Thugs and Mob Generators

I have sort of followed this flap between The New Republic and the conservative noise machine over a diary posted anonymously by "Scott Thomas," a soldier in Iraq, about atrocities and ethically dubious behavior committed during the war. The reports of beating Iraqis and running over dogs and other "fog of war" stuff didn't fit with the rose-colored worldview of the insaneosphere, so they immediately decided it was a fake.

Then Scott Thomas Beauchamp himself revealed himself as the soldier and author.

So the insaneosphere did what anyone who supports the troops would do: they went after the soldier personally.

MICHELLE MALKIN DEMONSTRATES HOW TO SUPPORT THE TROOPS. Try to intimidate them. When they drop their anonymity to add credence to an article you doubt because it conflicts with your worldview, post their picture on your blog. Post their MySpace page on your blog. Quote people calling them a "pretentious ass" and a "strange chap. Write vaguely threatening lines like "Milblogger/ documentarian J.D. Johannes is headed back to FOB Falcon in Iraq in a few weeks, where Beauchamp’s unit was located (and which Johannes guessed correctly). Johannes has some words for the TNR writer." Find and post their college poetry.

Shit happens in war. Furthermore, that shit that happens has an impact when you're engaged in an occupation and trying to win hearts and minds. It's been true since the DAWN of war; "raping and pillaging" and "the spoils of victory" are fairly old concepts. That the insaneosphere thinks that this war is somehow different, somehow being fought by 150,000 carbon copies of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, is insane, and made all the more so by attacking anyone

The vast majority of our troops serve with honor. Some are beaten down psychologically by the horrors of combat and do something stupid. The military has a system in place to deal with that but it appears to be missing some incidents. That's the bottom line. And when you put troops in an unwinnable situation and in the middle of a civil war without a clear sense of mission, these incidents go up. Period.

But the insaneosphere doesn't want to deal with that, so they attack a member of the military personally. It's revolting. It's grade-A thuggery. To protect the President and his failed war, they will frag an American soldier. Nice people.

UPDATE: Yglesias:

That's just crazy. All these people need to stop. They need to take a deep breath. They need to apologize to the people at TNR who've wasted huge amounts of time dealing with their nonsense. And they need to think a bit about the epistemic situation they're creating where information about Iraq that they don't want to hear -- even when published in a pro-war publication -- can just be immediately dismissed as fraudulent even though the misconduct it described was far, far less severe than all sorts of other well-document misconduct in Iraq.

There's this perpetual sense from the nutters on the right that as long as confusion and doubt can be placed into one story then the totality of the literally thousands of similar stories in Iraq are rendered moot. These people are shameless.