I kind of have the feeling that we'll find out we're the real monsters, as in Scott Beauchamp's spec script, Honey, I Cut Out The Kids' Tongues!

Minor hope: the director here is Peter Berg, an actor turned director who looks kinda dumb but is really pretty damn smart and very funny. He did the overperforming The Rundown, which really should not have been as good as it was, even if it did have Seann William Scott and Christopher Walken in it.

Hope against hope that he's not a complete dick. But I'm ready and willing to be disappointed. Look, if the terrorists are Muslims, that means the Westerners have to be worse, and the orders will come down "from the President himself" for Jamie Foxx to let the terrorists kill the captives, because, damnit, there's oil on the line. (Foxx, of course, will disobey this order.)

And yes, that is Jason Bateman you saw get taken hostage there. The terrorists have no idea they're up against one of the FBI's deadliest experts in dry sarcasm.

Thanks to Slublog.

PS, anyone see Peter Berg on Dinner For Five talking about his disastrous location-scouting trip in the Amazon for The Rundown? One of the funniest Hollywood stories I've heard.

I've been trying to find a clip of that for years. No dice.

Posted by: Ace at 11:06 PM | Comments (33)
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Another reason for anonymity, and, of course, always being polite and civil when online.

As I do.

Called him a "nerd." A nerd, mind you.

A Navy man who got mad when someone mocked him as a "nerd" over the Internet climbed into his car and drove 1,300 miles from Virginia to Texas to teach the other guy a lesson.

As he made his way toward Texas, Fire Controlman 2nd Class Petty Officer Russell Tavares posted photos online showing the welcome signs at several states' borders, as if to prove to his Internet friends that he meant business.

When he finally arrived, Tavares burned the guy's trailer down.

This week, Tavares, 27, was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading no contest to arson and admitting he set the blaze.

"I didn't think anybody was stupid enough to try to kill anybody over an Internet fight," said John G. Anderson....

I didn't think anybody was stupid enough to doubt someone might kill somebody over an Internet fight.

Andrew Sullivan... you know we're buds, right? Just joshin' around like old college chums, right? Oh, how we laugh. Good times. The stories we have together.

Incidentally, when did the word "guy" become acceptable in a legitimate news article? I think blogs are having some bad influence. Not to be all prim and stuffy, but if you're writing for something printed on paper, don't write that someone "burned the guy's trailer down."

"Guy" is the fateful half-step to the nightmare of "dude."

Thanks to DRI.

Posted by: Ace at 10:57 PM | Comments (30)
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You're not anyone until you have a parody blog in your honor.

TheyÂ’re turning us in to monsters

Its a shame the common folk don’t realize when we’re in the Sandbox we’re being handed “vitamins” on a daily basis, but they aren’t the regular Flintstones, they’re being used to get us all amped up to go on killing sprees and wipe out entire villages of Sand-wops…

We crept through the oil fields on a raid the other night, probably into neighboring Saudi Arabia, and burned an entire village to the ground. Their sand huts were set ablaze and we used sling-shots with special darts, made from the spit of the man-bear-pig, to finish off the survivors. The poor bastards never stood a chance.

As we were air lifted out the gunner on the ‘chopper was just firing indiscriminately at a bunch of brown-people tending their sand-patties. I asked him how he could tell the enemy and he just laughs maniacally, I guess the vitamin hadnÂ’t worn off yet, and starts screaming theyÂ’re all terrorists. “If they run theyÂ’re a terrorist, if they donÂ’t run theyÂ’re a well trained terrorist.” He had written “Sand-wops Iced Since ‘03″ beside the door and was actually keeping score. The pilot said theyÂ’ve had to re-skin the inside of the ‘chopper twice when he ran out of places to mark kills, so they didnÂ’t have a total count on hand, but their last estimate was over six-hundred-thousand.

Its those “vitamins” that get our blood lust up and we just can’t help but killing. Hell our CO, Major Payne, is all the time saying that “killin’ is his business and business is good“. I’m not sure what’s become of us, but it isn’t natural and damned sure isn’t humane.

Funny stuff. But I have to say our own Beauchamp-Lytton contestants are giving it their all as well. Some funny friggin' stuff in the contest thread below.

Some of you weisenheimers might want to re-write your stuff so it's in the ScottThomas.us style (i.e., always from Scott Thomas' POV) and submit it to that guy. So your stuff can be preserved forever side by side with Scott Thomas' exploits.

Sean Gleeson's... entry is over on discarded lies, since he posts there. So I thought I'd link it. It's called "Storm Troopers." Good stuff.

