Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald goes ballistic over my tentative statement that “From my use of the Post’s (not always reliable) search engine, it seems that the Post never actually reported to its readers the striking news that the real Joe Biden had said words very similar to the SNL Joe Biden.” Greenwald has discovered that if I had put in the Washington Post’s search engine the full statement of Biden’s that I quoted, it would have yielded six instances in which that quote had appeared at least on the Post’s website. I had instead used something like “Biden and ‘international crisis’” and got no results. (I just tried it again, and again got no results.)

To Greenwald, I am engaging in “petulant, fact-free right-wing victimhood” that supposedly is consistent with my service in DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel at a time when OLC authorized what Greenwald labels “radical, disgraceful policies” and that reflects “the Right’s inability to accept responsibility for anything,” including “the Iraq War and the collapsing economy.”

Never mind that I had done what strikes me as a sensible search (and one that should have yielded more results that Greenwald’s) and had expressly stated my lack of confidence in the reliability of the Post’s search engine. Never mind that, when informed by a reader that he recalled seeing the quote in the Post, I used his information to find one article and promptly (within an hour of my original post) added a correcting update. Never mind that the fact that the Post previously quoted Biden doesn’t detract from my core point about the strangeness of the “Impolitic” feature in this morning’s paper. Never mind that there are mountains of evidence of media bias in covering the campaign and that Greenwald obscures from his readers that I said I was providing a “tiny example”. Never mind that no one has ever alleged that I had any knowledge of or role in the OLC legal advice (not “policies”) that Greenwald is apparently referring to. Never mind that my post wasn’t refusing to accept responsibility for anything.

I’m not familiar with this guy. Is he always so unhinged?