From the "Really Big Ooops" Department

So, you likely have seen the news reports about Tulsi Gabbard reacting angrily at Hillary Clinton saying that she is being groomed by the Russians as a Third Party candidate, and that Jill Stein (who ran in 2016) was a Russian asset.  To be clear, Secretary Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name, and just talked generally about a woman candidate for the Democratic nomination, of which there are quite a few (though Gabbard seemed the most likely.)  She was quick to respond with pointed fury -- an somewhat understandable reaction, perhaps, though questionable given that Ms. Clinton is the most-recent Democratic nominee for president by the party and was named the most admired woman in the world something like 21 years in a row.

It turns out that that "questionable" part about how she responded has kicked into high gear.

That's because it turns out that Hillary Clinton never said what caused Gabbard to slam her.  It turns out that the New York Times got the story wrong.  Clinton had been on a podcast with David Plouffe and talked about how the Republicans were grooming someone to be a Third Party candidate.  That might be enough to piss someone off if they thought they were being referred to -- but again, Ms. Clinton didn't name anyone and "Republicans" is very, very different than "Russians."  (Though not as different under Trump as it should be...)

​Here are a couple of tweets that discussed this and showed graphics of the real story.

On Friday, the NYT did a piece about a podcast Secretary Clinton did with David Plouffe. They incorrectly quoted her saying that the “Russians” were “grooming” a candidate running in the Democratic primary. They rightfully fixed it to reflect that she was taking about the GOP. pic.twitter.com/iFCphQhZcU

— Nick Merrill (@NickMerrill) October 22, 2019

The story was correct on Hillary Clinton's comments about Jill Stein, though, as this article in the Wall Street Journal ​(which had both parts right) shows --

If Tulsi Gabbard thought that Hillary Clinton was talking about her, one can see why she's be upset.  (That doesn't mean that Ms. Clinton is wrong, by the way.  She might be wrong, though Gabbard has been getting huge praise from Republicans ever since she announced her candidacy.)  But it is always a good thing to get your story straight on what you're upset about, before you attempt to trash someone who many in the party consider a role model and hero, and risk destroying your own campaign.