Ha ha ha ha! Hindrocket is still trying to indict the media for reporting on a memo that was really written by a Senate Republican's office, after weeks of Hindrocket accusing Democrats of forging the memo. Most confusingly, the Weekly Standard has seen this as
worth publishing.
The Post's story was picked up by the Reuters news service and by dozens of newspapers, and was, in large part, the basis for a widespread popular belief that the leadership of the Republican party had played politics with the Schiavo case.
Ha ha ha!
Hindrocket, eager to prove/insinuate/bullshit that Republicans are all good and pure and didn't play politics, is now trying to claim the memo was misreported.
The Democrats were thus not guilty, as many of us believed, of creating the memo as a dirty trick. The central claim of many Democrats, newspapers, and commentators--that the memo was the product of the Republican congressional leadership and constituted an official "GOP talking points memo"--has likewise been proved false. It was this characterization that justified the memo's use as an indictment of congressional Republicans' motives in the Schiavo case. If the memo had been correctly described from the beginning, as the inept product of a freshman senator's aide, with no responsibility for Republican political strategy, which may not have been read by a single Republican senator, it is questionable whether it would even have merited a news story.
Wow! That's scandalous! So, which Democrats, newspapers and commentators referred to this as a "GOP talking points memo"?
Suprise! NONE OF THEM! A google news search shows that the only organizations referred to a "GOP talking points memo" were the website OpEdNews, France's Collective Bellaciao, the left-wing site Truthout, and right-wing sites Men's News Daily, Accuracy In Media, National Ledger, GOPUSA, The Conservative Voice, American Daily, and RedState. After the "forgery" story picked up, other orgs started referring to the memo in scare quotes, with the implication the GOP didn't make it.
But you can't keep Hindrocket down. He expounds upon this in a new endless Powerline post called "REAL MEMO, FAKE STORY."
Notwithstanding the revelation of the memo's source, some of the most important questions about this story remain unanswered. Foremost among them is, what led the Post to report, on March 19, that the memo was written by "Republican officials" and "distributed to Republican senators by party leaders"? Was the Post misinformed about the memo's origin and significance, either by Senator Harkin or by someone else? Or did the newspaper's reporters see the memo and simply leap to the conclusion that it was a statement of policy authored by the Republican leadership and distributed to the Republican Senate caucus? The former seems more likely, but Mike Allen, the Post's principal reporter, has not responded to our request to clarify the source of the error in the paper's original report.
Sniff sniff ... why won't the reporter burn his sources? He's so mean and untrustworthy, unlike Senate Republicans like Mel Martinez whom had his office
lie to the Washington Times on Wednesday and say "No one in our office has seen it, nor had anything to do with its creation."
You think I'm making too much of that Washington Times story? Well, here's Hindrocket.
Likewise with the story that the Post printed on March 20, which was better, but still inaccurate. Its statement that the memo was "distributed to Republican senators" is apparently incorrect, based on the Washington Times survey published on April 6, as well as the Post's own story on April 7, which suggests that no Republican Senators other than Martinez received the memo (although this, too, is a fact that remains uncertain).
The Washington Times story, which contained a
proven lie from Mel Martinez's office, is Hindrocket's basis for claiming fraud and scandal.
But we're not done!
The disclosure of Senator Harkin's role in the story raises further questions. Where has Harkin been for the last two and one-half weeks?
The answer:
on Senate recess. The entire Senate had a scheduled break and was out of Washington from March 21 to April 1. Was Harkin supposed to break his recess to check in on the latest wingnut blogs?
While the creation of the "talking points memo" didn't turn out to be a Democratic dirty trick, the media's treatment of the memo was misleading at best. An ineptly produced memo, written by an unknown aide, which represented no one's opinions but the aide's and, as far as we now know, was distributed to almost no one, was widely trumpeted as the handiwork of the Republican party's leaders and an expression of the party's political strategy.
And here we have the summit of Hindrocket's bitterness and paranoia. The memo represented "no one's opionions but the aide's" - because Hindrocket thinks so. It "was distributed to almost no one" - because a discredited article in the Washington Times said so. It was singlehandedly responsible for the perception that Republicans were playing politics with Schiavo - no matter that they called Congress out of recess and the president made a historic flight to Washington to sign the bill!
This is insane. You can almost see Hindrocket's nerves catching flames, as his credibility and influence smolder in a heap.