THE WEATHER'S GREAT, WISH I WERE HERE
Never being one to grieve over the demise of a foe, Ann Coulter once again demonstrates her world-class ability to drag a corpse through the mud. There are builders, and there are destroyers; hmm...I wonder which one Ms. Coulter would be??
Under the excellent system of checks and balances at the Times, reporter Jayson Blair kept turning in reports with datelines from places like West Virginia and Maryland -- while submitting expense receipts for the same time period from Joe's Bar in Brooklyn. You can't blame him. He couldn't very well turn in articles with the dateline "My Mom's House."....
Editor Howell Raines ignored Blair's repeated, brazen mendacity. He ignored his editors' urgent demands that Blair be fired. He ignored press conferences in which public officials remarked that Blair's stories for the Times were full of lies. Raines ignored it all -- until finally one day, another newspaper caught Blair plagiarizing one of its stories and blew the whistle on the Times.
And then Raines claimed to be shocked to discover that Blair was engaging in "a pathological pattern of misrepresentation, fabricating and deceiving." After all, the Times had issued Blair a series of warnings. One sternly worded memo urged Blair to be "more black." (That's a joke. In the immortal words of Jayson Blair to Newsweek: People should not "believe everything they read in the newspapers." He really did say that.)
Gee, Ann, it's always nice to see you enjoying yourself at another's expense. While no one would ever condone the editorial failures at the New York Times, could you lose the holier-than-thou attitude? Oh, sorry; I keep forgetting- that's your stock in trade....
