McCain Plagiarism Smear: Think Progress Issues Retraction

Think Progress earlier this week alleged John McCain of plagiarizing his foreign policy speech Wednesday from Los Angeles.

I read the post at the time, but was awaiting additional, independent confirmation. It turns out that Think Progress, in its ejaculatory haste to smear the GOP nominee-in-waiting, failed to find corroborating evidence prior to publishing their claims. FOX News has the story, via Blogs for McCain:

Here's Think Progress's retraction:

CORRECTION: As a blog that strives to maintain credibility and transparency, we would like to explain our mistake. When we were alerted to the tip that Adm. Ziemer gave a similar speech in 1996, we searched LexisNexis and McCain’s campaign site for whether the senator used the disputed phrases before that time. We did not find anything. After we published the post, the McCain campaign contacted us and pointed to a speech given by the senator in 1995, which appears on McCain’s Senate site. As soon as we were alerted to the error, we rushed to publish a correction. Once again, we regret the error, and we apologize for it.

Right, a blog that strives to maintain credibility. That makes me feel a lot better. Now, perhaps the rest of the left blogosphere could get the memo.

The FOX story is here.