Holy Crap!

Will the mainstream media actually find a way to commit suicide? This story is so huge in so many ways ... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

First of all, you can read Ace's updates here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. There should be one more link, but it's broken as I type this.

Allah has stuff here, here, here, and here. If it looks like Allah's more of a slacker than Ace, it's because Allah is more generous with his updates, rather than starting new posts.

Spoons reports here and here. It doesn't look to me like Spoons has an excuse.

Powerline has just gone insane. This post alone has over 300 trackbacks as I write this. Another link here.

Okay, that's enough of the copious linking. I don't expect anyone to read every one of those, I just wanted to create a visual impression of the volume of blogging at some (a very small number) of my favorite blogs. The guys who seem like they have nothing to do but blog all day.

The story in a nutshell is this. CBS is triumphantly showing recently discovered memos from the time period when GWB was in the National Guard, which purport to show he was AWOL, thus substantiating an old hobgoblin of the liberal attack machine. The problem? CBS' Dan Rather can't get it through his head that the old days of news reporting with no accountability are over. A million bloggers, working at a million typewriters, for anywhere between all day and a couple of minutes have demonstrated amply that the documents are forgeries.

Bill at INDC Journal actually got an authentication expert to give an evaluation, and the expert says 90% chance of a fake is perfectly plausible. As I write this, Bill's post has 259 comments.

It is amazing just how much of an impact this is having in the blogosphere. And more importantly, we're talking about (for the most part) an army of people with no professional training in forgery-spotting who research information about what kinds of typewriters the Army was using in the early 70s, what kinds of fonts were used, whether "smart quotes," super-scripted ordinals and letter-spacing could be done on those typewriters. Less frequently, we get people like Bill who are doing the stuff we traditionally rely on the media to do, like authenticate stuff. As in, the opposite of what Dan Rather did before putting his career on the line with this one.

And that's what a lot of bloggers are saying - that his gallingly reckless partisanship and whole-hearted effort to destroy a president rather than report the news have combined to end his ability to be taken seriously, ever again.

That's it for the serious stuff. And just as I said you don't really need to click on any of the links above (what the heck, you can if you want...) I think you should click the following:

The Commissar has found another smoking gun.

Via Ace, who got it from Right on Red, who in turn got it from Right Wing News, yet another smoking gun.

And it wouldn't be a decent conspiracy without America's favorite fat man. Dave tells me his permalinks aren't working, so if that link doesn't do the trick, just go to his blog (Garfield Ridge - it's on the blogroll) and scroll down to Sept. 9 at 17:14 (military time? What's up with that?). And the post right above that one is good, too.

More links forthcoming as more bloggers find ways to spoof Kerry, the media, or liberals in general.


Update: More good times at Politicalities. If you don't click this one, you deserve to be shot.

Also, this morning the Times-Picayune (to their credit) picked up the Washington Post article about this whole scandal (which article gave due credit to internet writers!). But to their demerit, the story is on page A-10.