Danny Boy
In today's
Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer
sneers at 24 year-old Army private Scott Thomas Beauchamp for serving in Iraq while having ambition or getting his facts wrong or pissing on George and Dick's Excellent Adventure, or something. He really hasn't settled on one point just yet.
Krauthammer pegs Beauchamp as a tool of the anti-war left, oblivious -- and perhaps willfully so -- of the fact that Beauchamp also wrote -- and
TNR published -- an
account in which members of a Shiite militia allegedly brutalized a young Iraqi boy who expressed pro-American sentiment.
Regardless of his questioned veracity, however, Private Beauchamp is fighting the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here, as Krauthammer would have it. Which puts him in a different league than another young American, a
self-proclaimed neocon,
failed blogger and
Harvard senior. Unlike Charles' pop-psychological caricature of Beauchamp, Daniel Krauthammer knows what he thinks about evil, and he's not afraid to stand up to it and call it names:
And on foreign policy, the area I think this is pattern is the clearest and most important, it takes strength to achieve peace. The great conflicts we faced with fascism and nazism were not won with peace talks or compromise or appeasement. They were won by standing up to evil, calling it by its name and fighting it until victory.
Sure, Danny Boy may act timorous when facing the gruesome realities of watching his father accept an award, but he'll fight Islamojihadofascism to the death or until he gets bored after eight blog posts, whichever comes first.
And when Danny recalls getting together with his buddies for chow, he'll certainly never forget which country he's in.
There's now a vacancy in the Baghdad Diarist position. Charles should encourage Danny to fill it, so the young non-appeaser can call evil by name and stand up to it while giving us the rosy scenario the anti-war left doesn't want us to learn. I might even subscribe to The New Republic to read that.
