We probably should have mentioned something about this earlier, but we plead subconsciously willful ignorance. Let’s make it quick, then: the recent Shattered Glass-lite semi-scandal over at The New Republic heavily involves one Cpl. Matt “Rod Majors” Sanchez, who was used as a source for accusations of fictionalization. Surprised? 

You probably know the story already, but here it is again: Allegations from The Weekly Standard came out that ”Scott Thomas” (now outed as Scott Thomas Beauchamp), a soldier who was doing an Iraq diary for TNR, was fabricating unpleasant details and that he was hand-picked to write because he was married to a TNR reporter. Currently, TNR editors (and the military!) are still investigating, they say, and re-checking every piece of information. Sanchez, it turns out, was the guy telling TWS reporters that Thomas had cooked his facts.

Of course, not everyone is buying Sanchez’s story. A tipster passed along this Time Magazine blog entry today, which speaks for itself.

(Yeah, we know that’s Hayden Christensen. So?) 

- KER

Because Bwog doesn’t do hot, sandy or constantly-in-existential-danger, Iraq didn’t quite make it into our summer plans. Not so for Matt Sanchez, GS,  who has been blogging out of the war-torn country for the past couple of weeks. What the hell’s gotten into the conservative activist, military man, Spec opinion writer, American studies major and one-time porn icon? We reached the Marine corporal by e-mail in an attempt to find  out.

How did you get the opportunity to travel to Iraq? Moreover, why go there in the first place?

I applied for the media embed; the process seems daunting but if you’re tenacious and know exactly what you want to do, your chances of getting approved are a lot higher.  I had several advantages. I have a security clearance from my time at NYPD Counter-Terrorism,  I know people who have been through the process and they explained it in detail, I had a definite plan of doing a syndicated radio show, In Their Own Words and Hometown Heroes, and I was as specific as possible with dates, units, places etc.

The reason why I came here in the first place was because I just wasn’t content with the media coverage.  Having seen, personally, how the media can twist, mislead or just fabricate stories, I really wanted to see things for myself.  You see, I know lots of people who have been to Iraq and back and I had not been given that opportunity, so I was eager to see for myself  Let’s face it, this is THE issue of 21st century and, frankly, I want to know what’s going on as much as possible.  Read more…

Think your summer plans are exciting? Well porn legend turned Marine corporal turned conservative activist Matt Sanchez has you beat. Eschewing the safety of comparatively calmer destinations (Eastern Chad, for instance?), Sanchez has traveled to a certain far-away quagmire of death squads, roadside bombs and internecine warfare–namely Iraq.

Not satisfied with American media coverage of the Mess-O-Potamia, Sanchez is attempting to set the record straight, embedding himself with an American military unit and posting daily to a blog. Sanchez’s work makes for some interesting reading, and Bwog wishes the Corporal luck in returning to America safely.

The 2006-07 school year has contained multitudes. In fact, it may just be the most eventful year Columbia’s had since… well, the year before. Remember Matthew Fox? The Chung-Diamond “scandal”? “Don’t Be a Pussy”? “Epilogue to Our Crime & Punishment: A Petition“? Bwog certainly does, so step into the Wayback machine – you’re about to relive nine months of Columbia in a single post.

August

First-years move in. Orientation yields a legendary (to Bwog’s mind, at least) week-long burst of posting. Addison Anderson went to a bunch of bars in the name of “journalism.” Most literary post: “And now for some disorientation,” which reads like early Bret Easton Ellis, if he knew about Koronet’s. Orientation week was the best.

 

September

Facebook went literally insane. Then calmed down somewhat. Harvard abandoned ED; Columbia did not. Columbia Football had as-yet uncrushed high hopes, later crushed. Seth Flaxman declared victory. Best villains: Zuckerberg! Murphy! Ahmadinejad! You know, one of those.

October

Everything was coming up roses for Mark Modesitt. 1968 spirit was invoked by Jim Gilchrist. The fallout was immense – shady disciplinary letters, “news” coverage of all sorts (Jon Stewart, Fox News). Even Bwog had an opinion. But October wasn’t all about relevant television coverage of Columbia issues with high production values – we also had “The Gates”!

Best correspondence to Bwog: “Subject: terrorists. your worse then the mooselums who flew the planes into the buildings” Read more…

Want extraneous ephemera? We’ve got extraneous ephemera!

• Bwog missed it while QuickSpecking, since the classic headline ”Penn to Teach at Penn” ran under today’s College Briefs in the print edition only. “Sean Penn?” one student was overheard wondering. Not quite, and if seniors here are upset about Matthew Fox speaking on Class Day, we wonder what they’d think if Columbia signed the star of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and Van Wilder: Rise of Taj as an adjunct professor (okay, okay, he was in The Namesake too…and we’re still waiting for Fox to take on a similarly respectable role…)

• We’re not going to go beyond providing the link: Radar‘s…saucy interview with Matt Sanchez

• Dean Quigley, overheard leaving Low around 6PM yesterday: “One of my favourite* things in life is that time in between jobs.” Following in Zvi’s footsteps? Say it ain’t so, Austin…

• Are the SDS, progenitors of the 1968 protests, on the rise again? We guess we won’t know for sure until attending tomorrow night’s meeting. Until then, we offer a synopsis of their logo from Bwog’s very own semiotician, reporting from the Hamilton stairs: “They appear to be lacking a sense of irony. The flyers have George Bush doing a clenched fist and ‘Is this what democracy looks like?’ — but then two inches away, the SDS fist logo, in almost exactly the same position.”

