Spitting On Veterans, Again: All of Lembcke's "No Vets Were Spat Upon" Claims So Easy To Disprove As To Be "Laughable"

Pretty easy for Jim Lindgren of the Volokh Conspiracy to find many contemporaneous print reports of Vets being spat on.

One of Lembcke's claims to support his no-one-spat-upon-Vets thesis: Girls don't spit. Ergo, any story involving a female spitter is, ipso facto, false.

Obviously this scumbag had an agenda.

But the amateur leftist webzine Slate is supposed to be accurate, even if it is transparently left-leaning. What is their excuse?

And where is their retraction?

Here's Jack Schafer endorsing the no-spitting story as true. Presumably he's implicitly claiming to have fact-checked it for accuracy. There is, as you see, no retraction -- and Slate's (commendable) practice is to include all corrections at the bottom of the articles they correct.

And here's Jack Schafer insisting that none of the evidence offered to him disproves Lembcke's, or his own, claim.

Although he seems to admit, implicitly, that contrary to his and Lembcke's claims, there are in fact contemporaneous reports documenting spitting incidents, he now moves the goalposts -- no longer does he want what he previously did not exist (i.e., contemporaneous published reports), he now wants proof the charges made in those reports were not fabricated:

Alas, none of the leads provided to me by readers contains anything that confirms that the incidents took place: I've yet to locate a news account that documents a specific spit altercation or a police or court paper trail that would back the accusations.

Original Claim: There are no contemporaneous journalistic reports backing up the "urban legend" of Vets being spat upon

Revised Claim, now that such contemporaneous reports have been produced: There are no court documents proving the Vets who made these charges were not simply flat-out lying

Nice, Schafer. Always remember-- no matter what, no matter what information is offered to you, never confess error. You're a journalistic "expert," after all -- you decide what reality is on behalf of your readers.

I look forward to his next response to Jim Lindgren.

posted by Ace at 05:26 PM

| Access Comments