A Bad Precedent

Reading the article excerpts referenced by d. below, is it just me or isn’t the first story Goldfarb discusses — about some soldiers making fun of a woman horribly disfigured by an IED — highly reminiscent of a famous fabricated Stephen Glass anecdote? It’s only referenced obliquely in Shattered Glass, but Glass made up an incident where some young Republicans at a convention who picked up an overweight young woman at a bar, had her partially disrobe, and then cruelly humiliated her. It was a more clever fabrication that the stuff in “Hack Heaven,” because it’s at least imaginable that someone would do such a thing. The story in the new anonymous New Republic article is similar; not facially inconceivable (most people who aren’t conventionally attractive, especially women, will be no strangers to some kind of casual cruelty), and yet there’s something about the details that has a faint whiff of bullshit about it. It’s all just a little too After School Special-y. I’m not saying that it’s made up — and as d. points out it passes the Michael Yon credulity threshold — but I have to admit being pretty dubious about it.

…just FYI, an Iraq War veteran emailed me and said that (s)he felt that the first two stories were at least plausible (the first only if the woman is a contractor), but the third — the maniac Bradley driver — is implausible on its face. Again, I have no idea if the stories are made up or embellished.