Last month, the New York Times editorial board defamed Sarah Palin with a false story blaming her for the shooting of Gabby Giffords. That is a widely debunked story and the Times surely knows it.
The New York Times published the June 14 editorial, smearing her for inciting the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords and others.
What actually happened is the shooting was by a madman whose favorite book is The Communist Manifesto. He had no connection to Palin.
After considerable thought, Palin decided to sue. Generally a case like this, against a newspaper, would go nowhere. However, this newspaper is choosing the idiot defense to ward off the lawsuit. That might not work.
The New York Times says the Palin lawsuit should be tossed because the paper made “an honest mistake” when it said she incited a 2011 shooting that severely wounded Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six people, a lawyer for the Gray Lady said on Friday.
“There was an honest mistake in posting the editorial,” lawyer David Schultz told Manhattan federal Judge Jed Rakoff.
That’s their defense?
There is no way that is believable.
Palin’s team is not accepting that. One of Palin’s attorneys, Kenneth Turkel, argued against the board claiming ignorance or chalking it up to error.
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Turkel wrote that on the same day the Times posted the defamatory article, they refuted what they’d written in the editorial with another article they allowed to be published.
They hung themselves.
The lawyer is correct.
The article by Alexander Burns posted the same day as the article accusing Palin stated:
In 2011, the shooting of Ms. Giffords by a mentally ill assailant came during a convulsive political period, when a bitter debate over health care yielded a wave of threats against lawmakers. Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate, drew sharp criticism for having posted a graphic online that showed cross hairs over the districts of several members of Congress, including Ms. Giffords — though no connection to the crime was established.
The Times editorial board allowed the Burns article to go through on the same day they blamed her for the Giffords shooting. [That entire non-connection was absurd from the beginning. A Palin campaign flyer had a bullseye on it and was in no way tied to the lunatic who shot Giffords. A bullseye is meaningless especially since Democrats had used it themselves in campaign literature.].
That leaves the Times editorial board unable to plead ignorance, but they might win on the we are insanely incompetent defense.
Such is the state of our grand New York Times, a pathetic remnant of the Grey Lady.
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