My sister pointed me to another instance of someone examing the practicability of "flushing a Koran down the toilet". The party in question is Mark Steyn, who writes:
In a way, both the U.S. media and those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar, two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs -- not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of Al Gore's eco-crazed federally mandated low-flush toilets, a claim no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek's executive washroom.
The italics are mine. Actually, I had been thinking I should probably back off slightly. I am certain that I have heard many, many reports say, quite clearly, "Koran flushed down toilet", but I hadn't researched it carefully. So if I were a blogger with any significant readership--which of course I am not--I wouldn't be surprised if some fact-checkers would be weighing in saying "well, the article itself--if you had bothered to read it--actually said 'Koran was ripped apart, handfuls of pages at a time, and desecrated in near totality over multiple flush cycles, with only the hard binding remaining; and that, too, was discarded in the toilet, although not successfully sucked through the pipes".
But I really wasn't motivated enough to go do the research. Either way, there is an irritating lack of analysis. The implications are very different, of course. In the literal case, which I was making, it affects the merits of the issue. If the issue was merely that the subsequent reports were paraphrasing far too loosely, then the fault, still significant, was theirs, not that of the original Newsweek report.
Okay, I just did the research, it looks like the original report did say "down".
In a funny coincidence of timing, not an hour ago, I read an implicitly "revisionist" account that referred to "Korans being laid on toilet seats, and one flushed in the toilet" (what a difference a preposition makes).
10:18:41 PM 
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