It’s pretty pathetic, watching rabid hamsters snarling and ripping apart the big honking invisible fluffykitten that haunts their waking hours. I refer, of course, to the way they get their spinning wheels whizzing at the mere mention of the widdle furball, Scott Thomas Beauchamp.

And what is it about his catness that gets their blood pressure up? Because he’s possessed by evil spirits that only they can see. Here’s the imagined demons Hot Air was fighting three months ago:

Starting with the Vietnam war, the American public has been divided on the military question. A majority before, during and even after that war will claim that it supports and respects the military, but words are cheap and the actions of some tell a very different story. Some of those who say in a poll that they generically respect the military were undoubtedly among those who called returning troops “babykillers” as they spat on them. Some of those who claim to support the military only support it when it isn’t being used to defend the country, and even then they spend their time trying to cut the defense budget even while international threats mount and multiply. Some of those who claim to support the military look down upon those who choose to join it as either children who joined solely for the benefits, or thugs who joined because they love violence. And some of those who claim to support the military mistrust it and its intentions and see its members as the weapons of a fascist state.

Somewhere in all those descriptions, you’ll find the motivations that led TNR to publish the writings of Scott Thomas Beauchamp but not J. D. Johannes, Pat Dollard, Michael Yon, Michael Totten or any of the writings published by those of us who have been to Iraq for whatever length of time and have things to say about the troops and the war. TNR sought out a war critic, but not any war critic: TNR sought out a war critic whose writings either smeared the troops or exposed serious discipline problems among the troops. And examining the details of his writings, it became clear to many veterans and non-veterans alike that Beauchamp simply wasn’t writing the truth, and was therefore letting the men in his unit down by exposing them to unfair criticism. He was also reinforcing several stereotypes that many of those who claim to support the troops hold: That they’re dehumanized animals. Beauchamp’s work is today’s equivalent of calling the troops “babykillers,” only from inside the military where presumably the person tossing the insult will be insulated by his having “absolute moral authority.” TNR got to take part in the awful anti-military activities of the last lost war, but in a new and more pernicious way, by replacing smelly hippies with a man in uniform in the war zone.

So the dastardly TNR saw fit to publish something awful the bad kitty coughed up that totally ruined our image of the military, hurt their feelings really really bad and turned everybody opposed to this war into the demon that has haunted them, lo, all these many years, the hippy, which they’re convinced was smelly. As most of these hamsters were swaddled in cloth diapers at that time, the thought has never struck them that it wasn’t that horriable hippy where the smell emanated from.

Digressions aside, what awful libelous rotten lying story did the bad kitty tell?

He said he was mean to a disfigured woman, someone got goofy with a disinterred skull and someone liked to swerve and hit dogs and stuff.

I’d never tell a real journamalist how to pick their stories, but when I saw all the slavering hamsters, I momentarily thought there was a story there. Something bigger than ‘a buncha guys hanging out with their lives on the line daily finding ways to be weird, rude, crude or unkind to animals.’

I am a guy. I’ve known guys. Guys have been friends of mine. And nothing Beauchamp wrote revealed anything particularly new about guys. Black humor in stress circumstances is a form of relief. Cruelty’s a perfectly normal side effect when you’re worried you might be dead in an hour. I don’t know where TNR was raised to think this was even a story. If one of them Al Kayda terrierists were to read what they did, he’d likely be dead of a giggling fit.

That’s why I never touched the story. It was getting fun watching all those wacky hamsters going mental. Some of their wheels spun so fast I swore they’d self-immolate.

There’s real awful stories that can be told about this war. The horrors unleashed for twisted reasons, magnified by corruption and incompetence, destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands, disrupting the lives of millions. Very few of them have anything to do with soldiers. They’re mostly about civilian leaders.

And what do the hamsters think of those stories? Them’s okie-dokie. Because the ghouls don’t look like their demon kittens.

It’s a rare treat when I get an issue that’s a perfect convergence of everyone’s-wrong-except-me (and if you’re not part of this story, you). But as near as I can tell, there’s an infantryman who fancies hisself as a budding Hemingway, but he’s really kind of a little dick. There’s one or more folks breaking rules and releasing selective confidential info that has nothing to do with security or corruption, demonstrating he can be an even littler dick. There’s a lame-ass publication that’s putting out grade school adventures instead of tackling the biggest ugliest dicks. And then there’s the hamsters, the poor haunted hamsters, struggling for truth, justice and American hegemony.

Which would seem sincere if they were demanding the release of the still-secret Abu Ghraib videos. Any of them: author, editor, brass, or hippie-haunted-hamster.

Wake me if they get to that, would ya?

Update: John Cole’s take is good, as is Tom Tomorrow’s (within Cole’s post). But my next post has an even more amusing story.