Posted by: Ace at 08:40 PM | Comments (53)
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This time it's personal. more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:23 PM | Comments (20)
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Hah. And you thought my Dirk Gently quote -- "The trouble with clever people is that they assume everyone else is stupid" -- was offered for no reason.

From one of his blogs:

My Day off is just that

Americans dont like smart people...at least people who are intelligent just to expand human knowledge. If youre smart, it better lead to riches. And as for the all american heroes, they're not more intlligent than you...just sexier or faster or in a gang, or, like, really really really good at football. It leaves no hope for those who are pretty useless save their intellect. Sorry AJ. You'll always be MY hero.

Today: went to the library, checked out some new movies, was on the internet FAR too long....listened to Wilco and The Smiths....have to work 24 hr CQ tomorrow night. Damn.

Not much else to say really. Vicar in a TuTu.

Well, I'd say that's the perfect personality type to give an unsupervised assignment to! Let's see -- emotionally immature with a juvenile persecution complex; delusions of intellectutal superiority; a huge chip on his shoulder about not having his genius properly recognized by the morons around him; he believes America is keeping him down due to his intellect; and he's determined to get those "riches" usually reserved for football stars, by hook or by crook!

Damn-- forget making him Baghdad Diarist! Let's make this guy the fucking Secretary of Defense! Who knows where his undiscovered talents may take us!

By the way: I'm told (not sure how this is known) that searching this blog -- or cached versions of it; the post seems to be deleted -- for the keywords "liar" and/or "deceiver" might yield some good results.

Go here for details.

The greatest living poet? Really? Really?

Posted by: Ace at 04:22 PM | Comments (77)
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Did telling the truth become a firing offense?

When was that official TNR policy?

Is that in the TNR employee's manual, by the way?

Thanks to many people for reminding me of this.

So TNR can stuff it with its victim pose. Fuck them.

Question: If Scott Beauchamps should be discharged from the Army, will TNR complain?

How can they? Didn't they fire a guy for squealing themselves?

At least in Gracie's case he was telling the truth.

Posted by: Ace at 04:09 PM | Comments (20)
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One of his first, and finest, dispatches from Baghdad. Experience the horror of war as a sergeant orders a troop to kill a child, in a scene lifted straight out of Full Metal Jacket:

"Shit, 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 shit and piss and the smart ones sneak out to the fields to hidden caches of water jugs and trinkets of candy from the american soldiers.

"See that sarge, kids digging or something?"

"Well, better safe then sorry. Cap his ass Leclaire."

"You sure sarge?"

"Well, im either right or wrong. And if I'm wrong im still right because i could have been right even though i was wrong."

They watch the sliver of red sun fall slower and slower, silhouetting the little barbarians falling bodies. The Chaplain turns and walks back towards the FOB in contemplation. Gotta rack out early tonight. Handing out bibles in the marketplace tomorrow, early. Unintelligible rap blares out of the open doors of the HUMVEE.

Wait, did I say that harrowing account was from Iraq? My bad. It was actually written before he took a step into Iraq.

Now, I'm pretty sure he wasn't passing that off as a true journal entry; I'm pretty sure it was intended as a creative writing exercise.

But, as Goldfarb notes, he certainly seems to have his narrative -- and the sorts of details he'd be seeing and reporting -- formed well in advance of actually arriving in Iraq, doesn't he?

Did he need to make up the running-down-dog stories because his janitorial and maintenance duties just weren't affording him the dramatic, searing experiences of being forced to kill a child by demonic Sgt. Tom Berenger as he had hoped?

Let me ask again:

Is a dude who, in trying to make his blog interesting (apparently via the crowd-pleasing technique of purple prose), resorts to dunderheadedly derivative
fiction really the kind of guy you want to make your Baghdad Diarist with no fact-checking whatsoever?

It's time for a fucking contest, baby.

Herewith begins the Beauchamp-Litton Awards for the purplest, most absurdly melodramatic and/or plainly plagiarized "war narratives" you can imagine.

Ladies and gentlemen, get your creative juices rigorously edited and fact-checked reportorial juices flowing.

I hereby declare all of you -- every man Jack among you, and every lady Jane as well -- the official Ace of Spades HQ Baghdad Diarists.

Just make shit up -- don't worry, there will be no fact-checking whatsoever!

Just like at TNR.

