Back in 2000, when Al Gore battled US President George W. Bush for the White House, only the most technologically-savvy had heard of blogs (Web logs).
Four years on, the self-appointed army of fact checkers and commentators has become a parallel media for many US Internet users.
And what, for supporters of Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry, was a terrible late summer and September (partly because of the blog-boosted impact of the Swift Boat veterans) has now turned into a rosy autumn. The pro-Bush bloggers, who scored a hit in securing an apology from CBS over its story on Bush's time in the Texas air guard, were last week in retreat.
Joshua Micah Marshall, who maintains the respected Talking Points Memo, goes in for the kill over what he sees as the Bush administration's collapsing rationale for the Iraq war. He is most incensed by Bush's attempt to draw the oil-for-food program into the mix.
"That's the new casus belli -- corruption," he writes. "You can't make this stuff up."
"[It] makes me feel not only sorry for my country but also sorry for the Kerry campaign's strategists ... What sort of supple and outside-box mind can possibly predict what arguments the president and his advisers will come up with next?" he added.
Wonkette, called "gossipy, raunchy, potty-mouthed" by the New York Times, throws in a few satirical suggestions of possible new justifications for the war. That former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein "reads books", "throws like a girl" or "is too tall" -- does this all sound a little like Senator Kerry? -- are in her top 10.
The growing confidence leads Dave Pell's Electablog to republish its post on Bush's supposedly Oedipal relationship with his father. The argument is that Bush Jr, as Kerry suggested in the first debate, should have taken advice from Bush Sr over Iraq but, Pell argues, he wanted to be seen to succeed in the Middle East where his father did not.
"Bush is like Hamlet without the indecisiveness," he says scathingly.
Over at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, which is moving away from Bush, some readers are a little perturbed.
"Slow down on the Republican-bashing, my boy. We understand that you're unhappy with the way the war is being handled, as are many of us. But dear God! Do you really think Kerry would improve things?" writes one.
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