Quote from ZZZzzzzzzz:
Maureen Dowd also attacks dems and republicans.
However, she doesn't seem to need to use slurs the way Mann Coulter does...
Maybe that is why she got a Pulitzer Prize and Mann gets the booby prize...
Bush has no obligation to denounce Coulter beyond common sense and loyalty to the party...
No, Maureen Dowd does something far worse, she makes it up as she goes along.
TAKING LIBERTIES WITH THE FACTS
Maureen Dowd not wanted here (MARC R. MASFERRER, 5/30/03, The Lufkin Daily News)
The New York Times' considerable credibility problem is now our problem, as well.
But unlike the Times, which has been engaged in a torturous exercise of naval gazing and self-flagellation, with its accustomed arrogance, since it was revealed that one of its younger reporters had committed all sorts of journalistic sins, we are doing something about it, and fast.
Until she explains to our satisfaction her own ethical transgression--an apparently deliberate distortion of a comment by President Bush--you will not find the work of Times columnist Maureen Dowd on this page. [...]
Dowd, it seems, may have taken the title of her column--"Liberties"--way too far.
Here's what Dowd wrote in the column in question:
"'Al-Qaida is on the run,' President Bush said last week. 'That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated ... they're not a problem anymore.'"
Here's what Bush actually said:
"Al-Qaida is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top al-Qaida operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they're not a problem anymore."
New York Daily News columnist Zev Chafets offered a perfect criticism of what Dowd did.
"The words in italics were replaced in Dowd's column by three little dots. Those dots say to the reader: Trust me, I'm abbreviating here, but what I'm leaving out doesn't change the meaning.
"But the dots did change the meaning," Chafets wrote. "In fact, they turned it upside down. Far from declaring al-Qaida 'spent,' Bush was warning the country against complacency. The only terrorists the president declared 'no longer a problem' were the ones already jailed or dead."
Dowd quietly "corrected" herself by including the full quote in a subsequent column that appeared in The Lufkin Daily News on Thursday.
That's not good enough, and until Dowd, and her newspaper, fully account for her infraction, her column will not appear on this page."