One More Post on The Pelosi Smear

And I hope it's my last.

Congressman Adam Putnam, the guy who said this at the beginning of the Pelosi Plane Smear:

This is not about having secure communications and secure aircraft available to her. It's about an arrogance of extravagance that demands a jumbo jet that costs $22,000 an hour to operate to taxi her and her buddies back and forth to California.

And said that her desire for a large plane is an:

an extravagance of power that the taxpayers won't swallow.

Now admits that he had no personal knowledge of any Pelosi request - he was just commenting on the anonymously sourced story at the Washington Times.

The paper where he made the admission, The Tampa Tribune, goes on:

He calls the Pelosi plane story, whatever its legitimacy, "the first break [Republicans] have had from the media in driving our message since before the Mark Foley story broke." [emphasis added]

So he said all that and he's not even sure the story's true? That it was just an opportunity for the Republicans to "drive their message" regardless of the legitimacy of the story?

For the record, the paper itself goes on the record about the story:

It turns out there's no evidence Pelosi requested any such thing.

Now what of our own homespun Pelosi Plane expert? Ruth Ann Dailey wrote a week ago:

[T]he new Democratic speaker rejected the 12-seat Gulfstream 3 jet that her Republican predecessor had used and asked for something much larger.

And looking at her defense column of her earlier smear column, it seems pretty obvious that she, too, relied heavily on the anonymous sourced reporting at the Washington Times.

Will she soon admit, too, that there's no evidence that the Speaker "requested" (or asked for, or demanded, or whatever) a larger plane? Will she soon admit that she, too, doesn't really know whether the story's true, as Congressman Adam Putnam has?

Maybe someone should ask her. I will and I'll post whatever she writes.