Earlier in the day I criticized Maureen Dowd for giving Arnold Schwarzenegger the kid-glove treatment, presumably because meeting the big Hollywood lug rendered her incapable of critical thought. Well, while I'm at it, let me also slag the equally starstruck Peter Boyer, who profiled Mel Gibson a couple of weeks ago in The New Yorker. I almost fell for Boyer's malarkey when I read the article -- until Frank Rich went medieval on Boyer and his subject in yesterday's New York Times. Read the whole article for the pure nasty pleasure of it; for now, let me just note this:

In the New Yorker article, [Mel] says that his father, Hutton Gibson, a prolific author on religious matters, "never denied the Holocaust"; the article's author, Peter J. Boyer, sanitizes the senior Gibson further by saying he called the Holocaust a "tragedy" in an interview he gave to the writer Christopher Noxon for a New York Times Magazine article published last March. Neither the word "tragedy" nor any synonym for it ever appeared in that Times article, and according to a full transcript of the interview that Mr. Noxon made available to me, Hutton Gibson said there was "no systematic extermination" of the Jews by Hitler, only "a deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs. . . ." (This is consistent with Hutton Gibson's public stands on the issue; he publishes a newsletter in which the word Holocaust appears in quotes.)

(Fact-checkers -- isn't The New Yorker supposed to be famous for its fact-checkers? Or are they all starstruck too?)