New York Post calls Gaza 'genocide' a lie six weeks after rights group reports evidence hauled away by the ton.

…(cont) Here's today's page, word for word, near as I can read my own handwriting: Governor Hochul let Zohran Mamdani's "genocide" description of Gaza go by uncorrected, and that was a lie somebody in Albany should've caught. That's the story. I wrote it down because I wanted to get it right before I went looking for what came before it.

What came before it is dated six weeks earlier — August, if you're keeping track — and it's not from the Post, it's a wire item out of Prism, quoting a group called Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. Their count, not mine: more than eleven million U.S. tons of debris removed from Gaza, debris the group says was likely holding human remains and evidence of war crimes. Eleven million tons. I had to write that number twice because the first time I didn't believe I'd copied it right.

Now, I fix cars for a living — badly enough that the one in my garage still needs a new fan belt — and I know what it looks like when two invoices for the same job don't agree. One says the part was never installed. The other's a photograph of the part, in the trash, out back. I never have to guess which invoice is telling the truth. I just check which one's got the earlier date stamped on it. Can you check the date stamped on these two?

I drove down to the corner store this morning — the raincoat, since it was raining, since it's always raining when I want to think something through — and asked the guy behind the counter if he'd read the Post. He had. I asked if he'd read the item from August. He hadn't heard of it. That's not his fault. It's not on today's page. It's in the file next to it.

So here's what I keep circling, and I promise I'm almost done: a newspaper can call a word a lie. That's the paper's job, calling words what they are. But the same paper's own morgue already had, six weeks earlier, a rights group's count of the evidence — the actual physical evidence, by the ton — being hauled off the ground where it happened. I wrote both dates on the same page of my notebook, side by side, so I wouldn't lose either one.

Oh — before you go, one more thing, because I almost walked out without asking it. If this morning's job was correcting a word somebody used for what happened in Gaza, and the paper's own file, six weeks old, was already sitting there on what happened to the evidence of what happened in Gaza, which one of those two documents was the editor supposed to read first?