Help understanding the press reaction to Colbert on Bush

In the Oct 6, 2003 New Yorker, Rachel Cohen wrote about a famous review in which John Collins pointed out the many errors in a book by Edmund Gosse and then discussed its awful prose. In particular, she notes:

Cambridge stood behind its Clark Lecturer, although none of Gosse’s colleagues seem to have thought the book particularly distinguished, or the review particularly wrong. Henry James wrote to William Dean Howells that Gosse had “paid, fearfully, the penalty” of his “false position” at Cambridge, and later said that Gosse had “a genius for inaccuracy.” At Oxford, when a scholar made an error people took to saying, “He has made a Gosse of himself.” Still, the consensus was that Collins’s review was not nice. The way in which the literary world rallied behind Gosse has sometimes been taken to show that his offenses were not very serious. As Janet Malcolm has pointed out, Gosse’s habitual inaccuracy can too easily be regarded as a sort of condition, “like nearsightedness”; she suggests, convincingly, that physiology is not nearly so helpful here as psychology. [etc]