‘Innocent Mistakes’

I was wondering if Paul Krugman would use his New York Times weblog to respond to David Brooks’s “Reagan’s 1980 speech in Mississippi wasn’t racist” column yesterday, and he has. But apparently the Times policy forbidding columnists from addressing one another in their columns extends to their weblogs, because, in the same way that Brooks never mentioned in his column that it was Krugman (and fellow Times columnist Bob Herbert) who’ve been making the charge that Reagan’s speech was an appeal to Southern racists, Krugman does not mention Brooks:

So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy.

It’s a reasonable general policy, but it’s making things awkward in this case, where they really are addressing each other’s arguments but can’t name each other.

★ Saturday, 10 November 2007