Moureen Dowd – Boy, Oh, Boy – NYTimes.com

Joe Wilson is Your Pre-Existing Condition

Thought experiment: Suppose I wrote a column about Jackie Chan — or Cabinet members Steven Chu and Eric Shinseki, or Yo-Yo Ma, or new PGA champion Y.E. Yang — that began exactly the way Ferguson’s did. ‘Jackie Chan reminds me of Pluto. One of the best-loved characters from the Disney studio, Pluto was not only yellow. He was also very, very likable. I could go on to discuss policy aspects of Jackie Chan’s controversial comments about democracy in China — as Ferguson goes on to discuss Obama’s problems with the budget deficit. But 99% of the readers would think, What the hell? And if asked what I was doing, I would not try to relitigate the case, as Ferguson is now doing in several venues, but would recognize that I’d blundered and back off. But apparently that’s just me.

(Via James Fallows.)