Atrios thinks that folks who are connecting the Blair bruhaha to affirmative action must be bigots. Ditto CalPundit. I don’t know.

Folks point out that nobody raised the issue of race where various other recent fabulists and plagiarists were concerned, and that’s true enough. But that’s because race wasn’t already an issue in those other cases. As Radley notes, it’s not that critics are just crying affirmative action out of nowhere: there are plenty of signs that the brass at the Times was interested in the contribution to newsroom diversity Blair represented, and that blind eyes were turned to unusually subpar performance. Maybe race wasn’t the reason the Times was being unusually lax, to the point of ignoring warnings from their own editors that “we have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”—but it seems like as good a candidate as any.

So is this a case of affirmative action (on steroids, given the quantity of screwups) gone awry? Well, who knows. I don’t work in the Times newsroom. But is it a plausible story that maybe this guy got cut slack because Raines was trying to promote a more diverse staff, and then made stuff up (in part) because he couldn’t cut it, and concluded that he could get away with it? Well, yeah. There’s plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing that way, and no reason I know of to think that this couldn’t be at least part of the explanation. So why is it ipso facto bigoted to raise the possibility?

My guess is that it’s because bigots would also be likely to jump on this explanation first, whether there were evidence for it or not. But so what? Of course racists don’t like affirmative action. That doesn’t mean that it can’t ever have genuinely bad consequences, does it?