Bad News, War Nerd fans...

[Cain]

...if you want to read Gary Brecher, you're going to have to pay for it.

And, more specifically, you're going to have to pay NSFWCorp the princely sum of $3 a month.

Also, Mark Ames has finally admitted that Gary Brecher is in fact John Dolan:

It was exactly ten years ago that I first proposed the War Nerd column to my writing mentor, Dr. John Dolan. My former partner Matt Taibbi had just left Moscow and The eXile, and I needed a new columnist to fill the void. Everyone was talking war in 2002, but it was clear to me that no one was talking honestly about war—and if one person could, it was John Dolan.

We were only a few months into the War On Terror, and the talk by amateur war dorks was getting out of hand: If you remember, the major magazines and newspapers were slobbering all over each other for a new superlative to describe America's military dominance. It wasn't enough anymore to call America "the world's only superpower"—by 2002, they were inventing super-bosso playground words to describe America: now it was a "hyperpower" rather than a mere "superpower"; they claimed that the American Empire was the most powerful empire that mankind had ever produced, putting the Romans and the Mongols to shame. America had achieved "full spectrum dominance" they boasted. The only thing that prevented America from completely subjugating every last human being on earth was America's own benevolence and sense of restraint. Thomas Friedman, with his narrow little shoulders, his jowly face and his ridiculous mustache, stormed into the Charlie Rose Show and dared the Arab World to "suck on this!"

In sum: we were fucking ridiculous. All the cheap triumphalism and affected gravitas of all these middle-aged men striking grim "look at my steely-yet-anguished expression as I make tough decisions while dressed in my dark suit" poses for the covers of all those Woodward hardback jackets—it screamed "comic foil," the big setup before the fall, and yet there was no one in pundit-land to capture the mean humor of it all.

What was lacking from all of the tough-guy martial talk in DC and Manhattan was the plain, flat, obvious, comical truth: These wars were a godsend to millions of Americans, mostly males, whose dull, dreary lives aren't worth protecting, let alone remembering. For them, this war—other people's wars, other people's deaths and glories and massacres—was the closest to a meaningful existence they'd ever get.

Dr. Dolan had already invented the expression "War Nerd" in a column he wrote shortly after 9/11 for The eXile, under his own name. But for the new War Nerd column, Dr. Dolan insisted on using a pseudonym, to release the War Nerd column from any of Dr. Dolan's own personal baggage. So he invented a character, Gary Brecher, based entirely on Dolan's own real war-nerd experiences and analyses, only with a simplified biography, in a voice that's best described as a sort of "cheerful nihilism."

It quickly became the most popular column that The eXile ever ran, with thousands of fans—mostly male, mostly nerdly— the world over. Dr. Dolan once confided to me, "People like the War Nerd better than they like me—and you know, to be honest, I agree with them. I like Gary Brecher better than I like myself."

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I don't know what to think of this.

On one hand, it's brilliant.  On the other, Gary Brecher's existence always made me feel a bit better.

[Cain]

It does, however, put Victor Davis Hanson's claim that Brecher set fire to his vineyard in a whole new light, since at the time, Dolan was in Moscow.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

It does, however, put Victor Davis Hanson's claim that Brecher set fire to his vineyard in a whole new light, since at the time, Dolan was in Moscow.

The Hanson thing was EPIC.  I can die happy, having witnessed that unfolding.

[Cain]

In ways, this makes Brecher even more epic.  Because it means the guy responsible for making Hanson flip out is also the guy who correctly called James Frey on his bullshit, years before any US network station would cover the story.

Lots of people suspected that Brecher might be Dolan and/or Ames.  Especially Dolan, since he grew up in California, and recounted once in the eXile how he spent his formative days in the library, reading Jane's Defence Weekly.  Also their shared hatred of the English. 

[East Coast Hustle]

I've "known" for a few years that Brecher was Dolan, but I hadn't ever made the connection to that and the VDH debacle. I mean, I always figured Hansen was full of shit but this pretty much cements it.