…to paraphrase Bartleby. I’ve been intentionally avoiding comment on the 60 Minutes 2 uproar about the forged–or not–documents from Bush’s Air National Guard service.

There has been much praise of the “blogosphere” for uncovering this “story.” And while as a newbie blogger myself, I do think that there is merit to that sort of scrambling angry personal-opinion journalism. But I just watched the follow-up to the story in which Bush’s superior’s secretary said she thought the documents were forged, but that the ideas were not. A sort of third way.

Is this ass-covering on Rather’s part? Maybe. But we can’t really know what’s going on, since we weren’t wherever it was that these memos made their way to CBS. I can’t imagine that CBS made this up, as some blogging conspiracy theorists have suggested. I CAN imagine that someone did. But I could be wrong, and anything I say is speculation.

Which is why we need good, professional journalists, too. Bloggers may have outed the documents, but they’re not going to solve the mystery.