Amy Davidson of the New Yorker should take up bowling or gardening because history doesn’t seem to be her thang, if you will. In the aftermath of Barack Obama’s own false historical reference, made during a Wednesday press conference, of famed WWII era English Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Davidson jumped to her keyboard to further garble history with an April 30 blog post on her Close Read blog at the New Yorker website.

On Wednesday, Obama made a reference to an “article” he was reading “the other day” wherein he discovered that during WWII Prime Minister Winston Churchill supposedly said “We don’t torture.” (Transcript of Obama’s remarks)The following morning, Davisdon praised Obama for his sentiment and waxed envious over the “very good” article from which Obama gleaned the tale.

There is only one little problem with the whole thing. Churchill NEVER said the line that Obama claimed he said. And further the “very good article” that Davidson praised was erroneous to say so. This means Obama was wrong, the article was wrong and so was Davidson’s blog post.

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The guys at Open Left attack CNBC viewers for not being particularly well informed. I think that they missed the tastiest story about a Pew research poll about news habits.

The tastiest bit is that of all the categories, as measured in the poll, people who get their news from Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are the most informed about US poltics. (at least if you accept Pew’s metric).

Let’s look at the numbers:

On the question of naming the House majority party, 84% of Hannity viewers get it right. 83% of Limbaugh viewers get it right.  Hardball (MSNBC) is next at 76%. I can’t tell if that difference is statistically significant.

On the question of naming teh Secretary of State, Hannity’s viewers are again the highest at 73%, while NPR’s are next, and Limbaugh readers tie with readers of the New Yorker and the Atlantic. (presumably combined because the samples are so small) Here, Hardball viewers are down at 66%.

Now, to get an over-all number that doesn’t place Hannity and Rush at the top, there is a question about UK Prime Minister. And, admittedly, they perform worse. However, somewhat ironically, more Hannity viewers can identify the UK Prime Minister than BBC viewers. And Rush listeners are only 3% less.

Now what to make of all this? Rush and Hannity get bragging rights of a sort.

How does that work for the arrogant lefties who think that they are smarter than everyone? Like those guys at OpenLeft. Not so hot? Then maybe they shouldn’t have started the debate…