SHOULD I ADDRESS TARANTO'S IDIOCY OR GLENN'S IDIOCY FIRST? LET'S START WITH JAMES

James Taranto, the guy who runs the Wall St Journal's daily online column "Best of the Web Today", gets all excited about a little gaffe of Howard Dean's in his appearance on Hardball the other night:

On yesterday's "Hardball," Dean was asked by Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, what he would do about Iran. Here's what he said:

The key, I believe, to Iran, is pressure through the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is supplying much of the equipment that Iran I believe mostly likely is using to set itself along the path of developing nuclear weapons. We need to use that leverage with the Soviet Union, and it may require us buying the equipment the Soviet Union was ultimately going to sell to Iran, to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

That's four times Dean mentioned the Soviet Union--a country that hasn't existed for almost 12 years.

Okay, James, you got him, he said Soviet Union instead of "the former Soviet Union" or Russia. Congratulations. I wonder what I'd say if Chris Matthews was screaming in my ear for 45 minutes.

Only problem is, Taranto goes beyond his trivial triumph and tries to frame the gaffe historically:

Remember Gerald Ford's famous gaffe? In a 1976 presidential debate, he declared, "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration." Would that it were true--and of course it became true, 13 years later. But that statement may have cost Ford the election, which he narrowly lost to the execrable Jimmy Carter.

Now Howard Dean has committed the same gaffe, only in reverse.

This does not pass muster. Consider if Taranto were standing next to both Ford and Dean, at the time of each person's statement. Right after each says their lil bit, Taranto asks each of them, "What did you mean to say?" Dean would remark that he meant "the former Soviet Union" or Russia. But what the fuck would Ford say? "When I said that the Soviets don't control Eastern Europe, I meant that the Soviets do control Eastern Europe"??? These two comments aren't even in the same ballpark.

James Taranto does today exactly what Don Luskin did last week: Proclaim equivalence based on the use of a particular word, ignoring the profound differences of context. Next!