Republicans continue to become parodies of themselves

It seems this is my day for "believe it or not" posts.

So.

Al Gore has a new book out. You may know that I've been a little critical of Al Gore in the past. I do think he was treated unfairly by the media before the 2000 "election," but I believe if he'd been a better candidate, that wouldn't have mattered as much.

I'm also one of those who thinks Gore plays a better role more-or-less outside the system, from private life. He's in the rare position of one who can criticize the system while knowing it inside out.

That said, I loved his appearance on The Daily Show last month and have ordered the new book from my local library.

What follows comes verbatim from news from me:

Last Sunday, the Washington Post ran a scathing review of Al Gore's new book. The review was written by Andrew Ferguson. Here's a link to the whole review and here's the first paragraph of it...

You can't really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, "The Assault on Reason." It's a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I'd love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.

The Post has now added a "slight" correction to the online version of the review. And I'll put it in smaller type because they did...

Andrew Ferguson's June 10 Outlook article, "What Al Wishes Abe Said," said that former vice president Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason" does not contain footnotes. The book contains 20 pages of endnotes.

Mark goes on from there. What struck me about this, though, is that it just seems almost too textbook an example of Republican dirty tricks to be believed. It's such a deranged thing to do, I'd almost believe it was something Al Franken cooked up for one of his books.

But no, apparently, it's real. Ferguson actually chose to make the thrust of his review about attacking Gore for not sourcing his quotes opinions...when he did exactly that.

On a completely unrelated matter, Ferguson is a senior writer for The Weekly Standard. This is a conservative publication with its other writers including the namecalling, imagination-poor John Podhoretz, and its editor, Jonathan Last thinks the Star Wars movies are pro-the empire.