What the Biggest Story Should Be

August is known as a month that no news is made, it's manufactured. Hence we have the Sheehan non-story. The media and the left side of the blogosphere is so into this story that an astounding number of posts at Arianna's site are slamming Bush. The MSM is covering this story with as much vigor as they are using to ignore the Air Scamerica scandal.

But that begs the question, why would the media cover the Sheehan story and ignore what is one of the bigger news stories of the year--the non-inclusion of information that Mohammed Atta was identified in 1999 and the committee knew about it but chose to not include it in the final report? I know why, that was a rhetorical question.

Mark Steyn sums it up succinctly:

How'd that happen? Well, as Felzenberg says so disarmingly, "this information was not meshing with the other information.'' As a glimpse into the mindset of the commission, that's astonishing. Sept. 11 happened, in part, because the various federal bureaucracies involved were unable to process information that didn't "mesh" with conventional wisdom. Now we find that the official commission intended to identify those problems and ensure they don't recur is, in fact, guilty of the very same fatal flaw. The new information didn't "mesh" with the old
information, so they disregarded it.

Of course you must read the whole thing.

John Podhoretz doesn't agree.