Lind witnessed the birth of Bat Boy, who became the tabloid's most beloved character and the subject of an off-Broadway musical. It happened in 1992, when Dick Kulpa, WWN's graphics genius, was playing around with Photoshop, trying to turn a picture of a baby into a picture of an alien baby. He gave the kid pointy Spocklike ears, big wide eyes and fangs. Ivone looked at it and said, "Bat Boy!" and Eddie Clontz turned to his brother Derek and said, "Do it!"
Derek concocted the story of a creature, half bat and half boy, captured in a cave in West Virginia. "BAT CHILD FOUND IN CAVE!" was the headline on the first story. But there were more, many more as the little tyke escaped and was recaptured again and again, constantly fleeing from the FBI and a brutal bounty hunter named Jim "Deadeye" Slubbard, who vowed to stuff him and hang him over his fireplace.
"Eddie fell in love with Bat Boy," Lind says. "He was one of the most in-depth characters we dealt with. He could be mean, he could be spiteful, but he could also be kind. And every once in while, he would be captured by the FBI and held in an undisclosed location near Lexington, Kentucky."
One day -- Lind swears this is true -- Eddie Clontz got a call from an irate FBI agent complaining that the bureau's switchboard was swamped with calls demanding that they free Bat Boy.
"Eddie said, 'I'll never do it again,' " Lind says, "then he hung up the phone and went on to the next Bat Boy story."
In the spirit of Eddie Clontz, we won't risk ruining that story by fact-checking it with the FBI.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/08/2007 14:33 Comments ||
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#2
"It is my belief that in the '80s and into the '90s, most people believed most of the material most of the time," says Derek Clontz.
Hell, my grandmother believed that stuff all the time, back in the '70s. I can't remember which tabloid it was, but she even believed the "WWII Bomber Found on Moon!" story. Well, it was in the newspapers, wasn't it?
#3
My Grandmother read the old "GRIT" newspaper, and believed every word printed there. Dad and I gave up trying to convince her that some of the stories were there just to get readership. And IT was much better at printing reasonable stories than most of the other weeklies, especially the tabloids.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
08/08/2007 17:07 Comments ||
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#4
"Did we quit when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?" - I'm sure they're no deader than Star Trek. The Web is a very large place.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
08/08/2007 21:48 Comments ||
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#1
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
And also found upon those stones, was crudely writ,
And poorly wrought, the name of one "B. Jones",
Who scribed, "Was Here", and nothing else of note,
(He long ago was taken up by local constables for it.)
#2
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
And also found upon those stones, was crudely writ,
And poorly wrought, the name of one "B. Jones",
Who scribed, "Was Here", and nothing else of note,
(He long ago was taken up by local constables for it.)
Democrats are fond of arguing that we should withdraw from Iraq so we can fight more effectively on the "real" battlefields in the war on terror in Afghanistan and perhaps Pakistan. But at the Contentions blog, Max Boot maintains that defeat in Iraq will make it more difficult to fight in Afghanistan and to counter terrorists in Pakistan. Boot points to a report in the Washington Post that Pakistan's dictator Musharraf has complained that his leverage over tribal militants has slipped because their leaders are less fearful of the U.S. given our difficulties in Iraq. Boot suggets that U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would accentuate this trend.
The point is a rather obvious one -- failure to succeed at war reduces a nation's ability to exert influence and emboldens a nation's enemies and potential enemies. This may not be a rationale for continuing to fight a lost cause. However, recent developments in Iraq strongly suggest that the cause there is not lost.
If the Democrats push for defeat in Iraq under these circumstances, it would be difficult not to conclude that either (a) they would like to see the U.S. unable to exert influence in the world or (b) they have no understanding of how the world works. Option (a) provides a good working definition of an American leftist; option (b) of an American liberal.
The tale of Army Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the discredited Baghdad Diarist for the discredited New Republic magazine, is an old tale: Self-aggrandizing soldier recounts war atrocities. Media outlets disseminate soldiers tales uncritically. Military folks smell a rat and poke holes in tales too good (or rather, bad) to be true. Soldiers ideological sponsors blame the messengers for exposing anti-war fraud.
