4/7: One Memo To Rule Them All

Yesterday the blogosphere was split along partisan lines, with the left focusing on twin MSM stories about Maj. Leader Tom DeLay and the right covering a variety of stories of lesser interest to national politics. Today it's just the opposite: there is near unanimity on the news of the day: the apparent crumbling of

As we wrote in this space yesterday, the memo story died peacefully last week without much fuss. The fight over Terri Schiavo's life, while contentious and ubiquitous in recent weeks, has passed along with her. This memo is one of her immediate political legacies, and while it we'd expect it to be off everyone's radar screens by the end of the week, today it's all anyone can talk about.

Recap: When the memo -- click here to see it as a JPG -- surfaced, the left cited it as an example of GOPers playing politics with the Schiavo episode -- and apparently poorly, as the issue doesn't seem to have been a "great political issue" (a line from the memo) for them. The coverage seemed to indicate it was a widely-distributed high-level memo among GOP senators.

The right noted that the memo cited the wrong Senate bill and misspelled Schiavo's name, and thus didn't seem to them plausible as an actual Senate memo. A few bloggers kept the story alive, and yesterday the Washington Times splashed front-page, above the fold: "Was the Schiavo memo a fake?" The right crowed, the left mostly ignored it. But today's revelation (see the "Congress" story elsewhere in this Hotline) that it originated from the office of Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) made it the issue of the moment. The left is having a good laugh at the conservative bloggers' expense, while the right concedes the main point but sticks with a few sub-arguments.

In particular: The Washington Post's Mike Allen denied having reported it as distributed by "party leaders," but conservative bloggers (along with centrist Mickey Kaus) pointed out that in fact a version of the story had gone out over the wire to other papers with that phrase in it. The Post's Howard Kurtz followed this up and more or less concurred. Today the right blogosphere sees Kurtz as vindicated and Allen owing a correction; the left blogosphere sees the opposite.

TRACKBACKS: Note To Self -- Stop Writing Memos

Where the blog swarm is headed, who's taking part, and what they're saying:

• The most popular version of the story is the typically well-linked Washington Post, which is fitting, because the author is the Mike Allen. Other treatments come from the AP and New York Times. Anybody who's anybody links: Obsidian Wings; Althouse; Jeralyn Merritt; The Moderate Voice; Hit and Run; Skippy The Bush Kangaroo; Think Progress; Betsy's Page; The Spoons Experience; Captain's Quarters; Instapundit; Little Green Footballs; Ace of Spades HQ; Eschaton; America Blog; MyDD; Wizbang.

  >> A fairly representative post from the left comes from Kevin Drum: "Martinez has fired the errant staffer, calling the memo 'stupid.' With that, I hope that Power Line and Hugh Hewitt and Michelle Malkin and the rest of the crew trying relive the glory days of Rathergate will take his lead and just STFU. Enough."

  >> A fairly representative post from the right comes from National Review's TKS assigns "half a point to the mainstream media, half a point to the bloggers," and adds: "In this blogging world, sometimes you're going to find a superscript 'th'. And sometimes you're going to find a muddier situation, in which a foolish GOP staffer tried to play Karl Rove to the whole party without using spellcheck or checking bill numbers."

  More below.

BLOGS VS. THE MSM: That's the Way The Controversy Crumbles

Daily Kos: "The wingnutosphere spent the last few weeks screaming bloody murder about the memo (which frankly I had forgotten about), claiming it was some sinister Democratic plot. They wanted to make a big deal about it, so let's make sure we oblige."

National Review's Jonah Goldberg, at The Corner: "I think it's interesting that Martinez says he never read the memo but managed to pass it to Tom Harkin. That's possible, but it might be a bit of a lawyerly dodge given that when Chris Wallace asked him about the memo on March 20th, on Fox News Sunday, he said he'd never saw it before." And from a reader e-mail posted to The Corner: "Even if Senator Martinez was handing out the memo on the steps of the Capitol to every Senator and citizen that passed by, you could hardly say that the 3 month first time elected Senator equalled 'Republican leaders.'"

"Armando" at DailyKos castigates the Post's Kurtz as a "shill" for his reporting on Allen's apparent mishandling of the memo. So does Oliver Willis, who adds: "Shut up Hinderaker. Shut up Malkin. Shut up "Comisar". Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. ... I am laughing so hard now. So. Damn. Hard. ... Will the last honest right-winger please turn out the lights?"

But Slate's Mickey Kaus (scroll to "Non-fake but inaccurate!" disagrees on the Kurtz/Allen point: "The whole 'memo' fuss, as played up by WaPo and ABC's Linda Douglass, was wildly overdone even if the memo was a GOP leadership document -- as if senators never consider what is a good political issue, as if that's a no-no in a democracy." More: "But certainly whatever legitimate valence Allen's 'memo' story had depended almost entirely on the impression that the memo revealed and represented the strategy of the GOP leaders who pushed the Schiavo bill. If all that was involved was a staff memo Martinez gave to Harkin, Allen's story was way out of whack."

