The Most Bizarre Political Story Of The Season?

This has got to be the most bizarre political story of the season. So bizarre it screams for a word more bizarre than "bizarre."

Absurd, balmy, cockeyed, derisory, eccentric, fantastic, fatuous, foolhardy, foolish, goofy, half-baked, harebrained, idiotic, ill-conceived, impracticable, imprudent, inane, inappropriate, insane, irresponsible, imprudent, inane, inappropriate, loony, ludicrous, nonsensical, odd, outrageous, peculiar, potty, preposterous, puerile, quixotic, ridiculous, senseless, short-sighted, silly, strange, unworkable, wacky, wierd, wild. Thank you Mr. Roget.

Yesterday, the NYT ran a story that took not one but two effete Ivy school journalists to compile. It was a detailed analysis of the words Joe Lieberman has used not just during the campaign but since 9/11:

As the battle of interpretation continues, The New York Times sorted 362 of Mr. Lieberman’s war-related comments since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks into content-related categories, and found that he has alternated his arguments about the parties and the war’s prosecution, shifting tone at critical points as political circumstances have evolved.

No way! Really? The more newsworthy story would be if the NYT had found a single national politician who didn't shift tone at critical points as political circumstances have evolved. I voted for the war before I voted against the war. Or was it the other way around?

Don't worry it'll be the other way around next year.

But the really big news in this story was ... well, really big:

Never, in the statements reviewed, did Mr. Lieberman utter the words “stay the course.”

How painful it must have been for our two intrepid Lamont-lickers to write those words. How delighted they would have been if only they could have found Lieberman staying some course somewhere.

Well, guess what? This little expose, all tied up neat to give Ned Lamont a desperately needed boost, isn't even the bizarre, goofy, inane, ludicrous, wacky, etc., story. That story ran today.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut has used the phrase “stay the course” several times in discussing the war in Iraq in recent years, echoing a key phrase of the White House, contrary to an article published Tuesday in The New York Times.

The angst! He REALLY did say "stay the course," but to get that story out, the NYT had to run a complex, authoritative explanation of how their two highly trained reporters and their crack editing and fact-checking crews all screwed up:

It is unclear why, when the database was checked for the phrase before publication, three times, it did not come up.

How did the mistake get discovered? Readers called them. Even NYT readers are smarter than NYT reporters.

What the hell, they got to stretch a one-day Lieberman bashing into a two-day bashing.

... they just proved in the process that to support Lamont you've got to be kinda dumb.

Related Tags: Media bias, MSM, Joseph Lieberman, Ned Lamont, New York Times