NYTro-gate misfires, CBS undies exposed

Never trust a lefty journalist in a time of war. They do not know how to hold their fire. Stonewall Jackson would be so ashamed of them.

Thank God.

The New York Times (NYT) missing ammo story has blown up in their face. Being dubbed NYTrogate in blogdom (thanks to Polipundit) it has taken less than 24 hours to reveal the fact that the alleged 380 tons of high grade explosives was not found at the ammo dump when the 101st Airborne arrived. How do we know? NBC had a team of imbedded reporters with the 101st, and NBC reported Monday evening that the ammo was already gone.

(Or as Bill Murray might have said in Stripes, "Blown up, sir!" That's one of the possibilities.)

Ah, but it gets better still. Drudge reports today that 60 MINS PLANNED BUSH MISSING EXPLOSIVES STORY FOR ELECTION EVE. Well, isn't that sweet. A scary Halloween surprise for the Bush-Cheney re-elect team with little more than a day to go before voting begins and no time for counter-investigation of the story.

Except that the NYT wouldn't and couldn't wait to dish out the dirt in the final week of the campaign. This tells us a couple of things:

1. The story was not well researched. If the NYT reporters knew how old and flimsy the story was, they would have held off until later in the campaign cycle. (Note we say they would've "held off," not spiked the story.)

2. CBS probably did not know the NYT was working with the same "United Nations" sources on the same story. Either that or CBS had figured out that it was a bogus tale of limited legs and figured the NYT staff was smart enough to know that too.

3. It says that CBS refuses to crawl out of the slime-pit it has created for itself. Even in the wake of Rathergate they have learned nothing. In the words of Polipundit:

They refuse to release the results of the RatherGate investigation until after the election because it might affect the election.
Bottom line: CBS is fine with last-minute stories that “affect the election” in favor of Kerry. Stories that might help President Bush are ruthlessly suppressed.

So where did the ammo go?

No one knows for sure but the most likely explanation is that it got moved by Saddam's Iraqi forces sometime between March 8, 2003, and April 10, 2003. That's a little over a month in which a lot of men, machinery and materiel were moving here and there. There was a window of opportunity and someone went through it.

Is it George W. Bush's fault? Only if you buy into the notion that the world was safer with those 380 tons sitting there under Saddam's jurisdiction with pretty little plastic IAEA tags placed on 'em. (No wait, it is not even clear from the evidence that the IAEA even tagged the stuff.) In reality, the fault could be with all those "world test" types like John Kerry who forced us to delay and delay while the inspectors were run through Saddam's silly WMD drill. If the U.S. had gone in earlier, there would not have been enough time to remove the ammo.

So should we blame this problem on John Kerry? No. He's proven himself as a "not responsible" man.
But we can blame John Kerry for rushing to the microphone with NYTro-gate and declaring to the world what an incompetent president Bush is. Wrong! The incompetence is with the NY Times, CBS 60 Minutes and the politicians who are in bed with them.

UPDATE -- Captain's Quarters as usual has an angle worthy of view. A teaser:

One can understand the reluctance of the New York Times to backpedal on what it thought was a sure-fire takedown of George Bush, eight days before the election, even though their reporters and editors wound up only doing a half-ass job of research. (They undoubtedly did not plan on having NBC make them look like idiots.)

Read all of it.