I'm reworking my weekly column for the Daily Standard on Canada tonight, which will appear a little later this week, and the renewed trackback function drove me to a new level of insanity ... and to upgrade to Movable Type 3.2, which supposedly controls the spam attacks much better than previous versions with the MT-Blacklist plugin. What I thought would be a 30-minute quick update turned into a three-hour ordeal, the last of which took the site down intermittently, especially if you tried to post comments. It should be back up and running now, but blogging will probably be over for the evening.

If you get a chance, take a look at my friend Scott Johnson's latest column at DS, "Second Time's A Charm", about Mary Mapes and her attempt to rehabilitate herself after the Memogate debacle. So far, it's a complete flop, and few things are more fun than watching the delightful way Scott shoots the fish in the barrel:

WHAT IS CERTAINLY ILLUMINATING is the degree to which Truth and Duty makes plain the level of malice Mapes has for the president. Although she offers herself as an impartial journalist searching for truth, her tract seethes with Bush hatred. Mapes suggests that Bush's "success in skewing the public perception of his military service was a prelude to his success in shaping public opinion around the reasons for the war in Iraq, the treatment of detainees, the need for a tax cut, and every political battle he has fought and won in his White House years." She refers to "the Bush campaign's aggressive pattern of sliming anyone and everyone who raised questions about the president." She describes Karl Rove as Bush's "über-adviser" and bizarrely credits him with masterminding "the Republican attack against the [60 Minutes II] story." Given her claims of the documents' authenticity, she absolves Rove of fabricating and planting the documents--"not that I believe Rove isn't capable of that kind of dirty trick."

It is a shame that those reviewers favorable to Mapes's book appear not to have read the Thornburgh-Boccardi report, which is full of information that discredits the segment in its entirety, belies Mapes's book, and establishes far beyond reasonable doubt that the documents on which Mapes staked her career are fraudulent.

Who better to deconstruct Mapes than the man who disassembled her work and put the blogosphere on par with the national media?

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Tracked on March 28, 2006 8:54 PM