A reader writes:
So now your beef with Scott Thomas is that he whines?
That’s pathetic: the stuff the guy described really happened; the right’s “None of our boys would ever behave that way!” crap has been discredited; and now you’re trying to change the subject.
Just one question, though. You guys advocate torture and warrantless wiretapping and elimination of habeus corpus and black sites and all the rest. That’s your bread and butter. It’s what you love. Why’d you get so upset about a soldier in the desert wearing a skull on his head?
Er, actually, I didn’t get upset. I haven’t written a word on the subject and, if I did, I’d tend to agree with my distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle. But no doubt Private Beauchamp’s moral authority is now as “absolute” as Maureen Dowd said Cindy Sheehan’s was. I do find it interesting, however, as Michelle Malkin does, that in his own words he appears to have joined the army in order to add “legitimacy to everything” and “bolster my opinions on defense, etc” when he becomes an “author”. This entry on his blog is worth pondering:
“S***, I don’t know…put a 556 in his head”
On the street below the mans brown face dissolves into a thick red mist. The lights in the cities houses shut off in unison. Elecricity rationing. Water rationing too. You ever tried to survive for more than a few hours in hundred and twenty degree weather without water? In the streets the kids bodies start convulsing in semi-orgasmic rhythms. Their pants fill up with s*** and p***…
That was May 2006. Not dissimilar to Private Beauchamp’s skull-wearing-in-Baghdad diary. Was he in Iraq last year? Did he witness a war crime? Is this reportage? Or was he just doing a bit of imaginative fiction like the creative-writing classes teach? And into which category do his New Republic pieces fall?
Strange chap.