Alright then, thinly-sourced anonymous stories are now verboten. And good riddance, I say. But, uh, what about this guy? I mean, unless you happen to be one of those left-wing crazies who just insists on believing that our friends on the right aren't being completely sincere in their denunciations of Newsweek's journalistic practices in this case, you have to expect the man whose name is synonymous with irresponsible Internet gossip to come in for all sorts of conservative criticism now, right?

Right?

UPDATE: Just to be clear: I'm not trying to let Newsweek off the hook here. They screwed up. Period. Still, all that Newsweek lied, people died stuff is more than a little hard to take when so much of it is coming from folks who penned not a word about the deaths in question until the precise moment that they became politically useful. Cynical stuff, that. And we shouldn't allow ourselves to be bullied or browbeaten into pretending otherwise.

ANOTHER UPDATE: John Cole rebukes the would-be censors, and asks an important question. "The media was wrong for reporting a false story, but had the story been accurate, they were well within their rights and, IMHO, obligated to report this sort of thing. Which would be worse in the war on terror in the long run- suspicions of abuse and sacrilege running rampant for years, or said abuses acknowledged, aplogized for, and punished?"