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My Worst Blog Post of the Year.

Jim Manzi at The Corner comes up with the idea of Worst Blog Post of the Year:

I think that progress requires shining a spotlight on our errors, rather than trying to sweep them under the rug. As such, I?m starting what I intend to be an annual tradition of identifying what I believe to my worst single blog post of the year.

Now, obviously, this could be used as a device to actually brag. I'm reminded of something Obama said after a debate in which the candidates we asked to confess to their "greatest weakness":

?Because I?m like, an ordinary person, I thought that they meant what?s your biggest weakness? So I said, ?Well, I don?t handle paper that well. You know, my desk is a mess. I need somebody to help me file and stuff all the time.? So the other two they say uh, they say well my biggest weakness is ?I?m just too passionate about helping poor people. I am just too impatient to bring about change in America.

?If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. I could have said, ?Well you know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don?t want to be helped. It?s terrible.??

So what does Manzi come up with? It's this post in which he links to a piece about how well-organized the Hillary Clinton campaign supposedly is, and he's impressed by what we now know was wrong, but he voiced doubt at the time about the accuracy of the report. Aw, come on. That's a little sometimes they don't want to be helped to my ear. That's as bad as you got all year and you're innovating an annual feature to 'fess up?

Now, I'm not so sure I want to participate in this little game. Unlike Obama, I don't have to go first. I can see how the opportunity can be used simply to identify a time when I wrote about something bad that someone else wrote and I didn't call bullshit on it. But what the hell? I'll comfess. This is my worst blog post of the year. I saw something that wasn't there, impulsively called attention to it -- I was really quite excited about it -- then immediately had to update to say what I thought I saw wasn't there, but couldn't resist going on about how it could have been there in a much less conspicuous way which, of course, I would not have been able to see.

Full post as published by Althouse on December 24, 2008 (boomark / email).