I've met, read, and been interviewed by some lazy reporters in my time, but I'm pretty impressed by John Leo's display of ineptitude. He wrote an article about how the left thinks Bush is Hitler and scoured a few site looking for supporting evidence. One of them is MetaFilter. Here is his entire quote:
Another vexing question about Rove: Is he Goebbels or Josef Mengele? Goebbels is the top choice among antiwar commentators, but a writer to the MetaFilter site said: "Karl Rove made up stories about John McCain, just as Josef Mengele conducted medical experiments on children in Auschwitz."
Now read the post he plucked it from.
Clearly -- to anyone that reads the post -- they could see it was posted in a mocking, over-the-top tone. The comment used in the quote is obviously a joke. Other comments on the thread by MetaFilter's conservative and liberal posters were mocking the article and writing it off as pathetic, but Leo used it anyway. It's the laziest display of "journalism" I've seen and now it is being syndicated across a range of conservative news sites.
I don't dispute the fact that a small segment of the extreme left thinks bush is hitler. But many pundits on the right have tried to push their viewpoint that extremists are the left going back at least to the WTO protests in Seattle (where a few psycho anarchists were supposed to represent anyone that didn't vote for Bush) and that's ridiculous. It's as ridiculous as trying to paint all conservatives as white supremacists. Quoting someone's joke intended to mock an extremist screed is also ridiculous and beyond the pale.
