Dear Sandy: About you and your drooling readership ...

Several days ago, there occurred a quiet yet significant development in the ongoing saga involving dishonest hack and cowardly Stephen Harper propagandist Sandy Crux to which I would like to draw your attention, and it all involved her list of Harper's alleged "accomplishments" and a comment I left at her craptacular web site here:

Ms. Crux:

I love the way you give PMSH credit for “Chinese Head Tax Eliminated;”. The fact that it was, in reality, repealed in 1947 should in no way stop you from giving credit to Stephen Harper for it.

Obviously, I was tweaking Ms. Crux for her hopelessly-addled claim that Harper was responsible for repealing the Chinese head tax when, in fact, all he had done was acknowledge it and arrange for historical reparations. To Sandy's credit, after she clued in, she acknowledged her error and fixed her list thusly:

CC– Thank you for the heads up re the Chinese Head Tax. I obviously made an error there and I have gone in and corrected it.

So ... end of story? Actually, no. Because as innocuous as this incident seems, there are two important lessons we can draw from it.

First, Sandy Crux is an ignorant retard. Seriously, she is breathtakingly (and even dangerously) stupid. And why is that? I'm glad you asked.

Most people might suggest that, hey, CC, cut her some slack, so she miswrote, it happens to the best of us, she fixed it right away after it was pointed out to her, so what's the big deal? The big deal is that this was not simply an erroneous historical claim that was made spontaneously in the heat of conversation. If it was, then, sure, it wouldn't be a big deal. But that's not what Sandy's up to, is it?

Rather, Sandy has taken it upon herself to become Stephen Harper's personal fluffer, and create a list of his official achievements, and spread it far and wide, and even get it onto YouTube, so to make a mistake of that magnitude is most emphatically not forgivable. To write something that idiotically inaccurate is fine if you're just dashing off a blog post. It's not acceptable when you're determined to pimp that list and stick it under the noses of the media every chance you get.

If that's your plan, then you have a responsibility to do some serious fact-checking, and not publish stupid shit like that. Because once you realize that Sandy is capable of making such ridiculous claims, then it's not unreasonable to conclude that the rest of her list is probably equally bullshit and can't be trusted. But that's not even the best part. Oh, no, not even close.

What's truly revealing is how long that claim went unchallenged until I called her on it. First, it's hard to tell when that particular claim was originally made because Sandy has a truly annoying habit of going back and adjusting her previous lists to remove any evidence of her earlier, ignorant fuck-ups, but we can at least establish that a variation of that list appeared as far back as April 20. And what does this mean?

It means that it's quite possible that Sandy was making the Chinese head tax claim for up to three weeks until I corrected her. So what, you ask? Here's why so what.

What that means is that, for up to three weeks, Sandy's adoring groupies were falling over themselves with praise for her work, lauding her accomplishments and promising to help in any way they could in getting that list out in front of the public, but not a single one of them recognized that one of her claims was totally, utterly bogus. Which leads us to one of two possible choices.

The first possibility is that Sandy's entire readership are absolute fucking idiots. Every one of them. Without exception. Really, how else would you explain the endless fawning over Sandy's work, while not one reader picked up on that historical howler? Morons, the lot of them. Or ...

... the other possibility -- which is even creepier -- is that they might have noticed that but just didn't give a shit because they simply don't care about accuracy. They're not interested in facts, they're interested in propaganda regardless of its truth value.

So, really, given that that claim went unopposed for three weeks, you can safely conclude that Sandy's readership are either a) really fucking stupid, or b) really fucking dishonest. Pick one. There is no door number three here; those are your only two choices. And, of course, the inherent entertainment value here is that, while all those readers were lining up to slobber all over Sandy's list, it fell to me to point out the inherent craptacularity of that one claim.

Don't you find that ironic? Sandy's fans can't suck up to her enough, but it's only me that goes to the trouble of keeping her honest since no one else seems even remotely interested in doing that. And that's because, when it comes to fact-checking, only one of the two of us is interested in actual accuracy. And hint: it's not Sandy.

P.S. By the way, Sandy, just to save you the trouble of having to intellectually struggle with the ramifications of this post, this is not about me. Rather, it's about your hopelessly stupid or dishonest readership, so let's not turn this into a discussion of my civility, shall we? I'm the one who cares enough about accuracy to try to keep you in line, so you might want to have a word with your readers and ask them why they don't give a fuck about honesty. Seriously, I think that's a conversation you might want to have. You might even learn something from it, but I'm not about to hold my breath.