The New Republic Gets Caught Again…

William Kristol , in an article due out in the 7/30 edition of the Weekly Standard:

Cindy Sheehan, mother of a soldier who was killed in Iraq, emerged on the American political scene two years ago. Distraught and unstable, she was shamelessly exploited by opponents of George W. Bush and the war while such exploitation seemed to pay political benefits. When she became an embarrassment, she, like others before her, was tossed onto the trash heap of history by her progressive minders.

That exploitation becomes far more problematic when you consider that the woman demonstrably was unstable even before Casey Sheehan became a soldier.

Sheehan was useful to the antiwar left in a particular way. As Jonathan Cohn put it in the September 12, 2005, New Republic, “Sheehan’s value isn’t as a barometer of public opinion or as a source of foreign policy wisdom. It’s as proof of one very simple point: that a person can criticize the war and still support the troops.”

It’s unclear that Sheehan was particularly interested in “supporting the troops”–unless one means by that lamenting the fate of the troops as victims. The fact that relatively few soldiers see themselves as victims, the fact that few families understand their loved ones’ service and sacrifices in that light–that didn’t matter. What mattered to the left was that it was dangerous politically not to “support the troops.” Of course the antiwar left hated what the troops were doing, fighting the enemy in Iraq, and they hated the troops’ goal, victory in Iraq. So “supporting the troops” meant feeling sorry for them, or pretending to–something antiwar politicians and media did with great hand-wringing and hoopla.

Kristol slides right by something here… something kinda crucial: seeing the troops as “victims” is directly in line with the overall mantra of the left, these days, where everyone is a victim, a victim that needs liberal democrats in power to solve their problems.  Of course, a close examination of those whom the left has adopted as “victims” is less than encouraging; Victims they have remained.  Blacks, for example, have become a permanent class, which are necessary for liberal Democrats to remain in any kind of power whatever.

Kristol does strike to the heart of the matter here, however:

…the “support-the-troops-but-oppose-what-they’re-doing” position has become increasingly untenable. How can you say with a straight face that you support the troops while advancing legislation that would undercut their mission and strengthen their enemies?

You can’t. So those on the cutting edge of progressive opinion are beginning to give up on even pretending to support the troops. Instead, they now slander the troops.

Two progressive magazines have taken complementary approaches in this effort. In its July 30 issue, the Nation has a 24-page article based on interviews with 50 Iraq veterans. The piece allegedly reveals “disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops in Iraq”–indeed, it claims that the war has “led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis.” Needless to say, the anecdotal evidence in the article comes nowhere close to supporting this claim. There are a few instances of out-of-control behavior, some routine fog-of-war and brutality-of-war incidents, and much that is simply trivial. The picture is unpleasant, as one would expect–but it comes nowhere close to living up to the authors’ billing: “The war the vets described is a dark and even depraved enterprise.”

Herein, we see the dark underbelly of the left… Which, for so long, has been hiding underneath the “we support the troops” mantra.

Kristol then goes on to speak to the recent slander piece in the liberal paper…”The New Republic”, entitled “Shock Troops”. Says he:

The New Republic, in its July 23 issue, takes a different tack. Its slander of American soldiers appears to be fiction presented as fact, behind a convenient screen of anonymity.

A column entitled “Shock Troops” is said to be the work of “Scott Thomas”–“the pseudonym for a soldier currently serving in Baghdad.” “Thomas” colorfully describes three sets of alleged misdeeds he and his buddies committed in Baghdad: They humiliate a woman in a military dining hall who has been disfigured in an IED explosion (the woman “wore an unrecognizable tan uniform, so I couldn’t really tell whether she was a soldier or a civilian contractor”); they discover human remains and one private spends a day and night playing around with a child’s skull (“which even had chunks of hair”), amusing his fellow soldiers; and one private routinely drives a Bradley Fighting Vehicle recklessly and uses the vehicle to kill stray dogs.

My colleague Michael Goldfarb raised questions about this account in a July 18 post on THE WEEKLY STANDARD website, asking for assistance from soldiers and veterans in assessing the truth of the stories told by “Scott Thomas.” Within a day, dozens of active duty soldiers and veterans had come forward to point out errors, implausibility, and indeed the well-nigh-impossibility (in the case of the Bradley) of what was claimed. The editors of the New Republic provided to Goldfarb a couple of allegedly corroborating details–for example, the name of the Forward Operating Base, FOB Falcon, where the taunting of the badly disfigured female IED victim was said to have taken place. Soldiers who served at the base have come forward to say no such woman has been seen there.

