I was harsh about Senator Barack Obama of Illinois here a couple of weeks ago, and the very next morning his press aide, Tommy Vietor, was on the phone howling about inaccuracies. It was an illuminating conversation.

Obama's man took grave exception to my use of the phrase "distancing himself" to describe what his boss had done when Illinois's senior senator, Dick Durbin, got into trouble for likening conditions at Guantánamo to those in a Nazi or Stalin-era camp. This was one of Durbin's finer moments, and he duly paid the penalty by having to eat crow on the Senate floor.

His fellow senator, Obama, did not support him in any way. Obama said, "We have a tendency to demonize and jump on and make mockery of each other across the aisle, and that is particularly pronounced when we make mistakes. Each and every one of us is going to make a mistake once in a while...and what we hope is that our track record of service, the scope of how we've operated and interacted with people, will override whatever particular mistake we make." That's three uses of the word "mistake." This isn't distancing?

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