UPDATED: Monumentally dumb, even for The American Spectator. Or, more from the Kevin Jennings Witch Hunt

Can Jeffrey Lord at American Spectator count? It's a serious inquiry. Because this week he seems incapable of counting past 15.

Lord uncorked a typically incoherent American Spectator response to my dissecting of his early Kevin Jennings Witch Hunt post. In that post, Lord wrote this:

Why is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi so quiet about Kevin Jennings? Jennings is in the news because he is the Obama administration's Safe Schools czar, in bureaucratese the assistant deputy secretary of the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools inside the Department of Education. And because he has now admitted that when, as a teacher, he was sought out by a 15-year-old boy asking for advice about an affair with an older adult male, Jennings suggested wearing a condom.

The boy was not 15 years old. Period. He was 16, which was the legal age of consent in Massachusetts, where the incident took place. I noted, quite clearly, that everybody who follows the story now knows the boy was 16, not 15. Yet days later, fact-free zones of the GOP Noise Machine, including The American Spectator, continue to cling to the age of 15 because it allows them to float even more false claims that Jennings condoned statutory rape of a student.

Days after the boy himself confirmed he was 16 years old at the time of the incident, the American Spectator reported he was 15. And when called on it, refused to correct the purposeful error. What other proof do you need that the fringe rag doesn't care about even brushing up against the truth now and then?

Now in his response, Lord's howling that--a-ha!--at the time Jennings thought the boy was 15, so that's why he used that age in his post. Of course, that's not what Lord originally wrote. He didn't report that Jennings “was sought out by a boy who he thought was 15 years old asking for advice.” Lord wrote that the boy was 15. False, and everybody knows it. He was 16.

Again, what further proof do you need that Lord and his fellow loons are trapped in their own hermetically-sealed world when they refuse to acknowledge even the simplest facts, like somebody's age. The boy in the Jennings story confirmed he was 16 years, but the American Spectator still writes up a story announcing, as fact, that he was 15.

Like I said in the original post, we're through the looking glass with this stuff.