WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET THE POST LOOKING AT MILITARY RECORDS? A story that’s bad for Kerry’s critics, I guess. No mention at all of the Cambodia story, though, in which Kerry’s critics have been proved right (as even the Kerry campaign has admitted) — and which the Post has ignored.

UPDATE: Charles Austin notices something unusual here:

Isn’t it interesting that in the case of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the “correction” appears on page one above the fold, while the original news was buried on page 19.

Something of a reversal there. There are those who email me to say that focusing on this stuff isn’t the best way to get Bush re-elected. Fine, maybe so — but getting Bush re-elected isn’t what I’m about. I like him better than Kerry, true, but he has people paid to get him re-elected, and I’m not one of them. (And given their silence on this issue, maybe talking about it is a bad move for Bush.) But this story seems to me to be absolutely fascinating in that it reveals just how in the tank for the Democrats the mainstream media are, and how little the vaunted Cronkitean claims of objectivity and research and factual accuracy really mean when the chips are down. What’s more, lots of people are noticing.

To me, that’s a bigger deal than the underlying issue or even, in some ways, the election itself. Elections come and go, politicians come and go, and pretty much all of them turn out to be disappointments one way or another. But the “Fourth Estate” is a big part of the unelected Permanent Government that in many ways does more to run the country than the politicians. And it’s unravelling before our very eyes, which I think is the biggest story of the election so far. (More thoughts in the updates here.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related thoughts from Robert Clayton Dean here and here.