It may have been a fake but Bush was AWOL. (Link via TBogg.)
This is how arguments are won in the internet age focus on trivialities and ignore the larger picture. If there’s a typo in your message board post, then you are clearly a worthless asshat who should be ignored by all reasonable people, blah blah blah. If you got suckered by somebody with forged memos and god knows what agenda then your entire career should be deep-sixed.
A few months back, the Times op-ed page asked various bloggers mostly right wingers what they thought the most important story of the election was. Some of the give-em-an-inch-and-they-think-they’re-rulers crowd nominated themselves, and their obsession with these memos, as the most important story of the 2004 election cycle. And maybe they were right, in one sense: maybe they’ve helped usher us into a new era. Call it the Age of Obsessive Nitpicking. (Or, more accurately for the obsessive nitpickers in the audience the Age of Obsessive and Generally Misinformed Nitpicking.)
But that’s not exactly something to celebrate.
…there’s a good overview of the whole mess here.