Imagine a random journalist who covers Congress for two decades. Twenty years on, he still is reportng that the Constitution was written in 1976.  Speedily, the original copy was driven to over to the Capitol in a shiny black ’76 Cadillac.

This kind of sloppiness is what we unlucky monitors of the erratic Los Angeles Times are asked to digest, with (cough) a lump, when scanning the latest report from the Times’s latest discount hire, a (cough) “special correspondent.”

Noga Tarnopolsky, who grew up in a suburb of the moon known colloquialy as Switzerland, has been covering Jerusalem on the cheap the last few weeks while the journalistic version of the Titanic continues to sink or go deeper, whichever way you prefer to succumb.

Noga – Tarnopolsky is too long to write every time – has been a career freelancer, covering the Palestinians’ hourly war on Israel since the mid-‘90s.

She should know better but clearly does not.

In the tradition of all cockeyed L.A. Times’ reporters covering Jeruusalem, Ms. Tarnopolsky writes as if she has one eye on her knee and the other in her hip pocket.

Every beginning student of the Palestinian conflict knows bette than his or her name, Arab terrorists massively invaded Jerusalem and select other areas of Israel on the May 1948 day Israeli statehood was declared and recognized..

The story is black and white, as clear as a cloudless sky.

Kicking truth and context in the teeth, she refuses to report the truth. Instead of acknowledging the Arab invasion, she scrubs out the context and merely says that Jerusalem “was divided into eastern and western sides for 19 years, beginning in 1948,” as if the cleavage were mutually voluntary.

Sorry, kid, you are  a liar. Times’ readers lose again.