Some Questions for Mr. Neal

Day before yesterday, we critiqued a column by Washington Post columnist Terry Neal, which argued that Republicans and Democrats are equally hypocritical on the filibuster issue. To make that argument, Neal quoted a fragment of a sentence uttered by Senator Orrin Hatch some years ago. Neal misrepresented what Hatch said, however; if you read the whole statement by Hatch, as reproduced in our post, you will see that the point Hatch made was exactly the opposite of what Neal alleged. Hatch didn’t support the filibuster, he opposed it. And the syntax of Hatch’s statement was reversed by Neal’s truncated quote.
Neal will do an online chat tomorrow at 11:00 a.m., eastern time. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to participate or not, but you may want to consider it. I’d like to ask Neal where he got the Hatch quote, and what he did to verify it. I found it interesting that Neal misspelled Hatch’s first name as “Orin,” which, for some reason, is how a number of far-left web sites have spelled it when they quoted the same sentence fragment. This leads me to suspect that Neal simply picked up the “quote” from such a source because it fit his story line, without making any effort to get the transcript of what Hatch actually said. We should ask him about this tomorrow.