It took two Times reporters to pool their resources and come up with this a lead this stupid: “Birtherism, meet burgerism.”

The two Times reporters don’t know the meaning of the word “evidence.” Relevant evidence is that which has a tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence and the fact bears on the question in issue. The Times offers the statement of Harris’s campaign and the alleged recollection of a friend who heard it from Harris’s deceased mother. We are at best hanging by a thread here. We are about as close to no evidence as it is metaphysically possible to get.

Contrast the Times story with the Washington Free Beacon story by Joe Simonson, Chuck Ross, and Andrew Kerr that is acknowledged by the Times — in paragraph 17. The Beacon story not only introduces substantial evidence from which one may reasonably infer Harris never worked at McDonald’s, it is the kind of evidence that would be admissible in court on the question in issue.