Twin Cities-based blogger and Northern Alliance radio host "Captain Ed" Morrissey is a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy. (Perhaps that's a little too playful a way to say Morrissey is solidly conservative.) He's also a smart, intellectually honest reporter. So, when the righty Townhall Magazine hired him to analyze the Coleman-Franken recount, he did a lot of reporting and analyzing -- even to the ludicrous extreme of interviewing your humble ink-stained wretch on how the recount turned out the way it did.

Morrissey surely had a rooting interest in the Coleman side during the campaign-election-recount. With a few seconds of googling, I found this August 2008 piece in which Morrissey is quoted as saying that Al Franken had "next to no chance at all" of winning the Senate race unless Norm Coleman withdrew, and that Franken might not win the DFL primary (in which Franken faced no serious opposition).

But apparently Captain Ed, whom I like, is that rare ideologue who is nonetheless able to occasionally look inconvenient facts in the eye and, at the risk of mixing my metaphor, follow said facts where they lead. After a lot of reserach, Morrissey came to the conclusion that Team Franken won mostly by outhustling and outlawyering Team Coleman. (This brilliant conclusion happens to coincide with my own.)

But Franken didn't steal anything, Morrissey and I agree. Morrissey also believes that Republicans who, for reasons of the heart but not the mind, insist on believing that Franken stole the election will only blind themselves to the real lessons of the case and leave themselves vulnerable to being outhustled and outlawyered the next time.

How clearly and bluntly did Morrissey state his conclusions that the recount was clean and fair and that Franken didn't steal the election? These two excerpts from the top and bottom of his Townhall piece (which is now out in the ink-paper version of the magazine but not yet available on-line) tell that tale:

Excerpt 1:

"Minnesotans had every expectation that they could avoid a Florida 2000 controversy and not just have a clean, reliable election, but a clean, reliable recount, if necessary. In that, Minnesota largely succeeded, albeit painfully and not without criticism of its processes."

Excerpt 2 (can't address the "stealing" suspiction much more clearly than this:

"Franken did not “steal” this election in the recount process. The Republicans lost this election because they failed to learn from their mistakes in [the] Washington [State guv election] four years earlier and because they failed to realize how serious Democrats are about winning recounts for significant political offices. The Democrats have made it a major adversarial business, working much like defense attorneys or litigators do to find every legal advantage available to them in order to prevail.

As long as Republicans continue to handle election recounts as an afterthought, act like referees rather than stakeholders and fail to match resources with their opponents, they will lose these close elections. And if Republicans insist on believing that fraud rather than their own mistakes led to the recount loss, they will fail to learn this lesson—and lose the next one as well."

So Morrissey was surprised when he got his copy of Townhall to see that, on the cover, his story was headlined:

“How Did This Happen? Al Franken and the Democrats Stole the Election as the GOP Stood By, by Ed Morrissey.”

To his credit, Morrissey blogged about the disconnect between the headline and the story (don't know how his clients at Townhall felt about that, but intellectual honesty required that he make a clear repudiation of the headline, and he did).

The power of selective perception and confirmation bias as important elements of my own understanding of how the human psyche works, and I think we have a pretty good illustration of it here. A headline should not contradict the story over which it runs. Whoever wrote that headline for Townhall probably didn't realize this was a case of diametric contradiction. I'm assuming that the headline writer simply needs to believe that Franken stole the election and indications to the contrary -- even a blunt clear statement to the contrary -- were invisible.