Saturday's New York Times features two particularly insipid articles critiquing candidates' reactions to the Bhutto assassination. Here's the nut graf of the primary story by Patrick Healy:
The Bhutto assassination is one of those rare things in a presidential race — an unscripted, unexpected moment that lays bare a candidate’s leadership qualities and geopolitical smarts. Think of Mr. bin Laden’s videotape message late in the 2004 election — giving President Bush a chance to look more commanding than Senator John Kerry — or the twists of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980, as Ronald Reagan made President Jimmy Carter look feckless.
Can someone explain to me how the bin Laden video "[laid] bare" George W. Bush's "leadership qualities and geopolitical smarts"? What is Healy talking about?
After presenting some candidates relatively charitably, Healy then moves on to pedantic nitpicking. This, for instance, is one of the dumbest fact-checks I've ever read:
Some candidates had moments, meanwhile, that sounded a bit out of the presidential loop. Mitt Romney said that, if he had been president, he would have gathered information from “our C.I.A. bureau chief in Islamabad.” The Central Intelligence Agency has station chiefs, not bureau chiefs.
Busted! Clearly, Mitt Romney isn't ready to be president.
The worst, though, is this passage about Mike Huckabee:
Mike Huckabee, the leading Republican in polls of Iowa caucusgoers, found himself on the defensive on Friday, trying to clarify earlier remarks in which he said the chaos in Pakistan underscored the need to build a fence on the American border with Mexico, and that “any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country” should be monitored. A series of misstatements in discussing the issue could buttress criticism that Mr. Huckabee has faced from his opponents that he lacked experience on foreign policy.
Note the passive voice in the last sentence, which seeks to obscure Healy's own role in legitimizing that criticism. Like many people, I'm concerned that Huckabee lacks a deep knowledge of policy, but it's pretty clear that reporters are being influenced by that narrative and writing nitpicky stories that serve to reinforce the perception. (It's the same story as the narrative-driven feeding frenzy over Mitt Romney's minor exaggerations.)
Things get even worse in the accompanying fact-check article on Huckabee by David Kirkpatrick. Ask yourself this question: would misstatements this minor become a story for any other candidate?
In discussing the volatile situation in Pakistan, Mike Huckabee has made several erroneous or misleading statements at a time when he has been under increasing scrutiny from fellow presidential candidates for a lack of fluency in foreign policy issues.
Explaining statements he made suggesting that the instability in Pakistan should remind Americans to tighten security on the southern border of the United States, Mr. Huckabee said Friday that “we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities, except those immediately south of the border.”
Asked to justify the statement, he later cited a March 2006 article in The Denver Post reporting that from 2002 to 2005, Pakistanis were the most numerous non-Latin Americans caught entering the United States illegally. According to The Post, 660 Pakistanis were detained in that period.
A recent report from the Department of Homeland Security, however, concluded that, over all, illegal immigrants from the Philippines, India, Korea, China and Vietnam were all far more numerous than those from Pakistan.
In a separate interview on Friday on MSNBC, Mr. Huckabee, a Republican, said that the Pakistani government “does not have enough control of those eastern borders near Afghanistan to be able go after the terrorists.” Those borders are on the western side of Pakistan, not the eastern side.
Further, he offered an Orlando crowd his “apologies for what has happened in Pakistan.” His aides said later that he meant to say “sympathies.”
He also said he was worried about martial law “continuing” in Pakistan, although Mr. Musharraf lifted the state of emergency on Dec. 15. Mr. Huckabee later said that he was referring to a renewal of full martial law and said that some elements, including restrictions on judges and the news media, had continued.
Remember, this is a newspaper that routinely ignores far serious misstatements by the President of the United States about major policy issues. But if Mike Huckabee says "eastern" instead of "western" or "apologies" instead of "sympathies," watch out!
Update 12/29 3:29 PM: Matthew Yglesias mocks geography trivia and points out the striking parallel between the narrative-driven nitpicking of Huckabee and what happened to Al Gore:
[I]n a sense maybe it's fair to make a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to a minor geography slip-up.
But I don't really think so. That's the same kind of logic that led the press to conclude it was okay to say Al Gore had lied and said he invented the internet even though he (a) never said that, and (b) what he did say was true. To the press, the important points were (a) the press didn't like Gore, and (b) Gore was a liar. Thus, any anecdote that could possibly be seized on to illustrate the point that Gore was a liar was seized on -- whether or not they were actually lies. It was BS then, and it's BS for it to happen to Huckabee. There's solid evidence out there that he's clueless on foreign policy, so point to the evidence.
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