Matthew Yglesias, with the last word on TNR's Scott Thomas non-scandal:
What does have significance is this genre of right-wing press criticism. Basically, a story comes out that conservative bloggers don't like, someone -- without evidence -- proclaims it bogus. Then all kinds of people who may or may not know what they're talking about put forward theories about why X or Y must be false. Then those theories are all uncritically endorsed by key conservative bloggers.This story has absolutely nothing to do with accuracy (or nepotism) and absolutely everything to do with the idea- heresy to the Hewitts and Malkisn of the world- that a soldier might actually think the war is going less than perfectly. Posted by Stephen Silver at July 29, 2007 02:21 PMThen if it turns out that any of the dozens of claims made by the blog swarm end up vindicated, the horde proclaims "advantage: blogosphere" and decides that all war-related news reporting it doesn't approve of must be made up. It's as if you had a guy batting .134 who hit a home run once, years ago, and fancies himself a slugger.