Free Republic

Most liberal commentators have preferred not to dwell on Barack Obama's broken promise to accept public financing of his campaign. For years, liberals have been at the forefront of demanding such public financing with pious lectures about the corrupting effects of money on politics. So the McCain-Feingold public financing law was passed and guess who was the first presidential candidate to opt out of that system? The Lightworker who flat out lied to the public when he earlier pledged to accept public financing. So when Obama announced he was breaking his public financing pledge a few months ago, there was...

The New Republic associate editor, Eve Fairbanks, needs to send a royalty payment to her senior editor, Michelle Cottle. Actually, Fairbanks might as well bypass Cottle and send the payment directly to your humble correspondent since The New Republic senior editor ripped me off when she wrote that the Washington Post compared Todd Palin to Hillary Clinton just a half hour after I made the same suggestion. Since the Washington Post story never mentioned Hillary, where do you think Cottle got her story idea from? The following update to my September 22 blog post explains: UPDATE: Your humble correspondent wishes...

Your humble correspondent is of the opinion that, without even knowing who wins the election in November, one can easily determine the winner by simply looking at the screen shots of liberal members of the MSM on the day after the election. Are the faces of Brian Williams, Katie Couric, Chris Matthews, etc. mournful? That will pretty much tell you who won the election the previous day. Likewise, simply by reading an analysis of last night's debate in Oxford, Mississippi in liberal publications, one can determine who won that debate without even watching it. It is called reading the liberal...

The New Republic has come up with a new way to drag conservatism through the mud---Simply describe racists as "racially conservative." Get it? They are implying that if you are a conservative then you must somehow be a racist. Your humble correspondent caught them using this term in a story headlined on The New Republic front page as: "Are People Who Hang Up On Pollsters More Racist Than Those Who Don't?" The story itself pretty much goes nowhere since no voting trend by people who refuse to talk to pollsters can be discerned. However, the story does link conservatism with...

Jonathan! Oh Jonathan! Paging Jonathan Chait! To paraphrase a certain wide stance senator, you've been a bad boy, a naughty boy. In fact, you're probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy. You see, you've written a long smear of Sarah Palin in the New Republic where you are The senior editor and yet a certain name was missing in your attack. What was that name? Why, Joe Biden. And why is Chait so reluctant to so much as mention Biden nowadays except in passing? Simple. When it looked like Biden had not a chance in the world of ever being...

What a difference a few weeks make. It wasn't too long ago that the liberal media were already congratulating themselves on Barack Obama's "inevitable" victory. Many of those reports crossed the line into flat out gloating in which the election itself was a mere formality on the road to the coronation of the Lightworker. Well, that was then and now it appears that Obama's halo of perfection has become quite tarnished to the extent that the liberal New Republic is worrying if their erstwhile messiah is heading towards a "long, disappointing fall." John B. Judis, a senior editor of The...

Interesting TNR article here. The thing is about how the Obama campaign's hubris is starting to piss off the media. In particular an incident with a NYT reporter is written about in some length. When you get lefty rags like TNR openly making admissions like the quote below, and whining about how closed and controlling the Obama campaign is, it sounds to me like the campaign's honeymoon is just about over....The press certainly helped Obama get so far so fast; the question is, how far can he get if his campaign alienates them?... ...But, as Obama ascended from underdog to...

The presidential election has an oddly placid feel to it. Four years ago, the notion that George W. Bush would get another four years in office, actually ratified by a plurality of the voters, was more than any liberal could bear, and, after the election, there was loose talk everywhere about "Jesusland" and wanting to flee to Canada. This time, even though Democrats are extremely enthusiastic about Barack Obama, that life-and-death quality is absent. I think the reason is that a lot of liberals kind of like John McCain. I know I do.

