I'm not american and I wasn't familiar with that bush quote; but my first assumption upon reading that typo would probably have been "Oh, they're joking about m

I'm not american and I wasn't familiar with that bush quote; but my first assumption upon reading that typo would probably have been "Oh, they're joking about making grammatical mistakes because the subject is schoolchildren". But then again, I had a higher opinion of the magazine to start with. I don't think you were being contemptuous, exactly, but I do think the train of thought you were describing is one often found on Hacker News, that boils down to "stop at the first problem I see and declare the rest is probably not worth considering". Maybe that process works well for filtering out things you don't want to spend attention on, but it's going to have false positives, and maybe it's a little grating when you confidently present one of these false positives as a rebuttal to other people praising the overall quality of the writing. (See also: that guy in this thread who got flagged for replying "Do they claim to?" implying they only engaged far enough to read the headline and come up with a sarcastic reply.)