Frist Attack Update
Today's New York Times recycles a ludicrous story about an allegedly racially insensitive remark made by Sen. Bill Frist when he was running for the Senate in 1994:

Also in that campaign, Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., Democrat from Memphis, demanded that Mr. Frist apologize to African-Americans for remarks that he and a supporter made. Mr. Frist, going to a largely black march against crime, had asked a worker to obtain imprinted pencils to distribute, requesting unsharpened pencils. "I don't want to get stuck," he told the aide.

Frist would be holding a handful of pencils to distribute and didn't want to prick himself on one of the sharp points - but his innocuous comment was seized on by the anti-Frist reporters for the Memphis Commercial-Appeal and the Nashville Tennessean as "evidence" that Frist had been racially insensitive.

It was absurd then - a lie propagated by two newspapers that had already endorsed Frist's opponent, the incumbent Sen. Jim Sasser - and most everyone in the newsroom at The Tennessean, where I worked at the time, knew it and was embarrassed by the story. It is even more absurd now for the NYT to recycle it in an attempt to undercut Frist as he ascends to the post of Senate Majority Leader.

[Editor's note: the Frist/pencils story from the 1994 campaign is not available online via the Tennessean's website. If you have a hard copy of it and can scan in an image of it, I'd be glad to post that image here. Email it to me at bhhobbs-at-comcast.net]

UPDATE: Reader H. Koenig writes to say: I had to reread that excerpt you posted at least three times before I figured out what it might be that was so offensive - it finally occurred to me that he was supposed to be implying they will be used as a weapon against him. The only racist here are the people who go out of their way to find offense in any innocuous comment. It's time to start telling people who react this way, "the comment is racist only to someone who is a racist, and wants everyone else to be one, too."

Amen to that.

UPDATE: Regular readers of kausfiles on Slate.com will see an item there today about Frist, the sharp pencils, and me. Mickey Kaus writes: "Hobbs' insider perspective carries some weight (although since his wife was apparently working on the Frist campaign he's not exactly unbiased, as he admits)." Kaus is referring to the post directly below this one. I should clarify something: My wife did work on the 1994 campaign - however I did not meet her until April 2000 and we were married in November 2001. At the time of the Sharp Pencils Attack, I had no connection to the Frist campaign. UPDATE OF THE UPDATE: Kausfiles has updated that post to reflect this. Thanks, Mickey.

ANOTHER UPDATE: OpinionJournal.com mentions the Sharp Pencils Incident and mentions my take on it in their "Best of the Web" roundup for Monday, Dec. 23. They call the NYT's reportage of it a "pointless complaint."