Gay Activists Ascendant by: Audra Taylor, July 10, 2008 Anticipating unprecedented victories in the United States, gay rights groups in America are raising their profile at home and abroad. “It’s a really exciting time to be an LGBT American,” Rob Anderson, who edits the web site for Campus Progress, said at the group’s fourth annual national conference last week. The progressive student organization held its annual meeting at the Omni Shoreham Hotel. The panel was entitled, “Is LGBT Activism Obsolete?: Assessing the goals and methods of the LGBT movement,” and offered a particularly notable presentation. The panel of four LGBT...

The New Republic Bush's Last Laugh The Editors: On Obama vs. Clinton, Democrats need to choose or lose. In the recent history of presidential campaigning, April is the time when hope springs eternal. When every Democratic general election candidate--Michael Dukakis! John Kerry!--looks like he might have the stuff to pull off a landslide. It is the time to heal from the knocks and bruises suffered during the primary season. You raise money, you begin building a case for the fall, you vet vice presidential candidates, you start to knock around your opponent, and you still have time to head to...

Here's James Kirchick, Assistant Editor of the liberal New Republic, writing in NR's "Plank" blog last night about the New York Times McCain article [emphasis added]: What Story? So here's the essence of the Times' 3,000-word "bombshell" on John McCain. John Weaver, whom McCain fired last summer (indentified in the Times piece as "now an informal campaign adviser" to McCain, which sounds like a puffed-up euphemism for "unemployed") says that 8 years ago, he and two other former employees who have since "become disillusioned" (read: disgruntled), suspected that McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist. The rest of the...

Documents released by the Office of the Chief of Staff, U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base Florida, in relation to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests files for documents relating to the military investigation into the Scott Thomas Beauchamp "Shock Troops" article in The New Republic magazine. The following are the never-before published statements of soldiers interviewed in the course of the investigation. Names are redacted per federal privacy laws.

You hear a lot these days about the chaotic state of the GOP race, which is obviously true insofar as lots of candidates still have a shot at winning. But I don't think it's true in the sense that several candidates have an equal shot of winning. My sense is that Mitt Romney emerges from Michigan with some pretty clear advantages. For one thing, the first kind of chaos ("type 1") makes it pretty tough for Romney's rivals to raise money, which will, perhaps more than anything else, influence the outcome of the 21 February 5th contests. As this Politico piece notes, the GOP's general fundraising environment...

This is definitely a KOmmie THREAD that the Daily KOs would dearly wish to have disappeared down the memory hole. This thread titled, "Wingnut Thugs Personally Attack Soldier Serving In Iraq," was published in KOmmieland back in July. As you can see, the KOmmies are angrily attacking the "Wingnut Thugs" for daring to question the veracity of a soldier, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, whose allegations of atrocities in Iraq were published in The New Republic. One problem now for the KOmmies, it turns out that, in fact, the stories written by Beauchamp, The New Republic's Fabulist, were untrue. And WHO...

A Scott Beauchamp Update Since our last statement on “Shock Troops,” a Diarist by Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp that we published in our July 23 issue, we have continued our investigation into the article’s veracity. On Wednesday, for a brief period, The Drudge Report posted several documents from the Army’s own investigation into Beauchamp’s claims. Among those documents was a transcript of a phone conversation that TNR Editor Franklin Foer and TNR Executive Editor J. Peter Scoblic had with Beauchamp on September 6—the first time the Army had granted TNR permission to speak with Beauchamp since it cut off...

The story of General Petraeus getting accidentally shot in the chest is a case in point. One of his own soldiers had pulled the trigger. Normally, something very bad would have happened to that soldier and his commander. Instead Petraeus sent that soldier to Ranger School, and his Captain (Fred Johnson) was promoted early. In June, I witnessed LTC Fred Johnson helping to restore security and rebuild Baqubah. Fred Johnson is a believer in second chances. Some months ago, a soldier in Baghdad wrote a piece on the way war can degrade the morals and affect the judgment of combat...

