Fraud is OK, as long as your critics are "smug"

"Analysis" from Newsweek on the Scott_Thomas_Beauchamp controversy:

But neither is The Weekly Standard clean in this fight. In the blog by Michael Goldfarb that first raises
doubts about Beauchamp, there is a partisan smugness, a gotcha undertone. A
later column by Standard Editor William Kristol, the neocon stalwart, is laced
with ideological nastiness. Instead of restricting the argument to standards of
good journalism, they effectively accuse TNR editors of running a smear campaign
against troops in Iraq. "I think this story fits really well into their
narrative and the left's narrative of the soldier as both victim and perpetrator
of the war," Goldfarb told me in a phone interview from his home in Boston.
Kristol summed it up this way: "The left is now turning against the troops they
claim still to support."
[. . . . . . .]
The author has contributed freelance pieces
to The New Republic in the past.