A Meme I'm Tired Of

I think of myself basically as a partisan operative first and a journalist second. Maybe not even journalist second. Humorist second, then probabaly some other stuff, and journalist, say, ninth. Point being I don't often write the sort of thing I'm about to write.

GEORGE BUSH DID NOT SAY IN THE 2003 SOTU THAT SADDAM TRIED TO BUY URANIUM FROM NIGER.

He said "Africa." Now, this was almost certainly weaselly. The WH never did explain just what part of Africa they meant. And it seems very likely that the claim was based on the Niger intelligence which was known to be false.

But to say, over and over, as so many liberal blogs have (including Think Progress today) that Bush said in the 2003 SOTU that Saddam tried to buy Uranium from Niger just contributes to confusion. When a person learning about this for the first time goes out into the world and repeats the claim, an informed conservative will tell them that phrase wasn't in the SOTU and make the person feel stupid.

Conservative sites can get away with chumping their readers consistently. They attract and retain, shall we say, a certain type of core reader. Lefty blogs, with the probable exception of some extremely shrill sites on the very fringe, cannot get away with this. If we chump our readers they will stop listening to us.

This is a blessing we should not squander.