The soldier whose New Republic article about military cruelty in Iraq was labeled false by Army investigators refused to defend his accusations when questioned by the magazine, even after being told that the editors could no longer support him unless he cooperated.In a recorded Sept. 6 conversation, the writer, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, said from Iraq that the controversy had "spun out of control" and had become "insane" and "ridiculous" and concluded: "I'm not going to talk to anyone about anything." Beauchamp stood his ground even after Editor Franklin Foer told him "that if you're not able to talk about...

SHOCK DOCS: THE NEW REPUBLIC 'SHOCK TROOPS' STORY COLLAPSES WED Oct 24 2007 12:29:44 ET The DRUDGE REPORT has optained internal documents from the investigation of THE NEW REPUBLIC'S "Baghdad Diarist", Scott Thomas Beauchamp, an Army private turned war correspondent who reported tales of military malfeasance from the Iraq War front. The documents appear to expose that once the veracity of Beauchamp's diaries were called into question, and an Army investigation ensued, THE NEW REPUBLIC has failed to publicly account for publishing slanderous falsehoods about the U.S. military in a time of war. Document 1: Beauchamp Refuses to Stand by...

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...

The New Republic magazine recently ran into big trouble for publishing a first-person account of military savagery in Iraq. The author, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, used the pseudonym "Scott Thomas" to write of the debasement of war that he claims he saw in the cauldron of Iraq. But it was soon discovered that one of the gruesome "wartime" incidents the private described -- the author, desensitized by war, mocking a disfigured woman -- took place in Kuwait before his unit actually went into Iraq. And when, post-publication, The New Republic rechecked Beauchamp's other suspicious anecdotes and assured its readers they...

As many of us know, the "Baghdad Diarist" and the details of the "activities" of his American Army buddies have been, by his own recants, shown to be fictitious. However, The New Republic who published those "stories" continues to operate under assumptions borne of arrogance and ignorance. For 18 months or so, I worked in the Public Affairs Office onboard the USS Midway so, unlike Pvt. Beauchamp and The New Republic, I have a good understanding of how these things work. While military journalists use the same style book as mainstream journalists, they also operate under a different set of...

If anyone ever starts a museum of horrible explanations, the one-liner by Newsweek's Evan Thomas about his magazine's dubious reporting on the Duke non-rape case— "The narrative was right but the facts were wrong" —is destined to become a popular exhibit, right up there with "we had to destroy the village to save it." What Mr. Thomas seems to mean is that the newsroom view of the lacrosse players as privileged, sexist, and arrogant white male jocks was the correct angle on the story. It wasn't. According to Duke's female lacrosse team and other women on campus, the male players...

NEW YORK - A magazine gets a hot story straight from a soldier in Iraq and publishes his writing, complete with gory details, under a pseudonym. The stories are chilling: An Iraqi boy befriends American troops and later has his tongue cut out by insurgents. Soldiers mock a disfigured woman sitting near them in a dining hall. As a diversion, soldiers run over dogs with armored personnel carriers. Compelling stuff, and, according to the Army, not true. Three articles by the soldier have run since January in The New Republic, a liberal magazine with a small circulation owned by Canadian...

In their latest demonstration of how much they love the troops, liberals have produced yet another anti-war hoax.

Can't say we haven't seen this before: Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a writer for the New Republic, has recanted his tales of American military savagery according to the Weekly Standard (h/t Powerline): The Weekly Standard has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp--author of the much-disputed "Shock Troops" article in the New Republic's July 23 issue as well as two previous "Baghdad Diarist" columns--signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods--fabrications containing only "a smidgen of truth," in the words of our source.Separately,...

Col. Steven Boylan, Public Affairs Officer for U.S. Army Commanding General in Iraq David Petraeus, just emailed me the following in response to my request to confirm an earlier report that the U.S. Army's investigation into the claims made by PV-2 Scott Thomas Beauchamp made in The New Republic had been completed. He states: To your question: Were there any truth to what was being said by Thomas? Answer: An investigation of the allegations were conducted by the command and found to be false. In fact, members of Thomas' platoon and company were all interviewed and no one could substantiate...

