A Year Late, and Way Short on Logic

Mary Mapes, that is. Scott posted on her new book last night. We’ll be deconstructing Ms. Mapes’s revisionist history, bit by bit, over the weeks to come. For now, let’s just pick out a point or two from her book’s first chapter to ridicule.
Ms. Mapes writes:

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.

Really? I did a simple site search, which you can easily reproduce, and found that during the 2 1/2 years of commentary that we wrote prior to September 9, 2004, we mentioned Dan Rather a total of six times–on average, once every four to five months. Hardly “loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS.” Moreover, amazingly enough, in our famous post “The Sixty-first Minute,” which we updated fifteen or so times on September 9, 2004, the day after the 60 Minutes story aired, and which led pretty directly to the downfall of Dan Rather and poor Ms. Mapes, we mentioned Mr. Rather exactly zero times. That’s right, zero. How’s that for obsession?
Ms.Mapes isn’t done. Her writing reveals that she has no idea what she is talking about; repeatedly, she says that critics of her television program talked about “peripheral spacing” in the alleged National Guard documents. This is astonishing; it’s hard to say what is more amazing: that after a year, Mapes still doesn’t know that “proportional spacing” is what we and many other bloggers discussed, or that she and her editors 1) know nothing about typography, and 2) on top of that, are too lazy to read our posts.
Ms. Mapes is evidently lost in the far-left fever swamps; she repeats a conspiratorial chestnut that dates to the immediate aftermath of the 60 Minutes fiasco:

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

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