In a blog post, former Bush speechwriter David Frum notes that while the conservative media are now acknowledging that “an innocent woman had been defamed,” they have largely written out Andrew Breitbart's primary role in her smearing, instead blaming “President Obama and the NAACP for believing Breitbart's falsehood.” He concludes:

On the phone on the evening of July 20, a friend asked me: “Can Breitbart possibly survive?” I could only laugh incredulously. I answered: “Of course he'll survive, and undamaged. The incident won't matter at all.”

There will be no apology or statement of regret for distributing a doctored tape to defame and destroy someone. There will be not even a flutter of interest among conservatives in discussing Breitbart's role. By the morning of July 21, the Fox & Friends morning show could devote a segment to the Sherrod case without so much as a mention of Breitbart's role. The central fact of the Sherrod story has been edited out of the conservative narrative, just as it was edited out of the tape itself.

When people talk of the “closing of the conservative mind” this is what they mean: not that conservatives are more narrow-minded than other people -- everybody can be narrow minded -- but that conservatives have a unique capacity to ignore unwelcome fact.

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