Lou Dobbs Cures Leprosy

After pressure from newspaper writers and the Southern Poverty Law Center, Lou Dobbs has apologized for the shaky (read: false) claim that Mexican migrants had brought with them a wave of leprosy infections. In fact, he'd relied on an old factoid by a less-than-entirely-credible scientist, Madeleine Cosman, who had overstated the leprosy rate by a factor of 10. So Dobbs walked back the report. Sort of.

Let's look at a few other issues, however, raised by The New York Times, including that columnist's statement that none of the enemies of the middle class, he said I said, "play a bigger role than illegal immigrants."

Well, again, that's just not true. I've made perfectly clear over the years that corporate power, expressed by lobbyists spending billions of dollars each year in Washington to influence both political parties and public policy, represents the greatest single threat to this nation's middle class.

That columnist also said I gave air time to white supremacists, and mentions one by name: Madeleine Cosman, who wrote the article that Christine Romans used as a source for her later leprosy statement.

The fact is, I made a mistake, and I've said we would never have used her as a source if we had known of her controversial background two years ago, at the time of the offending ad-lib. But the columnist fails to note that his own paper wrote a glowing obituary of Madeleine Cosman when she died last year.

Are there more reporters and interest groups trying to discredit Dobbs than your average, non-Buchananite talk show host? Absolutely. So why's Dobbs making their job so easy?