Scott Beauchamp: How Far The MSM Will Go To Find The Narrative--UPDATED & BUMPED

You knew there would be a John Kerry coming out of this War, didn't you? I mean, it's inevitable. Never mind that the army these days is 100% volunteer. Never mind that soldiers are re-upping and re-upping to serve in Iraq; to get the job done. There had to be at least one of these guys:

Let's see -- emotionally immature with a juvenile persecution complex; delusions of intellectutal superiority; a huge chip on his shoulder about not having his genius properly recognized by the morons around him; he believes America is keeping him down due to his intellect; and he's determined to get those "riches" usually reserved for football stars, by hook or by crook!

And, by Job! The New Republic found their needle in the haystack, this super-secret "Bagdhad Diarist" in Private Scott Beauchamp. Here's what he said before being deployed:

Americans dont like smart people...at least people who are intelligent just to expand human knowledge. If youre smart, it better lead to riches. And as for the all american heroes, they're not more intlligent than you...just sexier or faster or in a gang, or, like, really really really good at football. It leaves no hope for those who are pretty useless save their intellect. Sorry AJ. You'll always be MY hero.

And this, too:

...I cant do it without getting through this army experience first, which will add a legitimacy to EVERYTHING i do afterwards, and totally bolster my opinions on defense, etc, and of course its making me a lot less lazy, just because im not use to being lazy any more, etc

Gateway Pundit says this:

Private Beauchamp is in a heap of trouble!
And, so is The New Republic for publishing such obviously bogus stories.

We'll see about that, Larry. So far, I haven't seen any part of the MSM pay for any of their misinformation ever. I mean look at the Duke Rape case. The MSM just keeps rolling.

Over at The Weekly Standard:

It's good to finally know the author's name, but there is nothing here to confirm the events as described by Beauchamp. Right now, we have no reason to believe that his stories are anything other than what we first suspected them to be: a "pastiche of the 'This is no bullshit . . . stories soldiers like to tell."

If the stories are true, we regret that Beauchamp has been forced to take "time out of his already insane schedule" of ridiculing IED victims, desecrating children's corpses, and killing stray dogs to "play some role in an ideological battle that I never wanted to join." But, as Dean Barnett points out this seems more than a little disingenuous considering that his blog reveals that he joined this war "just to write a book" and that he "misses political arguments. There seems to be a consensus with all the boys overseas...we laugh harder at CSPAN than comedy central. Silly republicans."

That Beauchamp chose to reveal himself at this point also seems a bit disingenuous, since the military has already launched an investigation and, courtesy of JD Johannes, we'd already identified his unit four days ago. If we'd gotten that much information, it was only a matter of time before somebody besides his editors started asking him "hard questions."

"Scott Thomas" won't be the first or last. In this charged environment, Lefties will believe ANY THING impugning a soldier. It fits the narrative. Just like John Kerry came back and exploited the post-Vietnam EST, there will be weak-minded, weak-willed, self-serving soldiers who went to Iraq with an agenda and will come home with one, too.

And for every traitorous soldier, there will be a media outlet who gives him succor and shelter.

More at Blackfive. Doesn't every office, every church, every team everywhere have a guy like this?

Every unit has a Scott Thomas, the whiny pissant whose brilliance is never recognized and who is always being abused by the chain of command for stuff that's not his fault. It would be normal to hear folks telling him to STFU and do his damn job.

This is the guy who you want to yell at: Shut up and march!

More at OpFor:

Private Beauchamp has just placed himself in an unenviable 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' scenario. If his stories are true, he'll be facing the business end of the UCMJ. If false, he'll be exposed as a fraud and a liar, and will have destroyed that budding writing career that he so confidently promised.

So we know he's a soldier. I never doubted that in the first place, he spoke the lingo well enough. But, as Greyhawk noted, the inquiry has really just begun. Now we have to go about fact-checking his stories, which I suspect will turn out to have been grandly embellished.

So no doubt wheels are turning over in the 1/18's command staff right now. Wouldn't be surprised if Private Beauchamp was standing tall in front of the man at this very moment, under the scruntity of an aggressively curious CO who is demanding details down to the letter about each of his diary entries.

Expect a press release soon. The Army is going to move quick on this, now that they have a face to the name.

Either way, today is going to be a very bad day for Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp.

It's a bad day for Beauchamp, but the MSM will slither on, spewing their venom with impunity.

By the way, why do these arrogant scumbags always look just like you'd imagine them to look? Sheesh, Beauchamp just walked out of central casting: Arrogant, disaffected, intellectually superior, yellow belly whiner.


UPDATE: Charles at Little Green Footballs reports that Beauchamp is engaged to a TNR staffer and the "formerly sane" Andrew Sullivan is defending "Thomas".

UPDATED AGAIN: What if this was just a matter of a soldier baiting a Leftist MSM outfit and making them look like jack-asses using parody, asks Jeff Goldstein. Hmmmmm.... Crafty! That would kinda blow the whole "soldiers are no-necked ijits" wouldn't it?

Consider: if the author’s intent is to produce a “Scott Thomas” whose “reportage” is eventually shown to be apocryphal, then what we have is a person who intended that “Scott Thomas” be found out and exposed as a fraud. From there, we can speculate on the motives behind that intent. For instance, we can speculate that this entire hoax was created in order to weaken the credibility of the anti-war press.

As it turns out, of course, Beauchamp’s actual motives, coupled with Foer’s gullibility and his lame subsequent attempts to cover up for what will prove to be a major editorial blunder, will weaken the credibility of the anti-war media without any special help from some skilled parodist. But the text itself doesn’t rule out the latter, and it is this point that I hope to drive home.

Jeff is responding to this semiotic analysis of "Scott Thomas'" work by John Barnes. He is astonishingly accurate in his suppositions and funny, too:

"Scott Thomas", however, writes exactly like the mid-20s macho MFA student who is lying about an adventurous background. That list of symptoms I gave above is what every one of them I have encountered – probably around 50 in my lifetime – has written like. The point of those stylistic tics and content-fetishes is the same as the point of all the bizarre stories of mayhem, cruelty, and sheer shit-headedness that they tell in the bar after writing workshops: to confirm their role in the MFA program social system. Among the benefits of that role are free passes on certain kinds of bad behavior in class, sexual attractiveness to some other grad students (those with a thing for bad boys), and the maintenance of their interior movie in which they are played by some combination of James Dean, Bob Dylan, the younger Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson.

But ultimately, he's upset at The New Republic because it gives the left a bad name, and Barnes doesn't want that. Ah well, I'd like to say that this little TNR boondoggle will change the leftist narrative that drives everything within the MSM, but I have a little prediction of my own:

The left will come out defending this indefensible tripe. They will project their conspiracy theories on the military and suggest just what Goldstein puts forth: The New Republic was had! The military used them! This will make the Left look loonier. The public will sigh and shrug. So what? The press is biased...blah, blah, blah.

And Barnes is right. One day there might really be a horrible scene like leftists imagine happened every place an American soldier carries a weapon. There might be some atrocity committed. But no one will want to hear it. The left has cried wolf too often now. The public is going deaf.