The New Republic has published the results of their investigation into the events described by Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp. The editors say, we spoke with five other members of Beauchamp's company, and all corroborated Beauchamp's anecdotes, which they witnessed or, in the case of one solider, heard about contemporaneously. Except they didn't. The recollections of these three soldiers differ from Beauchamp's on one significant detail (the only fact in the piece that we have determined to be inaccurate): They say the conversation [mocking a disfigured woman] occurred at Camp Buehring, in Kuwait, prior to the unit's arrival in Iraq. When...

A STATEMENT FROM SCOTT THOMAS BEAUCHAMP: As we've noted in this space, some have questioned details that appeared in the Diarist "Shock Troops," published under the pseudonym Scott Thomas. According to Major Kirk Luedeke, a public affairs officer at Forward Operating Base Falcon, a formal military investigation has also been launched into the incidents described in the piece. Although the article was rigorously edited and fact-checked before it was published, we have decided to go back and, to the extent possible, re-report every detail. This process takes considerable time, as the primary subjects are on another continent, with intermittent access...

A STATEMENT FROM SCOTT THOMAS BEAUCHAMP: As we've noted in this space, some have questioned details that appeared in the Diarist "Shock Troops," published under the pseudonym Scott Thomas. According to Major Kirk Luedeke, a public affairs officer at Forward Operating Base Falcon, a formal military investigation has also been launched into the incidents described in the piece. Although the article was rigorously edited and fact-checked before it was published, we have decided to go back and, to the extent possible, re-report every detail. This process takes considerable time, as the primary subjects are on another continent, with intermittent access...

The New Republic has published an article entitled "Shock Troops" which paints a most unflattering pictures of our troops in Iraq. The problem is that it seems to be the work of another fabulist who like Time's McGirk was telling a story about soldiers "too good" to be checked. Dean Barnett notes: "...PERSONALLY, I FIND THIS TO BE ONE OF THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS incidents of the war. I've spent much of the past couple of weeks speaking to men who have served in Iraq to prepare a piece for the next issue of the Weekly Standard about what I call...

Over at the Weekly Standard, Michael Goldfarb continues to do yeoman’s work tracking down that very suspicious looking New Republic story from "Scott Thomas", a man purporting to be a soldier in Baghdad. Goldfarb’s doing such a good job, if he keeps it up through the day I may consider having him on as a guest this evening when I’m pinch-hitting for Hugh The New Republic dispatch from the pseudonymous soldier related several horrific tales, all of which seemed too horrifically perfect to check or corroborate: Goldfarb reports: "The first episode puts 'Thomas’s' unit at a 'chow hall' at an...

The Canadian media giant CanWest has taken a majority stake in the 92-year-old New Republic, and plans to relaunch the weekly as a thicker, glossier – and half as frequent – magazine with a more robust Web site. The new ownership and redesign completes a period of change at the magazine, which shifted markedly to the political left under its new editor, Franklin Foer, and has sought to shake off its association with the Bush administration’s pursuit of the Iraq war. CanWest, which publishes a dozen Canadian daily newspapers and owns other media properties around the world, is controlled by...

f you ever wander into a stranger's house and see Chris Hansen lurking about, it's time to call a lawyer. The gotcha "journalist" behind "Dateline" NBC's "To Catch A Predator" series has created a huge buzz by exposing and shaming Internet predators to the delight of millions of Americans, parents' groups, and even a swooning Oprah Winfrey. Nowadays, the "To Catch A Predator" website is, oddly enough, even hyping the fact that former Representative Mark Foley at one time praised the program--making the show seem like a twofer, I suppose: "To Catch A Hypocrite!"

