Private Scott beuchamp is a bs artist..

The New Republic has been exposed once again for the partisan hack establishment it has become. Bloggers from the beginning pointed out how their Iraq Diarist could not have been telling the entire truth in his writings. Turns out Beauchamp was: married to a TNR researcher, was a leftist activist in college who supported Howard Dean; created false blog entries about how he killed Iraqis while he was still in Germany; stated in his written pieces that he wanted to become a writer and that joining the Army would help him gain credibility. And now this: TNRs latest "clarification: reveals that a third of his article is pretty much BS. Beauchamp starts his essay with, "I saw her nearly every time I went to dinner in the chow hall at my base in Iraq" — "her" being a disfigured woman that Beauchamp later admits he and his buddy cruelly mocked. Shortly after bloggers started raising questions about Beauchamp's essay, Beauchamp told TNR that the incident occurred on Foward Operating Base Falcon in Iraq, prompting a number of men serving there to e-mail The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb to tell him that they had never seen a disfigured woman in Falcon's dining facility. No one could corroborate this element of the story. Turns out that's because it wasn't true. In its latest statement, TNR reports that "the conversation occurred at Camp Buehring, in Kuwait, prior to the unit's arrival in Iraq." In that light, it's worth taking another look at this passage from Beauchamp's essay: Am I a monster? I have never thought of myself as a cruel person... Even as I was reveling in the laughter my words had provoked, I was simultaneously horrified and ashamed at what I had just said. In a strange way, though, I found the shame comforting. I was relieved to still be shocked by my own cruelty—to still be able to recognize that the things we soldiers found funny were not, in fact, funny. At TWS, Goldfarb wonders: "Relieved that he was still shocked at his own cruelty? After his tour in Germany and the long flight to Kuwait?" (An NRO reader suggests, "Maybe it's the morally deadening effects of being a contributor to The New Republic.") Take the story out of Iraq and it becomes a completely irrelevant anecdote proving nothing except that Scott Beauchamp and his friend are jerks. I guess that's why he "forgot" that it didn't actually happen there. The New Republic statement is, to put it mildly, unpersuasive. The first sentence of Private Beauchamp's now famous column reads as follows: I saw her nearly every time I went to dinner in the chow hall at my base in Iraq. The magazine now concedes that that statement was an "error". The disfigured woman that he and his pal were mocking was not at the chow hall "every time" he went to dinner at his base in Iraq, but in an entirely different country, back in Kuwait - before he got anywhere near the war. Which demolishes the entire premise of the piece: "That is how war works- It degrades every part of you, and your sense of humor is no exception." In this case, his sense of humor seems to have come pre-degraded - see also the blog entries he wrote while still in Germany. This is not just a "discrepancy" in one of the three anecdotes that make up the diary. It renders Private Beauchamp's agonizing in The New Republic over his desensitization by war transparently fake: "Am I a monster? I have never thought of myself as a cruel person... I once worked at a summer camp for developmentally disabled children, and, in college, I devoted hours every week to helping a student with cerebral palsy. Dean Barnett has more. War is hell, but, if you beat up a bloke in a pub in southern England a year before D-Day, that may not be the best anecdote to prove your point.