As readers doubtless recall, writer Wayne Madsen wrote a column on the left-wing counterpunch site that began by roundly ridiculing President Bush for showing up for Thanksgiving dinner with the troops at 6 a.m. Eastern time. "I would have thought most of the troops," the columnist wrote, "many of whom are support personnel who work relatively normal working hours, would have been more surprised when they were ordered to get up before sunrise to eat Thanksgiving dinner between 6:00 and 7:30 A.M." The columnists then faults the media for not picking up on this: "And the abysmal and sycophantic Washington and New York press corps seems to have completely missed the Thanksgiving 'breakfast dinner.'" However, it turns out that the 6 a.m. report on which the columnist relies seems to have been a typo in the Washington Post, and the timeline in the Post's own article should have made this clear. Whoops.

So what does Mr. Madsen do? Well, I can't really do it justice, except to say that he somehow blames the whole problem on the malign machinations of the Bush Administration, the policies of which were responsible for the Washington Post's typo, which in turn was responsible for the problem in Madsen's column. Nowhere in the follow-up does Mr. Madsen even suggest that maybe the party responsible for the silly mistake was Wayne Madsen, and his quick assumption that everyone else in the media was "abysmal and sycophantic" for missing a rather striking and surprising element of the story, rather than that maybe he should double-check his sources.