Does Crikey's Guy Rundle need a fact checker?

Rundle would perhaps do a better job of analysing things if he bothered taking the time to get his facts right! Today it is seeming to think a Scots sniper is an Australian, though his real point here was to try and have a go at conservative blogger Tim Blair with an infantile and fatuous remark about a twelve thousand mile shot that really made no sense at all. Though I'm not surprised in the least that Rundle, an out of touch "academic" who apparently hasn't gotten over his undergraduate flirtation with Marxism, (a kind of Peter Pan syndrome I suppose you'd call it), has no clue whatsoever about the difficulty in hitting a target out in the open that is a mile away. But as the Cut & Paste section from The Australian (about which the people at Crikey seem to be absolutely obsessed about) points out, that was nothing: Pay attention, Guy Rundle. Crikey criticises The Australian on Monday for commissioning an essay by Malcolm Turnbull: THE Oz not only did Turnbull a disservice by commissioning it, they shot themselves in the foot too. With the Rudd government making a very deliberate effort to sideline News Ltd as the place where things happen, what did the Surrey (sic) Hills sultanate do? An imitative form of catch-up, which only served to emphasise their new, relegated status. Except we didn't. Fairfax did. Phillip Coorey in The Sydney Morning Herald last Saturday: AUSTRALIA's youth could be the first generation in 60 years to have a life tougher than their parents because of the debt being accumulated by the Rudd Government, Malcolm Turnbull says. Mr Turnbull poses the question in an essay written for today's Herald. Rundled again. Crikey on Thursday: CHANGE is everywhere in The Oz. First, the piles of free copies have been withdrawn from airports, hotels etc and now they seem to have discontinued Cut& Paste, the cheerfully crazy column which had gormless pearls-and-clinical-acne interns combing old speeches to find proof that Kevin Rudd once said one thing, and now, in fact, says another. Come on (editor-in-chief Chris) Mitchell. First you knock off the freebies, then you cut out the happy finish. Rundle wasn't doing much better either today in trying to understand the concern about President Obama's vastly expensive and bureaucratic proposals to "reform" health care in America, doing nothing more than picking up partisan Democratic talking points about astroturfing and less than honest claims about the behaviour of opponents. Perhaps he takes speaker Nancy Pelosi seriously, (and he'd be one of the few people left in the world who does), when she talks about people turning up to town hall meetings wearing swastikas? Or does he take Paul Krugman's line that anybody opposing this plan must be doing so because they are racist? You know, if you have a black president and you are white, you couldn't possibly have an honestly held difference of opinion could you. Come to think of it though, Rundle did play the race card too

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