Brad DeLong has written a nasty post attacking Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times as having “neither memory nor morals” and suggesting he be used as “a cosmetics testing subject”:

Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps? Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times demonstrates once again that he would be more useful to society as a cosmetics testing subject. Rutenberg regards the famous dog-eating Jew-counter Fred Malek as “noncontroversial.” He may be noncontroversial to Rutenberg because Rutenberg has neither memory nor morals. Fred Malek is not controversial to me. He is very controversial to me. Personally, my guess is that Rutenberg has a memory but has no morals.

What’s incredible is that Rutenberg did not actually call Malek “noncontroversial” as DeLong suggests. Rutenberg simply wrote that Malek’s appointment to an obscure federal board “provoked no complaint”:

Mr. Bush appointed a longtime family friend and former
business partner, Fred V. Malek, to the board of visitors of the United
States Military Academy. Mr. Malek, who was a partner with Mr. Bush in
the Texas Rangers baseball team, will serve for three years. A West
Point graduate, he has donated generously to its campus; his
appointment, like the others, provoked no complaint.

Rutenberg’s claim is empirical, not normative. He did not say Malek is a “noncontroversial” public figure; he reported that no one had complained about Malek’s appointment. Rather than challenge that empirical claim, however, DeLong paraphrases Malek inaccurately, puts his paraphrase in quotes, and proceeds to demonize Rutenberg on the basis of the inaccurate quotation. It’s reminiscent of the process by which Al Gore was falsely attacked for claiming to have “invented the Internet.”