After a Bernie Sanders supporter tried to kill as many Republicans as possible before a recent Congressional baseball game, the New York Times decided to focus on the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords instead. Her shooter -- Jared Loughner – was a paranoid schizophrenic and had no political motivations for the shooting, unlike the Bernie bro who specifically targeted Republicans. But that didn’t stop now-pariah Kathy Griffin from blaming the Tea Party for inciting the shooting of Giffords.

Of course, people shouldn't listen to a widely-discredited “comedienne,” and no one really did. Except, possibly, the New York Times' op-ed columnist David Leonhardt, who wrote this:

In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

Oops. Two problems with that, according to Neo-Neocon:

The first was that, in the Giffords shooting, there actually was no link to political incitement at all. This has been known for many years, and anyone familiar with the story ought to have been well aware of it.

The second is that Palin’s PAC had not published a map that fit that description; the cross-hairs were on the districts, not the people (the actual map can be found here).

Palin is suing the paper, but now the NYT's attorney is saying they just made an honest mistake in blaming Palin for six deaths. Yes, really. The New York Post reports:

“There was an honest mistake in posting the editorial,” lawyer David Schultz told Manhattan federal Judge Jed Rakoff…

On Friday, Palin’s lawyers argued that the Times knew the story was false.

“It was literally acknowledged the same day in another story in their paper,” said Kenneth Turkel.

Neo-Neocon asks, “If the Times (or any other newspaper) claims it made an ‘honest mistake’ in a story, shouldn’t its mistake be based on—you know—-something? Or can it be an honest mistake to just make s*** up?”

Exactly. Surely the New York Times is not basing its reporting on old Kathy Griffin tweets. But if they were, wouldn’t that explain a lot?

h/t Neo-Neocon

Image Credit: By David Shankbone (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons