The inept LA Times effort to smear bloggers—GOP Activist Made Allegations on CBS Memos—has now been picked up and promoted by Editor and Publisher, with a really dumb title: ‘I Am Buckhead’: Newspaper Exposes Blog Folk Hero. “Folk hero?” Please.

His identity, the Times says, “is likely to fuel speculation among Democrats that the efforts to discredit the CBS memos were engineered by Republicans eager to undermine reports that Bush received preferential treatment in the National Guard more than 30 years ago.” GOP officials have denied this.

Note to Editor and Publisher and to the clueless LA Times: there is no “effort” to discredit the memos. The memos have been discredited. Period. Full stop. They are forgeries. They are the fruit of a poisoned tree. No amount of idiotic finger-pointing and lame conspiracy theorizing will erase that simple, damning fact.

I had a telephone conversation with the author of the LA Times hit piece (Peter Wallsten) last week, and he asked me several times if I knew who “Buckhead” was (no), or if I had been in contact with anyone from the RNC (no), or if I knew of any other bloggers who had been in contact with the RNC (no). His agenda was clear even then.

Here’s another interesting fact. I’ve now spoken to at least a dozen newspapers, and had my words quoted many times. In every conversation I’ve made sure to point out that I’ve voted Democratic my whole life, but that I now support President Bush. Not one of these papers thought this was noteworthy enough to print, and with the publication of this LA Times smear job we see why: it doesn’t fit their program.