Ah. A fine example of blaming the victim. The NEA tried to avoid the first and worst mistake people make when they get slimed, and tried to avoid having their own statements serve as vehicles for distributing the libel. And the NEA gets blamed for not mounting a specific enough defense! And then gets attacked--via the implication that there must have been some sinister reason for their failure!

Instapundit.com: ...SPINSANITY AGREES with Cathy Young and others that the NEA is getting a bum rap. I'm persuaded now, but I can't help observing that the NEA hurt its case by acting guilty. As SpinSanity itself says:

After repeated attempts to contain the controversy, the NEA issued an indirectly worded statement on Aug. 27. Rather than directly refuting the charges, it vaguely asserts that critics "have taken the material out of context" and are "using this national tragedy to attempt to score political points," giving little indication that the entire controversy has essentially been fabricated. It also at some point apparently removed links to Lippincott's lesson.

Now that doesn't make misrepresentations of its views any less misleading, but on the other hand, people watch an organization's behavior for cues as to whether to take charges against it seriously. If NEA had said "this is a made-up controversy" and "we never said that" people would have been less inclined to believe the critics. So why didn't it?

Now consider the art in the paragraph above. One would expect a paragraph that begins "Now that doesn't make misrepesentations of its views any less misleading..." to continue with at least some mention of the offenders: Ellen Sorokin and the editors of the Washington Times, the TV commentators who picked up the Washington Times's story, online instant pundits who know damned well how unreliable the Washington Times is, and yet blithely rely on it without lifting a finger to check, say, what the NEA website says.

But that's not the paragraph we see. After the initial head-fake of the first "Now..." clause, it comes close to tripping over its feet in its haste to start blaming the victim...