A Liberal Rathergate, or Joe What’s the Frequency?

The word Rathergate still causes conservative bloggers to puff out their chests with pride.

The story was that a blogger found errors in memos used by Dan Rather in a story about George Bush’s National Guard service. The errors proved (in the court of public opinion) that the memos were fakes. The story was discredited, Rather was discreditd, and he was finally forced out of CBS in disgrace this summer.

Is the Joe Lieberman "hacker" story about to become the left’s Rathergate?

What makes this relevant (still) is that three days after the Lieberman Web hacker claim the Mainstream Media (as Rathergate.Com would call it) is still going with the claim,
not the documented refutation. This despite the fact that the computer
press, which knows something about this kind of thing, has pretty much accepted the accuracy of the bloggers’ account.

To review. Within hours of Lieberman spokesmen claiming that unnamed "bloggers" had "hacked their Web site on Tuesday morning, a group of bloggers used Internet resources to debunk the claim. In fact, Markos Moulitsas (DailyKos himself) concluded,
the site crashed because of rank incompetence on the part of the Lieberman staff, which did not understand the need to scale their site (and its bandwidth) to
handle Election Eve traffic. (Kos is not just speaking as a blogger here — his own site requires a 15-server rack to run, and it crashed briefly Tuesday night due to a traffic overload.)

So why is the lie still being reported as something other than a lie? I have some theories, which basically come down to
laziness, a proprietary attitude on the part of political reporters, and a cozy relationship with "known" (as in known to the reporter)
sources. The fact is that, from the beginning of this affair,
Lieberman’s people misrepresented the truth (at minimum), claiming a
conspiracy without evidence, on national TV, on an Election Day. At
worst, they not only lied, but brought the FBI in to investigate their
lie. (Lieing to the police is called perjury.)

And as of now the political media is buying their bullshit.

At what point does this become less a story about Lieberman and his Web
site and more a story about the media’s culpability in spreading lies
and filth? At what point do we start seeing the same pushback here we
saw on the Rather story?

I’m still waiting for it. And you should demand it.  Especially since, at some point, things like this have to start taking a toll on media (and Administration) stories about other matters they think are more important.