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):

In exploring the blooming career of Monica Lewinsky as an anti-cyberbullying activist, it’s not only Lewinsky that’s trying to rehabilitate or reinvent hereself. It’s also a chance for the liberal media to revise feminist history. See The New York Times, with an article last week “Monica Lewinsky Is Back, But This Time on Her Terms.” Reporter Jessica Bennett lauded Lewinsky for “a biting cultural critique about humiliation as commodity.”

She even turned to Gloria Steinem for commentary. “It’s a sexual shaming that is far more directed at women than at men,” Steinem wrote in an email, noting that in Lewinsky’s case, she was also targeted by the “ultraright wing.” She thanked Lewinsky “for having the courage to return to the public eye.”

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:

LifeNews.com reports that pro-lifers in Ireland held a march on Wednesday night to protest the nation’s broadcast and print media bias in favor of abortion on demand. Several thousand pro-lifers turned out in Dublin outside the Irish parliament for an event they called “33 to 1: Challenging Media Bias.”

In a recent two-week period last December, the campaigners asserted that 33 pro-abortion articles appeared in Irish national newspapers but they published only one pro-life article during the same period.

When it comes to right-wingers and the Affordable Care Act, biology and race are destiny. That’s the word from lefty pundit Marcotte, who argued in a Thursday column for Talking Points Memo that the “fight against Obamacare has been about needling the gender- and race-based resentments of the conservative base.”