From his story in the Washington Times on President Bush supposedly soliciting advice from Bill Clinton:

The president also praised one of Mr. Clinton’s domestic policies — trying to reform Social Security. Both men have proposed personal savings accounts as part of the solution, an idea that is vociferously opposed by congressional Democrats.

As Ron Brownstein pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, however, Clinton and Bush’s approaches to Social Security are utterly different:

Clinton’s response to that challenge was close to Bush’s only in the sense that two trucks are close when they collide head-on.

Clinton had a two-step answer. First, he wanted to reduce government interest costs by paying down the national debt with the federal surplus of the late 1990s. Then he would have used the annual savings on interest to help fund Social Security. Bush instead applied the surplus to massive tax cuts that had contributed to mounting federal debts and rising interest costs.

Clinton also wanted to create tax-subsidized personal investment accounts on top of Social Security; Bush wants to carve out personal accounts from Social Security by diverting part of the payroll tax that funds benefits for retirees. One would have added onto Social Security; the other would take from it.

And that’s not all. Sammon’s wording also falsely suggests that Democrats and Clinton are at odds on private accounts, but the reality is the opposite — many Democrats support the add-on accounts that Clinton first proposed, including Al Gore, who pushed them in 2000.

It’s just one more entry in the long and illustrious history of faux journalism at the Times.