Horse's Ass: "I've said it before and I'll say again: us bloggers ... we have an agenda. And anybody who naively relies on the blogosphere for their news, because they somehow believe we are more accurate, honest and unbiased ... is a f---ing idiot. We're not better than the mainstream media ... we're just different."

Power Line analyzes previous and current reporting on the memo and concludes that the full story has not yet been told. Michelle Malkin prints excerpts from hate mail.

DELAY: Why's Nobody Picking On Me?

The American Prospect's Garance Franke-Ruta: "He should have known: 1997 was a banner year for stories on congressional junkets, and many members of Congress were stepping back their overseas travel at that time or had begun to more closely scrutinize foreign trip offers out of concern for adverse publicity."

ELECTIONS: Hicksville

Conservative John Hawkins: "The Republicans who've being politically penny wise and pound foolish on illegal immigration had better hope that Democrats like Hillary and [VA Gov. Mark] Warner who're getting tough on illegals are just exceptions to the rule instead of the start of a trend because this is an issue that could cost the GOP a lot of elections if the Democrats are smart enough to figure it out."

Colorado Pols notes, "Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper is the newest victim of a spontaneous uprising of Grassroots Activists united in only one thing: the election of our next Governor." From an "anonymous email being circulated": "Colorado needs to elect a Democrat as governor in 2006. And we think John Hickenlooper is the man for the job." Writes Colorado Pols: "I can't wait to get my 'Draft Hick' lapel button."

BLOGS VS. THE MSM: Fledgling Ventures

Liberal Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo sneaks a few details on a new site he's about to launch: "It has a few different components. But the main one is a new group blog with a few more than a dozen individual contributors. ... As you might expect, the focus of conversation will be politics and current affairs, but neither narrowly nor exclusively. We're also hoping for lively exchanges about the arts, literature, religion and the sciences. We're still putting together the list of contributors. And we'll be bringing you more on that in the coming days. But the list of those who've already signed on includes Todd Gitlin, Ed Kilgore, Mike Lind and Judith Shulevitz, among others"

New from blog tycoon Nick Denton is Sploid, a tabloid-like competitor to the Drudge Report. Jeff Jarvis, who was clued in ahead of time: "It delivers the headlines worth talking about, like Drudge. But it looks better -- like a cheesy German tabloid. And it puts the top news on top, where it should be. And it won't spare Drudge's sacred cows." Also discussing it: Instapundit; Washington Canard; Magnetic Media Field.

MISCELLANY: Today It's All Miscellany

Via Captain's Quarters, news that didn't get a lot of play yesterday: Saddam Hussein had to watch Iraqi Kurd Jalal Talabani be elected president on a live closed-circuit feed, and was "clearly upset." Law prof Ann Althouse: "Beautiful!"

Liberal MyDD's Chris Bowers assesses the "Schiavo backlash" against Pres. Bush and the GOP suggested by Gallup's latest poll and gushes: "Oh baby. This is just so great I have a difficult time being more articulate."

Noting Bush's poor poll numbers plus Tony Blair's re-election fight, liberal UMich prof Juan Cole asks: "Could Iraq be the undoing of both major political parties that backed the war in the West?"

Northwestern law prof. James Lindgren of Volokh Conspiracy relates a story from his experience in uncovering the Michael Bellesiles gun-records scandal (very big in the blogosphere a couple years back) and notes the Wonkette angle: blogger Ana Marie Cox at the time was a Chronicle of Higher Education reporter looking into allegations of forged/faulty documentation by Bellesiles, but was removed from the story once it seemed she was about to write an anti-Bellesiles piece.

"R. Musil" from Man Without Qualities launches into a lengthy rebuttal of Christopher Hitchens' post-mortem Pope-criticism.

Also Pope-related and noted in the blogs is an article in the Weekly Standard on an overlooked story that the USSR ordered the murder of John Paul II in 1981. Power Line links, as does schoolteacher Betsy Newmark.

GOPbloggers interviews RNC chair Ken Mehlman.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Why The Filibuster Helps The GOP

TNR's Noam Scheiber, uncredited as always at &c: Today the White House can credibly argue that any conservative activist bent on overturning Roe v. Wade would be filibustered, so there's no point in nominating one. (Just as Bush recently pleaded to conservative evangelical leaders that there's no point in pushing an anti-gay marriage amendment since the votes in the Senate aren't there.) Absent the filibuster excuse, Bush would have a much harder time resisting demands from his base that he nominate that kind of candidate."

LEST WE FORGET: You're Not My Real Daddy!

Jim Treacher writes his own captions and dialogue for an otherwise normal-seeming comic strip and titles it "The Dame Wore Clothing." There are many more attempts at captioning the same strip available here.