For two days now, the best minds and resources of the blogosphere have been concentrated on digging into what’s become known as “nytrogate,” the hit job by CBS and the New York Times on the President that purports to show the Administration’s incompetence in guarding Iraqi ammo dumps following the fall of Baghdad.

Excellent work has been done by Captains Quarters, Powerline, Wizbang and Just One Minute to name a few. These and other center-right blogs have examined in minute detail every possible aspect of the Times story, including finding soldiers with the 3rd ID who were first to arrive on the Al Qaqaa site and testified to the fact that the 380 tons of explosives may in fact have been moved by Saddam before the war even started.

The effort has been as intense and as thorough as the effort devoted to Rathergate. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter one iota.

On election day, perhaps as many as 110 million Americans will go to the polls. The purpose of this piece was to move a very small percentage of that number-perhaps two percent-away from voting for President Bush and towards voting for John Kerry.

That’s a four point swing. And in this election, that could be the ballgame.

All of the fact checking, research, and intelligent speculation done by the collective wisdom of the blogosphere is going for naught because true or false, right or wrong, the story HAS DONE EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS INTENDED TO DO: PUT THE PRESIDENT ON THE DEFENSIVE.

Even if the NY Times were to issue a retraction tomorrow, it would be too late. The story is out there…has been out there for 48 hours. It has dominated the news cycle in a way that Kerry’s lies about his UN “meetings” and recent revelations that Kerry betrayed his country by cooperating with the enemy during the Viet Nam war have not and now, will never do. The story, as they say in the business, has “legs.” And no amount of factual corrections and alternate story telling will change that fact.

Certainly conservative media organs are doing their best to change the tenor of the story. But as of yet, I don’t see it. It’s like the tree falling in the woods…if no one hears it, does it still fall?

Of course it does. But that doesn’t change the fact that NOBODY HEARS IT.

A better analogy is being trapped in a cave. The blogs are yelling for help at the top of their lungs…but all the rescuers hear at the cave entrance are unintelligible noises. The noise tells them the bloggers are alive but beyond that, the words disappear in the echo chamber that is the cave.

The 110 million voters are the echo chamber. At the moment, they are being overloaded with a barrage of ads, news, lies, distortions, half-truths, intimidation, and fear. The two percent of voters this hit piece was targeting are the least attentive amongst us. Hence, when something like this is plastered all over every media outlet for 48 hours, they can’t but help to become aware of it. And this makes any subsequent information that contradicts the original story that much harder to penetrate the clutter.

I don’t know whether the situation can be retrieved at this point. At the very least, this has made the race much closer than everyone thought just 48 hours ago. At worst, it’s cost George Bush a second term.

We need a break…some “smoking gun” revelation that will make this story backfire in Kerry’s face. Right now, all we’ve got is circumstantial evidence that the stuff wasn’t there before our guys secured the location.

We’ve got to find a way to clear the entrance to the cave so the bloggers can be heard.