I wrote a month ago about Slate’s new Kerryisms feature. At the time, my biggest complaint wasn’t funny. In the month since that post, Slate has bent over backwards trying to find “caveats and curlicues” to the point that the column mostly consists of arbitrarily removing phrases from Kerry quotes. In the process, they often misrepresent what Kerry has said. For example :

Question: But no regrets about those votes [for NAFTA and the China trade agreement]?

Kerry: [1]Sure.

?senate presidential primary debate, Milwaukee, Feb. 15, 2004

[1] I regret the way that they haven’t been enforced,

Verbatim:

I regret the way that they haven’t been enforced, sure.

If you just read Slate’s version of the Kerry quote, you’d think that Kerry is agreeing with the “no regrets” statement when the full version of the quote makes the exact opposite point.

And this isn’t the only example, either. Last week, Spinsanity noted the following distortion :

Kerry’s original statement, from a February 9 broadcast of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” was the following:

I am the only United States Senator who has been elected four times, currently serving in the senate, who has voluntarily refused to ever take, in any of my races for the senate, one dime of political action committee special interest money. The only checks I took were from individual Americans. Now did some individual lobbyists contribute? The answer is, yes, they did.

Will Saletan, the author of “Kerryisms,” edited it into the following form (footnotes representing excised text appear in brackets):

I am the only United States Senator[1][2] who has voluntarily refused to ever take in any of my races[3] one dime of[4] special interest money. The only checks I took were from individual Americans.[5]

By removing “political action committee” with footnote 4 and the clarification about accepting donations from individual lobbyists in footnote 5, Saletan makes Kerry’s precise claim much less clear. But, more importantly, the removal of the text in footnotes 1-3 actually makes the statement untrue.

Also last week, Eugene Volokh noted yet another column twisting the facts as egregiously as the examples above and ended his post with this comment :

What exactly is the point of the Kerryisms? At first, I thought — based on the column’s introductory installment — the Kerryisms were meant to show that Kerry throws in lots of unnecessary verbiage. But here, this was a necessary proviso.

Another possibility is that “Kerryisms” has evolved into an attempt to show simply that Kerry uses a lot of qualifiers, instead of giving very simple answers. But often, as in this case, the right answer isn’t simple. It’s actually not terribly complex, but it’s not one-word simple. Is it really good to fault a politician for refusing to oversimplify? Should we want supposedly smart media outlets mocking politicians for trying to be precise?

The only other option that I see is that the column has descended into self-parody. (“Question: What’s the ratio of a circle’s circumference to the diameter? Kerry’s real answer: 3.1415926. Our answer, shorn of caveats and pointless embellishments: 3.”) But surely it can’t be intentional self-parody. So I ask again, what’s the point?

I think the point is that now we’re in an election year and Slate feels the need to balance out their coverage by providing Kerryisms to sit beside their regular Bushisms. The problem here is that Kerry’s speech isn’t as littered with “pointless embellishments” as the editors of Slate want to believe.

UPDATE : Via Digby, I see that William Saletan has posted an explanation of the Kerryisms column…sorta. His explanation is, to borrow a phrase, full of “caveats and curlicues” including this retarded analogy :

It’s like they ordered steak at a restaurant, and the waiter carved the meat off the bone, and they looked at the bone and accused the waiter of removing the meat. I’m the waiter, so I bear some blame.

Huh??