Bonus Points! for combining your super-tough Cong-killer thousand-yard-stare personas with thoughtfully liberal sentiments like this:

Every morning I get up and say I'm Scott Beauchamp, in the army, living in Germany, and this is my life, and I'm going to be treated like shit today and do landscaping and janitorial work and practice killing people and there could be no other way to appreciate what I had or what I'm going to have once I get out other than enduring this now when all I really want to do is teach history and lay around and read and hustle around and repair the world (tikkun olam) and sift through knowledge and improve culture and learn how to sail and work in soup kitchens and start a family and really, I mean REALLY study the best the western civilization has to offer and facilitiate the mystery and power through everything I do, but I cant do it without getting through this army experience first, which will add a legitimacy to EVERYTHING i do afterwards, and totally bolster my opinions on defense, etc, and of course its making me a lot less lazy, just because im not use to being lazy any more, etc.

Repair the World (Tikkun Olam). Go and do likewise, gentlemen.

He wanted to be a history teacher? Christ, even his real life aspirations are cribbed from Saving Private Ryan.

"Hey sarge you gotta give me a minute here on this thing we're doin'..."

For inspiration. Get to it, most rikki-tik.

Posted by: Ace at 03:57 PM | Comments (168)
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For the single-issue thing today. And I didn't even get a chance to post my interview with my source, which I expected to be my big thing today.

I think I'll try to stop on this for a while, at least. No promises, really. If someone sends something good, I'll link it. Maybe I'll just do a round-up later. But I'll stop actually writing about it. I've said everything I can say about this sixteen different times today in seven different ways.

Preventing me from moving on have been the long, long arguments with J-Pod and Allah. Not so much an argument with Allah; just him being old Eeyore, bringing me down, as usual.

I Lied: Beauchamp plays the victim card -- as regards his fellow soldiers.

You know, the ones who drive a severely disfigured woman from the room, crying. The ones who wear children's skulls as rigid Yarmulkes.

Beauchamp simply will not abide you all running down their characters.

Posted by: Ace at 03:01 PM | Comments (32)
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Not to escalate my current dispute with J-Pod -- which I hope he takes in the spirit it's offered, a good-natured disagreement -- but CJ writes the following. I've edited out some of the stronger stuff out of respect for NRO.

I am not in the media business and know nothing about it, but it seems to me that a number of people (all of the NRO) who are poo-pooing this story [are part of the] good old boy school of journalism...

...

Yes, they are on your side politcally, but that's only where it doesn't [conflict with class/guild loyalties]. The problem isn't journalism as the left practices it or the right practices it. The problem is journalism.

I'll say that's overstated, but there does seem to be a feeling out there -- maybe J-Pod isn't guilty of this, but we have seen this before -- that if a blogger breaks a story, it must not have been a story, because only those in the media are actually qualified to break stories, and, if they don't break it, it is, ipso facto, not a story.

We saw that with Rathergate, God knows, and a dozen times since then. It's not actually a story unless and until the MSM says it is, and if the story doesn't originate somewhere within their ranks, they're very reluctant to confirm story status on it.

As I said last night, I do not consider the name of Scott Thomas Beauchamp "huge." I said it was a "random name" which would mean nothing to anyone. I also said there was an angle in the how of how he got hired, but that too was not "huge" -- a story, yes, but not a huge one.

I do not believe this is a huge story, even though it is giving me lots of traffic. It is a fairly minor story. I admit this.

But yeah, it's a minor story that broke here, and and even a minor story is still, in fact, a story. And the media runs hundreds of minor stories every day about bigger stories -- unable to actually make progress on the bigger story, they nibble around the edges with smaller stories tangential to the big one.

J-Pod, I'm afraid, is behaving as if he's never witnessed such a phenomenon in all of of his years of journalism.

Huge story? Definitely not. I've repeatedly, expressly warned people this was not a huge story. I warned them not to expect a huge thing.

But not a story at all? Are you kidding me? No story value here whatever? No resonance with the Plame matter? No questions about TNR's candidate-search processes? No questions about TNR just running a guy's claims without fact-checking them because he is vouched for personally by someone on the staff -- his wife, of course -- and because, of course, he is politically "one of us"?

No story value in that Jon? Not even a little teensey itty bitty bit?

The fact of the matter that this guy was hired for all the wrong reasons -- ease of recruitment, social relationship to the organization, the right political leaning -- which is, I guess, fine and all, and fairly common, but one certainly should not then run such a dubiously-qualified "reporter's" stories with no fact-checking whatsoever. Hire him if you will, sure, but you cannot pretend you have just hired someone like John Burns whose track record and experience and reputation make his dispatches nearly self-verifying.

More fact-checking -- before the stories were run, mind you -- were needed based upon who this guy was and how he got hired, not less, for God's sakes.

