Before everyone freaks out, let’s sit back and take a few deep breaths.

First of all, I am not “avoiding the issue” as one or two people have speculated. I have a day job — a rather intense one — and I got to this as soon as I could. I am not paid to blog, and I do not blog full-time.

Now that everyone has calmed down a bit, let’s look at today’s revelation, look at the flood of moonbat mail and traffic I am receiving, and ask ourselves whether we at Rathergate.com got it wrong.

As of today, we know the following:

1) Brian Darling, legal counsel to freshman Sen. Mel Martinez penned the memo. He has since resigned.
2) Martinez said he inadvertently passed the memo off to Sen. Harkin, thus explaining how it was “distributed.”

From the get-go, the issue here has been whether the charges poised in The Washington Post and ABC News were accurate. As a refresher, the Post alleged the following:

1) Its early story, distributed and printed nationwide via the Post’s wire service, explicitly stated that the memo was written by GOP leadership. UPDATE: Martinez has been in office for three months and is not part of the party leadership.
2) The stories also stated that the memo was distributed to GOP Senators.

As The Washington Times wrote the other day, not one of the 55 GOP Senators said they had seen the memo until it made the news. (Martinez may have some explaining to do on this account).

I always kept the door open on the possibility that some knucklehead with nothing better to do wrote the memo:

This memo could be real – maybe some idiot in a GOP office somewhere decided to jump into the fray and offer some useless advice that no one asked for to begin with. Idiots are not an endangered species in Washington. But as Memogate proved conclusively to the American public, it is up to the media to prove that the memo is real, not up to the Republicans to prove that the memo is fake.

So is the memo real? Yes, since it did indeed come from some knucklehead who felt everyone should know what is on his mind.

But let us look at what Rathergate.com has been after. One by one, let’s ask if the arguments posed by the MSM have been proven:

1) Was the memo written by GOP leadership? No.
2) Was it distributed to GOP Senators? No.

Mickey Kaus points out the same thing I did (hat tip to Powerline):

WaPo’s Mike Allen reports that the now-famous Schiavo “talking points” memo came from freshman GOP senator Mel Martinez’s office. So that mystery is cleared up. The memo wasn’t a fake. But Allen doesn’t come off looking too good in this latest account. a) The memo was apparently not “distributed to Republican Senators by party leaders,” as Allen’s initial story, sent out through the Post news service to other papers, reported. It was–at least judging from today’s account–handed to one Democratic senator, Tom Harkin, by one freshman Republican senator (who isn’t in the party leadership); b) Allen doesn’t explain why he told Howie Kurtz he “did not call them talking points or a Republican memo” when he had in fact done just that in the news service draft; c) Even the later, more “carefully worded” account Allen published in the Post itself was apparently wrong. Allen wrote
In a memo distributed only to Republican senators, the Schiavo case was characterized as “a great political issue”…
This is almost the reverse of what Allen now reports. We know the memo was distributed to at least one Democratic senator. We don’t know whether it was distributed to any Republican senator other th[a]n the senator whose staffer wrote it (although it’s hard to believe it wasn’t given to at least some other GOP lawmakers)…

But certainly whatever legitimate valence Allen’s ‘memo’ story had depended almost entirely on the impression that the memo revealed and represented the strategy of the GOP leaders who pushed the Schiavo bill. If all that was involved was a staff memo Martinez gave to Harkin, Allen’s story was way out of whack. The memo wasn’t close to being worth the play it got in WaPo or in Douglass’ report…

So at this point, do I owe anyone an apology for getting anything wrong? Well, I’ll gladly point out that Tom Harkin’s story apparently has panned out — he did get the memo.

Rathergate.com is not some GOP front organization — my mission is to expose bad journalism. And I believe I have done exactly that — to summarize Kaus, the story now is almost the exact opposite of how the WaPo reported it.

So the answer here is no, Rathergate.com didn’t get it wrong. We raised legitimate questions about the memo’s origin, and have discovered that the MSM got the story wrong from end to end.

But just to be fair, I am now combing over every one of my posts on this subject, and will be updating this post throughout the day with any information that has been proven wrong. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: In this post, I linked to an In the Agora “exclusive” in which Josh Claybourn interviewed some GOP aides who saw the memo being passed. ITA has since realized that it was duped. I never got around to correcting the record, and for that, I do apologize. The post has been updated.

UPDATE 2: Many of my posts have called the memo “apparently bogus,” likely to be bogus,” etc. But yes, a few of my posts state the opinion that the memo was in fact a fake. With today’s revelation, the memo did have an origin from a Republican office — it is not the origin that the Post, ABC News and other MSM agencies have reported, but the memo is authentic nonetheless.

Having corrected the record here and there, allow me to point out that The Post still has not run corrections for its original story, two Reuters stories on its Web site and two columns that incorrectly correct the record.

Upon hearing today’s news, I read through every single post regarding this issue, and immediately corrected my own record. It has been 18 days since the Post broke this story with a major inaccuracy sent out via its wire service.