I'll leave aside the bizarre idea of taking out ads to insist that you won a debate, but I noticed something else odd in the latest ad coming out of the Kerry Campaign.



Look closely at that headline and quote. It says "Skewed Intelligence on Iraq Colored the March to War". It cites the source of that as the Sunday edition of The New York Times (October 3, 2004).

Well, here's the interesting thing: a search of the Times' web site shows that the phrase has never appeared there.

A search for the shorter phrase "Skewed Intelligence" again yields no hits.

A seach for simply the word "skewed" shows that it last showed up in the Times on September 29th.

Now, my assumption is that the headline shown in the Kerry commercial refers to this story in the Sunday edition of the Times, entitled "How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence."

But note, the headline on the Kerry commercial is in quotation marks, representing it as an exact quote from the times.

This leaves us, in my view, with three options:

1) The Kerry campaign's ad people paraphrased (or guessed at) the title of a forthcoming story and stuck it in the ad.
2) Someone from the Times told the Kerry campaign a proposed title ahead of time and it was later changed.
3) For some other reason the title of the article referenced and the actual article do not match.
4) I'm an idiot who is missing something obvious.

I don't know which is the answer at the moment. But I'd sure like your help.