Welcome fellow jihadists!

Mary Mapes, that darling producer of CBS News and willing accomplice in Dan Rather's memogate scandal, has written a book due out in a few days. One of the central figures in the scandal of which Brokaw quipped, ""There's a political jihad against Dan Rather and CBS," Mapes laments:

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of (GASP!!!) Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.

All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing, material that seemed to spring up overnight. It was phenomenal. It had taken our analysts hours of careful work to make comparisons. It seemed that these analysts or commentators---or whatever they were---were coming up with long treatises in minutes. They were all linking to one another, creating an echo chamber of outraged agreement.

I was told that the first posting claiming the documents were fakes had gone up on Free Republic before our broadcast was even off the air! How had the Web site even gotten copies of the documents? We hadn’t put them online until later. That first entry, posted by a longtime Republican political activist lawyer who used the name “Buckhead,” set the tone for what was to come.

There was no analysis of what the documents actually said, no work done to look at the content, no comparison with the official record, no phone calls made to check the facts of the story, nothing beyond a cursory and politically motivated examination of the typeface. That was all they had to attack, but that was enough.

Why go through the exercise to analyze the content of the memo when the memo itself was proven to be fake, Ms. Mapes? Or is it, as you libs say, the mere seriousness of the charge that is relevant (damn the authenticity)? And just where do you come upon the audacity to say that whatever tripe you and your ilk feed the public needs to be swallowed hook, line and sinker, without question?

Still, the publisher of Mapes' book contends:

TRUTH AND DUTY is a riveting account of how the public’s right to know—or even to ask questions—is being attacked by an alliance of politicians, news organizations, bloggers and corporate America. It connects the dots between the emergence of a kind of digital McCarthyism, a corporation under fire from the federal government, and the decision about what kinds of stories a news network can cover

A digital McCarthyism?? The public's right to know is being attacked? How about the public's right to know when a "trusted" MSM organ is selling them what amounts to a bill of goods? Or does, as the libs are want to say, "the seriousness of the charges" trump the bed of lies and fabrications on which they are built?

The absolute arrogance that these self-annointed elitist moonbats continue to display is beyond the pale and is necessarily beyond the comprehension of any rationally-thinking human being.

***UPDATE***

Editor and Publisher report that the excerpts quoted above by Howard Kurtz, initially available on Amazon.com are now conspicuously absent. But not only is the excerpt missing; it would appear now that the whole damn book is missing from Amazon, save for the audio version:

He said he had drawn the brief excerpts from the first chapter, which had been posted (as sometimes happens with new books) at amazon.com. He also provided a link. But the link goes to a dead Amazon page. In fact, the book (which is due out on Nov. 8) seems to have disappeared completely from Amazon, except for its audio version (Mapes narrates herself).

Very interesting, indeed.