Beauchamp belongs in the same ward as John F. Kerry, the original infectious agent of the toxic American disease known as Winter Soldier Syndrome. The ward is filling up. . . .
Defenders of The New Republic, a left-leaning magazine infamously duped by another young and ambitious fabulist, Stephen Glass, say the Beauchamp saga has been 1) blown out of proportion; 2) perpetuated by sloppy, rumor-mongering bloggers; 3) used as a distraction from the troubles in Iraq; and 4) exploited by chickenhawks who deny that war atrocities happen.
But the truth is, you wont find a single Bush Kool-Aid drinker among the military bloggers, embedded independent journalists, and active-duty troops who prominently questioned the Beauchamp sham. They know it aint all going swimmingly overseas. But unlike Pvt. Beauchamp, theyre committed to telling the whole truth about the war, not just approximations and embellishments that will score easy magazine gigs and future book deals with elite New York City publishers. The doubters of Scott Thomas know atrocities when they see them. But, unlike the TNR editors, they know steaming bull dung when they smell it.
Ever since John Kerry sat in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and accused American soldiers of wantonly razing villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, the Left has embraced a small cadre of self-loathing soldiers and soldier wannabes willing to sell their deadened souls for the anti-war cause. Think Jimmy Massey, the unhinged Marine who falsely accused his unit of engaging in mass genocide against Iraqis. Think Jesse MacBeth and Micah Wright, anti-war Army Rangers who werent Army Rangers.
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 doesnt make a difference? Imagine where Sen. John Kerry would be now if the Internet had been around in 1971.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/08/2007 09:38 ||
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Link ||
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#1
Where's the hook that removes this guy--his 15 minutes of invented fame are over? The guys a zero. He can probably get a job with the NYTs after exiting the military making up $hit.
. . . It's easy to see how things like this happen. Beauchamp is a gifted writer, with a point of view and raw material. If the Weekly Standard's report is true, it means that Beauchamp -- who could have published a novel, perhaps an excellent one -- is also a man who subverted his own work by calling it true and making it a lie -- not fiction, but a lie. The motivations are not hard to fathom. He gained access to The New Republic -- which gave him stature and an instant readership.
It's also easy to see how The New Republic succumbed. The writing was sharp, the man was on the scene where he could witness important events, and he was speaking in a voice they wanted to project. Why weren't they more afraid of being duped? Was it because he was saying what they wanted to be true, giving weight to their arguments against the war? (Here's the lead story over there right now.) Maybe they thought they were protected from the suicidal blunder of getting taken in by another Stephen Glass because they were publishing the writing not as a news article but as a "diary."
My life was one very long process of lying and lying again, to figure out how to cover those other lies, says Glass....
I remember thinking, If I just had the exact quote that I wanted to make it work, it would be perfect. And I wrote something on my computer, and then I looked at it, and I let it stand. And then it ran in the magazine and I saw it. And I said to myself what I said every time these stories ran, You must stop. You must stop. But I didn't.
I loved the electricity of people liking my stories. I loved going to story conference meetings and telling people what my story was going to be, and seeing the room excited. I wanted every story to be a home run....
Everything around him turned out to be incredibly vivid or zany or in some other way memorable, says [TNR literary editor Leon] Wieselteir. And at the meetings, we used to wait for Steve's turn, so that he could report on his next caper. We got really suckered....
I would tell a story, and there would be fact A, which maybe was true. And then there would be fact B, which was sort of partially true and partially fabricated. And there would be fact C which was more fabricated and almost not true, says Glass.
And there would be fact D, which was a complete whopper. And totally not true. And so people would be with me on these stories through fact A and through fact B. And so they would believe me to C. And then at D they were still believing me through the story.
Read that whole article: Glass went to some trouble to beat the fact checkers. Here's some analysis in The Columbia Journalism Review about how TNR fell for Glass:
[T]he truth is Glass gamed the system, and brilliantly. He'd often submit stories late to the checkers so they were pressed for time. When they questioned his material, [TNR editor Charles] Lane says, Glass would provide forged faxes on fake letterheads of phony organizations, as well as fictitious notes, even voice mail or actual calls from people pretending to be sources....
