Recently, the Associated Press wrote about a joke Queen Elizabeth II told at a state dinner in her honor.

The gist: Earlier, President George Bush began to mistakenly refer to the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence as having happened in 1776, before catching his error and correcting the date.

Says the Associated Press:

The year 1776 cannot be a favorite year for the queen. It is the year when the monarch at the time of the American Revolution, George III, lost his richest colony.

Wrong again, AP.

The United States declared its independence in 1776 but was far from independent. Although according to Wikipedia, by the time of the Declaration’s signing Patriots controlled all of the colonial governments, the British had been forced from Boston and had evacuated all royal officials, America was far from pacified.

Again, according to Wikipedia, in late 1776 Britain significantly increased its military presence in the colonies; by 1778, although the war was going badly in the North, Britain had seized control of New York and Philadelphia (albeit Philly was abandoned not long after being taken), and turned back the U.S. invasion of Canada.

Fighting continued in the South from 1778 to 1781, with the war effectively over after Yorktown fell. It wasn’t technically over, however, until November 1782, when “preliminary peace treaties” were signed.

It may seem like picking nits to say Britain didn’t lose America in 1776, but that’s the point. The entire premise of the queen’s joke is to poke fun at the president for a slip. Isn’t it therefore incumbent upon the AP to get the facts right? Jabbing someone for an obvious mistake is basically the story’s premise, so how in the world can the AP make its gaffe, even if the gaffe is basically a gross simplification being used as a bridge to another thought?

Seriously, I wonder how the national wire can carry statements so inane when intelligent people write and edit them. If they can’t do that right, why in the world would you trust anything they say?

Here’s an excerpt from one of the earlier stories about Larry Birkhead being the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby:

NASSAU (Reuters) - A former boyfriend, Larry Birkhead, was identified on Tuesday as the father of Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith’s 7-month-old daughter after DNA test results were released by a Bahamas court.

The revelation brought to an appropriately dramatic climax a tabloid maelstrom that was kicked off by the abrupt death of the buxom widow of a billionaire from an accidental drug overdose in a Florida hotel casino on February 8.

This mess is what happens when you’re arrogant about your subject — or, more accurately, trying to talk down the subject.

Read literally, the second paragraph implies that J. Howard Marshall, Smith’s billionaire second husband, was made a billionaire “from an accidental drug overdose in a Florida hotel casino on February 8.”

The problem here is that the reporter, and clearly the desk editors, believe they are better than the story they are reporting. And they’re trying to prove how much better they are by torturing adjectives and dependent clauses, cramming 10 pounds of veiled invective into a 5-pound sentence.

Note the weasel words: “tabloid maelstrom”, implying that the story was driven not by the mainstream media, but by showbiz rags. Of course, Reuters moved over a dozen stories about Smith in the week prior to this story, so is Reuters a tabloid wire service? Then there’s “appropriately dramatic climax,” which isn’t even true, because anyone paying any amount of attention could clearly divine, by the actions of the parties involved, that Birkhead was the father. If anything, the test results are prosaic. Now, had Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband turned out to be the dad. …

Also note that my preceding paragraph is very complex, but can be understood perfectly. There are no dependent clauses defining the wrong thing. I broke for a sentence when a new thought arose. The adjectives are kept to a minimum. Where clarity was needed, I turned to nouns and verbs.

If the reporter and editors assigned to this story think the issue isn’t newsworthy, they can quit. Clearly, none of them are clever enough to either mask their disdain for the subject or reveal their biases in a way that doesn’t embarrass themselves, rather than the subject. And that, alone, should be reason enough for Reuters to fire everyone involved in this report.

A recent participant in the Denver Broncos cheerleading tryouts:

There are a number of reasons why I’m not a cheerleader. Principal among them is that I’m an ugly tub of lard. So why wasn’t that reason good enough to keep this horrific fatty at home on the couch with a box of doughnuts?

Now, I’m all up for a goof. It’s funny that Sanjaya Malakar is still on American Idol; that there’s an active effort to keep that kid on the show, butchering songs, is a great laugh; that it is so widly successful is even better.

A quick aside on Malakar: Since pop music sucks and American Idol produces the B talent in that awful genre, anything that makes American Idol interesting or, better yet, expedites its demise, is welcome. Malakar is doing both at once, which clearly makes him the greatest contestant of all time.

The best part of Malakar’s sustained run is that people actually treat it like it matters. Not only that, they bemoan the idea that someone might want to sabotage American Idol’s voting process, when the entire effect of public voting, from Day 1, was to marginalize “judges” Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson and Paula Abdul to little more than commentary.

But the absolute best thing about it is the Associated Press’s ham-fisted attempt to explain why Malakar has stuck around. Their theory: pre-teen girls think he’s cute. That’s amusing. The truth: Howard Stern and all the other efforts pushing to ruin that awful show. Yet more proof that the press does, indeed, make up facts to support their premises and make up stories to push agendas.

Anyway, back to the ugly beast pictured above.

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Published in a recent news story on the growing Justice Department prosecutor firings scandal:

DES MOINES, Iowa - Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday blamed the Bush administration’s fear of scandal for the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, dismissals she said were virtually unprecedented.

Come on, Associated Press.

Nothing can be “virtually unprecedented.” A precedent is absolute. It serves as a guide to all similar, subsequent events. Therefore, the absence of a precedent cannot be virtual. A precedent either exists or it does not, period.

Now, it may well be that mass firings of this sort are rare, or avoided at all costs, or not handled in the manner the White House has handled the situation. That certainly seems to be the gist of the matter. (Hell, I’d argue everything this administration has done since being elected is a new precedent in bad advice, poor management, arrogance and ham-fisted public relations.)

It may even well be that “virtually unprecedented” is an exact term Clinton used; Lord knows, attorneys, for as smart as they’re supposed to be, routinely mangle the language as effectively as they mangle fairness and common sense. But there’s no need for the AP to repeat such nonsense; just quote Clinton making a fool of herself.

It’s amazing to me this sort of grammatical gaffe can make it all the way through a cycle, especially on the national wire, and especially because Webster’s New World College Dictionary — the official dictionary of the AP — clearly says that yes, indeed, precedents either exist or they don’t.

Seriously, AP, get your heads out of your asses.

More proof that sports writing (and, apparently, sports editing) is the ultimate job for the inane: ESPN.com’s Greg Garber.

In an article about placekickers, Garber discusses Adam Vinatieri’s impressive stats for game-winning field goals:

He hit the winner in Super Bowl XXXVI, a 40-yarder as time expired, to give the Patriots a 20-17 victory over the St. Louis Rams. It was the first time a Super Bowl ended on the last play.

Actually, all 40 Super Bowls “ended on the last play.”

[Aside: I know that the first two Super Bowls were not originally called Super Bowls, but the name was there from the start, the NFL renamed the first two games as Super Bowls and the freakin' Super Bowl trophy is named after the guy who won those first two games, so as far as I am concerned, you can leave your nit-picking out of it and let me carry on with my own.]

What Garber meant to say, of course, is the kick marked the first time a Super Bowl was won by scoring on the last play.

Given that we’ve already established that intellect is not requisite in sports writing, I’ll let Garber have a pass, since the article is otherwise a good work and I’ve made many a gaffe along that line when spewing forth words on deadline.

What’s sad is that one would assume this article was edited prior to publication.

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