Mark Kleiman’s latest entry consists of a multiple-choice quiz concerning Jeff Jacoby’s allegation that John Kerry’s has long exploited the popular misconception that he was Irish and Mickey Kaus’s subsequent links to the story. In the quiz, Kleiman asks the reader which of the following is not true:

1. Jeff Jacoby accused John Kerry of exploiting his newfound Jewish roots for political advantage, and said that Kerry allowed everyone in Massachusetts to think he was Irish, not correcting the Boston Globe when it so identified him in numerous front-page stories.
2. Mickey Kaus linked to Jacoby and endorsed the charge.
3. Roger Ailes demonstrated that the charge was false: there had been so such front-page story.
4. Mickey Kaus retracted and apologized.

The “sucker” answer is #4, i.e., Kaus didn’t retract or apologize for his link to Jacoby’s story. The correct answer, though, is that neither #3 nor #4 is true. Ailes certainly attempted to demonstrate that Jacoby’s charge was false, but ultimately, he failed miserably (scroll down to heading: “Not a correction”) in that endeavor. Ailes, to his credit, eventually owned up to his gaffe and apologized to everyone involved. Kaus, for his part, has not retracted or apologized for anything. Why should he? He was right!

Kleiman, unlike Ailes, has yet apologize to anyone involved, though in all fairness he hasn’t posted anything new in the interim, either, so we probably shouldn’t read too much into his new-found silence. Maybe no apology is needed at all, just a clarification that the quiz was intended as a trick question. Or maybe not. Advantage: Game, set and match: Kaus!

UPDATE: Kleiman has come clean and admitted his error, sort of. Unfortunately, his reply to Kaus is something of a Clintonian non-apology apology:

Mickey Kaus seems to have difficulty grasping the distinction between having made a mistake and being a fool, which is perhaps (1) the result of his own infallibility and (2) the cause of his reluctance to admit an error when he makes one. Since I’m not infallible (unless the College of Cardinals has done something really weird while I’ve been out of touch) I don’t feel at all foolish saying I was wrong.

[Link in original.]

Actually, no, Kaus did not call Kleiman a fool. What he said was, and I quote, “And boy does Mark A.R. Kleiman look like a fool!” (emphasis added.) More importantly, I do not read this to suggest he was saying Kleiman looked like a fool because he was mistaken, but because (1) he posted a smug, arrogant “quiz” without first getting the facts straight and (2) he took his sweet time in fixing it. That was a pretty foolish thing to do. Especially annoying is Kleiman’s refusal to apologize for his own error, even after taking Kaus to task for declining to apologize for an error that wasn’t. I guess the old saying is true: being a liberal really does mean never having to say you’re sorry.

FINAL UPDATE: Better go easy on Kleiman for a while, as his father recently died. No point making a difficult situation more difficult than it needs to me. So if you do send Kleiman any mail, better to send him your condolences than a final “gotcha.”