Stenography 101

Helen Kennedy, ostensibly a Daily News Staff Writer, but for all intents and purposes an overpaid stenographer, is credited with a story today on Page 3 of "New York's Number One Newspaper."

She breathlessly cherry picks an "explosive" story that will soon be on the pages of that paragon of journalism, GQ.

Apparently, someone provided Robert Draper, a writer for the magazine, with classified briefing slides during the early stages of the Iraq War. The slides had Biblical verses on them. Odd? Perhaps. However, who is to go on the record and state that these slides are indeed the real McCoy rather than fancy fakes to deceive? I understand that efforts to control the proliferation of PowerPoint technology are failing.

Apparently these quotations worried nameless Pentagon analysts for fear that they would inflame the Islamic world. If anyone was going to get inflamed, it would have happened shortly after the first tanks rolled into Iraq.

Other snippets abound in this "damming GQ article" alleging that Rumsfeld blocked efforts to present Senator Kennedy the Presidential Medal of Freedom. How or why Rumsfeld would care isn't broached. Ms. Kennedy (A relation perhaps? She doesn't tell.) describes the Senator as cancer-stricken. Alas, the senator's cancer was diagnosed long after Rumsfeld left office, so her adjective is used to provoke a reaction rather than to describe.

As you can imagine, the sources are anonymous but the allegations are treated as, well, like gospel.

Tellingly, the liberal media, and the NYDN which sets its editorial sails to those prevailing winds, fails to even bother attempting to contact either the former President or the Defense Secretary for their views. Nor for that matter does Ms. Kennedy bother to independently confirm the allegations herself.

That would require journalistic skills and that's not the job of a stenographer.

Bush and Rumsfeld may be gone, but they will not be forgotten by those who wish to distract us from the current dangers.

UPDATE: Rumsfeld responds. Quite strenuously.