In a discussion thread on Alan Keyes’s website where the unbiased Keyes supporters are debunking my “yellow journalism” and “spineless hypocrisy,” Eternal Vigilance — apparently Keyes political director Tom Hoefling’s handle — corrects me on an important point. In my column, I repeated his quote to the Kansas City Star and described him as having “sulked.” He replies, “Gosh, I hate liars.” He’s right. On rereading, “whined” would have been more accurate. I regret the error.

Eternally vigilant readers may recall that I’ve been sympathetic to Keyes in the past. I remain sympathetic to the pro-lifers and other conservatives who are giving money to his increasingly erratic and unserious campaigns. But sometimes, you just gotta call ’em as you see ’em.

UPDATE: Dave Weigel brings up the Ron Paul angle of the story: Party founder Howard Phillips argued that Chuck Baldwin, as an antiwar conservative who endorsed Paul’s GOP presidential run, could win Paul supporters’ votes and donations while Keyes couldn’t. For their part, Keyes backers complained that the CP was really “a Ron Paul party,” which is in some limited sense true, though there is a strange Christian Reconstructionist element too. I don’t know how far Baldwin falls into this camp, his Falwellesque 9/11 comments notwithstanding. I tend to doubt that Baldwin has as much electoral potential as whoever the eventual Libertarian nominee will be. I’m also not sure how much impact Phillips’s speech actually had on the outcome. But if Paul had wanted the nomination, he would have beaten Keyes too.

UPDATE II: The whining continues in the comments, where Hoefling treats me with dignity and respect. He also raises a bear-in-the-woods philosophical question about whether a person can sulk or whine if you are not physically present to hear it.