It Is Worth Noting

Happy Belated Fathers' Day to each of you fathers out there. I hope you had a blessed day.

Just a brief note before I get back to writing (tomorrow), having taken a brief hiatus from my duties.

The Downing Street Memo is heating up in the United States, particularly in a small congressional caucus, and is thus heating up the blogosphere. Rushing to and fro are the accusers, some suggesting the memo is enough to impeach the president; others, that the memo is a fraud.

To the latter group, that the memo is a fraud, I would point out what seems to be a blog-fixation on the genesis or origins of the memo: who wrote it? why? on what kind of paper? etc. That it is reported by the AP that the London Times reporter who first brought the memo to public scrutiny confessed to having copied originals using a typewriter, and then destroyed the originals to protect the identity of his source, deserves serious analysis, and even lends merit to suspicion. But the fixation on the external rather than the internal problems with the memo seems too easy, too predictable and maybe even too headstrong. The memo, as I suggested on May 22 in Daniel Schorr and the Downing Street Memo, contains sufficient internal problems to justify a healthy suspicion. No doubt, the AP report is important, but the internal dimensions of the memo strike me as more revealing than any other report thus far. Who knows?

It's going to be fun to see where this all leads.

Contratimes