The Labour deputy has now redoubled his denials and is threatening to sue the Daily Telegraph. I can’t say his statement settles the matter. It sure doesn’t convince me. The reporter explains to the Guardian:
“Nobody steered me in that direction at all. We just went and purely by chance we stumbled across this room which had these files in it, and again purely by chance we came across these files which carried the label Britain. And it was two days before we had actually gone through the contents and found this document. I find it very hard to believe that this document is not authentic. I think it would require an enormous amount of imagination to believe that someone went to the trouble of composing a forged document in Arabic and then planting it in a file of patently authentic documents and burying it in a darkened room on the off-chance that a British journalist might happen upon it and might bother to translate it. That strikes me as so wildly improbable as to be virtually inconceivable.”
The story is now leading every major British news source, so we’ll find out soon enough. But the full implications of this story for the anti-war movement are epic.
DEAN, THE E-CANDIDATE: ABC News asks an interesting question: how come outsider, purist know-it-all candidate Howard Dean has amassed $2.6 million already? The answer is partly the internet. I smell a McCain-like campaign.
THE FAR RIGHT’S ANGER: One sign of the domestic moderation of the Bush administration is that some elements of the religious right are furious. Not so long ago, RNC chair Marc Racicot visited the Human Rights Campaign, the major gay rights group. The Family Research Council has gone nuts about this. FRC’s head, Kenneth Connor, claims that the party chair shouldn’t meet with groups who disagree with official party platform policy. Does that mean that no Republican president should ever address the NAACP, I wonder? Or Hispanic or Jewish groups who don’t agree with everything in the GOP platform? Connor further says that the GOP believes that homosexuality is incompatible with military service. But even the Pentagon doesn’t believe that, and allows closeted homosexuals (and increasingly some not-so-closeted ones) to serve their country. Rcaicot was right to reach out to gays and lesbians. He’s right to implicitly deny that being gay-inclusive and pro-family is somehow an incoherent or un conservative position. Gays are members of families;they always have been and always will be. The question is whther they will be pushed out of family life or included in it. In his private email, Connor calls HRC “a radical organization working to advance an extremist agenda.” This is baloney. I know the gay left; and HRC is the gay center. They increasingly understand thay many gays are conservative and moderate and have intelligently reached out to conservative thinkers, writers and politicians. Heck, Jonah Goldberg and David Brooks addressed the same conference as Racicot. The Bush administration needs to know that its impulse for inclusion is the right one; in fact, it’s the only one that will give the GOP a healthy and moral future.
BBC WATCH: They also tend to get their basic science reporting wrong.
The Dish 