In recent years, The New Republic, one of the nation's leading magazines of political and cultural commentary, has been embarrassed by scandals involving two of journalism's original sins: fabrication of stories and plagiarism. But the latest scandal, involving the magazine's cultural critic Lee Siegel, has to do with a transgression peculiar to the Internet age: sock puppetry. A sock puppet, in Internet parlance, is a false Internet identity created for deceptive purposes. Siegel, who had been writing a culture blog for The New Republic, had started using the pseudonym "sprezzatura" on the blog's forums to praise himself and savage his...

by Mark Finkelstein September 1, 2006 - 16:49 During the course of a conversation with former Deputy Defense Secretary Jed Babbin on this afternoon's show, Tucker Carlson described himself as "a real conservative." But it was just a few minutes earlier, chatting with New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, that Carlson mentioned in passing that he hadn't supported President Bush for president in 2004. When Carlson stated that he had been wrong to support the war in Iraq [and now opposes it], Beinart retorted: "You've just made a statement which almost guarantees that you're going to have to support the Democratic...

by Mark Finkelstein August 16, 2006 - 08:02 We all remember how the MSM climbed all over Hillary Clinton when a few years ago she thought it was funny to claim that Mahatma Gandhi "ran a gas station down in St. Louis." Or more recently when she made her "plantation" remark. And of course we recall the liberal media saying it was a career-ender for Joe Biden to have said "you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking," Or not. But let George Allen make a similarly insensitive...

Though it has been a long 53 years since former President Harry S. Truman was in office, he was the hot topic of conversation at The Hudson Institute on Monday, July 17, where a panel discussed his legacy and influence on current policies. Truman’s defense-laden foreign policy has recently been compared to President George W. Bush’s tactics for the War on Terror; an association that was a major point of discussion for the three members of the panel. While the speakers all had their own specific opinions of the Bush-Truman comparison, they all praised Truman’s policies while he was in...

It´s the sort of thing that makes you hate the Internet. On June 21 New Republic senior editor Jason Zengerle posted on the magazine´s website portions of a message Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the founder and public face of popular liberal blog dailykos.com, sent to a private e-mail list. Zengerle said the message, which primarily concerned Moulitsas´ request that his fellow bloggers refrain from writing about Securities and Exchange Commission allegations against blogger-turned-online-political-consultant Jerome Armstrong, showed that Moulitsas issued orders that other liberal bloggers dutifully followed. In an entry titled, ¨The Blogosphere´s Smoke-Filled Backroom,¨ Zengerle accused liberal bloggers of displaying ¨a...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Peter Beinart, editor-at-large at The New Republic. He is the author of the new book The Good Fight: Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. FP: Peter Beinart welcome to Frontpage Interview. It is a pleasure and privilege to be in your company. Beinart: Nice to be talking with you. FP: David Horowitz will join us for the discussion, but let's first talk to you about your book. Before we even get to that, let me ask you to comment on the recent killing of Zarqawi. What...

realize that the new, counterintuitive thing to say about the left blogosphere these days is that it's not really that radical. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga says nice things about Mark Warner, which means he's really just a pragmatist (or easily co-opted, but the effect is the same). All this is mostly true. What this interpretation misses, however, is that the radicalism of the lefty bloggers lies not so much in their ideological platform but in their ideological style. They think like sectarians. And that style is on perfect display in Kos's attack on The New Republic.Kos announces in his headline, "TNR's...

Peter Beinart is an advocate of liberal -- not ''progressive'' -- nostalgia. He wants to turn the clock back to 1947 at Washington's Willard Hotel. Beinart, who was born in 1971, is editor at large of the liberal New Republic magazine and disdains the label ''progressive'' as a rejection of liberalism's useable past of anti-totalitarianism. An intellectual archaeologist, he excavates that vanished intellectual tradition and sends it into battle in his new book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. It expresses Beinart's understanding of liberalism...

