Doonesbury in-country

Writing on the New Republic/Beauchamp debacle of several weeks ago concerning fabricated dispatches from Iraq (see here), Bob Bateman at Media Matters reaches this hard-to-dispute conclusion: When Salon's Glen Greenwald and the National Review Online's Michelle Malkin agree (and we might as well count Confederate Yankee and Andrew Sullivan, too), we've broken another seal on the apocalypse.

Congrats to TNR for doing its bit to promote bipartisan dialogue, even if it signals the end times.

Bateman makes another point, though, about what the Beauchamp mess reveals:

Essentially, what unnerved me is that a magazine like TNR was so completely divorced from the military that they did not even have one person on staff -- one single person -- who was personally connected to a career professional in the military (and Elspeth Reeve, an intern at TNR who is now married to Beauchamp -- himself not a career professional in the military -- doesn't count), who could have a) helped them screen what was being sent in the first place, and b) helped them figure out how to fact-check the guy (let alone, after the fact, help them figure out what was really going on). I mean, seriously, how is it that at this point the best de facto depictions of life in-country come ... in Doonesbury?! (The very liberal cartoonist Gary Trudeau is, in a strange twist of journalism, apparently far better wired in to real soldiers on the ground than is the editor of a major magazine? How did this happen?)

While pondering Bateman's question, check out the Doonesbury strip yesterday and today.