For those of you who are still interested, the post I wrote the other day about the President skipping out on the historical Salute to Heroes Inaugural Banquet & Ball took on a life of it’s own. We got linked to more than 50 other blogs because of the single link I put on Little Green Football’s Link Viewer. Those 50 blogs were little ones and HUGE ones.
The first guy to pick up on the post was Mr Wolf at Blackfive who also wrote about it at Pajama Media from there it took on a life of it’s own (about 300,000 hits here in two days). On a story I sat on for 18 hours while I decided whether to post it or not.
Before I posted it, we were actually getting hits from search engines that were asking if President Obama had attended the Ball based on TSO’s first post of that day about his stalking of MOH recipients – so folks were wondering. Finally I decided to run with it.
Immediately, the first wave of believers applauded, the second wave was the unbelievers. They fanned out across the internet and attacked the story wherever it popped up. Some leftist bloggers accused us of deleting comments (not realizing that I don’t sit here 24 hours every day monitoring the spam and spam-like comments) then the doubters did their superficial Google searches and determined 1) the ball was canceled so we were lying, or 2) the ball was merged with another one so we were lying, or 3) Obama did come to the ball so we were lying, or 4) so what?
First thing Thursday morning, the American Legion put up an article about another ball. The VFW took down their article about the Ball. This only confounded me because I was trying to prove it actually happened the way I reported it. So my only alternative was to point people to the hotel to prove it had indeed happened. Unfortunately there are two hotels with the same name a few blocks apart and I pointed people to the wrong one – further confounding the process.
In the interim, other bloggers were dealing with the unbelieving trolls. Finally, I got a frustrated email from Mr Wolf this morning. Eventually, he called the American Legion and he’s now updated his post at both Blackfive and Pajamas Media with what he gleaned from the good folks in the PR office at the Legion.
Here on this blog, I finally got the right hotel and the right phone number at about the same time as a reader David Bell posted his own email from the Legion. The thread at Little Green Footballs grew to over a 1000 comments, and our thread is over 300 comments long. At PJM, someone even called us the “Scott Thomas Beauchamp of the Right”. Well, I don’t see any apologies from the doubters, so I won’t apologize for my missteps. In fact, the doubters have all fled.
My regular readers know the extent I will go to for the truth, and newer visitors might not, so I forgive them for doubting me this time. There’s a real interesting story behind all of this confusion that I can’t relate right now. Maybe if you get me drunk at the April get-together.
But, it demonstrates what we’re in for every time we post something that makes Obama look bad, even if it’s true. And as big a story as this was on the internet, the MSM still hasn’t picked it up. So we have the responsibility to post nothing but the truth and to have a defense lined up before we hit that “send” button.