And especially at TNR, which, I must stress, has a rather bad history with young, ambitious, unproven reporters with yearnings for a book deasl and minds that run toward the creatively, fictively faux-dramatic.

Admission: This story is being overplayed on the right because, let's face it, it's slightly juicy. It's got the thrill of a secret revealed to it. Undoubtedly more is being read into it than should be. No doubt I'm getting more traffic today than Blackfive, Greyhawk, etc., who really ought to be getting more traffic, because their reportage is more important.

So I concede that: This is a minor story which is, wrongly, playing huge just because it has a little bit of skullduggery and sex appeal to it.

On the other hand, it does have the benefit of being a new fact, rather than new (or old) speculation and analysis. New facts always get big play, even when they're not, in the scheme of things, the biggest new facts one could imagine.

But , yes, the story is probably getting more attention that it deserves. And yet I still reject the claim that there is no story here at all. There is a story here. Just not a huge one.

Hire someone related to the magazine by marriage? Wouldn't be the first time, God knows.

Let this person, with scarce additional qualifications or experience apart from his personal relaionship with a staffer, run his pieces with no fact-checking?

That is a story. And for TNR, more than any other news outfit (with, perhaps, the exception of CBSNews), an absolute disgrace which can neither be forgotten nor forgiven.

On Fact-Checking TNR: If Confederate Yankee can find the email of the supervising officer in this area of Baghdad within a half hour, and get a response an hour later, why is it that Franklin Foer couldn't have?

Why is Franklin Foer only doing this fact-checking now?

And let's address a flat-out lie by Foer:

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.

There is no other way to characterize this: This statement is a lie.

This is what Foer means by "rigorous editing and fact-checking," it seems:

"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."

Let's see... rigourous editing and fact checking. Four parts to that:

1) Pass the stories around to people who were not witnesses to see if it "smells good" -- i.e., is not immediately, jump-right-out-at-you absurdly fraudulent.

2) "Confirm the woman," whatever that means. That she exists? That she was wounded? What? Well, there was a woman in Baghdad -- that much Foer can swear to you.

3) Establish that women are in fact permitted in FOB Falcon, which, um, I'm not sure anyone ever doubted.

4) Ask the "reporter" hard questions. Like, I imagine: "Really? You're sure? No bullshittin'? Seriously, are you jerking my chain?"

As if asking him that would eventually produce the response, "Please! I can't take it any longer! I admit it! I faked a lot of the details!"

Rigorous editing and fact-checking, Franklin?

Pull the other one why don't you.

I guess you did so much fact-checking you haven't asked Ryan Lizza to stay on (he having departed to work at another magazine) in order to lead the actual fact-checking investigation now, huh?

If this fact-checking was done before, why do you not already have the confirmations -- the names, the emails, the phone-numbers, etc. -- ready to share with everyone?

Why is it your whole magazine is scrambling to prove these things true now?

Posted by: Ace at 02:08 PM | Comments (47)
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Again check the byline.

I have to ask at this point: At precisely what time did the Reeve-Beauchamp relationship begin? As he seems to have had a fiancee or near-fiancee in Germany, presumably there was a period when there was no relationship.

But I am wondering if it's one of those on-again, off-again type deals. And why Elspeth Reeve keeps covering former-college-classmate-future-fiancee Scott Thomas Beauchamp.

“I don’t think there’s usually enough men at these kind of events, so it’s really important to show up and support it,” said Scott Beauchamp, who endured a 24-hour bus ride from Columbia to attend Sunday’s march. “I think it’s really a civil rights issue.”

Sorry, gotta ask: Did Elspeth Reeve and Scott Beauchamp, both travelling from Missouri to DC, happen to share that busride?

This is, as J-Pod said, a tangential issue in many ways.

Still, I maintain that given TNR's disastrous history with fabulists, they should have been doing more fact checking on a young, very partisan, inexperienced, ambitious, apparently underquallified faux-journalist/blogger, not less.

Post Stephen Glass, TNR promised they had fixed their fact-checking so that this could never happen again.

And yet here we are: TNR is now "investigating" these stories for the first time.

As Foer said the other day, the previous "fact checking" was showing the stories to other embeds to see if they "smelled good." Not if they were actually true, mind you, which the other embeds could of course not have known-- but just to determine if they passed the smell test, if they were superficially plausible.

None of this, they told us, would ever happen again. They'd learned their lesson from Stephen Glass.

And of course they learned that lesson before with Ruth Shallitt.

How many times does TNR get to re-learn this lesson before it's shuttered for nearly criminal journalistic malpractice?

Posted by: Ace at 01:43 PM | Comments (23)
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