The Kerry honeymoon is over; the hacks who had spent their wad on Dean, Clark, and other upstarts are now on the Kerry beat. And the Rebulican Wurlitzer is churning out the infantile hits for weak-willed journos.
The preciously titled Kerry Rejects Outsourced Endorsements is a case in point.
Getting into all the ways that this is a terrible article would give me an aneurysm. I'll just focus on the baldfaced lie in article, that "Gore claimed invention of the Internet."
John F. Harris writes on the Kerry campaign's statement that Kerry is not seeking foreign endorsements:
So goes the effort to end the hubbub over perhaps the most damaging boast in U.S. politics since Al Gore claimed the invention of the Internet.
This is a work of remarkable journalistic legerdemain, because Al Gore never claimed the invention of the Internet. Rather, Republican operatives, late night comedians, and journalists falsely stated that Gore did so.
Harris would have been correct to state: "So goes the effort to end the hubbub over perhaps the most damaging slander in U.S. politics since Republicans and journalists claimed that Al Gore claimed the invention of the Internet."
What Gore actually said was
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth, environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
(CNN Late Edition, March 11, 1999)
It was the RNC that originated the falsehood that Gore claimed he invented the Internet, repeated blindly by the AP, Lou Dobbs, and thence to the other media outlets. See the Daily Howler for details.
Furthermore, the statement "Gore was indeed an important early backer of government research funding for the technology that eventually became the Internet" is damning Gore's role with faint praise.
Gore was the Congressional leader in supporting high-speed computer networking, not just through support of technology funding, but also leading the effort to privatize the Internet, allowing it to transform the world economy, ensuring net access to schools and libraries, and a host of other specific activities that led Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, two of the technologists who led the development of the Internet Protocol, to say "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
See First Monday's Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet for reference.
Again, the entire article is a piece of Kurtzian hackery. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to find further examples.