…to my post yesterday questioning her analysis of the Beauchamp saga. In her first post, remember, Young took the position that, by attributing to Foer and Beauchamp a certain intent, some right wing bloggers were betraying a kind of ludicrous paranoia (an argument echoed by Ross Douthat at the Atlantic blog). To which I responded that Young infantilizes Beauchamp as a writer, and provides Foer with intellectual cover for what

The head, it spins. From the New York Times: The New York City Council, which drew national headlines when it passed a symbolic citywide ban earlier this year on the use of the so-called n-word, has turned its linguistic (and legislative) lance toward a different slur: bitch. The term is hateful and deeply sexist, said Councilwoman Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn, who has introduced a measure against the word, saying it

“Take it from this old KGB hand: The left is abetting America’s enemies with its intemperate attacks on President Bush.” Ion Mihai Pacepa, WSJ Opinion Journal: Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners

So long as we’re going on about the importance of correcting the record, let’s just say were these “300” charged with fighting the Persian hordes at Thermopylae, Frank Miller wouldn’t have had much to work with. Unless he thought he could produce an interesting graphic novel about Xerxes strolling casually through Hell’s Gate in search of really bitchin’ gyro sandwich. Which he probably could. But that’s not really the point,

From the Weekly Standard: 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

From Newsweek: The controversy over President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program took another surprise turn last week when a team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)-the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets. The agents seized Tamm’s desktop

Welcome to the big time, Barack Obama! From The WorldwideStandard: This past Friday, Germany’s highly-respected conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an editorial page commentary — euphemistically titled “Also robust” — taking issue with the national security advice dispensed by the first-term junior senator from Illinois. Whoever takes Obama’s remark seriously will soon begin to start brooding, especially because Pakistan and its president are indispensable to wear down the terrorists. For

Cathy Young calls the Beauchamp affair “a proverbial tempest in a teapot,” and argues that: conservative bloggers aren’t covering themselves in glory either when they stridenly insist that TNR gave Beauchamp a platform in a nefarious plot to smear and slander the troops. TNR is not some far-left rag that revels in spitting on American soldiers; it is a centrist magazine that initially supported the war in Iraq. Indeed, while

I’ve written before on the failures of the “diversity” project revealed by Robert Putnam’s wide-ranging study, so I won’t rehash those arguments here at any length. In short, Putnam’s research (Putnam, incidentally, is a progressive scholar and advocate for the diversity project that, though it is decidedly illiberal, in that it relies on forced central planning and often unwelcome social engineering, continues to be embraced by no fewer than 5