Mickey Kaus fisks my condemnation of Paul Krugman’s column this morning, which claimed that two media consortiums said Gore would have won a full hand recount. The thing is, in order to fisk me, he first must condemn the way those recounts were themselves written about in, among other places, the New York Times, which according to him (and some of my e-mailers) described a result almost exactly the opposite of what its consortium found.

Well, shame on me for believing the New York Times, I guess. But look. I don’t want to fight the 2000 election all over again, really and honestly, but there’s a reason the Times’s and other stories on the recounts were so confusing. The “hand recount” results that would have handed the election to Gore were the result almost entirely of interpretations by the people hired by the consortiums to do the recounts. Those people would not have been the same people who would have done the full, statewide, manual recount. These theoretical actual recounters might well have come up with results that differed from the ones the consortiums came up with, since the consortiums were dealing with every ballot invalidated every which way — overvotes and undervotes both.

Certainly, for example, many of those invalidated ballots would have been deemed invalid after they were examined a second time, especially if, say, somebody voted for every candidate on the ballot, which evidently happens frequently. My point against Krugman was that he breezily claimed something — that Gore won both media manual recounts — that simply is not true. There may be an argument to be advanced in that direction, but Krugman didn’t argue it, he asserted it as though it were fact, which it ain’t.