When Pajamas Media heard the authenticity questions surrounding the “Baghdad
Diarist” articles by Scott Thomas Beauchamp in The New Republic, we asked our
Washington Editor Richard Miniter to look into how the respected opinion
magazine could once again be the locus of such a scandal.
Miniter spoke with several people involved in the extraordinary story, including the
whistle-blower and a German woman who was Beauchamp’s fiancée until just before
he married, of all people, Miniter discovered, a fact-checker at The New
Republic. That fiancée said of her former boyfriend, the soldier/reporter: “He
hates the army. The only reason he joined was because he wanted to have more
experience to write about.”
It is asked if Miniter went to far, and made the attack on Beauchamp too personal. What I wonder is if this is all about politics being too personal. Everything from the stories themselves that seem to have been written by Beauchamp as a personal attack against the armed services. To the pundits who believed it, because they wanted to believe it - perhaps if they were not so personally attached to their ideas they would have seen the problems in the story. That includes people who worked at the magazine, was their relationship with the author too personal - he was engaged to one of the fact checkers, would a more objective fact checker seen the errors in the story? Even the attacks against the story, came out so fast and hot, that many of them must have been personal. Like those who are against the war, they have gotten too attached to their ideas and see any attack on them as personal. In the end, the last question is what does this mean for political dialogue in this country.
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