Take a Bow. Clap. Clap.

This is good stuff.

"Saying something is a rumor is not saying it's true...to me, a rumor is not true."

Well, case fucking closed then, yeah? I'm all for respecting the public's intelligence, but an editor at the Washington Post says that "to (him), a rumor is not true," and that's supposed to be the last word on the fact that his paper, the second-most respected print daily in America, published a front-page story that rehashed in full the Republicans' whisper campaign that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim traitor? The smear, as we all know, carries the implication that Obama has already suicide-bombed like nine elementary schools and one black church on fish-fry Sunday, and it isn't some harmless chicanery along the lines of "my opponent is soft on crime" or most other gambits of dubious veracity. In this case, too, every person who has done even a lick of research on this allegation has found it to be categorically false.

In other words, the Washington Post not only reprinted a pernicious rumor as though it were news, it gave the appearance that the rumor is true. But the icing on the cake is that the editor (who thinks he did a bang-up job, by the way), in his own defense, is claiming that because he, personally, understands the word "rumor" to connote a false idea, he assumes that all the Post's readers do, too. Maybe it's me, but that seems like a very slim reed to rest your case upon, indeed. But what do I know? Perhaps the Washington Post's readers really ARE all a bunch of linguistically rigid editors, who obsessively ultra-parse every sentence in the damn rag.

But probably not. Just in case, though, maybe somebody could tell Bill Hamilton, the editor in question, that "giant fucking retarded asshole," to me, is a huge compliment. And I think my readers share that understanding. Case closed.

This is why I haven't bought a newspaper in almost ten years.