Kerik is out as possible Homeland Security chief, for nanny-related problems (as well as for a lot of other things). This sounds to many like a replay of Clinton’s early problems nominating an Attorney General, so unthinking news organizations and some of the blogosphere has swept Lani Guinier, once nominated by Clinton for AG, into the maw of the NannyGate that ate Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood.

But this is wrong, wrong, wrong. At Best of the Blogs, Michael Scott writes:

Buried in the stories of Bernard Kerik’s withdrawal of his name for head of Homeland Security, is this little bit of “revisionist history:”

Lani Guinier, a Clinton classmate at Yale University Law School, was the president’s choice to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division until it was learned that she had not paid taxes for a domestic worker.

No, no, no. Christ, this was not that long ago; some of us actually remember this: Kimba Wood had “nanny problems.” Zoe Baird had “nanny problems.” Lani Guinier, on the other hand, got smeared by the rightwing as “The Quota Queen,” and her name was withdrawn because of her “controversial” writings about race and discrimination remedies.

I challenge anybody out there to find me a contemporaneous account (i.e., not written in the last few weeks or months) that shows that Lani Guinier had any “domestic help” controversies discussed in the media at the time of her Justice Dept. nomination, or its withdrawal shortly thereafter. This is such lazy, sloppy, dishonest reporting — I expect to hear next that Robert Bork withdrew his name from consideration as a Supreme Court Justice because he smoked pot with his college students at parties!

One of the great things about the blogosphere is what might be called its propagability — news travels really fast. Do corrections travel equally quickly? Eugene Volokh has blogged the correction (and follow his links). We’ll see.