Dirty Democrat Pool

You would have thought the MSM would have learned from Rahtergate that they can not just go off an try to pass off faked documents as genuine. But here we go again. Both ABC and the New York Times that a so called "talking points" memo was created by the GOP on the Terri Schiavo matter. Powerline, In the Agora, and Fishkite took the lead in debunking the memo. ABC has gone into spin mode on it. The Washington Post claimed that it had confirmed the document's provenance, but could not reveal the source. The American Spectator has a few things to say on this as well.

"Very quietly, Senate Republican leadership aides to both Sen. Rick Santorum and Sen. Mitch McConnell, as well as the Senate Republican Policy Committee, have been using the Senate recess break to reconstruct the purported distribution of a document that media outlets, including ABC News, the New York Times and a number of regional newspapers, identified as Senate "GOP talking points" on the Terri Schiavo fight that unfolded over the weekend.

"There is a process here for documents like this that are passed around down on the Senate floor, which is where the media claimed that the 'talking points' were being distributed last Thursday," says a Republican policy committee staffer. "There was a lot of stuff going on Thursday, but a document like this one was not being distributed. As far as we know, the only documents being handed out related to votes on a series of amendments being pushed through before the recess. Schiavo wasn't part of that package.""

It should be noted that Power Line has a copy of the "document" and it has no letterhead and the wrong Senate Bill number on it.

"The document, which was posted online by ABC News, as well as several Democratic-leaning websites, was unsigned, bore no Senate office letterhead, and was rife with errors, including the incorrect Senate bill number and the misspelling of Schiavo's name. For days, Republicans denied any knowledge of the document, and a number of Republican Senators claimed they had never seen it."

In addition the Spectator article goes on to say:

"However, Republican leadership staffers now believe the document was generated out of the Democratic opposition research office set up recently by Sen. Harry Reid, and distributed to some Democratic Senate staffers claiming it was a GOP document, in the hope -- or more likely expectation -- that it would then be leaked by those Democrats to reporters. In fact, the New York Times stated that it was Democratic staffers who were distributing the "talking points" document.

"Democrats have tried to pin this document on Santorum's staff, on [Sen. Bill] Frist's staff, on [Sen. Sam] Brownback's staff," says a Senate leadership staffer. "Watching the investigation underway on line has energized us enough up here to want to at least confirm that we weren't the source, and everything we have found would confirm that Republicans didn't generate this memo. This is just amateurish, and perhaps Democratic staffers think we put out work product like this, but it's laughable."

The staffer added that while just about any House or Senate staffer with an email account could readily distribute a document, it was a huge stretch to believe that such a document would end up being widely distributed by or even to Senators in the cloakroom or in the well of the Senate. "This has all the telltale signs of a political dirty trick," says the staffer.

Other Republican staffers blame not only Democrats but also the mainstream media which once again put out a story to embarrass Republicans before checking all the facts first."

On it goes, the MSM trying to help the Dems they support by trying to make Republicans look bad, at any cost. No wonder so many are keen to see the blogosphere silenced. - Sailor