In a blow to right wing bloggers, the legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, according to the Washington Post.
Rightwing bloggers questioned the authenticity of the memo, comparing it to the unauthenticated CBS documents about Bush's National Guard service.
In attempting to limit the potential harm the GOP memo could do, bloggers attacked the media, questioning whether the memo was authentic, how many people saw it, and so forth.
When it first appeared, Cliff Kincaid of the conservative Accuracy in Media wrote The memo may have been written by some Republican somewhere. But there's no independent evidence at this point that it was authorized by a Republican Senator or written by a top Republican staffer.
The Right now can narrowly claim it wasn't authorized or written by a top staffer as Sen. Martinez wasn't a big fish. However, isn't the real question, just like with the Bush memos, whether there a bigger story waiting to be found?
Kincaid asked the right question - Didn't we learn anything from Memogate? In Memogate bloggers and the media only examined the authenticity of the memo, not whether the overall story was accurate. This time the bloggers attacked the memo (which turned out to be authentic) AND also the story, which may have been more of a molehill rather than a mountain.
Why not look at both on the SUBJECT of the CBS story? The memo was only a part of the story. Perhaps no one really wants to admit that if the Schiavo memo was authentic then maybe there was more to the claims of Bush not completing his military duty.
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