Scott Walker's Conservative Posse Goes After Gail Collins

The New York Times's columnist roster is full of writers who drive conservatives to annoyed distraction, including Paul Krugman, Charles Blow, and Tom Friedman. None of them rankle quite as much as Gail Collins, a reporter and popular historian whose preferred column style is a bloggy, gee-whilikers stream of thoughts about something in the news. In 2011 and 2012, Collins snuck in near-weekly references to Mitt Romney's old dog Seamus—specifically, the fact that Romney had once parked the dog on the roof of the family car. "I’ve made a kind of game of trying to mention Seamus every time I write about Mitt Romney," she admitted. "This is because the Republican primary campaign has been an extremely long and depressing slog, and we need all the diversion we can get."

You can detect a kind of (earned) glee in the way conservatives pummeled Collins into a retraction over her last column. In "Scott Walker Needs an Eraser," Collins interviewed a teacher, Claudia Felske, who was named Wisconsin Teacher of the Year in 2010. In many of his speeches, for years Walker had been claiming that a woman named Megan Sampson won that prize, when in fact she won a (similar) award for outstanding teaching. Walker's point was only that union rules forced Sampson to be let go, and Collins wanted to debunk this.