Today Bob Herbert questions the nasty attacks on Barack Obama by Clinton surrogates — a fine subject for a column. But then he transitions to a random quotation from the Internet:

The Clinton camp knows what it’s doing, and its slimy maneuvers have been working. Bob Kerrey apologized and Andrew Young said at the time of his comment that he was just fooling around. But the damage to Senator Obama has been real, and so have the benefits to Senator Clinton of these and other lowlife tactics.

Consider, for example, the following Web posting (misspellings and all) from a mainstream news blog on Jan. 13:

“omg people get a grip. Can you imagine calling our president barak hussien obama … I cant, I pray no one would be disrespectful enough to put this man in our whitehouse.”

Herbert’s reference to a “Web posting” on a “mainstream news blog” suggests that the news organization wrote the quotation in question, when it was actually just a random comment on an ABC News blog post about Bob Kerrey’s reference to Obama’s middle name. Memo to pundits: Stop quoting random web commenters. You can find a crazy comment on any blog — it just doesn’t prove anything.