… offer excellent commentary on current events.” Someone said something like that, I don’t know who. I didn’t make it up; it just seems pertinent in light of the latest minor kerfuffle over Frank Gaffney’s attribution to Abe Lincoln this quotiation in a Washington Times piece this week:

Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged. — President Abraham Lincoln

The only problem, as Editor and Publisher explains, is that Lincoln never said it. It seems that one Brooks Jackson at FactCheck.org tracked it down thus:

… “The conservative author who touched off the misquotation frenzy, J. Michael Waller, concedes that the words are his, not Lincoln’s. Waller says he never meant to put quote marks around them, and blames an editor [at the magazine Insight] for the mistake and the failure to correct it. We also note other serious historical errors in the Waller article containing the bogus quote.”

Yeah, blame it on the editor. That’s right up there with ‘my dog ate it.’ Speaking of bogus quotes, remember this one?

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.

That was Barbra Streisand slamming GW Bush in September 2002. But, of course, there’s not a scintilla of evidence that Caesar ever said it, nor do the words appear in any of Shakespeare’s plays, to whom the bogus quote is sometimes attributed, presumably from his play, “Julius Caesar.”

Ralph Keyes wrote about misquotations in The Quote Verifier.

Misquotation is at least as common as accurate quotation, and for perfectly good reasons. The primary reason is that when using quotes, the reference we’re most likely to consult is our memory. This is a hazardous form of research. Our memory wants quotations to be better than they usually were, and said by the person we want to have said them.

As Lincoln said, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

Drudge reports,

The Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality hearing scheduled for Wednesday, February 14, 2007, at 10:00 a.m. in room 2123 Rayburn House Office Building has been postponed due to inclement weather. The hearing is entitled “Climate Change: Are Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Human Activities Contributing to a Warming of the Planet?”

The link is probably perishable. The “inclement weather” is an ice and snow storm that has mostly paralyzed the capital.

Anti-Judaism in Britain is at an all-time high:

A study published today shows the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents has almost tripled in 10 years, with more than half the attacks last year taking place in London.

The findings prompted the report’s authors to warn of a “wave of hatred” against Jews.

The number of incidents increased to 594 last year, up by 31 per cent on the previous year.

Violent assaults soared to 112, up by more than a third on 2005. …

• An Orthodox Jew punched in the face and almost pushed off a Tube platform by an Arab man who screamed: “Get back to Stamford Hill, I want to kill you all”

• A Jewish man walking to synagogue with his two young sons suffered a broken leg after being punched and kicked by a white man shouting “f***ing Jew”

• Seventy incidents of desecration and damage to synagogues, cemeteries, Jewish schools and private homes with attacks including swastikas daubed on walls

• Savage assault of a 12-year-old Jewish girl Jasmine Kranat, who was beaten unconscious on a north London bus by two teenage girls who asked her first if she was Jewish.

Here is the USA, the number of anti-Semitic incidents actually declined, though slightly, in 2006 from the year before. But 2004 saw the highest number of anti-Jewish incidents since 1994.

Dutch police search for man with broken neck:

Amsterdam police are seeking a British man who has a broken neck and may be in risk of severing his spinal cord but doesn’t know it.

The man, identified as 29-year-old Benjamin William O’Connor, was involved in a traffic accident on Saturday in Suffolk, where he lives, police said.

He was released from hospital, but later that day, doctors later examined his X-rays and realised the dangerous nature of his injury – but couldn’t contact him.

British authorities investigating his movements found he had already departed for the Netherlands.

“He is in danger of serious injury or death,” said a spokeswoman for Amsterdam police.

Amsterdam police have published a photo of O’Connor, hoping someone will recognise him and alert him to contact police and seek immediate medical treatment.

Let’s pray authorities find poor Mr. O’Connor quickly. As for the rest, well, there ya go. nationalized health care at its ordinary.

FNC reports:

An American GI assigned to one of the harshest posts in Iraq had a simple request last week for a Wisconsin mattress company: send some floor mats to help ease the hardship of sleeping on the cold, bug-infested ground.

What he got, instead, was a swift kick from the company’s Web site, which not only refused the request but added insult to injury with the admonition, “If you were sensible, you and your troops would pull out of Iraq.”

Army Sgt. Jason Hess, stationed in Taji, Iraq, with the 1st Cavalry Division, said he emailed his request to Discount-mats.com because he and his fellow soldiers sleep on the cold ground, which contains sand mites, sand flies and other disease carriers.

In his email, dated Jan. 16, 2007, he asked the Web-based company, registered to Faisal Khetani, an American Muslim of Pakistani descent:

“Do you ship to APO (military) addresses? I’m in the 1st Cavalry Division stationed in Iraq and we are trying to order some mats but we are looking for ships to APO first.”

The reply he got basically said get stuffed. See the FNC site for the rest of the story.

Unbelievable.

Isaac Newton, that is. Today’s demolition derby is brought to you by your Mom. Good ol’ Mom Nature.

Headline: “Skull shows possible human/Neanderthal breeding”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A 40,000-year-old skull found in a Romanian cave shows traits of both modern humans and Neanderthals and might prove the two interbred, researchers reported on Monday. …

It could be “evolutionary reversal” [Joao Zilhao of the University of Bristol in Britain] said — humans changing back into archaic forms.

“They could also reflect admixture with Neanderthal populations as modern humans spread through western Eurasia,” Zilhao said in a statement.

“This mixture would have resulted in both archaic traits retained from the Neanderthals and unique combinations of traits resulting from the blending of previously divergent gene pools.”

No hock: a US Marine major told me that this discovery explains a lot about the Corps’ recruiting pool. I think he was joking. Maybe.

So simple even a caveman could do it.