The Discerning Texan

Power Line walks us back through all this memo mess and points out that the mainstream media and certain Democratic Senators from Iowa still embellished the facts greatly to make it appear to be a "Republican conspiracy", when in fact it was one man's opinion:

Notwithstanding the revelation of the memo's source, some of the most important questions about this story remain unanswered. Foremost among them is, what led the Post to report, on March 19, that the memo was written by "Republican officials" and "distributed to Republican senators by party leaders”? Was the Post misinformed about the memo's origin and significance, either by Senator Harkin or by someone else? Or did the newspaper's reporters see the memo and simply leap to the conclusion that it was a statement of policy authored by the Republican leadership and distributed to the Republican Senate caucus? The former seems more likely, but Mike Allen, the Post's principal reporter, has not responded to our request to clarify the source of the error in the paper's original report.

Likewise with the story that the Post printed on March 20, which was better, but still inaccurate. Its statement that the memo was "distributed to Republican senators" is apparently incorrect, based on the Washington Times survey published on April 6, as well as the Post's own story on April 7, which suggests that no Republican Senators other than Martinez received the memo (although this, too, is a fact that remains uncertain). Again, the question presents itself: what was the Post's basis for reporting that the memo was distributed generally to the Republicans in the Senate?

The disclosure of Senator Harkin’s role in the story raises further questions. Where has Harkin been for the last two and one-half weeks? He must have known that a controversy was raging around the memo. On one hand, it was being attributed to the Republican leadership, and, on the other hand, its authenticity was being questioned. He knew where the memo came from, but didn’t say a word for more than two weeks. Why? To our knowledge, no one has asked Harkin to explain his weeks of silence.

Just because an aide to Mel Martinez wrote this memo, the mainstream as usual has taken that to mean they were justified in their treatment of this story in the first place; and nothing could be further from the truth.