If a picture is worth a thousand words, McClatchy's front page today lays the blame for the current financial crisis at Bill Clinton's feet. Over the headline "Wall Street crisis is culmination of 28 years of deregulation" we see a photo of Bill grinning and giving the thumbs up, captioned "Bill Clinton in 1999 signed legislation that overturned nearly 70 years of regulation of the financial industry."

The commenters strike back with the facts, supported by linky goodness: it was a Republican bill, passed in the Senate on a straight party-line vote with exception of the DINO Hollings. Read more…

The thing is, it's pervasive. It's not just the big things like sticking the (lack of) evidence on WMD on page 15 instead of page 1, it's the assumptions they're always slipping past me.

Here's the NY Times trying to get me to agree that torture works, or possibly that waterboarding works and isn't really torture, in the very first paragraph of an (actually worthwhile, scary) article on something else entirely:

The new technology is, to its critics, Orwellian. Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete.  Read more…