Fooled again: How conservative bloggers got today's Afghanistan story wrong

Writing about the recently leaked memo from General Stanley McChrystal about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, Bill Roggio of The Long War Journal wrote this under the headline “McChrystal to resign if not given resources for Afghanistan”:

According to McClatchy, military officers close to General McChrystal said he is prepared to resign if he isn't given sufficient resources (read “troops”) to implement a change of direction in Afghanistan [emphasis mine]

The problem is, as noted by Mudville Gazette, what McClatchy actually wrote is this:

Three officers at the Pentagon and in Kabul told McClatchy that the McChrystal they know would resign before he'd stand behind a faltering policy that he thought would endanger his forces or the strategy [emphasis mine].

Which, as clear as day, is mighty different from the story Roggio published. As usual, this apparently did not stop conservative bloggers from doing the hard work of clicking the link to see the story for themselves. They took Roggio's misrepresentation as gospel.

HotAir, Q and O, Strata-Sphere, and Wizbang, amongst others, all once again demonstrated the rigorous distaste of reality that has come to characterize the conservative media.