Interpreting facts.

There was some talk about a quote from Chris Cox at CPAC last week. Salon quoted him thusly:

"America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame America first crowd," he crowed. Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq." Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation.

Now, Brendan Nyhan has a response from Rep. Cox. Brendan's take is that Salon was wrong (having taken Cox out of context) and Cox is wrong (having misinterpreted available evidence). Have a look.

My take is that this is similar to the "interpreting Eason Jordan" problem that I yacked about incessantly for a couple of weeks.