Just reading the first sentence of Ellen Brodsky’s latest attack opens up all sorts of possibilities for delicious irony:

Not surprisingly, Bill O’Reilly addressed reports of errors in his new book about Abraham Lincoln. Unfortunately, his defense was either disingenuous or else… well, inaccurate.

Ellen ticks off such devastating points as O’Reilly and one Rae Emerson disagreeing about the number of mistakes. Brodsky, of course, goes with the highly regarded best-selling writer Rae Emerson’s count. She gives no reason for doing so, other than that it is higher. You see, that’s the way things work at the kennel. X is true not because of evidence or documentation, but because Ellen says so. Period.

The thrust of Brodsky’s highly intellectual argument seems to center around the Washington Post. Ellen nails O’Reilly:

Now we have attacks on my new book,” O’Reilly intoned. “The Washington Post saying the bookstore at Ford’s Theatre in Washington where Lincoln was assassinated is refusing to sell the book.”
Actually, that’s not quite what the Post said. It reported:
While the National Park Service does not carry “Killing Lincoln” in the theater’s basement museum bookstore, Ford’s Theatre Society, which operates Ford’s Theatre in partnership with the park service, sells the book in its gift shop in the ground-floor lobby.
So when O’Reilly announced that the director of the Ford’s Theatre Society issued a statement clarifying the misinformation that O’Reilly’s book had been banned and advising that the book is for sale in that shop, he was not contradicting anything reported by the Post.

Another stunning exposé by historian and researcher Ellen Brodsky. But there’s a catch: Miss Ellen is not telling the truth. The Washington Post did report that the book was banned--without the very paragraph that Ellen wants you to think was there all along. Unlike Brodsky, we aren’t saying that’s true because we say so. We’re saying that’s true because the Washington Post itself says so:

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the book “Killing Lincoln” was banned by Ford’s Theatre. The book is available in the theater’s gift shop but not its basement museum bookstore. This version has been updated.

So Brodsky cites a later, revised article instead of the one O’Reilly was responding to. And then uses that wrong article to smear O’Reilly. On top of that Ellen tries to absolve the Post from its error, even as the Post itself admits the error! What does it all mean? You guessed it: it’s Another Brodsky Lie.

Tags: newshounds, oreilly