There really isn’t a reputable news source out of the major news networks. While not all of them are as bad as former ABC News political chief Mark Halperin, all of them have some pretty awful contributors.

CNN.com is my primary news source online and their albatross is Lou Dobbs. Today, he wrote a rather amazing editorial defending himself against an OpEd in the NY Times that criticized his show. It’s amazing because he actually doesn’t defend himself.

I don’t want to get into the specifics of the two articles. If you’re interested, read the Times OpEd first, then Dobbs’s article to have them in the proper chronological order. Instead, I’ll just highlight some parts of Dobbs’s response:

Today’s New York Times column is primarily a personal attack on me, focuses on an ad-lib on the set of this broadcast uttered more than two years ago by Christine Romans on a number of cases of leprosy in this country. …

But today’s scurrilous personal attack from The New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, carrying the water of the Southern Poverty Law Center, also has the facts wrong.

So, you read this and, think, “Gosh, I wonder what the Times got wrong?” After all, a “scurrilous personal attack” will be primarily wrong on the charges, right? Let’s see what Dobbs says the charges are:

He wrote that I said, quote, that “One third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants.” That isn’t what I said. I didn’t say anything close to it.

Here’s where it gets weird. So, Dobbs denies saying it, but Leonhardt (unlike Dobbs, I’ll note) actually links to the transcripts on CNN.com. If you go there, you’ll find:

DOBBS: … One-third of the inmates in our federal prisons come from another country. The cost, staggering. Bill Tucker reports.

Sure, he doesn’t say “illegally” in there, but what’s the implication? Apparently nothing relevant, as Dobbs continues in his “defense”:

We reported that one-third of the federal prison population three and a half years ago were non-citizens. The columnist said the number was 6 percent. The exact number of the year in question was 29.3 percent for fiscal year 2001. And by the way, we’re putting up links on our Web site, loudobbs.com, so you can check the numbers for yourself.

I introduced that report three and a half years ago by saying the number of illegal immigrants in our prisons was increasing and the financial burden rising. Well, we had to go back and check, and because our correspondent no longer has his notes to support that statement, that the number of illegal immigrants within a prison population of non-citizens, I have to retract it here tonight, and I apologize to you for the necessity of doing so. But like I said, I do make mistakes.

Nowhere in the original transcript, by the way, will you see any qualification of the numbers as coming from 2001 (the Dobbs report originally aired in 2003). That might not seem that important except for one thing. Something significant happened in 2001 (around September) that caused a change in how the government handles non-citizens who commit crimes… deportation is swift, even if the person is a lawful, greencard holding resident.

On the other hand, Dobbs is right about one thing: Leonhardt’s numbers were for all prisons in the U.S. while Dobbs’s 29% is for the federal system. Of course, I still come back to, “so what” since nothing in either sets of numbers speaks to illegal vs. legal immigrants.

What next, Lou? (actually, I skipped one, it’s trivial)

That columnist also said I gave air time to white supremacists, and mentions one by name, Madeleine Cosman, who wrote the article that Christine Romans used as a source for her later leprosy statement.

The fact is, I made a mistake, and I’ve said we would never have used her as a source if we had known of her controversial background two years ago, at the time of the offending ad-lib. But the columnist fails to note that his own paper wrote a glowing obituary of Madeleine Cosman when she died last year.

OK, so you made a mistake, and the only thing you can add is, “But you did it, too!” Classy.

Next up:

And the columnist writes that I suggested that new immigration reform bill would be the first step to a North American union. Nope. What I did say is that the proposed legislation, favored by President Bush and Senator Kennedy and others who are misguided, contains language in Section 413 that, if approved by Congress, would endorse and legitimize the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, which is the foundation of this administration’s efforts to create a North American union, and which would further threaten, in my opinion, our national sovereignty.

So, though it’s not “the first step” to a North American union, it would further the “administration’s efforts to create a North American union.” So, what, it’s step 2 or 3? What the hell is he clarifying here?

Look, I had fun writing this in part because Dobbs makes it easy. He paints himself as some man of the people speaking truth to power. I would be willing to accept that if he actually did more than pander to the “middle class.” So much of his show is based on reinforcing that “everyone is coming to get you!” Even that might be OK if he could actually make sound arguments.

I don’t necessarily have to agree with the guy to respect him, but he doesn’t even try to make sense. Like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and the other blowhards on radio and TV, Dobbs makes his arguments simply by assertion. He simply hopes that most of his viewers will just assume that he wouldn’t be so cavalier with the facts. Unfortunately, his viewers would be wrong.