Bad News Barry

"Military officials in Kuwait tried to verify the incident and called it an 'urban legend or myth.' Beauchamp's essays are filled with similarly spun tales. How much of a bull-slinger was Beauchamp . . . The very first line of his essay 'Shock Troops,' which opened with the melted-face mockery, was this: 'I saw her nearly every time I went to dinner in the chow hall at my base in Iraq.' 'Nearly every time.' At 'my base in Iraq.' Complete and utter bull.

"Defenders of The New Republic, a left-leaning magazine infamously duped by another young and ambitious fabulist, Stephen Glass, say the Beauchamp saga has been 1) blown out of proportion; 2) perpetuated by sloppy, rumor-mongering bloggers; 3) used as a distraction from the troubles in Iraq; and 4) exploited by 'chickenhawks' who deny that war atrocities happen. But the truth is, you won't find a single Bush Kool-Aid drinker among the military bloggers, embedded independent journalists, and active-duty troops who prominently questioned the Beauchamp sham. They know it ain't all going swimmingly overseas. But unlike Pvt. Beauchamp, they're committed to telling the whole truth about the war, not just approximations and embellishments that will score easy magazine gigs and future book deals with elite New York City publishers."

TPM's Josh Marshall is more skeptical about the military's conclusion:

"What's up here?

"Beauchamp makes his charges. The US Army allegedly investigates and finds the highly embarrassing charges to be false. But no information will be released about which of his charges were false, how they were false or how they were determined to be false.

"They then punish Beauchamp by preventing him from having any communication with the civilian world. And if that's not enough, an unnamed military source tells the Standard that Beauchamp has undergone a successful self-criticism session and has recanted everything. But an Army spokesman tells TNR that he's not aware of any confession or recantation. We can at least be thankful that the matter is being handled with such transparency.

"Maybe Beauchamp was always a teller of tales. He wouldn't be the first nor even the first to have wormed his way into the pages of The New Republic. But it's hard not to have some suspicion that the Army has put itself in charge of investigating charges which, if true, would be deeply embarrassing to the Army; that it has provided itself a full exoneration through an investigation, the details of which it will not divulge; and it has chosen to use as its exclusive conduit for disseminating information about the case, The Weekly Standard, a publication which can at best be described as a charged partisan in the public controversy about the case.

"This hardly inspires much confidence."

A liberal blogger agrees to pay a $30,000 fine to settle SEC charges that he touted a stock without disclosing he was being paid to do so.

Bush had lyme disease last year--now they tell us?

Is 43 getting advice from 41?

"Interviews with a broad range of people close to both presidents -- including family members like the elder Mr. Bush's daughter, Doro Bush Koch, and aides who have worked for both men, like Andrew H. Card Jr. -- suggest a far more complicated father-son dynamic, in which the former president is not nearly so distant as the White House would have people believe," says the NYT.