John Kerry had more credibility than the AP!

John Kerry’s claims to his medals in Vietnam has more credibility than the Associated Press’ claims about its reporting of the six Sunnis purportedly set afire by Shiites.

As we used to say in the Marine Corps, that’s lower than whale sh_t, which lays on the bottom of the ocean, and you know how low that is.

Kerry’s medals were issued, however manipulatively or erroneously, by an official U.S. military process. The AP’s source for its story is not the policeman he and the AP claims he is, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials, and the AP refuses to produce him.

Kerry mustered several named boatmates to support parts of his claims, although far more fellow and chain of command witnesses saw otherwise. The AP says it has, afterwards, found three witnesses, who are unnamed and not produced. The AP “reporters” who say they spoke to the mysterious “policeman” or the “witnesses” are unnamed, and in the case of one such “AP reporter” his provenance is suspect and he has cited for other reports several other Iraqi “police” who are not.

Kerry's medals resulted from actual combat events. The AP's narrative fails to produce the immolated bodies and their relatives, the AP's narrative shrinks from 5 or 6 mosques to one, and that one's damages are actually from an earlier incident.

Kerry’s claims, once exposed as either outright lies or gross exaggerations, engaged the major media in ignoring the contrary evidence, but in a very few cases – such as the imaginary trip to Cambodia – where the evidence was incontrovertible, at least that was admitted by the major media. The AP, and its sisters at the New York Times and elsewhere, with even more personal stake in the matter of their own veracity, have not even admitted the above but just baldly stand by their assertions.

I haven’t bothered to insert all the links to the above, as almost every word would be highlighted to a virtual encyclopedia of sources. Just keep reading FloppingAces, as a key entry point, scroll back through his entries, and follow the path for yourself.

AND while you’re at it, get updated with the “story” that even the New York Times can’t find, but blames the bloggers for.

Why is it that the "agenda" of the bloggers--finding out the truth--somehow seems so alien and suspicious to [NYT’s] Zeller and his colleagues? Imagine! Bloggers who want to know whether what the media reported is true!

Even though:

Left out of the article, as Allah notes, is Zeller's discovery that the NYTimes reporter in Iraq could not substantiate the story. Zeller published the little-noticed e-mail he received from Times reporter Ed Wong on his blog last week:
Hi Tom,
You ask me about what our own reporting shows about this incident. When we first heard of the event on Nov. 24, through the A.P. story and a man named Imad al-Hashemi talking about it on television, we had our Iraqi reporters make calls to people in the Hurriya neighborhood. Because of the curfew that day, everything had to be done by phone. We reached several people who told us about the mosque attacks, but said they had heard nothing of Sunni worshippers being burned alive. Any big news event travels quickly by word of mouth through Baghdad, aided by the enormous proliferation of cell phones here. Such an incident would have been so abominable that a great many of the residents in Hurriya, as well as in other Sunni Arab districts, would have been in an uproar over it. Hard-line Sunni Arab organizations such as the Muslim Scholars Association or the Iraqi Islamic Party would almost certainly have appeared on television that day or the next to denounce this specific incident. Iraqi clerics and politicians are not shy about doing this. Yet, as far as I know, there was no widespread talk of the incident. So I mentioned it only in passing in my report.
Best,
Ed Wong