Your Chinese/Martian secret codes have been exposed.

The correction may be up at the Washington Post, but Ferguson's article is still on the Post's website, uncorrected, and there's no indication there that a correction for the article exists.

Correction - NOW the on-line article has a correction posted at the top. The correction just says there are endnotes, it does not note that Gore's attribution is properly sourced.

Actually, the correction on the web site makes Ferguson look pretty lame: Feruson's article said that " . . . The Assault on Reason does not contain footnotes. The book contains 20 pages of endnotes."

Isn't it the job of an editor to, you know, review submissions of writers and- umm- edit? Doesn't anybody at the Post look at these things before they're published?

How can I get a soft gig like that, anyway?

The Post and other MSM argue that they are superior to the netroots as as source of information because of their "fact checking" and proofing role. This little incident shows what a lie that is. The correction still fails to show that Gore sourced the particular Lincoln quote (which may or may not be true) which reduces the whole article to "nevermind."

Oh, lovely.

A note that the book does, in fact, contain endnotes, but no mention of the fact that the endnotes completely invalidate the article.

This type of stuff warrants a full retraction, not a tiny correction.

What, you haven't learned the relevant lesson by now? As with "Gore said he invented the Internet," the new meme, "Gore's book is a bunch of lies" is out there. All the corrections in the world won't bring us back to the truth.

And while the WaPo OpEd crew (Fred Hiatt) is plenty to blame here, if it hadn't happened at the Post, it would have somewhere else.

Off topic: Has anyone else noticed how authentic, fatherly (in a stern, tough but just love sort of way), and folksy that Fred Thompson is? Man, that's a guy who could take on Saddam's Al Queada.

Why doesn't the Post just sell itself to Murdoch and quit the charade?

I'm serious.

Didn't Somerby hit this first today? If so , where's his link?

Silly people! You don't have to have fact checkers or editing *when you're smearing liberals*!!!

Let's say, for example, the Washington Post comes out with an editorial bitterly condemning Democrats for publicly acting troubled that Colombia's right wing government is now being exposed for decades-long collaboration with right wing paramilitary death squads.

And, let's say, that the WaPo's angry unsigned editorial says Come on! Give it up you useless Democrats! These are, pshaw, old charges, old history, we all know this, why you bringin' it up now!?!

You will look in vain through the Washington Post's history of coverage to find it blandly and commonly covered that, yeah, oh, of course, the highest levels of the Colombian federal, state, and local governments have been collaborating directly with right wing paramilitary drug trafficking death squads, while receiving tremendous amounts of U.S. aid.

You won't find it.

But, then, who cares if it's true when the WaPo condemns us for noticing this "old" news that it never portrayed as anything other than "allegations"?

Right wingers love Colombia's government, and right wingers and businesses want a "Free Trade" agreement with Colombia, so, screw you, they'll say anything about the situation they want.

If that takes portraying newly verified and indisputable proof that a US "ally" is working with death squads as bah! old news that no one cares about, then they'll do it.

Title on the corrected version is "What Al Wishes Abe Said," with no mention of the Lincoln attribution specifically.

Title should be: "What Andrew Ferguson Wishes Al Didn't Do and Lincoln Didn't Say."

Seems that you guys are being really dishonest here in claiming that the quotation is supported by the citation, without even taking the minimal step of informing your readers that the citation really is a hoax.

Anono is lying, of course. The book has the quote, the book attributes the quote to Lincoln, the quote is widely attributed to Lincoln. The evidence is that the quote is spuriously attributed to Lincoln, which makes it par for the course for quotes attributed to famous people. (Bismarck never said the quote about laws and sausages, either.)

This is so obviously a cheap hack job (at least I hope they didn't pay much for it), right to the reference to "Gore's Internet."

I put the first bit of that quote into the Google and got back a few links that referenced it, as well as this one:

Fortunately, after some burrowing in the univ. library, I was able to confirm its authenticity. Here it is, with more surrounding context:

"We may congratulate ourselves that this
cruel war is nearing its end. It has
cost a vast amount of treasure and
blood. . . . It has indeed been a trying
hour for the Republic; but I see in the
near future a crisis approaching that
unnerves me and causes me to tremble for
the safety of my country. As a result of
the war, corporations have been
enthroned and an era of corruption in
high places will follow, and the money
power of the country will endeavor to
prolong its reign by working upon the
prejudices of the people until all
wealth is aggregated in a few hands and
the Republic is destroyed. I feel at
this moment more anxiety for the safety
of my country than ever before, even in
the midst of war. God grant that my
suspicions may prove groundless."

Did he say/write it? I have no idea. But adding this to the Internet/Love Story memes will serve the purpose of the media elites just fine.

A note that the book does, in fact, contain endnotes, but no mention of the fact that the endnotes completely invalidate the article.

To be fair, Sam, though the endnotes make Ferguson's "no footnote" argument truly foolish, Ferguson seems to be correct about the Lincoln quotation. Despite its appearing in the Lincoln Encyclopedia of 1950, the quote seems to be a fake.

Endnotes are only as good as the works they reference. And this work appears to be flawed.

One further note: the materials from which this supposed Lincoln letter were collected by William Herndon, once Lincoln's junior law partner, and a figure of considerable controversy in Lincoln studies for the better part of a century. From the 1920s on, historians attacked Herndon. But he has also had his defenders.

Recent work on Herndon makes it sound as if the jury is truly still out on this material. For example, Douglas Wilson of Knox College notes that

very few students of Lincoln and Herndon have taken the trouble to read widely in the great mass of hard-to-read, handwritten material that is the Herndon-Weik Collection so as to be able to judge Herndon's evidence and the performance of his informants for themselves. Most are familiar with some of the more famous letters and interviews and with the badly edited sample published in the The Hidden Lincoln. For judgments on the collection as a whole, however, students of Lincoln continue to rely on the damning estimates of Angle, Randall, and Donald, estimates that I believe are far from even-handed, often quite unfair, and are frequently more adversarial than judicial. One of the chief legacies of their damning assessment is the absence of a reliable edition of Herndon's documents. I believe that a fair reading of these letters and interviews in their entirety will show them to be very different from what they have been represented to be, to say nothing of the important information still to be gleaned from them, but I also believe that no mere examples offered here or elsewhere are likely to convert students accustomed to relying upon the judgments of Angle, Randall, and Donald. On that score, one can only counsel patience, for a carefully transcribed and annotated edition is on the way.

(Source: Wilson, Douglas L., William H. Herndon and His Lincoln Informants. Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 14.1 (1993): 36 pars. 12 Jun. 2007 .

Note that Wilson is defending Herndon here, but also questioning Hertz, from whose work the quote in question is usually traced.

Incontinentia Buttocks why do you hate the internet and our troops?

Yah playing right wing ideologue is pretty easy, now if he replies back I just have to invoke the Morris Worm and say we're defending the tubes over there so we don't ave defend the internet tubes over here...or something similar

"a puddle of quicksilver"?

Is this guy 108 years old? He probably talked to Abraham Lincoln himself.