Back to those civil days of the 18th century

Via FireJoeMorgan, Buzz Bissinger is a remarkably uninformed gasbag.

He adds, “You have blogs that proudly parade around saying, ‘We don’t need no stinking credibility or stinking information — it doesn’t matter what you say or do if you know how to write.’ They cover themselves under the mantle of the First Amendment. But if John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had any idea what the First Amendment would have wrought, they would have canceled it.”

This guy was once a respected, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter.

But he ought to brush up on his American history.

"Callender has been described as ‘the most unscrupulous scandalmonger of the day,…a journalist who stopped at nothing and stooped to anything.…[He] was not an investigative journalist; he never bothered to investigate anything. For him, the story, especially if it reeked of scandal, was everything; truth, if it stood in his way, was summarily mowed down.’ True to his style, he fabricated a series of scandalous stories about Jefferson's personal life, the ugliest of which charged him with having fathered several children by a mulatto slave at Monticello, a young woman named Sally Hemings. Although Callender had never gone near Jefferson's estate, he alleged that this was common knowledge in the neighboring area. He included many lurid details of this supposed illicit relationship among the ‘entertaining facts’ he created for his readers, even inventing the names of children whom "Dusky Sally" had never borne." (Allison, The Real Thomas Jefferson, page 228)