I’m going to do something that has never happened on the internet ever before, and may result in a black hole that ultimately sucks the blogosphere up its own arse: I’m going to admit that I made a mistake. Yesterday I was writing a post to highlight a brilliant comment I read at Elijah’s weblog of shame, and I quickly punched out an introductory paragraph that contained this line.

conservative bloggers [are] indignant about the fact that a blackie with a muzzie name looks likely to win this year’s US election…

It was a throwaway line, based on the very real fact that a small, smelly corner of the Australian blogosphere does actually hold those views (I’m looking at you, A Western Heart and Crusader Rabbit,) but I freely admit that it’s a bit of a stretch to imply that all (or most) conservative bloggers hold them.

As is his wont, superblogger Timmeh Blair wrote a post that called me on the fact I hadn’t actually named any of these bloggers, so I wrote a post in response, listing some clear examples that backed up my claim, some examples that backed up my claim with less clarity, and one example that completely didn’t back up my claim. When my really dumb error was pointed out by Timmeh in an update to his post I quickly admitted the error in an update to my own post. In addition, some of the tenuous examples have been shown in comments here to be more tenuous than I’d like them to be. For this I also own up to getting it wrong.

Timmeh also noted in his post that attitudes of racism and religious intolerance are not the sole property of Teh Right — and I agree. I actually reckon that racism and religious intolerance can be found equally in both the left and right camps of that false dichotomy (hi, Lachlan!), and it was negligent of me not to make mention of this fact in the original post.

Having said all that, sarcastic exaggeration and selective reporting are mainstays of the blogging formula — they’re certainly the main tools in Tim’s armoury, even now that he’s been put on a leash by News Limited — but I’m not going to hide behind a “sarcasm” tag when I’ve fucked up. I repeat: I made errors and I apologise for them.

So here is my revised sentence: “Some (certainly not all) conservative bloggers are indignant about the fact that a blackie with a muzzie name looks likely to win this year’s US election, even though bloggers of Teh Left are equally capable of holding (and do hold) such detestable views.”

I look forward to similar admissions of error from Timmeh, J.F. Beck and Leon Bertrand QC* next time they’re caught out.

Husky Jim’s still a dick, though.

* Poor LeBert shouldn’t type when he’s hyperventilating from excitement. Check out some of these clangers in the grandiose GrodsCorp slapdown post he’s been having wet dreams about for months.

The prosecution’s spelling, punctuation, grammar and sentence construction rests, your honour.

Andrew Bolt, you’ve claimed that Kevin Rudd’s apology to the indigenous people of Australia was divisive, yet “the people” seem to think otherwise.

[Newspoll] also found that nearly 70 per cent of voters supported last week’s apology to the Stolen Generations.

Will you now delete those posts like you deleted the “Iraq war is won” post?

ps/- Sorry about Kevin Rudd’s 70% preferred Prime Minister results too, Andrew. I know that eats you up inside.