Have a look, please, at this, currently the top story on the Drudge Report:

A state dinner for a Communist leader?  Which commie?  Castro?  Or... like Stalin or Khruschchev?  (Except those guys are dead.  Same with Chairman Mao: dead.  Lenin too.)  Kim Jong-il, perhaps?  He's almost dead, but not quite.

Well, no.  No, the "Communist leader" is of course Hu Jintao, the current President of China.

And Drudge speaks the truth, as far as it goes: Obama will host a state dinner for Hu Jintao, who is the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China.  (And presumably a "lavish" one: aren't they always lavish?  Does the White House do state dinners where McDonald's is ordered in, or pizza, or for that matter, Chinese?)

But Drudge knows that he's obfuscating rather than doing what journalists at least claim to try to do (clarify).  If he were a clarifier, not an obfuscator, his headline would have been something like "Obama Gives Chinese Leader Lavish State Dinner" -- something with the word "China" or "Chinese" in it, because the pertinent thing about Hu Jintao is that he's Chinese, not that he's a Communist.  (Or even the actual headline of the actual story in the Guardian, which is "Hu Jintao Set for Lavish White House Reception on State Visit" -- and by the way, why is Drudge relying for his news on a leftie rag like the Guardian?  Isn't the Guardian a prominent member of the "MSM" which the right so loathes?  Drudge often links to the Times and the Washington Post and CNN and similar terrorist-hugging/gay/latte-oriented MSM organs too.  Weird: whatever.)

But something like "Obama Gives Chinese Leader Lavish State Dinner" wouldn't have been sufficiently inflammatory or vaguely deceptive enough for Drudge.

Yes, Matt: China is a Communist nation, or a "Communist" one, anyway.  It's the most capitalism-embracing Communist nation in history:  Marx would surely blush.  And most people, including most conservative commentators, would not, if asked to describe China in one sentence, say, "well, it's a Communist country."  (The word "communist" doesn't appear in the Guardian article which Drudge links to.)  The fact that China's ruling party is called the "Communist Party" is sort of a curiosity.  And you know this.  Which makes your infraction worse, but you know that too.  What you do, though, is defend yourself by noting that you are only reporting the truth.  Sort of like "McCain to Debate Black Man on Issues Facing Nation" would, in the autumn of 2008, have been "true" too, although even you didn't sink that low.

This isn't to say that there isn't room to comment on the fact of a state visit from the leader of our "frienemy" China (remember the three months in the middle of the last decade when that word sounded clever?).  But why is it that I suspect the recent University of Maryland study (the one showing that the more Fox News one consumes, the less well informed one becomes) would very likely apply to your not-super-smart-and-not-super-well-informed readers as well?

Oh and by the way, President Bush had Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao's direct predecessor, down to the ranch in 2002, but I don't need to check the Wayback Machine to be pretty sure that you "reported" that story differently; that your headline was not "Bush Hosts Communist Leader at Crawford Ranch."  I point this out, Matt, because you love "reporting" on what you see as -- and what sometimes even is -- liberal or Democratic hypocrisy.  So I thought you might get a kick out of my observation.