ann coulter: the answer lady
I know Ann Coulter's invective and vicious style turn alot of people off, wheter you find her writing amusing or not one thing that I have found is that it is almost always strictly factually accurate. It seems that there are people that have dedicated their lives to proving her a liar, but so far, I'm not impressed.

I read Treason, and after I finished the book I tried to find evidence to prove or disprove some of her more unusual theories. I still don't think I agree with the conclusions she draws on some from the facts she lays out, but among all the sites claiming to list the lies and innacuracies of this book the most damning offense seemed to be along the lines of citing the wrong page number of a newspaper article or attributing a quote to one nobody wingnut college professor when it actually came from a completely different nobody wingnut college professor. Sure, those things should be corrected for later editions and such, but from where I stand saying page "A8" when you mean "E8" among hundreds of citations qualifies as a typo, certainly not a "lie".

So anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that today I decided to read the past couple of columns of hers I missed. My regular reader(s) may remember that little while ago (Feb 13), I was wondering if Ward Churchill's story of the Army poisoning Indians with smallpox was complete B.S., or whether that had actually happened at some time other than when Churchill claimed it did. I'm pretty sure it's a "never", based on this article over here, but check this out:

Ann Coulter, Feb 17:

Not only are the diseased-blanket stories cited by Churchill denied by his alleged sources, but the very idea is contradicted by the facts of scientific discovery. The settlers didn't understand the mechanism of how disease was transmitted. Until Louis Pasteur's experiments in the second half of the 19th century, the idea that disease could be caused by living organisms was as scientifically accepted as crystal reading is today. Even after Pasteur, many scientists continued to believe disease was spontaneously generated from within. Churchill is imbuing the settlers with knowledge that in most cases wouldn't be accepted for another hundred years.

See? That's what I get for trying to do research when I could just be plagarizing professional columnists.  ¶ 3:16 PM