Keep at it. I hope this story can get legs. But who needs an anti-Kerry October surprise when the MSM's attempts for the anti-Bush Surprises keep, well, exploding in their faces.

Drudge is reporting that CBS planned an election eve story on the now discredited missing explosives story......Delicioius.

If the MSM won't go after Kerry for that story, you can bet they'll stay away from this like the plague:

http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=41106

http://www.nysun.com/article/3756

http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/staticpages/index.php?page=puppets

Hmmm...how to approach this?

Speaking for myself, when I say this won't matter much, or it's not that big of a deal, it's because I don't think that many folks will be swayed by this story, even if it's trumpted on the front page of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times (yeah, right, like that's gonna happen).

I don't say you or other bloggers shouldn't report it; you should. I personally don't blog on it because, well, there are a lot of things I don't blog about.

And to top it off, I've stepped away from blogging politics for now because it's such an incendiary subject, and I don't care to get involved in the screaming from either side. Not that you're screaming in your political posts, but you're certainly getting screamed at because of them. And that's your choice.

But in the end, I stand by my evaluation of this story: it won't matter much because most folks will view it, at most, as typical political exaggeration.

Well, you are free to disagree, but we really don't ...

See update.

I never thought that the story would be huge or get much MSM play, and never promised as much - but I do not endorse the diminishment of its relevance by people that are too jaded to care about Kerry making up bizarre stories.

If it was campaign spin, maybe ... but some of the things that Kerry says just weird me out. And people should know about them.

Since his very first appearance on the national scene - as a water carrier for the communists of North Vietnam - Kerry has continuously LIED and EXAGGERATED.
And he's been caught, over and over and over again... He slandered the US military in 1971; he lies about being at World Series games, about meeting with foreign leaders or UNSC members, about being in Cambodia - to name just a few!
Yet his LYING has not ever hurt him.
WHY? HOW?
Because since WW2 the Leftist meme has included a basic tenet of the post-modernist meme: a belief that there is no such thing as REAL TRUTH; they believe that truth is just subjective or culturally relative.
People who do not believe in truth have no problem lying or voting for liars if it advances their cause.
The Leftist cause is as it has always been: making the state bigger; having the state run by elites - it's fundamentally anti-libertarian and anti-democratic. And : it has failed miserably EVERY TIME, AND EVERY PLACE, AND IN VEREY MARKET IN WHCH IT HAS EVER BEEN TRIED.
Part of PERMANENTLY defeating Leftism requires permanently demolishing the culturally and morally relative post-modernist meme which underlies and underpins their ideology.
Only after this is accomplished can the Free World have a truly united front in the GWOT.
ASIDE: Old Europe is also under the hypnotic sway of post-modernism and moral/cultural relativism. One reason they are drawn to it is because they are - after the bloody 20th Century - very war weary, and because they blame nationalism and ethnocentrism for all the blood-spilling.
Cultural relativism allows them to go on being who & what they are culturally - (Frenchy French or Germanic Germans) - without making it necessary to belittle their neighbors. By asserting that "all cultures (and value systems) are equal" they believe they can avoid a repeat of WW1 or WW2.
That's why they reflexively seek accommodation and appeasement.
Chamberlain epitomizes this: his revulsion towards WW1 made him appease Hitler, rather than confront Hitler.
As we all know, that appeasement didn't work - in fact it made WW2 worse than it might have been because Hitler was confronted later than he might have been, and he was much stronger militarily in 1940 than he was in 1936.
The same is true now - in the GWOT, or WW4. The Bush Doctrine is the anti-Chamberlain doctrine; it rejects the "let's wait & see" and the "let's only counter-attack after we've been attacked" strategies. The Bush Doctrine does this because of two things:(1) the Jihadoterrorists cannot be deterred; to the Jihadoterrorists death is a promotion. And (2) in an age where portable WMD's can kill millions, retaliation is not sufficient.
Bush's belief that there is such things as GOOD and EVIL is precisely WHY the Left hates him; Bush's belief is EXACTLY the OPPOSITE of post-modernism; it's why they think he's a rube, or a religious fanatic.
But as Bush says: if the perpetrators of 9/11 - or of Beslan - are not evil, than evil does not exist.
Because 9/11 and Beslan are real, all logical people must conclude that evil is real. And that only by confronting it and counter-attacking it can we EVER hope to live in a time of peace and prosperity and liberty - something that all humans EVERYWHERE deserve.

