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21 Feb 2009 06:13 pm

Fact-Checking The Washington Poobahs

Another brutal take-down of the Post's treatment of a George Will column. Maybe Will will deal with the question in his next column. That's what a mere blogger would do. TNR, meanwhile, has not added a correction to Leon Wieseltier's column, either, despite having the error noted here and in the comments section of the piece. Wieseltier baldly asserts that Ronald Reagan's statement that "government is not the solution to the [sic] problem; it is the problem" was

"proclaimed categorically, without exception or complication"

when in fact the very quote he cites begins with a clear and critical complication and exception - "In this present crisis ..." (The quote itself - one of the most famous lines in any Inaugural address - is also wrong in a minor way, substituting "the" for "our.") That Wieseltier uses this error to prove Reagan a "fool" makes this much more than a throw-away line. And yet it still sits there uncorrected online - evidence that the magazine has lower online standards of fact than any number of bloggers whom Wieseltier has spent much of the last ten years dissing.

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