ABC's Tapper Blog: Oops! One Ted Kennedy CAP Quote Came From a Satire

Kudos to ABC reporter Jake Tapper, whose "Down and Dirty" blog carries an interview with Dinesh D'Souza, an editor for the magazine of Concerned Alumni of Princeton from 1983 to 1985, the time frame in which Sam Alito claimed membership in CAP when applying for a job in the Reagan Justice Department. As Brent Bozell noted, the network coverage of CAP has skipped over the responsible step of checking with the accused. Maybe the story was just too good to check. D'Souza said humorless Ted Kennedy actually made a boo-boo: one quoted article in the CAP magazine was a satire, not a serious argument:

First off, D'Souza says, one of the two stories from Prospect that Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-MA, read this week at the confirmation hearings was intended as a satire.

The 1983 essay "In Defense of Elitism" by Harry Crocker III included this line, read dramatically by Kennedy: "People nowadays just don't seem to know their place. Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they're black and hispanic..."

The essay may not have been funny, D'Souza acknowledges, but Kennedy read from it as if it had been serious instead of an attempt at humor.

"I think left-wing groups have been feeding Senator Kennedy snippets and he has been mindlessly reciting them," D'Souza said. "It was a satire."

One of the left-wing reports on this came from Eyal Press in The Nation, and there is NO hint in that piece of a satire as Press pounds D'Souza. The same goes for People for the American Way's press release.

(Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg at NRO)