He’s an ass whether he defends or attacks. In trying to get a “Oh yeah, what about them” attack piece on National Review’s TNR moment with a fabricated story he gloats:

“National Review reporter Thomas Smith has been exposed as a fabulist for plainly fictitious claims he made in two separate NR posts in September regarding Hezbollah’s alleged armed threat to the Lebanese Government. The most comprehensive report detailing Smith’s fabrications is from Thomas Edsall in The Huffington Post, who examines some of the most factually dubious claims (including Smith’s “report” that “between 4,000-5,000 Hezbollah gunmen had ‘deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling ’show of force’” and his separate claim that “’some 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen’ occupied a ’sprawling Hezbollah tent city’ near the Lebanese parliament”) Smith’s war-fueling conclusion: “Hezbollah is rehearsing for something big here.”

Edsall quotes four separate experts on Lebanon, who respectively labelled Smith’s claims “insane,” said his most grandiose stories simply “never happened,” and stated that Smith is a “fabulist.” As Edsall notes, Smith’s melodramatic and highly suspicious claims about armed Hezbollah activities in Lebanon “appear to be designed to bolster support for the ongoing presence of U.S troops in the Mideast.”

Rather than acknowledging any errors in a clear and straightforward way, National Review chose late Friday afternoon to raise this matter — the favored time period of politicians to dump embarrassing stories, when as few people as possible will see it — in the form of a mealy-mouthed, self-justifying “Editor’s Note” from Kathryn Jean Lopez. Lopez apologizes to readers on the ground that “NRO should have provided readers with more context and caveats in some posts from Lebanon this fall,” but never says what those caveats should have been or what the missing context was.”

In a few years of dealing with the mentally ill I’ve noticed their tendency to blather about in circles, and to see in others what they possess in themselves. Thus his snide insult of K. Lopez as “mealy-mouth” is more a revealing statement of Glenn’s character, than of hers. Truth is he’s not even in the same universe either ethically or journalistically.

Whether or not K. Lopez’s acknowledgment of the fabrication makes the grade of this third-rate hack isn’t as important than the fact that NRO stepped forward to made the acknowledgment without blaming others or deferring until “further investigation” even in the face of solid evidence. That’s the difference between what happened at NRO and TNR.

Just a side note, and to be fair the explanation doesn’t have to impress Michelle Malkin either.

While I agree that the difference between the right and the left is that we do not excuse bad behavior, we don’t need to pump out hit counters by piling on either.

UPDATE: K. Lopez further responds with more than enough.