Cal Thomas Column Presents Sticky Agreement Issue

Cal Thomas's column http://www.calthomas.com appears regularly in my local newspaper, and most of the time, I don't even think about his grammar or usage as I read what he writes. Yesterday, however, one sentence stood out with a jolt because it sounded awkward. My pet peeve, agreement, was the issue, but the solution was not so simple. Here is the sentence:



"So much of what passes for facts today are like what another generation called 'old wives' tales.'"



Generally, the word WHAT can be considered singular (therefore, the verb PASSES) even if what follows the verb (FACTS) is plural. However, this sentence goes further and adds ARE, which sounds awkward to me. I visited a couple other websites to check their opinions and found a good discussion of this subject on Englishforums.com http://www.englishforums.com/. If you want to access the discussion, which is an older post, Google the words "plural what," and this discussion will pop up.



I decided to tweak the sentence myself and improve it as follows:



So much of what passes for fact today is like what another generation called "old wives' tales."



I'd be interested in your comments. To me, my version sounds much clearer. (Of course, I hold a certain bias for my own opinion.) What do you think?