Gail Collins Needs an Eraser

Scott Walker may or may not be president, but he's pretty good at turning his opponents into Wile E. Coyote:

In hindsight, perhaps the headline “Scott Walker Needs An Eraser” wasn’t the best idea.

In a recent column about the Wisconsin governor, a conservative Republican, New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote that Walker had cut state aid to education, causing teacher layoffs in 2010. But Walker didn’t take office until 2011.

Whoops.

Perhaps the most amusing part of the story is the hectoring that Walker got from another media grandee, Ron Fournier:

Big Time

This later led to a Big Time embarrassment for Fournier:

Ron Fournier, Super Genius

Someone might ask why Fournier is taking sides, but we know the answer.

Meanwhile, let's ponder this rumination from Dave Weigel:

And the small point of this conservative fightback is that the media-watchers proved the columnist wrong. There would be no repeat of [Collins's] weekly Romney jokes. Walker was worth defending and telling the truth about; they did so and the paper grudgingly recoiled. There is no such conservative enthusiasm for protecting Jeb Bush from the "Democratic press." This says something about Walker's appeal, and where it's rooted.

So lemme get this straight -- is Weigel suggesting that Collins wasn't telling the truth? Or is he suggesting that conservatives only care about the truth as long as it serves an agenda? You get less projection at a 20-screen multiplex.

And on a related note, the accuracy of Walker's detractors isn't getting much better:

Feel the wrath of Collins Nation