“Hey, remember that time Sarah Palin thought she was talking on the phone with Nicolas Sarkozy?

Glenn Reynolds:

THE SECOND TIME AS FARCE: “At least it wasn’t on the front page.”

UPDATE: Heh: “Hey, remember that time Sarah Palin thought she was talking on the phone with Nicolas Sarkozy? The NYT presented that mistake as ‘one of the last straws’ that convinced McCain advisors that Palin didn’t have what it takes . . . Fake French — it’s so obvious. Except when it isn’t.”

It appears that the NY Time printed a “letter to the editor” that was supposedly sent by the mayor of Paris, but was a hoax.

If you get a phone call from someone with a French accent and you are the candidate for Vice President and the caller identified himself as the President of France, you can be excused for taking the call at face value.

When you are the NY Times and you get a letter via e-mail from someone claiming to be the mayor of Paris slamming Caroline Kennedy, and publish it without checking it out, you are incredibly stupid.

Via Roger Simon

This time the paper has outdone itself by publishing a putative letter from the mayor of Paris, attacking the potential elevation of Caroline Kennedy to the US Senate:

To the Editor:

As mayor of Paris, I find Caroline Kennedy’s bid for the seat of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton both surprising and not very democratic, to say the least. What title has Ms. Kennedy to pretend to Hillary Clinton’s seat? We French can only see a dynastic move of the vanishing Kennedy clan in the very country of the Bill of Rights. It is both surprising and appalling.

With all the respect and admiration I have for Ms. Kennedy’s late father, I find her bid in very poor taste, and, after reading “Kennedy, Touring Upstate, Gets Less and Less Low-Key” (news article, Dec. 18), in my opinion she has no qualification whatsoever to bid for Senator Clinton’s seat…

It goes on a bit, but I hadn’t gotten this far when I already suspected the letter was a put-on - and I’m the gullible type who is the last to get the joke at parties.

The Gray Lady is apprently in her dotage.