Eschaton

Daily Howler rips Saletan a new one.

POSTSCRIPT—OUR INCOMPARABLE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH: You know us—we thought we’d conduct a thorough search to see how often the Gore-like Torch accused his rival of “risky schemes.” And it was weird—the Bergen Record recorded no instance. Neither did the Philly Inquirer. In fact, we were almost starting to get the feeling that Saletan may have embellished a tad. Maybe he was willing to do and say anything. Or maybe he even had a problem with the truth. Gosh—maybe he felt the need to embroider even when the truth would have been good enough. We found that it wasn’t hard to imagine what probably happened when Saletan typed his piece up.

But finally! The New York Times replied to our search for “Torricelli AND risky scheme.” Here is the offending example, from a September 19 report by David Kocieniewski. For the record, this is the only response to “Torricelli AND risky scheme” on the entire NEXIS archive:

KOCIENIEWSKI: Mr. Forrester, who has tried to focus the campaign on questions about Mr. Torricelli’s ethics, has [used] the Social Security squabble to challenge the senator’s credibility. At a news conference in Trenton today, he said he would oppose the Bush administration’s plan to privatize Social Security and any attempt to invest part of the trust fund in the stock market.
He also cited Mr. Torricelli’s appearance on CNN’s “Crossfire” program in October 2000, in which the senator appeared to embrace a proposal to invest part of the Social Security trust fund in stocks.

“It’s a risky scheme, with two pitfalls,” said Bill Pascoe, Mr. Forrester’s campaign manager. “First, as demonstrated by the stock market downturn, we could end up losing the money. Second, you’d be in a situation when the government is picking stocks, choosing one company over the other, with the potential for political influence-peddling.”

Mr. Torricelli’s campaign manager, Ken Snyder, said that the senator had been invited to appear on the television show because he opposes privatization and that it would be misleading to interpret “a vague moment on a rapid-fire political talk show” as a formal endorsement.

Weird, eh? In the one recorded case where someone yelled “risky scheme,” it was Forrester’s manager—he’s a Republican—yelling “risky scheme” at the Torch! Why, if we didn’t know the press corps better, we’d almost think that Will’s “fact”—which helped slime Vile Gore—was mistaken. Or had just been made up.