Plumbing the Depths of the Newsweek Debacle

There are so many angles to the Newsweek debacle -- the mushrooming scandal surrounding Newsweek's erroneous report that American military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed the Q'uran down a toilet in order to intimidate Islamic prisoners. A threshold, somewhat facetious question that occurred to me that maybe didn't occur to the elitist reporters at Newsweek who presumably have nannies to take care of their kids is whether the story makes sense from a plumbing perspective. I mean, seriously, anybody who has had little kids, whose bowel movements can occasionally defy the laws of physics, knows that there are certain sized objects that simply will not go down. I can't imagine someone thinking they could flush a book down a toilet. The story doesn't -- pardon the pun -- pass the smell test.

The serious point is that, looked at this way, the story is eerily similar to the Rathergate, because the MSM's mistake was not just making journalistic mistakes, it was also just a failure of common sense. In Rathergate, they failed to notice what everyone else noticed almost immediately, namely, that the typewriting was Times New Roman. In WaterClosetGate (or Flushgate or whatever you want to call it), they didn't notice that a book can't go down a Crapper.