Paul Murray's weblog, with news you may have missed and my $0.02 worth on a number of topics.

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald

I bet you don't have a friend who's an acupuncturist

E-mail me: pmurray [at] despammed.com

A helpful tip. When publicly ridiculing someone for sloppy work and a factual error, it's best not to do the same yourself. Our latest exhibit comes from a conservative writer's op-ed piece in the Washington Post:

What Al Wishes Abe Said
By Andrew Ferguson
Sunday, June 10, 2007; Page B05

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.

Ferguson goes on to explain that the "Lincoln quote" about the danger of corporations and corruption turns out to be a fake dating from the 1880s. Fair enough, and Snopes agrees.

But look up at the top of the web page:

Correction to This Article

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.

(via News From Me)

Labels: error, Gore, Lincoln, mistake

posted by Paul Murray at 11:17 PM | permanent link |