In two acts. First, take a look inside the sausage factory at the Washington Post:

One of our readers has now penetrated inside the Post through an email exchange with Jeff Smith, one of the Post reporters “credited” with the story. Smith is unhappy at being associated with the debacle. This is what Smith emailed to our reader:

I agree with you that this was an egregious error. I also had nothing to do with it. All I did was obtain a copy of the unclassified summary of the IG report and write a precisely correct account, which I turned over to the other reporters. I’m not happy my name was put on that story by the editors, and I was astonished by the mistake. I blew the whistle on it internally. So don’t attribute the mistake to me.

Cheers,

Jeff Smith

The word you’re looking for is “wow.”

Next up, CNN’s Jack Cafferty on the moral equivalence between US action in Afghanistan during the 1980s–when we were repelling Soviet aggression–and Iran in Iraq today.

Iran’s interest in arming the Iraqi militias is not about repelling totalitarian aggression, as was the US interest in Afghanistan. Iran’s interest in Iraq is itself the aggressive act of a totalitarian government against its neighbor and against us, the neighbor’s liberator. To date, Iranian action in Iraq may be responsible for the deaths of 170 coalition troops, most of those being US, and possibly thousands of Iraqis. 1980s Afghanistan and current Iraq are very different situations. That Jack Cafferty doesn’t know or understand this, and that Wolf Blitzer fails to challenge Cafferty or explain the facts to him, speaks volumes about how those two see and therefore report the world around them. They’re ignorant of history and clueless about the present. Other than that, they’re fine reporters.

(video h/t Pat Dollard)