Category: The Dish

And therefore a liar. The Idaho Statesman has four named on-the-record sources claiming sexual contact or interaction with Craig. Bonus: one of them is the same guy who was hired by Ted Haggard. This is the most telling:

A fifth gay man, who is from Boise but who declined to be named for fear of retaliation, offered a recent and telling account: He was in a men’s restroom at Denver International Airport in September 2006 when the man in the next stall moved his hand slowly, palm up, under the divider. Alarmed, the man said he waited outside the restroom and then identified the man in the adjoining stall as Craig, whom he had met in Idaho.

Mike Jones audio account here. Sad.

(Photo: Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty.)

A conversation with Philip Seymour Hoffman:

Hoffmann noted that he is often defensive about the way that many actors react to the idea of evangelical Christians. Is there a bias, I asked, against that kind of person in the acting community?

"Absolutely!" he said. "It pisses me off that there is this knee-jerk reaction against them. There is certainly an antipathy against them in the acting world, just like there is an antipathy in the politically liberal world. And, as a result, the liberal Christian is not heard from as much. And, you know, a liberal person who has a deep belief in Christianity can be a very powerful influence on things."

She’s now a clear second in Iowa and losing momentum fast in New Hampshire. It turns out this isn’t a coronation of the Queen Consort after all, whatever the Washington elites assumed; it’s, you know, an election. Meanwhile, the two candidates gaining on the Republican side are Huckabee and Paul: the two most sincere guys in the race. Democracy is great, innit?

Tom Edsall asked some other Middle East reporters what they thought of Thomas Smith Jr’s reporting:

Michael Prothero, who has reported for Fortune, the Washington Times, and Slate, wrote in an email:

"In his [Smith’s] wildly entertaining postings, he describes kidnap attempts, an armed incursion into Christian East Beirut by 5,000 armed Hezbollah fighters that was missed by every journalist in town, he also notes the presence of 200 armed Hezbollah fighters in downtown Beirut ‘laying siege’ to the prime ministers office, recounts high-speed car chases and ‘armed recon operations’ where he drives around south Beirut taking pictures of Hezbollah installations, while carrying weapons. In a word, this is all insane."

"He’s a fabulist," wrote Chris Allbritton, who has reported from the Middle East since 2002 for Time, Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Times, and the Newark Star-Ledger. According to Allbritton, in an email to the Huffington Post, "[Smith’s] claim that 4,000 Hezbollah gunmen took over East Beirut at the end of September simply never happened. Every journalist in town would have pounced on that story, and he’s the only one who noticed?"

"Insane". But here’s the kicker:

Smith wrote at least five posts in September and October on The Tank attacking the Beauchamp stories, including the following comments: "It would have been virtually impossible for the things Beauchamp said happened to have played out the way he says they did" on September 10; and "Scott Thomas Beauchamp was either a fictitious character or a liar" on October 27.

So which is Smith?

Some background context to the story deliberately dumped late Friday to avoid scrutiny here.

A new book charts the fun:

If ever you thought sleeping was the uninteresting third of your life you spend unconscious, this is the book which will make you think again.

Bottom line:

In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity–which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.

When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

Foer’s chief critic responds here. After reading all of this, I have to say that I don’t trust Beauchamp’s credibility, even though the alleged facts in the matter remain murky. At some point, trust in the writer is essential. The one sin that is impossible to defend is assigning Beauchamp’s wife as his fact-checker. That simply shouldn’t happen. But Frank’s painfully extensive re-reporting and final conclusion are not the work of someone ducking editorial responsibility or accountability.

In Turkey, of course:

For many Turks it was inconceivable that the day would come in which they would enter a mosque to find a woman delivering lessons on Islam to both men and women. But this is what has happened. Today in Turkey, there are more than 450 religious female preachers delivering their religious lessons in mosques alongside the men.

Where’s Malkin? Others have noticed more weirdness:

Even stranger than the quasi-apology is Smith’s defence of his methods and actions in "reporting" on Hezbollah … He’s in Lebanon, under the auspices of the National Review, and announcing not only he’s there to report on Hezbollah as "the enemy" but seeking to directly provoke them. Smith lives in a state where if you shoot someone on your property who was stealing stuff, no one would bat an eyelid. So what will National Review’s complaint be if Smith gets hurt in one of his future pranks against Hezbollah? What explanation will they offer to another reporter who gets hurt on the assumption of Hezbollah that he’s another Smith character? And what is their liability if Smith, who apparently totes a gun in his trips around Beirut, hurts someone else? Someone has a blogger ethics problem.

Some Sunday reading. My fave: Ezekiel 23:19-20. But 2 Kings 2:23-24 deserves a looksie:

23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. "Go on up, you baldhead!" they said. "Go on up, you baldhead!" 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.

Pete Wehner and Yuval Levin chart the enormous gains in various social indicators since the early 1990s. The one great anomaly is the family, which remains roughly where it was:

Even as the teenage birth rate has fallen, out-of-wedlock births in general have reached an all-time high: 37 percent of all births in 2005. Over half of all marriages are now preceded by a period of unmarried cohabitation, and marriage rates themselves have declined by almost one-half since 1970.

In the life of any society, the place of the family is central. That fact alone makes these last statistics significant, and seriously complicates the picture of dramatic progress in other, related realms. Indeed, the two starkly divergent trends, taken side by side, should cause us to reconsider certain common assumptions concerning just how culture, behavior, family, and society interact, and how they change.

Wehner and Levin don’t really have a coherent explanation for this – especially since social conservatives have long argued that the breakdown in traditional family structure is the core reason behind other social ills, such as crime. Perhaps it isn’t in all social settings. Perhaps living in sin for a while before marriage is actually a social good for some; perhaps lower rates of marriage are not the end of the world – as many victims of awful marriages can attest. Perhaps child-birth outside marriage is not necessarily a bad thing if the relationship is solid and care for the child is secure. Perhaps, in other words, holding the family of the 1950s up as the standard by which all family structure should be measured is not, in fact, very helpful. I don’t know, but it seems one obvious inference from the data worth exploring further.