Jacoby and Liars

Of all the repulsive right-wing efforts to smear John Kerry, it's not surprising the least original comes from Jeff Jacoby. Fans of unethical journalism will recall that Jacoby's most famous column was his rewrite of an error-filled, anonymous e-mail which Jacoby attempted to pass off as his own work. So Jacoby's effort to claim the moral high ground is always good for a laugh.

Here's Jacoby's gripe about Kerry:

By the same token, it never did Kerry any harm to be universally mistaken for Irish in Massachusetts, a state whose political culture is dominated by Irish Catholics. Not that he overtly lied; if asked, he would say that his father's family was from ''Austria.'' But if others incorrectly assumed he was Irish, did he trouble to set them straight?

Kerry tells the Globe that he has ''always been absolutely straight up front about it.'' His press aides insist he speaks up when he sees or hears himself described as Irish. ''Kerry has never said he is Irish-American and has always corrected it when people have assumed it because of his name,'' his spokesman David Wade told The New York Times.

Yet there is no sign that Kerry or his staff ever alerted the Globe when it mistakenly labeled him Irish, sometimes in front-page stories he couldn't possibly have missed. A search of the Globe's archives turns up no letter to the editor from Kerry making clear that he is not of Irish descent. Over the years, the Globe has run 23 corrections mentioning Kerry; none is about his ancestry. (Emphasis added; inexplicable use of quotes around the word Austria by Jacoby.)

Get it? It's all Kerry's fault that the Boston Globe incorrectly reported that Kerry was of Irish descent. Kerry was spending so much time on the business of the United States Senate that he completely ignored his duties as an unpaid editor of Globe. I mean, it's not like the paper's reporters could have asked Kerry before publishing their articles or anything. He would have only told them some lame story about how his father's family was "from 'Austria.'"