Don’t miss Jim Geraghty’s take-apart of Martyr Mapes.

I recall this feeling from arguing with CBS last summer. They would say, “the sky is green, our experts said so.” Bloggers would then go back and check with the experts, who would say, “no, we told CBS the sky is blue.” Days later, CBS would go back to reasserting the sky is green, pretending the counterarguments never happened. It was as if their worldview was surrounded by an impenetrable shield, powerful enough to repel facts of any magnitude.

You’re familiar with the old legal strategy: If you have the facts on your side, argue the facts; if you have the law on your side, argue the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law on your side, then shout a lot and pound the table. We get a lot of shouting and table-pounding in Mapes’s article. Among the things we learn:

Bloggers are “far-right.” Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, and Power Line are “hard-core, politically angry, hyper-conservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS.” The recollections of the folks who actually used typewriters in the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s who doubted CBS’s report have “questionable recollections.” (As opposed to the ironclad recollections of “Lucy Ramirez,” wherever she is.)

Buckhead’s original posting saying that the memos matched nothing he had ever seen in National Guard memos or documents written on typewriters in the 1970s is a “screed.” He’s a lawyer affiliated with two conservative groups, the Southeastern Legal Foundation and the Federalist Society, so he obviously must be lying.

She writes, “the attack on CBS News and the story we aired was just another part of the Bush supporters’ aggressive pattern of sliming anyone and everyone who raised questions about the president.”

She writes, “If I am an elitist liberal, I have to blame it on my privileged background. I grew up in an elitist-liberal hothouse, a tiny farm in Washington State, where for generations my family worked from daylight to darkness, feeding cattle, raising crops, and watching the skies obsessively, hoping for good weather. The people who attacked my story are more gifted at working with fertilizer than facts.”

Pound that table, Mary, pound that table!

Mapes complains that newspapers like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times (ah, those noted propaganda rags of the vast right-wing conspiracy) “were reading the blogs and repeating their talking points without questioning them.”

What “talking points”? LGF typed the text of the memos into Microsoft Word and they matched perfectly! That’s not an assertion; it’s evidence that everybody can see with their own two eyes; no dubious anonymous sources to trust there. What’s to question? If the LGF guys used Windows XP or 2000?

Actually, it was Mac OS X, with Office 2004.