ANDREW McCARTHY HAS NO TIME FOR YOUR SILLY FACT VERIFICATION

Andrew McCarthy is a contributing editor at National Review; he also writes for PJ Media and The New Criterion, and he's published several books, among them The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America and, most recently, Faithless Execution: Building the Case for Obama's Impeachment. His National Review gig gives him an aura of respectability -- he's not just some right-wing hack! He writes for a serious and respected journal of ideas! But his regard for the truth was on display yesterday on Twitter, when he retweeted this:





One of the Gitmo detainees traded for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl was named Mohammad Fazl (not Fazi). Is that really him?

Er, probably not. Here's the same picture at the website of the Norway-based Hate Speech International. The man is tentatively identified as Khalid K., a former resident of Almere in the Netherlands who reportedly left the Netherlands to fight with an Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Syria:





If you're Andrew McCarthy, a serious and respectable polemicist, shouldn't you make at least a cursory effort to verify the accuracy of a tweet posted by Some Guy on the Internet before sending it out to your fifteen thousand Twitter followers?

Now, I'm not saying that the real Fazl is a nice guy -- as deputy defense minister for Afghanistan's Taliban government more than a decade ago, he's said to have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of minority Shi'tes.

But did he behead five guys and pose with their severed heads? It sure doesn't seem that way. But McCarthy hit the Retweet button anyway.

Remember McCarthy's regard for accuracy the next time he's frothing at the mouth about something. He doesn't care about facts.