The Blind Leading the Biased...

One of my favorite Far Side cartoons goes something like this: A man in a trenchcoat stands in front of a group of people on a couch, pointing at one who has a horrified expression on his face. The trenchcoated man is saying, "It was you, Larry, who gored and then brutally trampled the doctor!" One of the people on the couch - not the one the detective is accusing - is a rhinoceros.

I think we know who was the model for the detective: John Cloud. This is the man who wrote the hagiographic article on Ann Coulter in Time's 4/25/05 issue, in which he stated with absolutely no irony or hint of competence: "Coulter has a reputation for carelessness with facts, and if you Google the words "Ann Coulter lies," you will drown in results. But I didn't find many outright Coulter errors." The rather loud CRACK you heard was the jaws of millions of sane people fracturing as they bounced off the floor after reading this Brobdingnagian falsehood/admission of phoning in an article. Not finding outright Ann Coulter errors is like not finding kudzu in the South, or not finding snow during a blizzard. It takes a very special kind of mental astigmatism to not find Ann Coulter's errors, one that almost requires admiration that someone so blind can yet function.

Here are two sites that contain not a few, not some, but many, many, many of Ann Coulter's errors. Just in case you'd like some more, here's a no longer running site that also details her perpetual propensity to prevaricate. (One of the people who ran Spinsanity has another site now - http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/ - that I check daily, as well The Daily Howler, linked above. I also receive e-mails from Media Matters. While Spinsanity was and Brendan Nyhan's blog is neutral, Daily Howler tends to be liberal with occasional shots at liberal news coverage, and Media Matters is an organization made to show conservative errors and bias. However, I find their posts well researched and backed by facts, so I recommend them in spite of the bias.)

Ann Coulter is like Michael Moore. I would love to have these two meet one day, to see if there's a such thing as political antimatter. And if they both should happen to explode, discourse would take a quantum leap upward in factual content.

By the way, I'm happy I don't subscribe to Time. In this case, a stopped clock is not only wrong, it's downright fictional.