Is Sullivan Lying ?

Well, you be the judge. Here's his response to Joe Conason:


"I fixed a couple of typos and a date change within about ten minutes of posting. I typed enron when I meant citigroup and I confused the month when rubin left the administration with when he joined citigroup. I fixed within minutes of posting - something I do if I spot an obvious error, typo, or even sometimes just a horrible sentence after I double-check the site, and check my notes or sources. nothing nefarious. It would be stupid to post something, catch an error in it, and not immediately correct after posting if I see something wrong. That's part of the process of writing in real time with no editor or fact-checker. In this case, amended within a few minutes. Someone really eagle-eyed might have noticed if they read two versions immediately after each other in the afternoon. But the point was the same and nothing else was changed."



Timeline:

1) I receive email from Hesiod who makes this comment on Sullivan's original post.



This email has a timestamp of 1:30PDT or 4:30 EDT, my (and Andrew's) local time. Hesiod sent me his original correcting email to Sullivan, timestamp included, which shows that it was sent at 3:08 pm.

2) I read Hesiod's comment, and click on Sullivan's site. The original post is still there. I post about it here.



3) About 1 hour later (5:30 pm) Hesiod posts in my comments section that Sullivan has now changed his post, and he discusses it here.







4) I post an update on my weblog, commenting on this, and noting that Sully had modified a "4 hour old post.", which was approximately true as the timestamp at that time had said 12:30pm or so. Now the time stamp says 3:38. This is important as this time is AFTER his original post had been made, and the Blogger software DOES NOT change the original time stamp on an edited post. Point being is that since then he has one way or another changed the time stamp. I stand by my recollection and contemporaneous observation that he had changed a '4 hour old post.'


Only my, Hesiod's, and anyone who read but did not save the original post's recollection can attest to the fact that Sully changed more than a couple errors in that post. Obviously he changed it from a damning post premised on the notion that Rubin was in charge of Citibank at the time to a completely baseless one. It really doesn't matter - that's subjective to some degree I suppose. What I can show is that he obviously modified it more than 10 minutes later, and the timeline requires that he modified his time stamp as well (simply by, for example, later deleting and re-writing the post)..


But, who cares anyway?