There’s far more in the way of discrepancies with the story, of course.  Indeed the number of these discrepancies as gotten so bad, McQ over at Q&O points up:

From The New Republic via their blog “The Plank” in reference to this:

Several conservative blogs have raised questions about the Diarist “Shock Troops,” written by a soldier in Iraq using the pseudonym Scott Thomas. Whenever anybody levels serious accusations against a piece published in our magazine, we take those charges seriously. Indeed, we’re in the process of investigating them. I’ve spoken extensively with the author of the piece and have communicated with other soldiers who witnessed the events described in the diarist. Thus far, these conversations have done nothing to undermine—and much to corroborate—the author’s descriptions. I will let you know more after we complete our investigation. —Franklin Foer

Anyone surprised?

Look; it should surprise nobody that the avidly leftist New Republic is against our actions in Iraq. The reasons are clear; a Democrat isn’t in the White House.

Well, no, not particularly.  This is, I think, of a piece with the remainder of the slander that has been tossed in the direction of the troops that these liberals supposedly support.  And of course, The New Republic, for it’s own part, couldn’t be bothered to check up on its own sources, until such time as everybody else in the world had poked holes in the story.  Now they are “investigating”.  In other words, they’re waiting to see just how bad the damage to this story is, before they react. The pattern is well established, as Howard Kurtz points out:

The issue of veracity is especially sensitive for the New Republic, which fired associate editor Stephen Glass in 1998 for fabrications that editors concluded had appeared in two-thirds of his 41 articles.

Foer called the soldier “an amazing resource — a guy who’s on the front lines, who has a gift for observation and can write.”

***

As the criticism mounts, Foer says he sees an ideological agenda.

“A lot of the questions raised by the conservative blogosphere boil down to, would American soldiers be capable of doing things like the things described in the diarist. The practical jokes are exceptionally mild compared to things that have been documented by the U.S. military. Conservative bloggers make a bit of a living denying any bad news that emanates from Iraq.”

Scott at Powerline correctly notes:

Foer’s last point does not come close to doing justice to the questions rasised about the article. And one might respond that the left makes a bit of a living promoting calumnies and hyperbolic condemnations of our armed forces. I trust that the New Republic will at some point supply facts sufficient to verify the anecdotes related in the article or retract it, though the magazine has yet to do either and the hour is getting late.

Not everyone has been so reluctant to find the truth as TNR obviously has, however. The “Scott Thomas” moniker being given the supposedly anonymous soldier?  The American Thinker has been examining this more closely than TNR has been vetting it’s sources….

It turns out that there is a plausible candidate for who “Scott Thomas” might be: Clifton Hicks. The evidence is not conclusive, but it is fairly suggestive. Others are welcome to examine it with a fair mind. Hicks must be accorded the benefit of the doubt, of course.

Clifton Hicks is a former army soldier who did serve in Iraq. Hicks has become that most cherished item for the anti-war crowd, a soldier who fulfills their need for first-hand accounts of war atrocities. Hicks was granted conscientious objector status and a release from the Army after receiving administrative punishment for unprofessional conduct. Since then, and especially recently, he has tapped into the anti-war establishment for self-promotion.

Indeed, the writing style is close enough to have raised my suspicion, before The Thinker mentioned it. that having been said, The Thinker’s analysis is extensive, and I think very close to complete. In any event, it seems clear that Franklin Foer is the new Stephen Glass, particularly if any of this is traceable.
All that said….

The reason why I so extensively got into Kristol’s bit with mentally disturbed Sheehan and the exploitation thereof, is because I think this latest New Republic article, to be more of the same; the far left exploiting the demonstrably mental ill for their own purposes.  The more calloused among us might suggest this to be a case of damaged minds thinking alike.  However, I will leave that to the reader.
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Look; it should surprise nobody that the avidly leftist New Republic is against our actions in Iraq.  The reasons are clear; a Democrat isn’t in the White House. Has the depth of their need for political victory gone so far as to pass along slander wrapped in lies as “news”?  If they disagree with the war in Iraq, it is certainly their right to say so, I have no problem with that at all, though I think the position foolish.  Their right to that position however does not give them the right to fraud and slander in pursuit of the political goal.

Unfortunately, those two commodities, fraud and slander, would appear to be the main weapons in the quiver of the left, these days.

There is one positive note to pass along with all of this; At least now, the question of “whose side are they on” would appear to have been answered.