Two For One! NY Times Reporter Fact-Checks Rush Limbaugh And John Boehner
October 3, 2007 -- 8:14 PM EST // //

Credit where credit's due: The New York Times's Carl Hulse has come through with a fair piece on the whole Rush Limbaugh "phony soldiers" controversy.

Hulse fact-checks Rush Limbaugh's bogus pushback that his remark was taken out of context, and for good measure also runs the facts on John Boehner's phony efforts to spin his way out of his assertion that troop deaths in Iraq are a "small price" to pay for defeating Al Qaeda.

First, Limbaugh:

After the liberal media watchdog organization Media Matters sounded the alarm about his comments, Mr. Limbaugh said on subsequent shows that he was talking about only one discredited man who claimed to be a wounded veteran. “I was not talking about antiwar, active duty troops,” he insisted.

Yet analysts for Media Matters noted that Mr. Limbaugh’s first reference to the discredited man came nearly two minutes after his plural reference to phony soldiers.

That word "plural" is key. Then on to John Boehner's nonsensical assertion that his "small price" remark was a reference only to the financial cost of the war:

Mr. Boehner’s aides later said he was referring to the financial costs of the war though his comment was in response to a question that also included the military toll.

It sure was.

Relatedly, this provides an opening to say something churlish about The Washington Post's new Fact Checker section, which many of you probably know about. This blog, of course, is all for fact-checking. But do we really need a separate section for that? Shouldn't fact-checking take place in every single article that these papers publish, as Hulse did here?

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