Shouldn't all the unnamed sources, obscure organizations, and wild scenes viewed only by the writer have been another tip-off? "I've searched my soul and asked, "Why didn't my bullshit meter go off?" says Lane. "But it's hilarious. By the time I got there so many wild stories had run and seemingly stood up, I trusted him."
Some journalists see in Glass the dark side of a new magazine journalism that puts a premium on sensationalism and style....
But those who knew Glass insist that his story is more about one rotten apple. After all, many writers are under pressure and don't make stuff up....
If there is any value to the saga of what may be the biggest hoax in modern American journalistic history, it's that it has many journalists asking questions about their checking systems.
Asking questions... and then blowing it, all over again. You'd think, after Glass, TNR would be exceedingly careful when confronted with vivid writing with great quotes and anecdotes. Yet somehow, it seems to have gotten less careful. There's this notion that war makes the soldiers crazy. Journalists love it. Beauchamp reinforced it. It appears that war makes journalists crazy. . . .
Like me, Mark Steyn thinks of Glass: "[TNR] made the same mistakes all over again - falling for pat cinematic vividness, pseudo-novelistic dialogue, all designed to confirm prejudices so ingrained the editors didn't even recognize they were being pandered to. But this time they did it in war, which is worse."
Roger L. Simon says: "Fact-checking, in my experience, is a big lie. It barely exists in the mainstream media." . . .
Hugh Hewitt calls TNR editor Frank Foer "the Dan Rather of the political magazine world, a laughing stock caught up in trying to publicly maintain an obvious lie as truth." He wants a head to roll.
On the left, one theory has it that the army coerced a false confession out of Beauchamp. Expect this to become the dominant meme at KKKos and DU.
And John Cole somehow winds up "now, more than ever, convinced that a certain segment of the Republican party and the right wing blogosphere is certifiably insane." Okaaaay...
So as it turns out US troops are not heartless barbarians and that far too many people on the left can't accept that. Well from one of those barbarians who just happens to have more humanitarian and disaster assistance work under his belt than any of the smirking elite sitting around the table at Franklin "Which way is the door?" Foer's editorial meetings, F**k you very much! You finished what Glass started, and may this serve as a lesson to the many other supposed honest media sources, your agenda is pitifully obvious and your tactics so childishly unsophisticated that I almost feel guilty smacking you around. But I will, and I hope it stings.
Enough for now. Suffice it to say there's a big fight on.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/08/2007 08:02 ||
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Link ||
[7 views]
Top|| File under: Iraqi Insurgency
#1
"Gifted writer?"
Excuse me, while I roll all over the floor, laughing my **s off.
Beachy-Boy's only gift was in being married to a TNR staff member. TNR could have found better soldier-writers in Iraq by skimming through the links at Mudville Gazette... but no, they had to take the lazy way out, and go for a dumb**s wanna-be who couldn't even accuratly observe the world around him.
#2
And John Cole somehow winds up "now, more than ever, convinced that a certain segment of the Republican party and the right wing blogosphere is certifiably insane."
So that little turd is somehow the fault of the Republicans and Right Wing Bloggers?
I'm not following this guy at all.
#3
HEY TNR Michael Yon has been reporting from Iraq as diary for a couple of years, why not publish him? I still like to imagine all the cool things the 1st shirt is making PvT-E1 Beauchamp do to keep him busy and on the recieving end of a blanket party. Flush the turd.
Oh. My. God. I didn't see that the first time through. It surprises me not at all that some bozo fantasizes about the crazed killin' he's seen in his time with the Third Weed 'n Feed Division (Beauchamp was on landscaping detail while in Germany), nor that some gullible editor swallowed it whole and excreted it into his magazine. What does surprise me (though perhaps it shouldn't) is that you can pass through an MFA program and still write as wretchedly as Beauchamp.
