The O'Donnell kerfuffle

  So apparently the big news today is how stupid Christine O'Donnell is for not understanding the First Amendment. Fool that she is, she thought that the separation of church and state phrase is NOT in the First Amendment! She and Chris Coons were conducting a debate at a law school and her comment sent the law school students, who know so much and are so familiar with the Constitution, etc., that they scorned and ridiculed her comment. Here's a rundown of what happened over at Investors' Business Daily:

First Amendment: A law school audience fell into fits of laughter when a Senate candidate asked, "Where in the Constitution is separation of Church and State?" In fact, the phrase is nowhere in the document.

Tuesday's debate between Delaware's U.S. Senate hopefuls before what was described as a crowd of "legal scholars and law students" at Widener University Law School in Wilmington generated quite some mirth among the assembled elites.

You can watch the debate and hear the mocking laughter, the "Oh, my God!" shocked comments.  Here's Althouse's commentary. Read the whole article here:

A word needs to be said about the mocking laughter that instantly erupted from the law students in the audience. Presumably, that sound meant we are smart and you are dumb. Where did they learn to treat a guest at their law school — Widener Law School — with such disrespect? They hooted O'Donnell down, and she never got a chance to explain her point. What does that say about the climate for debate in law schools? Not only did they feel energized to squelch the guest they politically opposed, but they felt sure of their own understanding of the law.

About 7 minutes in: 

 

Apparently the Washington Post got caught changing their story because they too did not reaaallly know the facts, as the law students didn't. Patterico:

Literally I ran a document comparison in Word between the original text and every paragraph is completely rewritten.  Update (III): At the end of the post I show that 76% of the words in the revised version of this article were not in the original.

Oh, and how hard has the AP worked to correct this story?  Well, here’s a google search of the original version, which apparently the AP is disowning.  As of this writing, I got about 23K hits for that.  By comparison I got 4K hits for the corrected version.

More after the break.

First, here is the bare text of the original article:

Is this a pattern of behavior for these knowledgeable leftists? Gee, I dunno. How about that mockery for Sarah Palin telling tea partiers not to party like it's 1773 yet? And Gwen Ifill the NPR host mocking her for it, along with Kos? And they didn't know that she was clearly talking about the BOSTON TEA PARTY? Which, of course, occurred in 1773? 
  The attitudes of these people is breathtaking, considering they're wrong and are displaying a stunning ignorance of history and our national documents.