Al Qaqaa: Proof of MSM/DNC Bias

I've been saving this story for a while, because it's so delicious. In March, Jonah Goldberg expertly recalled the shrill rantings of the MSM/DNC (a singular noun) regarding al Qaqaa. You'll recall that al Qaqaa was, for a week prior to the presidential election, the most important story on Earth .

Al Qaqaa was the monstrous weapons cache that wasn't properly secured after Saddam fell. Or so the stories went. And it was due, one would surmise from these stories, to the ineptitude of (a) President Bush; (b) Donald Rumsfeld; (c) the U.S. Military; or (d) all of the above. Problem was... the story didn't hold water. I haven't seen many references to al Qaqaa since the election. I'm not the only one.

The New York Times splashed the news on its front page and didn't stop splashing it for a week. In all, the Times ran 16 stories and columns about al-Qaqaa, plus seven anti-Bush letters to the editor on the subject over an eight-day period. Editorial boards across the country hammered the "outrage" for days. It led all the news broadcasts. It became the central talking point of the Kerry campaign, with John Kerry bellowing his indignation at the administration's incompetence at every stump stop. Maureen Dowd wrote a column about it, titled "White House of Horrors." ... ...So, anyway, I'd forgotten about all this. Bush won the election despite the al-Qaqaa drumbeat from Kerry and his surrogates in and out of the press. But Byron York, my colleague at National Review, didn't forget. He wondered, whatever happened to The Biggest Story on Earth? The answer, it turns out, is nothing. The Times has not run a single story about the al-Qaqaa story since November 1...

Read the whole thing. And, please, sit down while you're reading it.

Jonah Goldberg: Remember al-Qaqaa?