Harking back to Republican strategies past, conservative icon Fred Barnes, who edits The Weekly Standard, advised John McCain to “touch on” gay social issues, which will “energize” the right his way…

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Take that, Weekly Standard. In The New Republic's ongoing saga about its "Baghdad Diarist" column (keep up, people), EIC Franklin Foer and his team claim to have vetted and confirmed every detail about Scott Thomas Beauchamp's heavily contested accounts of U.S. solider life in Iraq.

Well, except for one: The place where soldiers mocked a woman disfigured by a bomb explosion. It was not in Baghdad, but Kuwait. Aside from that, the magazines says they "place great weight on the corroborations we have received, [but] we wished to know more." Unfortunately, the U.S. military began its own investigation into Beauchamp's claims – like soliders running over a dog, or playing with the skulls of Iraqi children – and cut his phone and computer access for speaking so publicly.

Which, if you believe many conservative bloggers' viewpoint, is exactly what TNR would've wanted: Another excuse to play pick-and-choose journalism and finger the military as evildoers. As for the Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb, well, he's still not satisfied.

"Right now, we have no reason to believe that his stories are anything other than what we first suspected them to be: a 'pastiche of the 'This is no bullshit . . . stories soldiers like to tell.'" That's The Weekly Standard's response to the self-outing of Scott Thomas Beauchamp, otherwise known as The New Republic's "Baghdad Diarist" whose Iraq war accounts have been, let's say, "questioned." As the solider tells it: "My pieces were always intended to provide my discrete view of the war; they were never intended as a reflection of the entire U.S. Military. I wanted Americans to have one soldier's view of events in Iraq."

But that's still not good enough for the Standard's Michael Goldfarb, who wants dates and names to go along with Beauchamp's trio of tales. It's like their insisting on accuracy and accountability or something.

The Weekly Standard is having a field day with The New Republic's "Baghdad Diarist" problems. As you'll recall, the liberal-leaning rag's editor Franklin Foer is being called out for what many claim are gross exaggerations made by the column's author, pseudonym Scott Thomas, who is supposedly a current U.S. soldier. And TWS's more conservative editors want the soldier outed and, more than anything, for the competition to be embarrassed.

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Does The New Republic have a new Stephen Glass on its hands? The magazine's "Baghdad Diarist" – penned by the pseudonym Scott Thomas, a U.S. solider in Iraq, and which has been published three times – is being called everything from "punctuated with red flags" to "complete garbage" when it comes to the possibility that its first-person accounts are true. And The Weekly Standard is leading the fight for the truth. Or the chance to make the competition look incompetent.

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