You can call yourself a cultural critic, but you can't say you do journalism if you recycle an unsourced speculative tabloid article that has never been properly sourced, or even properly attributed.

By now do I even have to spell it out? Perhaps, you know, some medication might help?

You have to be brave to get the medication too. But that kind of bravery involves standing up to the government, not grabbing a gun and shooting everyone who scares you.

Good job on this review, by the way.

When the Bush administration told us that Saddam had WMD's -- at least he had a SOURCE. A real actual human source who was lying it turned out but still -- there was a source for this allegation.

There's no source for the Demi Moore allegation. There never was a source. There was no nurse at any clinic, there was no insider on her staff, there was no traitor in her family or in her partner's family.

There was never one source for this story, not even an anonymous one.

She was never photographed coming out of a clinic. She was never shown in bandages or covered by anything that would hide bandages.

This feminist version of yellowcake was concoted by people who had never met Demo Moore, looking at photos of fat Demi and thin Demi, and they said:

This is how much it would cost an ordinary woman to go from fat Demi to thin Demi if she did it by surgery instead of by exercise dieting and Botox.

The reason why everyone avoids attributing this to the original tabloid article is the original tabloid article never at any point alleges that she actually had any of these procedures described by the photograph inspectors.

This goes to show that feminists can be just as sleazy as the Bush administration when it comes to dredging up non-credible sources of politically titillating and validating non-information.

At least Bush had an actual source for his belief that Saddam has WMDs, even if his source was lying. At least he had one.

There seem to be no standards of journalism at Broadsheet. I wish Glen Greenwald would look into the allegation that Demi Moore had a $200,000 full body makeover and track down the original source for the -pseudo story so we can see whether this is really a credible story or whether feminists are doing to Moore what Bush did to Saddam.

Someone with real journalistic standards needs to take a crack at these allegations.

We criticize the Bush administration for propagating dodgy information that got us into war.

But can the left do any better?

The lifespan of the Demi Moore story suggests that the left is as bad as the right when it comes to propagating questionable information while concealing its dodgy origins.

There has to be someone whose job it is to tell Salon writers, "There's no actual source for that story so it's wrong to treat these allegations as firmly estabished facts."

Glen is the closest thing I can see to that person, although maybe he'll just stand by his team and insist that all information propagated by Salon is credible, period.

We got into a horrible war because a politically interested party passed us bad information that didn't withstand the test of real journalistic investigation.

If Salon is going to criticize the media for passing that bad information as if it were reliable, then you guys need to apply the same standards of scrutiny to the information being passed by Broadsheet.

There were so many details from the original tabloid article in the Daily Mail story, I suspect them of having the actual article at hand when they wrote the story.

If they did have the original tabloid article at hand when they wrote this, then they are guilty of fraud. They knowingly lied to their readers.

The original tabloid article makes it clear that these allegations are not really allegations at all and none of the statements made by their experts are to be taken as literal fact.

That would be really sleazy as hell if the Daily Mail had the original article when they wrote this.

That would be deliberate lying. That's absolutely scandalous if it's true.

I suspect it is true. They couldn't have gotten all these details without the original article at hand.

If they had the original article, then what they made of it amounts to fraud.

Questions of social appropriateness are not easily solved by people with Asperger's. There can be an enormous anxiety level dealing with things normal people seem to understand as if by magic.

When your whole understanding of the world comes from your intellect, with little or no input from your social instincts, when you have less natural ability at empathizing than a normal person has, then you might look at the subject of appropriate contact with children (or any human being) as a subject that's about 1,000 times harder to learn than calculus.

You'd try to "learn" the subject like you'd learn math, but that's not really going to help, because human empathy is not a subject like math that you can learn in an intellectual fashion.