Eli Lake on the Beauchamp Affair
TNR editors, as demonstrated by Michael Crowley's and Jonathan Chait's performances on BHTV, continue not to convince me to trust them with their own magazine. Eli Lake's analysis of Beauchamp «smells» better. Lake argues that Scott Thomas Beauchamp's opinions «did not square» with soldiers' opinions he encountered and were also «exaggerated». He pointedly calls him a «creep». Crowley afterwards confesses to the «strange experience» of experiencing support from the Left after years of «bashing» on the magazine's generally pro-Iraq War stance.
I'm confused about TNR. Initially, after I wanted to bolt when TNR did not warn subscribers of the CanWest buyout, I was reassured by what I heard on Charlie Rose from Leon Weseltier, Frank Foer, and even Marty Peretz. Each man said something I could take for coin on the question, what will TNR stand for? Marty Peretz called the magazine «center-left»; Frank Foer talked about «craftsmanship»; and, Weseltier almost lulled me to into a fantasy with «essays, thinking, and analysis». The «Baghdad Diarist» was none of this!
I believe TNR made a bad judgment publishing Beauchamp, because it wanted to placate the anti-war Left with something vitriolic and off-tempo for TNR, yet in tune with the Web. I want what Weseltier wants: provocative, cross-eyed analysis packed into thoughtful essays. Chait, Crowley, and Foer have appeared defensive and incapable of spinning a positive message about TNR. They sound as if they want to park TNR on the Left, and are exasperated with the discipline required to defend the shifting center, or smash the ideological atoms the Left and Right hemispheres of the American political spectrum generate.
Could this be a reprise of the Henry Wallace year for TNR?
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