#5
The MFA types gravitate toward "literary fiction," which is a term of art meaning "unappealing and pretentious nonsense written by English professors for other English professors"; see also, e.g., James Joyce, Ulysses (world's longest run-on sentence). Beauchamp's right at home in that league.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/08/2007 11:18 Comments ||
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#6
Many years ago, there lived an emperor who was quite an average fairy tale ruler, with one exception: he cared much about his clothes. One day he heard from two swindlers named Guido and Luigi Farabutto that they could make the finest suit of clothes from the most beautiful cloth. This cloth, they said, also had the special capability that it was invisible to anyone who was either stupid or not fit for his position.
Being a bit nervous about whether he himself would be able to see the cloth, the emperor first sent two of his trusted men to see it. Of course, neither would admit that they could not see the cloth and so praised it. All the townspeople had also heard of the cloth and were interested to learn how stupid their neighbors were.
The emperor then allowed himself to be dressed in the clothes for a procession through town, never admitting that he was too unfit and stupid to see what he was wearing. He was afraid that the other people would think that he was stupid.
Of course, all the townspeople wildly praised the magnificent clothes of the emperor, afraid to admit that they could not see them, until a small child said:
"But he has nothing on!"
This was whispered from person to person until everyone in the crowd was shouting that the emperor had nothing on. The emperor heard it and felt that they were correct, but held his head high and finished the procession.*
And John Cole walked over and smacked the child while screaming into his face - "It's the narrative that important, not the facts you little neo-con reactionary."
#7
TNR believed it because they wanted to believe it. They still believe it.
Could be why they constantly get taken by these bullshit artists. It's easy...and they're still in business.
#8
Sounds suspiciously like a Weekly World News wannabe writer, has all the credentials, no morals, only a passing glane at any truth, and chutzhpah in abundance, plus a ready whine when caught.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
08/08/2007 17:38 Comments ||
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#9
Some journalists see in Glass the dark side of a new magazine journalism that puts a premium on sensationalism and style....
Style has been giving substance a drubbing for many years now. How else could halfwits like Whitney Houston and Michael Bolton ascend to such heights were it not for average Americans having the attention span of a fruit fly?
The horror of it is how ethics and integrity are now being treated with the same undisguised flexibility that questionable taste so often enjoys.
#2
I gave serious thought to emigrating to the USA or some other English-speaking country a couple of years ago. I dont blame Europeans who do so, but for me personally, this seems like a less attractive proposition now than it was then. First of all because I believe there is still work to be done in Europe
And Europe should get down on its collective knees and service Fjordman daily for such totally undeserved loyalty to his home turf.
According to the blogger Conservative Swede, people of European origins will become the global Jews of the 21st century
Not likely. As Ralph Peters and myself continue to predict, Europe will sooner revert to what it does best and instigate slaughter on the usual unprecedented scale. Muslims who suffer mere deportation will likely consider themselves fortunate.
This is what the Western Christians and liberals are working eagerly towards.
While the liberals at least have some sort of excuseeven if it is abject moral deficiencythe Christians most certainly do not. Its long past tea for this worlds Christian population to throw off the yoke of complacency and overly forgiving disposition in order to begin its repulsion of Islam, if not an outright Crusade against it.
The only thing I can do is to prepare myself for it. A good plan is to live as a Jew in Catholic/Mestizo Latin America rather than a Muslim Europe, or the sinking Titanic of America. Even China looks like an option, in comparison.
From an intellectual light like Fjordman, this is an incredibly damning indictment of America.
Britons [moving] to Australia
It is a sign of the times that whereas once Britons were once transported involuntarily to Australia, they are now moving there of their own volition.
It is interesting to note how Australiamuch lambasted for its convict cultureis one of the few nations that unashamedly bash its radical Muslim colonists. This is most likely due to how Australians have had to forcibly overcome any notion of inherited disgracethe sins of our fathers et aland purposefully solidify their own sense of identity and nationalistic pride. However ironic, they may well prove to be the one culture that is most resilient against and impervious to multiculturalism.
Unless we have the good luck to turn up another Saddam Hussein, Iraq is never going to be any kind of a real nation. The only good thing we are doing there is killing AQIs; and if we werent there and if, as we are told, Iraqs own Sunnis have turned against AQI the Iraqi street gangs and tribal militias would probably be doing a better job of that, under rules of engagement considerably more... relaxed than ours. I love Derbyshire!
