That Bulge Again

There are a number of stories the mainstream media should be screaming about nonstop but have either ignored altogether or managed so to downplay that they have almost withered on the vine. Included are these:

1. The outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame
2. The accuracy of the content of the memos about Bush going AWOL
3. The Gannon-Guckert gay-prostitute-fake-journalist story
4. The bulge under Bush's jacket during the debates

Smirking Chimp has published another article about issue number 4 by Dick Ahles entitled "The battle of the (Bush) bulge" that tells how the story was killed by the mainstream media. If you're not outraged, I don't know why not.

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), an online media watchdog, is now reporting that all the White House theories became inoperative in late October when the photo was enhancedby a NASA scientist to better examine the bulge . Robert Nelson has spent 30 years as an astronomer with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech and is part of a photo enhancement team for the Saturn space probe. He concluded the bulge wasn't doctored or the result of a sartorial mishap, but looked for all the world like a device for receiving electronically transmitted material. The photo is available by going to www.fair.org and clicking on the story entitled “The Emperor's New Hump.”

FAIR says Nelson failed to interest newspapers in California and Pittsburgh before offering his photo and findings to The New York Times, which assigned three reporters to the story. On Oct. 26, reporter John Schwartz e-mailed Nelson that the story was “shaping up very nicely, but my editors have asked me to hold off for one day while they push through a few other stories that are ahead of us in line,” according to FAIR.

The next day, Oct. 27 and just six days before the Nov. 2 election, the story failed to appear and Nelson was told it had been killed. The Kerry campaign, as was its habit, blew an opportunity. If Kerry had commented,the media would have given the bulge question the attention it deserved.

The president almost certainly cheated during the debate. The American people had a right to know and they were not informed. The big newspapers and network news organizations should be shouting this from the housetops. Me, I just shout it from my little blog.