How hard is it to say that you’re wrong?  I imagine it all depends on how many paragraphs of qualifying statements you go through before you get to it.

What’s pathetic is that in the course of posting notice that NY Times editors are considering running a correction because of their characterization of James O’Keefe’s clothes during the ACORN scandal that Clark Hoyt repeats an out-and-out lie about O’Keefe’s candid camera situation with Mary Landrieu:

I could not reach O’Keefe — who is facing federal criminal charges of tampering with a Democratic senator’s phone in a different attempted sting — or Giles. But I am satisfied that The Times was wrong on this point, and I have been wrong in defending the paper’s phrasing. Editors say they are considering a correction.

First and foremost, in the course of suggesting that a public correction may be in order don’t top it with another one.  There is no federal criminal charge facing O’Keefe for tampering with anyone’s phone.  No phones were ever tampered with and it is only the contention of the agent handling the case that it was criminal intent and not a prank.

They dream about a Watergate Jr. scandal so bad that they have to sleep on a rubber mattress at night.

Hoyt belabors O’Keefe’s choice of attire during the ACORN sting as if the clothes he wore into their offices somehow disqualifies the criminal advice ACORN staffers gave him to help run his implied child sex trafficking business and secure fraudulent government benefits.

Acorn’s supporters appear to hope that the whole story will fall apart over the issue of what O’Keefe wore: if that was wrong, everything else must be wrong. The record does not support them. If O’Keefe did not dress as a pimp, he clearly presented himself as one: a fellow trying to set up a woman — sometimes along with under-age girls — in a house where they would work as prostitutes. In Washington, he said the prostitution was to finance his future in politics. A worker for Acorn Housing, an allied group, warned him to stay away from the brothel lest someone “get wind that you got a house and that your girlfriend is over there running a house of women of the night. You will not have a career.”

FAIR said that in Brooklyn, O’Keefe and Giles seemed to be telling Acorn staffers that “they are attempting to buy a house to protect child prostitutes from an abusive pimp.” That’s right, but FAIR left out the part about their clear intention to operate a brothel, which the Acorn workers seemed to take in stride, with one warning: “Don’t get caught, ’cause it is against the law.”

This is the problem with the Legacy Media and the leftwing blogosphere in particular.  Just because you do not have the facts on your side does not mean that you get to make up your own!   There is no alternative reality where something that is factually wrong is correct because you want it to be.

Go for the tortured self-examination.  Stay for the comments where the reflexively ignorant and bigoted Times readers contend that their admittedly non-existent coverage has been too Pro-O’Keefe and anti-ACORN.

Oh, and just wait until the HUD sting comes out.  Not that you’ll have a choice if you read the NY Times or get your news from the Big Three Networks.

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