Greetings to those coming from the Unofficial Dean 2004 weblog- nice to have you here.

It's almost fascinating to watch the right wing blogosphere go into full-on spin mode over the Yellowgate controversy. We've got several variations going:

There's simple namecalling and strawman-building (a sample: "they believe Bush is stupid when he needs to be stupid, and fiendishly clever when their conspiracy rubbish calls for guile...it's about time to pull the plug and throw people out of civil discourse on account of being partisan hacks");

There's multiple instances of misdirection (Eugene Volokh seems to be under the impression that using the word "false" instead of "dubious" to describe a president deliberately misleading Congress and the nation is somehow more newsworthy than the act in the first place... he also plays semantic games with polling statistics);

There's the endlessly amusing "This was one sentence in one speech" bit, which nicely ignores the fact that the case was built on WMDs, and the WMD charge was built on Iraq's supposed attempts to create a bomb, and the chief evidence for that was the Yellowcake bit;

There's the attempts to conflate a legitimate and well-sourced story that's all over the media with a discredited one that was in a few blogs (Pejman also used the "small bit" part, actually saying that it was just 1.3% of the speech, which is almost surreal);

And, of course, there's good ol' Glenn, coordinating the whole thing and making sure that his continuing quest to ingratiate himself with the conservative movement continues unheeded by balance, fact, morals or journalistic integrity. Sorry, but anybody who describes the ongoing questions about Bush's administration like this:

I think that people are tuning them out because their motivation is so transparent, and because they've piled on a bunch of issues like this, only to have them collapse one after another. It's the whole "crying wolf" thing.

...either works for Bush, or wants to.

It goes to show one thing, though. It looks like this story does have legs, otherwise there wouldn't be so many desperate and transparent attempts to dismiss its importance and distract from its shocking nature. After all, nobody advocating the target of a story says "nobody cares" unless they're blowing smoke and covering asses. If nobody really cared, Bush's defenders wouldn't need to discuss it.

"Cry Wolf"? Try "Big Lie", Glenn.