[darrels joy]

A Telling Mistake
Longtime journalist and former iconoclast Harley Sorensen, in his column for the San Francisco Chronicle Web site, makes an astonishing admission of error:

I suggested something that apparently isn't true: that our government is misleading us about the number of deaths of our troops in Iraq.

The rationale for my argument was that we rarely hear of a wounded soldier dying. When the severely injured never--or rarely--die, one might become suspicious.

I suggested sarcastically that our military doctors must be miracle workers because they seem to save every wounded soldier's life.

I could have done without the sarcasm. The apparent truth is that the lives of nearly all the wounded in Iraq are indeed saved.

Sorensen is about as ungracious as anyone can be in admitting such a stupid error: "In my own defense, . . . the Bush administrations' secretiveness, and its history of deliberate misrepresentations, certainly tempts one to suspect the worst of those fellows."

More telling, though, is the nature of the error itself. Those on the Angry Left often attempt a turnabout on the concept of patriotism. We're the real patriots, they'll say, because we're not afraid to criticize our country. Maybe there's something to this, but what Sorensen did was to assume, wrongly and without evidence, the worst about his country. Is there a word to describe this? Patriotic doesn't spring to our mind.