The willful ignorance of Eugene Robinson

On October 27 Dorrance Smith, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs since the following letter to the Washington Post:

Your article and the accompanying headline (“Rumsfeld Tells Iraq Critics to ‘Back Off,’” October 26, 2006) said incorrectly that the Secretary’s comments in his Thursday press conference were aimed at “detractors” and “critics.” In fact, the Secretary was referring specifically to journalists seeking to create a perception of major divisions between the positions of the U.S. and Iraqi governments. Secretary Rumsfeld was not referring to critics of the administration’s Iraq policy.

Here is a transcript of the press conference.

Yet today, Robinson issues this travesty of a column:

Go ahead, people, you have your orders from Napoleon Bonaparte, I mean Donald Rumsfeld. "Back off" and "relax." Book a cruise to Chillsville. Don't worry your pretty little heads about the debacle in Iraq, because "it's complicated, it's difficult." Are mere mortals going to be able to get their minds around a problem that even Albert Einstein, I mean Donald Rumsfeld, finds complicated? Let's be realistic here.

We should all thank our lucky stars that "honorable people" are willing to do all this super-advanced thinking for us. Aristotle, I mean Donald Rumsfeld, was kind enough to phrase it that way rather than spell out what he really meant, which was "people who are smarter than you."

I realize that a few news cycles have come and gone since the secretary of defense held that stunning news conference at the Pentagon last week, but it was such a telling moment -- such a revealing glimpse behind the curtain -- that it deserves to remain fresh in our minds, even amid the distracting cacophony of eleventh-hour electioneering. There, in just two words, you have the Bush administration's approach to the war in Iraq. Indeed, you have the Republicans' theory of government:

Back off.

...

So not only does the Washington Post not correct the error in its original story it allows one of its opinion artist to compound the error by deliberately misinterpreting what the Secretary said. Is he really that ignorant of the facts or is he just writing in bad faith. Mr. Robinson at best is confused by the facts. He certainly has had time to see that the Secretary was right about the Iraqi government position, but let's not let the facts get in the way of an opinion column.