Oh no. Perish the thought! He’s running with that Yushchenko poisoning "confirmed" story from the London Times – many hours after it’s been thoroughly debunked by the Associated Press, which reports:
"The cause of the illness that has left Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko’s face pockmarked is still not known, the director of the hospital that treated him said Wednesday, rejecting a report that the presidential candidate was poisoned.
"…Doctors are still running tests to try to determine what caused the illness, said Dr. Michael Zimpfer, the Rudolfinerhaus director.
"…Zimpfer rejected as ‘entirely untrue’ a story in the Wednesday edition of the London daily The Times, which quoted Dr. Nikolai Korpan – the Rudolfinerhaus physician who oversaw Yushchenko’s treatment – as saying that Yushchenko had been poisoned and the intention was to kill the candidate.
"Korpan also was quoted as denying making the remarks."
You mean the news media is – yikes! – biased??? The Times was … lying? Omigod, say it isn’t so!
Glenn was even busy implicating Vladimir Putin as the culprit. Evidence? Who needs evidence? Certainly not a professor of law….
To those of us with built-in BS-detectors, however, it wasn’t hard to anticipate this particular debunking. The Times story claims that the poisoning has been "confirmed," but somehow neglects to name the mysterious substance that supposedly disfigured Yushchenko’s once-handsome visage. Oh, and, even though the "poisoning" diagnosis is "confirmed," there’s just one minor complication:
"We need to check him again here in Vienna. If we received him today, we could finish the whole investigation in two or three days."
Unfortunately, however, according to the Times’s Jeremy Page — "reporting" from Kiev — "a spokeswoman said [Yushchenko] had no plans to travel to Vienna." Gee, so I guess that means the "mystery" wouldn’t be cleared up until … after the election. How convenient.
The key tip off, however, that the whole story was bogus from beginning to end is that the Cato Institute’s resident neocon and Karen Kean Lopez of National Review both believed it – and no doubt still do. Ideology trumps reality every time.
