David Brooks has a decent column today about how the tropes used by the Clinton and Obama campaigns don’t really work all that well because their original targets–the white patriarchy–aren’t really involved when they attack each other. Okay.
But then he comes up with this doozy:
All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.
Ward Churchill? No, he’s the nutcase University of Colorado professor who suggested that the victims of 9/11 were fascists.
Brooks means to talk about Ward Connerly, the African-American businessman who sponsored Prop 209, California’s anti-affirmative action initiative.
That’s a pretty big error: what it says about either David Brooks’ or the New York Times’ ability to get their facts straight in other areas is an exercise left to the reader.