Update: Mea Culpa! Wow, I read that poll and didn't see that, lo and behold, Mormons are mentioned, as Hugh points out. I too apologize to Brian Williams.
This presents me with a dilemma, however. This post is now completely erroneous and irrelevant. Do I take it down? Mind you, I don't mind being wrong, even egregiously wrong, in a blog post. It has happened before, it will happen again. I actually think this kinda thing is fun, because I don't pretend to be perfect and this is just an inevitable part of the organic nature of blogging. So I wouldn't take the post down in order to do a CYA. But . . . what is the point of this post now? All it is doing is taking up space. It isn't particularly newsworthy even as a fine example of sloppy blogging. Normal practice is to make the correction and leave the post up.
But would it be so wrong to have just said 'screw it' and taken it down?
During the Republican debate yesterday, co-moderator Brian Williams, asked Mitt Romney the following question:
Williams: Governor, we’ve got an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll coming out in the morning that says, among a lot of other things, 44 percent of respondents say a Mormon president would have a difficult time uniting the country. And I know you’ve answered similar questions about what you were able to do with the Catholic vote in Massachusetts, but 44 percent nationally, writ large, is a large number.
There is a huge problem here, which is that the poll Williams refers to asks no questions whatsoever about Mormonism, or how a Mormon president would fare in uniting the country.
Was Williams being dishonest? Was he making an honest but poor inference? Or is he just clueless?
Williams is either too fraudulent or too stupid to be trusted as a journalist, regardless of what character defect led him to ask this question.
(h/t Hugh Hewitt, not surprisingly)
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