The Left has been busily attacking Scott Walker lately. Gail Collins of the New York Times got into the act with a column that blasted Walker’s education policies. Collins wrote about a woman whom Walker has used as an example in speeches, who was laid off in 2010:
“In 2010, there was a young woman named Megan Sampson who was honored as the outstanding teacher of the year in my state. And not long after she got that distinction, she was laid off by her school district,” said Walker, lacing into teacher contracts that require layoffs be done by seniority. …
All of that came as a distinct surprise to Claudia Felske, a member of the faculty at East Troy High School who actually was named a Wisconsin Teacher of the Year in 2010. In a phone interview, Felske said she still remembers when she got the news at a “surprise pep assembly at my school.” As well as the fact that those layoffs happened because Walker cut state aid to education.
Ron Fournier, whom we last saw lying about President Bush, jumped into the fray with this arrogant tweet (someone on Twitter labeled it “insufferable,” which is about right):
Welcome to the Big Time, @ScottWalker. This is @nytimescollins; she'll be keeping you real: http://t.co/tiTREpzOwq
— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) February 14, 2015
The idea of the New York Times keeping anyone real–let alone Scott Walker–is laughable in itself. But here is the punch line: Scott Walker became Governor of Wisconsin in 2011. He obviously could not have “cut state aid to education” and thereby been responsible for teacher layoffs that occurred in 2010. The entire point of Collins’s column was a misfire.
One wonders, how careless can a columnist be? Is it really too hard for Gail Collins to spend 10 seconds Googling Scott Walker to find out when he took office? Does she spend more than fifteen minutes on her columns? And how about the Times? Does it have any minimal standards of accuracy? Does it not even expect its columnists to get dates right? Or to make sure that the entire premise of a column isn’t based on a mistake? Once again, one wonders: does the New York Times have any editors? If so, what do they do?
Rarely does one see such an epic multi-party fail. But when it comes to attacks on Republicans, the Left has no standards at all. I am looking forward to what should be an entertaining correction in the Times; in the meantime, neither Collins nor Fournier has apologized for falsely smearing Walker.
UPDATE: More here.
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