Pun Salad

Here is, in its entirety, a recent Andrew Sullivan post titled "Lying About Lincoln":

This is irritating. Why? Follow the link. It goes to a TPM Cafe post about a recent speech on the floor of the House of Representatives by Don Young (R-Alaska) where he attributed this quote to Abraham Lincoln:

This quote is, indeed, bogus, as a little querying of the Google will tell anyone. For example, here is a Washington Post article examining the controversy. The TPM article links to a Factcheck.org article with even more detail. Young was wrong and stupid to use the quote.

But:

1. Sullivan turns this single Republican example into "everything you need to know" about Republicans generally. For anyone with all hinges attached, that's a ludicrous overreach.

2. Worse, there's no evidence presented at the TPM article that supports Sullivan's slanderous "knowingly lie" charge. In fact, Sullivan's charge is exactly the opposite of the TPM author's explicit point that he doesn't know whether Young was intentionally recycling this bogus quote.

Since we don't share the prejudices of either TPM or Andrew Sullivan, we can ask the simple question that any reasonable person would: is it likely that Young and his speechwriters knew about the bogosity of the quote—which would mean that they would also certainly know the bogosity was relatively well-known—and then decide to use it anyway? What would be the point of doing that? None whatsoever; there's no upside, and an almost certain downside when you're caught.

So Sullivan's "knowingly lie" charge is evidence-free and almost certainly false.

But I should point out that the title of this post is not to be taken literally; Sullivan is not deliberately "lying" about this, or at least I doubt it. And the reasoning is the same as I applied to Young: Sully would have to be incredibly stupid to lie about something that's so easy to check by clicking the link he provides in his own article.

No, almost certainly this is a result of ideological self-delusion, the knee-jerk willingness to jump to a desired conclusion, to "know" your opponents' evil dishonesty in your own mind, and "see" supporting facts in an article that doesn't, in actuality, contain them.

In short, it's example number 463 in a continuing series: "Why We Don't Take Andrew Sullivan Seriously Any More, and Are a Little Ashamed That We Ever Did."

People with blogospheric memories going back more than a few months may recall the equally bogus "Jefferson quote" uttered by, among others, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, and Nadine Strossen of the ACLU:

Now (similar to the Lincoln quote) this would be idiotic even if it weren't bogus; but it is. The definitive history of the quote is offered by Jim Lindgren of the Volokh Conspiracy here and here.

There may have been some folks at that time who had mirror-image reactions to Sullivan's: who said something equivalent to "It says everything you need to know about the state of the Democratic Party: that they would knowingly lie about the words of the greatest Democratic president in American history."

But the vast majority of responses were in the derisive ridicule category. That's the appropriate treatment for Young. And Andrew Sullivan.

Brendan Nyhan has more.