#1
If indeed we turn up another Saddam Hussein, however much less Napoleonic (in the conquering, rather than reforming, sense) we'll have recreated the problem we went into Iraq to solve. As is so clearly demonstrated by daily events in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, in a tyranny people turn toward that facet of life left free; in the Muslim world that means radical Islam, as the only people who consistently try to change a painfully ineffective social set up. You think the Islamists/jihadis are bad now? Imagine how they'll metasticize if our experiment in a democratic civil society is thrown over for just more of what doesn't work, if the Islamists can crow that they really did defeat the well-armed but demonstrably decadent American bogyman. And at home we'll have demonstrated that the Arabs, at least, and arguably all of the Muslim world, are not capable of being civilized, with all that implies. To extend the metaphor, cancers are excised by surgery, then the body bombarded with chemical and/or radiation therapy until the doctors are certain every last cancerous cell had been destroyed. Else the cancer eats up the body until it accomplishes a painful death of the host. Dave D. described the options much more succinctly, but I haven't the link here.
Personally, I don't care if Iraq ends up one nation or three and I don't think preserving such artificial boundaries matters more than allowing viable societies to develop that can live with the rest of the world.
#2
This is the same guy who thinks Michael Schiavo is a hero. No wonder he's a Saddam fan.
Posted by: Mike ||
08/08/2007 7:04 Comments ||
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#3
Saddam was crazy. Goodness was done by removing that alien from this earth. Other demons do not change the fact that the world is better off no matter what you think.
The myriad of political insight exposed in Sunday's election have left each political camp to brag about a moral victory. One fact is indisputable, outside of Beirut and Damascus, there were no clear winners on Sunday.
Former general Michel Aoun's candidate, Camille Khoury, won 39,534 votes, against 39,116 votes for Amin Gemayel. Aoun's narrow margin victory of 400 votes, or half a percent, in the Christian-dominated Metn district in Lebanon, pales in comparison to the 80% popularity he claims to have among Lebanon's Christian population. Aoun's 80% popularity turned out to be among Lebanon's Armenian community, who's main political party joined pro-Syrian Michel Murr in an alliance with Aoun days before Sunday's election.
Aoun's support among his own religious sect, the Maronite Christians, was far less flattering. While his candidate may have won in the elections on Sunday, the move may backfire on Aoun's relentless, on the verge of desperate, drive to become president. Less than half of the Maronites who voted on Sunday, voted for Aoun. Since Lebanon's president must be a Maronite Christian, any candidate should at a minimum have substantial support from their own sect. The Maronite backlash at Michel Aoun can be traced back to his widely unpopular alliance with the staunch Syria-aligned Hezbollah.
Syria has always needed a Christian puppet in Lebanon to represent its interests. Now that the top Syrian General in Lebanon, Lebanese president Emile Lahoud, is all out of unconstitutional extensions, and is due to leave office in two months, Syria is pulling all the strings it has left in Lebanon to force Aoun in as the next puppet. The current president, Emile Lahoud, presents a clear example of how divided Lebanon will remain if he is replaced with another Syrian puppet.
According to Abu Kais of Beirut to the Beltway, it was the Syrian president who won on Sunday:
If anyone got a boost, it's the Assad killing machine, which proved still capable of assassinating deputies and replacing them with others. Aoun supporters should look closely at who really won the Metn election: the real winner is the Assad regime. They are losing their street so that the Assad regime can further its goals. Aoun's popularity among Christians does not matter to Assad, as long as the former general continues to provide a cover for the plot to bring down the government and divide the Christian community?which has always been the heart of the anti-Syrian opposition. Sadly, Aoun's supporters have convinced themselves that they're being forward-looking by striking alliances with the pro-Syrian camp.
Sunday's elections clearly showed that Aoun needs the support of Syria and the pro-Syrian political groups in Lebanon to scrape in a victory. Winning by the narrowest of margins in the Christian heartland was a significant setback for Aoun's aspirations to be president, despite the comparably minor victory for his candidate.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/08/2007 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
