Broken in Brief: Rove book ravages fact checking industry

NEW YORK—“Just let me die… just let me die. So… many… lies. There’s so much evil in the world,” were the cries of Media Matters intern Melissa Fargas from her hospital bed after her attempted self-disembowelment. Ms. Fargas had made her way through nearly four paragraphs in the misguided attempt to fact-check former White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Special Advisor Karl Rove’s new book Courage and Consequence.

These lamentations have afflicted many organizations and news outlets devoted to fact checking as scores of naïve young interns and associates come to grips with the true soul-deadening horror of life and the futility of existence as they attempt to wade through what Rove humorously calls "facts."

“We’re down 7 staffers and an associate editor and we’re only three chapters in,” lamented Faiz Shakir, editor of ThinkProgress. “I hear Fact Check.org mysteriously exploded minutes after their shipment of books arrived. And most of the staff of Politifact stripped down to the nude and ran off into the woods, clawing at their own flesh and shunning the entirety of society.”

“I’ve seen some sick shit in my life: most of Hannity’s books, pretty much every tome written by a former White House press secretary, and even the entire Coulter catalogue. But this just resets the bar. Now, if you’ll excuse me…,” Shakir finished by throwing himself out of a nearby window yelling, “You say the White House took care not to overstate the terrorist threat or exaggerate the danger posed by Iraq? My God….the gall. The balls,” before he impacted on the sidewalk below.

Until such a time as the sanity of fact checkers can be assured, most groups are refusing to even open Rove's new summer home book. Some are more adventurous, using three-man teams working with sentence fragments and random words so that the full brunt of Rove’s claims cannot be comprehended.

When asked if this wasn’t too much of a risk to the safety of the fact checkers, John Daniels, Director of CNN’s Political Ticker FactCheck, scoffed “That’s why God created unpaid interns.”