En garde!

Normally a rather docile creature, content to drift from lingerie emporium to chocolatier, your blogstress today, alas, finds herself in a position that requires the unsheathing of her mighty sword of rhetorical wit. This crusade arises from a very poorly executed attack on your Webwench by one of the resident liberal wags of Fox News Channel, who has accused your cybertrix of writing things she never wrote -- a trick more typically used by right-wing commentators. Herewith, your écrivaine's rebuttal:

With (the Christian) God on her side, who needs facts?

I don't find it particularly surprising that a Fox News commentator would resort to a factually challenged and misleading retort to an essay on Pope Benedict XVI's recent geopolitical mischief in the Islamic world. I did, however, find it a bit alarming to see that modus operandi employed at The American Prospect Online, by Kirsten A. Powers.

In her commentary, Who Should Apologize? (which includes an ostensible rebuttal to my essay, Benedict the Bombthrower), Ms. Powers misrepresents my work as a defense of the violence perpetrated by some Muslims in the name of God, and accuses me of blaming the U.S. for the murderous and abusive actions of Islamic theocracies. Hers is a tactic more commonly used on the right: State that someone said something she clearly did not, then berate her for having supposedly said it.

An honest rebuttal would have taken on my interpretation of the pope's speech, which is what my piece was about.

TO READ THE REST, CLICK HERE.

A SHORTER VERSION APPEARS AT TAPPED, THE BLOG OF THE AMERICAN PROSPECT ONLINE.