Krugman shows up his truth squad

The National Review had an article yesterday entitled "Krugman Truth Squad" by Donald Luskin. Essentially Donald went about showing that Paul Krugman had made a few incorrect assertions in his latest op-ed. Luskin explains:

America’s most dangerous liberal pundit had written,

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida’s ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore.

By the end of the day, Krugman’s lie had been blasted out of the water by a flotilla of Krugman Truth Squad members in the blogosphere, including Chief Brief, Power Line, Brainster, The American Thinker, Brain Terminal, and my own blog, The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor & Stupid.

Krugman’s lie was especially loathsome considering that his own newspaper — the New York Times — was a member of one of the media consortiums to review the election results. On November 12, 2001, the Times reported:

Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff — filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties — Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations … The media consortium included The Times ...

Of course, Krugman would never publish a formal retraction. As former Times “public editor” Dan Okrent said of Krugman, “I can’t come up with an adverb sufficient to encompass his general attitude toward substantive criticism.” And besides, that George W. Bush stole the 2000 election is the creation-myth of the Angry Left — it is an article of religious faith not to be questioned. And so we find Krugman, in his column Monday, digging himself even deeper into a pit of deceit as he attempts to paper over his lie.

Responding to what he called the “outraged reaction” to his Friday column, Krugman starts by rephrasing his lie in less ambitious terms:

what would have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court hadn’t intervened; the answer is that unless the judge overseeing the recount had revised his order (which is a possibility), George W. Bush would still have been declared the winner. … what would have happened if there had been a full, statewide manual recount — as there should have been. The probable answer is that Al Gore would have won, by a tiny margin.

Now, Krugman acknowledges that Bush would have won if the recount that had actually been ordered by the Florida Supreme Court had been allowed to proceed. Now, Krugman makes it clear that what he was talking about on Friday was something more than that — a “full” recount beyond the scope of the one contemplated at the time, something that was not on the table, yet he personally believes “should have been.” Now, Krugman discloses that even this would have made a Gore victory only a “probable answer,” and even then only “by a tiny margin.”

Luskin finishes with a bold question and a speculative answer:

Those are the facts. But will the Times run a correction, at least concerning Krugman’s blatant factual misrepresentations about the Miami Herald/USA Today consortium’s results? As of this writing, I’ve heard nothing in response to my query about it to “public editor” Byron Calame. I’m not holding my breath. There’s no way the New York Times is going to interrupt its most effective evangelist when he’s in the middle of a fire-and-brimstone sermon about the Angry Left’s cherished creation-myth.

Sadly for Mr. Luskin, Krugman has come out in his op-ed today (which, by the way, is a perfect example of why I can't read his stuff anymore, he has let his politics overwhelm his writing style and economic observations) and corrected his mistatements:

Corrections: In my column last Friday, I cited an inaccurate number (given by the Conyers report) for turnout in Ohio's Miami County last year: 98.5 percent. I should have checked the official state site, which reports a reasonable 72.2 percent. Also, the public editor says, rightly, that I should acknowledge initially misstating the results of the 2000 Florida election study by a media consortium led by The Miami Herald. Unlike a more definitive study by a larger consortium that included The New York Times, an analysis that showed Al Gore winning all statewide manual recounts, the earlier study showed him winning two out of three.

So where does this all leave us, well Luskin and the National Review come off looking incredibly petty while Krugman comes off as the mature one. Luskin could have decided to actually respond to Krugman's arguements but decided to attack his character. But the stupid thing was that Luskin's character attack was based upon the assumption that Krugman would never apologize. Woops.

-Mr. Alec