Like me, Bob Somerby is worried about the way liberals are sliding down the slippery slope of spin.

He first quotes from Paul Krugman’s column Friday:

[W]e’re not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we’re living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth.

But this problem is hardly limited to conservatives, as even Somerby points out: “No question— conservatives pundits recited bogus claims last week, as they’ve done for years and years. But today we ask a further question— is a similar habit of thought developing now on the left?”

He cites a recent Josh Marshall post as an example:

We refer to this Saturday post by Josh, which attempts to explain (away) an obvious mistake Joe Wilson made all through 2003. Throughout that year, Wilson insisted that Dick Cheney had surely seen an official report about his trip to Niger. He was “absolutely convinced” of this, Wilson said on Meet the Press the day his New York Times op-ed appeared. Throughout the year, Wilson battered Cheney for daring to say that he hadn’t seen such a report. By now, pretty much everyone, including Wilson, agrees that no such report went to Cheney’s office. In his post, Marshall was explaining (away) Wilson’s mistake.

Because remember—
in the America Krugman described, your side can never be wrong about anything; your side can’t make a mistake. “There is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth,” Krugman complained; indeed, “the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.” We think it would be a tragic mistake for liberals to begin behaving this way—
but we were forced to think of Krugman’s description when Marshall explained (away) Wilson’s error.

Why did Wilson turn out to be wrong on this matter? Why didn’t the CIA send a report about his trip to Cheney’s office? Marshall asked this question in his post, saying “this actually is a relevant fact in understanding the story.” Then he gave the following answer—
an answer which really did shock us:

MARSHALL (7/16/05): The explanation confected by the authors of the SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] report was the rather contradictory one that either Wilson’s trip generated no substantive information or that it in fact tended to confirm suspicions of an illicit uranium traffic between the two countries. No one who’s looked at the evidence involved believes that. Nor is that cover story compatible with the CIA’s subsequent and repeated attempts to prevent the White House from using the Niger story.

Why didn’t the CIA send a report? We’ll summarize Marshall’s full answer below. But according to Marshall, the authors of last summer’s SSCI report “confected” a “cover story” when confronted with that question. Just how fake was their “cover story?” This fake: “No one who’s looked at the evidence” believes at least one part of their story! Josh goes on to explain his claim further (see below), but that’s his claim about the Senate report. And that’s the claim that we found shocking—
and the claim that recalled Krugman’s piece.

Why was Josh’s claim so shocking? Because of what he didn’t tell readers. After all, who were the authors of that “confected” “cover story?” The SSCI report was unanimously presented by seventeen senators, eight of whom are major Democrats.