You're right on this one, Bill. Bloggers may not be primary sources of information (mostly), but they form the first-level filter and clearinghouse for what alert and informed people pay attention to.

It doesn't have to be all 300 million of us to make a difference. Back when the MSM was all there was, a fraction of the readers of the NYT plus the TV-news junkies were the ones whose information base mattered. People like you are replacing that base very rapidly.

It goes without saying that the old guard doesn't like it.

I didn't think for a second that you were talking about me, Bill, and if I did, I'd have to drive in from Loudoun County and open up a can of good ol' fashioned Texas Whoop-Ass on you.

Well, not really, but it sounds neat when I say stuff like that. :)

The LSM will not carry these types of stories this week, but will carry them November 3rd for reasons skerry lost.

That is their MO, and then they can scream all day they covered it, while in reality it just proves their inability to retain any integrity at all.

All this week will be nothing but negatives stories on president Bush, and kerry stories about bashing president Bush.

Just look at the questions asked on all the cable shows.

Example:
Q1 to Dem - Why do you say Bush did this alleged screwup.

Q2 to repub - Since Bush screwed up, will kerry gain in the polls...

Typical Biased liberal slanting of questions to generate nothing but negatvie news.

Bush has to rise above, and stay on message. And he will, since desperation on kerry and the LSM is a sure sign of a defeatist desperation view from the skerry campaign.

Regards,
Sonar5

Bill, I want you to remember this one big fact. I read no newspapers. I do not watch the news. 100% of my news comes from online, and my primary source is Blogs. What I don't get through blogs is usually cultivated through an aggrigator anyway.

So, to people like me, these stories are important and is important that someone try to expose them.

To be fair to Kerry, what he meant was that he met with the Security Council members that were important to him. Namely, France.
Everyone else is unimportant.

Don't worry, Boyd, I think Bill's mostly talking about people like me (see his comments here -- ouch!)

For the record, though, I agree with your evaluation of the story: "it won't matter much because most folks will view it, at most, as typical political exaggeration." I think those people are wrong not to care that Kerry's a serial liar, but politics is the art of the possible, after all. If they didn't care that he lied about Cambodia, or Kyoto, or Iraq, or... you name it... they're pretty unlikely to care about him lying about the U.N.

Just for the record, though, I haven't seen any criticism of bloggers for running this story. I've just seen criticism of bloggers for running it before it broke, and without telling anybody what it was about. I think that contributed a great deal to [much of] the blogosphere's collective sigh when this story finally hit the papers.

I still think it was a big mistake to front this story early, although Bill's early post was one of the least "hyped" I've seen. Still, I think mentioning it at all made it pretty much inevitable that the story would be disappointing to those would inevitably imagine something bigger. Bill did try to manage expectations in his comments (although I think his "you're getting warmer/you're getting colder" stuff probably had the opposite of the desired effect). Some others were not as circumspect.

In general, though, I think it's a bad idea for the blogosphere to get engaged in pre-hyping stories. One of the great things about the blogosphere is that authors provide links so people can judge stories on their own. When bloggers pre-hype a story, they necessarily can't do that.

I think doing this sort of thing also changes the relationship between bloggers and their readers. The blogosphere is a pretty democratic medium, with most bloggers, including Bill here, allowing a thriving give-and-take in the comments. Although the blogger always maintains control of the site, the relationship between bloggers and their readers is essentially one between equals. When a blogger tips a story like this, without telling what it is, he's creating distance between himself and his readers.

I can understand, certainly, that a blogger, in certain rare circumstances, might not be able to share all he knows about a subject for a variety of reasons. As an attorney, this happens to me fairly regularly when I have clients who are in the news. In my opinion, though, the best policy is to say that, if I can't be completely open about what I know about a story, it's best not to mention it at all -- or at the very least, it's best not to refer to the fact that I have additional information.

