You can imagine
how this happened. Jonah Goldberg imagines that the New York Times must have said something nice about Mussolini, because the NYT is liberal, the NYT in 1923 is exactly the same as the NYT now, and liberals love Hitler and Franco and Mussolini. Research assistant fires up the Lexis-Nexis, snippity snips the first quote he finds, produces a new wingnut fact (not to be confused with actual facts), and heads home early for appletinis.
