At Instapundit, Elizabeth Price Foley caught a real doozy of a column in the Cincinnati area's only daily newspaper — if you insist on calling something which looks like it was cobbled together overnight at Fedex-Kinko's a "newspaper."

If there was a daily prize for the largest quantity of subtle but arrogant condescension in an opinion column, Cincinnati native, Ohio State graduate, and current North Charleston, South Carolina middle school teacher Meg Stentz would be yesterday's hands-down winner. Proving that she's keeping up with the latest trends in political correctness, she even dragged one of the left's favorite new words into her Sunday writeup.

New Republic staff writer Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig has clearly run out of defenses for the conduct of those involved in the disgraceful, scandalous journalistic malpractice which gave rise to the now-retracted and thoroughly discredited "A Rape on Campus: The Struggle for Justice at UVA" at Rolling Stone.

So here's her last refuge: Conservatism deserves some of the blame, because Sabrina Rubin Erdely and others associated with the story supposedly "Used Rightwing Tactics to Make a Leftist Point" (links are in original; bolds and numbered tags are mine):

Earlier this evening, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism issued its report on Rolling Stone Magazine's November "A Rape on Campus" story. The report follows up on the magazine's request of Columbia to conduct an independent review of how the disastrously false 9,000-word story made it through to publication.

USA Today is reporting that for all the harsh criticism the piece's author and the others at the magazine received, and despite the fact that RS has now formally and fully retracted the story, no one is losing their job or suffering any other visible consequences. In fact, the magazine considers the whole affair "an isolated and unusual episode" (bolds are mine):

On CNN yesterday, after the network cut away from the press conference where Charlottesville, Virginia Police Department announced that it "found no evidence to support claims in a Rolling Stone article that a University of Virginia student was gang raped at a campus fraternity in September 2012," network panelist and CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin bizarrely resorted to "statistics" to defend "Jackie," the student-fabulist involved.

The panel discussion which followed the press conference seemed to be all about telling viewers that "Despite what everyone says, it's really not over." Hostin's major contribution to that meme was to essentially contend that because "only about 2 percent of rapes that are reported are false," any allegation that "Jackie" was making things up is unfair and likely incorrect because it "flies in the face of statistics." Video and a transcript follow the jump:

Meredith Shiner is currently a Yahoo News political reporter. Before spending three years at Roll Call, where she was considered "a leader in the newsroom," she toiled at the Politico for two years. Shiner is a graduate of Duke University, and "grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago."

I have provided these resume-level details to emphasize how utterly incomprehensible it is, as well as downright scary, that a woman with this kind of background and experience could have published, reacting to Ted Cruz's speech announcing his presidential candidacy, the following tweet (HT Instapundit):