*We like to imagine he both thinks and speaks aloud in the spelling of the Queen’s English. -CJS

Alright, alright, we got it. So we’ve already heard the news from all over the place, as have many of you guys: Marine Corps reservist and conservative military bias activist Matt Sanchez GS ’07 is former gay porn star Rod Majors, according to Gawker,  here, and here too. However, last night, Sanchez issued a personal defense on his blog and Salon.com. Sanchez posts:

“Did I think I could become a ‘public figure’ without some scrutiny? Of course not! Am I so craven for attention that I’ll stop at anything to get it? I’m the first to admit that I want to be heard, read and taken seriously, but some issues really are simple and some are more complex. I always hear the complaint of information reduced to sound bytes and of the lack of depth in public discourse. Well, porn is porn; self-explanatory and of little depth. The pictures do pretty much all the talking, and in an age when pictures are so abundant, they don’t say much. I’m concerned many will feel inadequate, as a conservative, I like to insist on equal opportunity even if some start off with more than others.

“I don’t like porn, it reduces the mind, flattens the soul. That’s not hypocrisy talking, that’s experience. If I started off with liberal leanings, being on a gay porn set should have been heaven. In porn, everything taboo is trivialized and everything trivial is projected. How does a conservative trace his roots to such distasteful beginnings? Like all followers of a cult, it’s tough to figure out when you stopped believing in the party-line, but I can tell you that by the time I finished my summer tour of the major studios, I was pretty disgusted with myself. It was an emotional low, and the people who surrounded me were like drug dealers only interested in being with the anesthetized in order not to shake off the stupor of being high. Why did I become a conservative? Just look at what I left, and look at who is attacking me to today? Let’s face it people, you’re all cynical enough to know that if I had espoused liberal causes, spoken out against the military, got a liberal award for courage and then outed with a porn-past, you’d be clamoring for my memoir, and nominating me for a diversity ticket with Barack Obama. Instead those who complain about wire-tapping reserve the right to eavesdrop on my private life for political brownie points…”

More on the story after the jump.

Read more…

It’s like Columbia Day over on Manhattan’s favorite gossip site.

Now we’re elitist for complaining? (oh, and Ivygate‘s got video).

Tasti rival moves in! Bwog misses Soupman.

We’ve been trying to avoid this one, but since so many of you seem to think it’s newsworthy (seriously, stop e-mailing us about it), Matt Sanchez has been up to some other activities besides bashing Columbia on conservative talk shows. Yawn.

Lieutenant Colonel Isaiah “Ike” Wilson, a visiting professor at SIPA on loan from West Point, has a more than academic understanding of the Iraq War, having studied it from both an historian’s and a commissioned officer’s perspective. Bwog editor Sara Vogel caught up with Wilson before class to talk about bad planning, doing better, and–of course–Fox News. Forget Baker-Hamilton–it’s all here!

What is your course here [Limited War and Low Intensity Conflict] about?

The course here is a double headed oxymoron by title, which I love, I think it’s part of what draws students to it. Really it’s a course that revisits the classic works, some of the seminal works on what we’ve come to regard as limited war, others would call it wars of national liberation, revolutionary war, insurgency, counterinsurgency, terrorism, counterterrorism, small wars.

Small wars. What exactly is a small war?

Well, we’ve spent 15 lessons in this course exploring that question. What does limited war mean? Kind of to cut to the chase, it depends on your point of view and perspective. At least as classical literature lays out, it has at least two different schools of thought. With the Western perspective, we cover it all, but we’re admittedly leaning towards the First World, advanced industrial nation state perspective, we have tended to define wars as small vs. total.

The West has, for a long number of years, been challenged with the idea of not only waging limited wars but winning them, finishing them well and legitimately. I mean, kind of case in point, Iraq, Afghanistan, the global war on terrorism. So that’s an important question to at least return to, if not begin with: is there actually such a thing as a small war, or is it just a matter of perspective?

Read more…

Fox news has found another skeleton in Columbia’s closet. Fox’ Hannity and Colmes picked up the year-old story of Matt Sanchez,  G’ 07, the Marine who was (depending on your politics) harassed or picked on by members of the ISO at the 2005 Activities Day Fair.

“They dehumanize people to get their agenda across,” Sanchez said about the ISO. “Right now, vets on Columbia’s campus are second class citizens.”

Not that this story doesn’t deserve the attention of cable news networks of record like Fox News. But this story is a year old!

Bwog’s on to you, Fox. Hannity and Colmes and the O’Reilly Factor go on every night, and you need segments to fill, and Columbia’s an easy mark. Just send a cameraman a few blocks north for some b-roll of Alma Mater and the Barnard gates, and invite the victimized over to the studio for a prime-time party.

Bwog would not be surprised if Fox, in desperate need of more knee-jerk segments, went to nursing homes and retirement communities to fish out the administrators harassed by the liberal jihadists of ’68. (Link added 2:55 pm)

-SEV