Worst October Surprise, Ever!

It was only yesterday that the New York Times reported that 380 tons of explosives had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from a facility in Iraq. The Kerry campaign had apparently been tipped by their own sources about this bombshell - or empty bombshell, I guess - and virtually within minutes Kerry was thundering the appalling news before his captive, terrified audiences. CNN set out to elaborate on the story: Condoleezza Rice knew about the greatest heist in world history several day ago - cover up, cover up!

Even as this mock outrage was pleasantly seeping through the veins of the barely loyal opposition, like China White through a starved junkie, by late yesterday the nation's sober persons were learning that the story was total cow confetti : The facility was already empty when our troops reached it in April 2003, the day after the fall of Baghdad. An imbedded NBC correspondent reported it as such at the time, and NBC was not backward about pointing this out again.

Today we learn that CBS news had planned to "break" this bogus story on October 31 (the last day for it to qualify as an October Surprise!) but the NYT beat them to it. Gosh, if we were suspicious types, it would almost look like CBS knew the story was damaged goods, and they planned to spring it on the eve of the election so there would be no time to debunk it.

And Cliff May at The Corner says:

Sent to me by a source in the government: “The Iraqi explosives story is a fraud. These weapons were not there when US troops went to this site in 2003. The IAEA and its head, the anti-American Mohammed El Baradei, leaked a false letter on this issue to the media to embarrass the Bush administration. The US is trying to deny El Baradei a second term and we have been on his case for missing the Libyan nuclear weapons program and for weakness on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”

If they were trying to scare us with this one, it just isn't very scary to see CBS drop its pants. We've seen that already.

UPDATE: And, as of 4:00 PM EST, CBS is still running the false report on their website. Pull up your pants, for God's sake, think of the children ...

Some back and forth on this, at Winds of Change. I can summarize my position as follows: Given that those syphilitic terrorist bastards (sometimes called "The Iraqi Resistance" - or "The New Minutemen" by you Michael Moore fans) have no vehicles available to them apart from the occasional civilian passenger conveyance, how many Datsun 4x4 trucks would it take to steal 380 tons of material? (To avoid the massive aerial and satellite reconnaissance of the area surrounding Baghdad, assume that Datsun 4x4 trucks are invisible.)