If you only read one more piece that deals in any way with the Scott Beauchamp affair, it ought to be this one. Final graph:

Winter Soldier Syndrome will only be cured when the costs of slandering the troops outweigh the benefits. Exposing Scott Thomas Beauchamp and his brethren matters because the truth matters. The honor of the military matters. The credibility of the media matters.

Think it doesn’t make a difference? Imagine where Sen. John Kerry would be now if the Internet had been around in 1971.

In 2004 I predicted that we would see John Kerry mini-me’s emerging to slam the war effort by smearing the troops. Since then, we have seen a bunch of them — Jimmy Massey, Jessie MacBeth, Amorita Randall, Josh Lansdale, Micah Wright and now Scott Beauchamp. In every case, the blogs and internet gumshoes have been crucial in stopping these campaigns of lies. Without the tireless, sometimes thankless and often derided efforts of bloggers and particularly milbloggers, these charlatans and many more like them would have followed John Kerry’s path to fame and power, and along their paths would have been strewn the tattered reputation of the world’s greatest military — again. This isn’t to suggest that terrible things don’t happen in war, and perpetrated by our own troops: They do happen, and our troops do commit the occasional crime in the course of combat. But that isn’t what Beauchamp et al alleged. They alleged, as did Kerry before them, that the entire military had rotted from the head down and is out of control. Kerry was wrong then, but there was no internet to debunk him in real time. He was a very lucky man for that. His imitators weren’t so lucky, and that’s a very good thing.

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Rusty makes a good point re CAIR and the South Carolina (alleged) pipe bomb students:

So two Muslims are found with pipe-bomb materials in their car and CAIR cries “discrimination,” but when a couple of teenage hoodlums throw a plastic Coke bottle out their car window near a mosque…

You’ll have to read the whole post to get the full impact, but it’s a keen observation.

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The Brooklyn Arab school’s “peace goals” have been released:

The controversial Khalil Gibran International Academy’s grant application for private funds says the school wants to produce “agents of change” and “ambassadors of peace” by focusing on the “complexity of Arab history and the diversity of Arab culture.”

This is the same school whose principal is connected to a group selling “Intifada NYC” t-shirts, which might give the phrase “agents of change” a whole new meaning.