SUPPORTING THE TROOPS. It's fascinating to watch how gleefully the Right has picked up on my retelling of yesterday's shouting match between a uniformed soldier and Jon Soltz, the head of Vote Vets. To be sure, I found the exchange disturbing -- that's why I wrote about it. But then, I didn't spend the last few weeks not only shouting down, but harassing, intimidating, investigating, slurring, discrediting, and attacking a soldier currently stationed in Iraq because he wrote a New Republic column I didn't like. SO let's be clear here: No one at the Kos panel searched out the questioner's wedding registry, no one at the Kos panel dug up his old poetry to embarrass him, no one at the Kos panel speculated on what a terrible soldier he is and how much he must have slowed his unit down, no one at the Kos panel unearthed his MySpace page, no one at the Kos panel said "he'd better watch his ass." And yet, merely a week after the Right did all that to Private Beauchamp -- whose story has been proven true in virtually all respects, with the singular error misremembering the location of one of the stories -- they have the audacity to accuse members of YearlyKos of proving insufficiently supportive of the troops. And they're doing so over an argument that was not between a room of people, or a conference of people, and a soldier, but between -- and limited to -- two soldiers. Remarkable. --Ezra Klein
