Mickey Kaus thinks the NYT is still obscuring the reason Van Jones resigned. In its story on the resignation, the NYT offers:
Van Jones . . . signed a petition in 2004 questioning whether the Bush administration had allowed the terrorist attacks of September 2001 to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East.
Kaus adds:
Reading that, would you realize the petition was a Truther petition? You might think Jones simply made the standard argument that Bush shouldn’t have used 9/11 to help gin up the Iraq War–as opposed to suggesting that Bush “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war,” which is what the petition actually said.
I think this may just be shoddy writing, rather than misinformation. After all, “allow” can be used without the secondary “to provide”, to mean “allow to happen”. Let’s observe how the same sentence reads with a comma:
. . . whether the Bush administration had allowed the terrorist attacks of September 2001, to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East.
Advantage: punctuation!
This time I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, and dismiss this as merely bad writing and editing.
(Via Instapundit.)
Internet Scofflaw 