Bad News Barry

"Official reaction: He outslugged Hank Aaron. Unofficial reaction: He outran investigations by federal prosecutors and Major League Baseball, which are pursuing charges that he used steroids and committed perjury about it. Compromise view: The performance-enhancing drugs are in his past. Cynical view: So is his performance--he has posted only 53 home runs in the last three years, and he's been hitting .185 since the All-Star Game."

ESPN columnist Gene Wojciechowski sees a charade:

"You can admire or despise him, but you can't deny Bonds' ability to make us watch. It was spellbinding stuff and -- wait . . . I'm sorry. I can't do this anymore.

"I can't pretend what Bonds did Tuesday night in front of a national television audience and his adoring but myopic Giants fans is anything more than a make-believe piece of baseball drama.

"I can't pretend Bonds' 756 homers truly matter because there's no way of knowing how many of them were hit by Barry The Clean or Barry The Cream.

"I can't pretend Bonds is the legitimate successor to Aaron because there are simply too many questions and too much evidence to suggest otherwise . . .

"What Bonds has done, as his body has morphed from a lithe, ungodly, athletic rookie into a Silver Surfer look-alike, was no coincidence. I believe it was cheating. Rationalize and justify all you want, but Bonds had a choice. And I believe he chose to cheat."

In the New Republic, Gary Hoenig says, well, lots of people do it:

"If you bothered to read beyond the Bonds exposés and the circus of congressional hearings in 2005, you would have learned that steroids have been used by baseball players as far back as at least the mid-'80s, that by 1991, baseball officials were alarmed enough to add steroids to a list of banned substances sent to all teams, and that even with new testing procedures in place since those hearings, any player who wants to enhance can likely do so with little chance of being caught. But most sportswriters and columnists went back to the safest route: blaming the few, extolling the virtues of the game, finding solace in building up new heroes to replace the fallen ones."

The Army's conclusion that Scott Thomas Beauchamp was lying in his New Republic pieces--and the magazine's insistence that it has corroborated his account--is really heating up the blogosphere debate. Michelle Malkin rips both Beauchamp and TNR:

"To illustrate the soul-deadening impact of war, Beauchamp had described sitting in a mess hall in Iraq mocking a female civilian contractor whose face had 'melted' after an IED explosion. 'I love chicks that have been intimate -- with IEDs,' Pvt. Beauchamp claimed he said out loud in her earshot. 'It really turns me on -- melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses.' Beauchamp recounted vividly: 'My friend was practically falling out of his chair laughing. The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall.'

"It wasn't true. After active-duty troops, veterans, embedded journalists, and bloggers raised pointed questions about the veracity of the anecdote, Beauchamp confessed to The New Republic's meticulous fact-checkers that the mocking had taken place in Kuwait -- before he had set foot in Iraq to experience the soul-deadening impact of war.