Ace of Spades nails it again. He links to a Hugh Hewitt post concerning a Washington Post piece by Terry Neal that misquotes Senator Orin Hatch. No shock there, but what I wanted to congratulate him on is the way he presents his take on the Liberal media. His analogy to college professors is dead on:

If you had liberal professors in college, you know this for a fact: Yes, you could argue with them when it comes to final exam time. And, if you present a perfectly-argued essay with very few gaps in logic and sufficiently backed up by evidence, they might even give you a good grade.

But they are going to be reading your essay much, much more carefully, and little slips here and there are going to cost you.

On the other hand… if you just parrot back to the professor the crap she was spouting all semester, you can turn in a rather shoddy effort and get an A.

I also have first hand experience with this phenomenon. In the winter of 1993 I was beginning my second quarter at Georgia Tech. I was enrolled in English 102 and had a woman professor named Anne Balsamo. This was the first quarter after the first President Bush had lost and she was absolutely giddy about her boy Clinton being President. We had to read Maya Angelou and watch the inauguration as well. The first day of class she stood up and told us that she was a liberal and that if there were any conservatives in the class or anyone that liked Rush Limbaugh, they had best be on their way out the door. She went on and on about this liberal agenda and that piece of legislation. It got rather humorous, as at that time the vast majority of Tech students were conservative leaning. I guess I had a smile on my face while I was contemplating the next ten weeks of hell that I was about to go through when she stopped talking, looked at me and asked, “Do you have anything you wish to add to this discussion?” I looked around as if to say, “Me?” Then I said, “No Ma’am.” To which she replied, “Then stop smirking!” I kid you not. Everyone looked at me and their looks told me they were thinking the same thing I was, that I had best get out of that class. Well I did not leave and I refused to buckle under to her liberal mantra. As a result, I got a “C”. Go figure.

If a conservative group had presented Terry Neal with a “quote” allegedly from Chuck Schumer displaying hypocrisy on the issue, you’d better believe Neal would have checked and re-checked that quote to make sure the conservative group had gotten it right and wasn’t misrepresenting him.

But when the target is Orin Hatch… well, Terry Neal just giggles with delight and, without any questioning or even a simple three-second Google search, writes “Great Job– A+++” at the top of People For the American Way’s essay.

That is how it is to be a conservative. Hell, just ask President Bush. He gets mistaken for Hitler all the time, but does anyone in the press actually investigate to see if the charge is warranted? Nope.