Look, I'm not saying that Bill or anyone else who ran with this story did anything "immoral" or "unethical " (although some certainly seemed to take it that way). I just think that tipping stories early like this is a bad idea. I think the way this case played out is a textbook case of why this is so.

Thanks for the clarification Spoons, I agree with most of your comments. For the record, I winced a bit when I saw Powerline's tease, but they didn't have all the details, so it's not entirely their fault.

Others have been more pointedly critical than you, and both more sweeping and specific in their criticism.

Managing info is tricky. How does a blogger lend story a little buzz without turning it into a letdown? I suppose that timing is everything.

So I've lost track: did Senator Kerry lie about meeting with the Security Council in the same debate where he promised "Integrity, integrity, integrity"? Or were those different debates?

Well, I've waited a while to weigh in too because I was trying to figure out what to say. Like Spoons, I figured that another one of those that you were referring to was this schmuck, who pretty much agrees with Spoons down the line. And, I can see how that wasn't apparent in the original form of the post, and perhaps not even in any of the updates (but maybe better in a different post linked in the one above).

Feedback from you, Mike, and Tac clarified things for me, and though I don't agree with the idea of the teaser at all, yours was by far the most restrained. And to be honest, my judgment of the tips is in hindsight. I've come out with an important lesson that I should have known already: "don't believe the hype" (which none of you guys can really be held responsible for). You're certainly right that it's a trick situation.

All that out of the way, I'm very happy with the way all of you are driving and developing the story and you certainly deserve a big thumbs-up for getting attention to it. Kerry's pathological, self-aggrandizing lying is, to me, by far his most disturbing characteristic. Thanks for keeping the heat on it. As I think I have said before, I desperately want you to prove this misanthropic old schmuck wrong.

Spoons has a good critique. I should add a little more fuel to it. One of the attractions of blogs is that the bloggers generally indepedent and not influenced by the spin machines.

This is rapidly changing, as evidenced by Atrios's e-mail last month on behalf of Democrats. (I've got it in my e-mail. I can forward it to people who are interested).

Another bit of evidence is the Commissar's recent receipt of talking points from Republicans (and his giving them whatfor over it).

Part of a publicity campaign is developing "buzz" by placing provocative ads or, better yet, giving selected journalists or opinionmakers a little peek at what you're working on so that they'll get their friends excited.

When conservative bloggers started trumpeting this forthcoming story, those bloggers allowed themselves to be co-opted into the buzz machine, seriously bringing their own credibility into question.

My greatest fear about the blogosphere is that blogs will come to be dominated by individuals who represent or are co-opted by major political players or media players. When those bloggers allow themselves to become part of publicity campaigns, they undermine the editorial independence that make them attractive news sources in the first place.

--|PW|--

PW -- point taken. But the MSM has always controlled the gateway before, so that people who were un-co-optable could never gain entry. This is no longer true; you or I or anyone else with an axe to grind can get involved and remain non-co-opted.

seriously bringing their own credibility into question.

I get offended by claims that my teaser in any way questions my credibility.

Everything in my tease, including hints and descriptions of the scope and severity of the story, was completely accurate.

Tone, temperature, facts, you name it.

Bill:

I'm not talking about you specifically. There's a far more general trend that I've noticed.

--|PW|--

I don't think the MSM is going to run with this one, especially since they are chasing stories about missing explosives.

This stuff does bother me, but then I didn't need this story to convince me that Kerry is the wrong choice at any time.

Kerry seems to have a tendancy to fabricate stories for no reason other than to make himself look more important. Either he suffers from a low self esteem, or a serious ego, neither of which I want in the president.

Has no one made the connection between this story and the "missing explosives"? Why did NYT run the story on Monday? They could have waited until Thursday, had a huge impact on last minute early voting and still beat 60Minutes to the story.

Isn't it possible that Bill and others forced their hand?

Thank you.