Maureen Dowd is caught rearranging the facts (again) by Andrew Sullivan:

In case you thought the Blair debacle was the only indicator of the Times' slide, you obviously haven't been reading Maureen Dowd. Today featured a classic, well, distortion. Here's Dowd's dumb-as-a-post take on Bush's conduct of the war on terror:

Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. "Al Qaeda is on the run," President Bush said last week. "That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated...They're not a problem anymore."

Here's what Bush actually said:

"Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they're not a problem anymore."

It's perfectly clear that the president is referring, sardonically, only to those members of al Qaeda who are "either jailed or dead," not to the group as a whole. Everything we know about this president tells us that he has always warned of the permanent danger of groups like al Qaeda, has always talked of a long war, and would never say the words that Dowd puts in his mouth.

So this is a wilful fabrication. Will they run a correction? Don't count on it.

The mainstream press isn't a monolith any more. A thousand eyes are watching, each with access to the Net and millions of readers. It's great, isn't it?