Who says bloggers don’t break news?

Yesterday, the Ace of Spades reported that Scott Thomas Beauchamp is married to a New Republic staffer. In spite of Allah’s fears that TNR had set up an elaborate sting operation that Ace had stumbled right into (Ace is prone to stumbling, so Allah’s fears weren’t unrealistic), Franklin Foer confirmed to Howard Kurtz that Scott Thomas Beauchamp is indeed the spouse of a New Republic staffer. According to Foer, that is “part of the reason why we found him to be a credible writer.”

Foer’s logic here is characteristically fanciful. If anything, Beauchamp’s marriage to a TNR staffer combined with his leftist politics and his previously expressed dreams of becoming an artiste should have called his objectivity into doubt. Besides, why on earth would the fact that he married someone who drew a paycheck from TNR make him “credible”?

Personally, I am devastated by this revelation. Andrew Sullivan had assured me yesterday that “The New Republic will be honorable and honest in following up” on the allegations regarding the Beauchamp affair. Since Foer concedes to Kurtz that The New Republic knew of Beauchamp’s marital affiliations since they started publishing his stuff, I find TNR’s week-and-a-half long embargo of this critical detail to be less than “honorable and honest.” After all, Foer began his dogged investigation 10 days ago. Only when a lowly blogger published this juicy detail did Foer release it to the public.

And think about how odd it is that out of 160,000 soldiers serving in Iraq, TNR found the individual most qualified to be their man in Baghdad right inside its own extended family. Remarkable. As to why TNR decided Scott Thomas Beauchamp was the guy to tell the inside story of the Iraq War, right now we can only speculate. Personally, I’ll go for the Occam’s Razor answer: Laziness. In Beauchamp, they knew they had an ideological ally who would see things in Baghdad through the “proper” ideological prism. At least when The Nation smeared the troops with an extended spread documenting military malfeasance, it put a little elbow grease into the task.

The spousal connection also answers why Foer and Co. were so willing to publish stuff that should have arched eyebrows without doing a serious fact-check on it. Scratch that. The New Republic’s style handbook apparently defines a “serious fact-check” as taking the following steps:

"We showed the stories to people who'd been embedded in Iraq to make sure that it all smelled good. We talked to one of the members of his unit to confirm the woman, a female contractor. We talked to a medic who'd served in Iraq to make sure that a woman could be in an FOB. We spent a lot of time with him on the phone asking hard questions."

Of course, the Diarist himself was agnostic as to whether the woman was a contractor or part of the military. But I’m not suggesting anything, because the most reputable of sources has assured me that The New Republic will be “honest and honorable” in investigating this matter.

However implausibly, Frank Foer is still taking the victim role in this drama. According to the today’s Howard Kurtz column,

Foer said the magazine is attempting to confirm every detail. "We are trying to be as deliberate and meticulous as we possibly can," he said. "We're not going to be rushed into making any sort of snap judgment."

That’s a part I really don’t understand. Why do they need to confirm every detail? After all, the Diarist is married to a TNR staffer and they showed the story to some reporters in Iraq who said it smelled good. What do these conservative bloggers want? A pound of flesh?

AT HOTAIR AND ACE’S PLACE, there’s a little debate going on over whether this story is getting too much play. Everyone says yes, except Michelle who insists no. I’m with Michelle.

At the Corner, my friend John Podhoretz says the only thing that matters right now is whether the Diarists’ details pan out. I must disagree. While waiting to see if The New Republic gets egg on its face (again) has its amusements, that issue is a freak side show.

In running the Thomas Diarists, be they true or false or somewhere in between, The New Republic attempted to smear the soldiers who are serving honorably in Iraq. That’s the real story here. The New Republic offered up one eye-witness account from a soldier in Baghdad in its last issue; that soldier told stories of horrifying sociopathic behavior. There are tons of other soldiers’ stories from Iraq that more accurately describe what’s going on over there; none of them interested The New Republic. The real story here is the editorial decision making process that led The New Republic to have its own private embed in Iraq, a uniform wearing mole who went to Iraq with the apparent specific purpose of maligning the war effort.

This is a serious story, a story whose gravity is minimized by the Gotcha Game that TNR is now stuck in. The real story here is agenda-driven journalists taking a hard turn left, attacking the military as their illustrious predecessors did back in the Glory Days of Vietnam.

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Image from "Suitably Flip"