John, Byron York, far from “sneering” at John Loftus, calls his judgement into question by reporting on his former investigations, publications, and opinions. Surely that’s legitimate, and fact-based. Like this:

I first encountered (Loftus’s) name in the fall of 2003, when I was working on a story about Bush hatred. I was looking at the people who claim that the Bush family got its wealth from financing the Nazis, and I discovered that one of the sacred texts of that particular worldview is a book, The Secret War Against the Jews, by the authors Mark Aarons and…John Loftus. In 1995, when the book appeared, Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman, who can reasonably be counted on to speak out against people who financed the Nazis, called it “so exaggerated, so scantily documented, so overwrought and convoluted in its presentation, that Loftus and Aarons render laughable their claim to offer ‘a glimpse of the world as it really is.'”

One might guess that the Sun is not aware of Loftus’ other work, but that would be incorrect. In January 2004, the paper published an article on those notorious MoveOn.org ad submissions that compared George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler. The story included a quote from Loftus, who said the ads were basically accurate. “The Bushes played a significant role in bringing money into the Third Reich,” Loftus told the paper. “They literally financed Hitler. It was all about the money. It wasn’t about the ideology.”

York, incidentally, was for years the star investigative reporter for this magazine, a stardom he deserved.