Bush, anti-war people.

Did the NSA also arrange for Elspeth Reeve, one of the TNR factcheckers, to fall in love and marry Scott Beauchamp? Those cynical bastards!

Huxley, in the minds of these "troofers," the NSA probably used a love potion.