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

Beauchamp: “The year was 1972, and I was in country — hip-deep ‘in the shit,’ as we used to say… Little Debbie had just posed on an anti-aircraft battery and was mouthing agitprop for the North Vietnamese; the war was being fought to lose by armchair generals and politicians trying to hide from their own shadows; and morale inside the platoon was eroding faster than one of Nixon’s promises under

Although that premise itself must of course be viewed through the progressive filter of nuance. Some dialogue is simply more equal than others. HOW DARE YOU QUESTION MY QUESTIONING OF YOUR PATRIOTISM FOR QUESTIONING MY PATRIOTISM BY QUESTIONING! (h/t Pablo)

Ron Paul is many things. But St George beating back the dragon of American Imperialism? Come now. I admit I don’t know Greg Scoblete from Adam, and that I find these types of hagiographic pieces uncomfortable to read, so embarrassed am I for their authors, who come across as nothing short of political groupies. And after reading Scoblete’s piece, I had the uncomfortable thought that, once he finished it, he