I try to correct errors immediately and let you know in letters -- usually, you're the ones who told me about them -- but that doesn't strike me as transparent enough, so periodically I'll do it here. Of course I'll start with something I acknowledged as an error, that it now seems I got right. Sort of. I wrote this week about George Tenet's book and noted that the former CIA director was belatedly telling the truth, only after Bush, and the Iraq war, had approval ratings down in the 20s. At the time, the president's approval rating overall was in the 30s, it was his handling of the war approval rating that's been stuck in the 20s, and at best I wrote the sentence imprecisely.
But now comes a Newsweek poll saying Bush's overall approval ratings have dipped into the 20s, his lowest ever, lowest than his father's worst and tied with Jimmy Carter at 28 percent. I hope the Republican '08 candidates look at those numbers, turn to their campaign managers and say: "Remind me why I'm sticking by this president and pandering to his base?"
A few other things, I got really wrong. Unbelievably, I spelled Will Ferrell's name wrong in my wrap post on the debate Thursday night. That makes no sense: When I feel low, I watch "Elf," "Old School" or "Talladega Nights:" I know how to spell his name. The GOP debate eroded my intelligence. I called Arizona Cardinals hero Pat Tillman a quarterback in an early version of this post; of course he was a safety. I also, in a post about Newt Gingrich's awful slurs on liberals after Virginia Tech, mentioned Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who tragically drowned her kids in 1994, only I said she was from North Carolina.
And finally: I know many of you think discontinuing "The Fix" was a mistake. I'm thinking a lot about the good ideas you all gave us in the comments thread. We're still thinking of ways to bring elements of it back, including our daily television listings. I miss them too. Stay tuned for more details next week.
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