WHAT IF WIRETAPPING WORKS? Wire Trap by Richard A. Posner Post date: 01.26.06 Issue date: 02.06.06 he revelation by The New York Times that the National Security Agency (NSA) is conducting a secret program of electronic surveillance outside the framework of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (fisa) has sparked a hot debate in the press and in the blogosphere. But there is something odd about the debate: It is aridly legal. Civil libertarians contend that the program is illegal, even unconstitutional; some want President Bush impeached for breaking the law. The administration and its defenders have responded that the program...

| Issue date 01.30.06 If you believe the statements they made during last week's hearings, Republican and Democratic senators agree that Samuel Alito, President Bush's nominee to replace Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, should be evaluated on the basis of his judicial philosophy--that is, on his general approach to interpreting the Constitution. "Will your judicial philosophy preserve these principles" of "executive power, congressional power, and personal autonomy?" asked Senator Charles Schumer of New York, in a characteristic opening statement. "Or will it erode them?" Unfortunately, not a single senator followed such questions by articulating a coherent judicial philosophy against...

ince inaugurating the "Today in Despotism" series earlier this year, TNR Online has chronicled the activities of a number of strongmen. Some are old, some are young; some are religious, some are atheist; some are called "Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya"; others are called "Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army, General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea, and Chairman of the National Defense Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea." But while countries around the world may have differences, the hopes and dreams of their despotic rulers...

wo months ago, I began reading the newspaper with a new set of eyes. That's when The New Republic launched The Plank, a crackling blog to which I regularly contribute. Before my new career, I had largely consumed the Times, the Post, and the Journal in search of information. Now I read them in search of items. This eternal quest for Plank grist has changed my relationship to these papers. They used to be my Starbucks buddies, but now I treat them more as adversaries, to be debunked and ridiculed. Newspapers deserve an army of enemies that nag them to...

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) September 27, 2005 -- Liberals on the airwaves and across the Internet have assailed the bestselling new conservative children's book "Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed" (Kids Ahead; hardcover $15.95; ISBN 0976726904) since it was announced several weeks ago, but the criticism took a surprising turn on Monday when prominent liberal Andrew Sullivan waded into the controversy, this according to the book's publisher. Sullivan — the author of multiple books and a former editor for the magazine "New Republic" — claimed on his popular blog that the book contains nudity, a charge which set...

...Then the Weekly Standard arrived in 1995, and Washington was suddenly a two-magazine town. William Kristol, Fred Barnes and John Podhoretz came up with the idea and Rupert Murdoch came up with the money.... Ever since, the Standard has proudly flown the banner of conservatism from Washington each week, sometimes conservatism of the "neo" sort.... "The Weekly Standard: A Reader" offers an impressive sampling from the magazine's first 10 years. Irving Kristol, William's father, defines neoconservatism, insofar as it can be defined -- he calls it a "persuasion," not a movement or ideology. Andrew Ferguson, tired of hearing Edward R....

WHITE HOUSE WATCH Legal Theory by Ryan Lizza Printer friendly Post date 07.21.05 | Issue date 08.01.05 E-mail this article The question this week is: Why did George W. Bush make such a seemingly responsible choice? There is little in the history of Bush's decision-making that would have predicted the president would settle on someone like John G. Roberts Jr. for the Supreme Court... Finally, Bush did not slavishly reward his base of evangelical conservatives. Some conservatives are describing Roberts as a "bold" choice. He is clearly not. His commitment to the social causes that animate the religious right is...

Impolitic Martin Peretz Post date: 06.16.05 It's a terrible risk in my environment to write anything positive about George W. Bush. When I do, my wife treats me as if I am a bit ill. My children (grown) are reluctant to introduce me to their pals. The phone stops ringing, except when there are nasty people on the other line. I get snubbed at dinner parties. Friends humor me, apparently hoping that this is just a phase--"Rather like," said a professor of law at the University of Texas, "when you went off the deep end and supported aid to the...

As the liberal offspring of conservative parents, I rarely find anything political over which to bond with my red-state family. I was therefore pleasantly surprised this week to learn that Tom DeLay's theatrics during the Terri Schiavo tragedy have, in addition to earning him a public slap from Dick Cheney, cost him the vote of my staunchly Republican father, a resident of the majority leader's suburban-Houston district. It seems Dad is so disgusted with DeLay's hysterical ranting about holding judges accountable for Schiavo's death that he's written his congressman off as "absurd," pronouncing, "I think he's lost it." Sadly, I...