Incredible. On September 8th and 9th, CBS's 60 Minutes II with Dan Rather and The Boston Globe both ran with a story featuring 'new' documents that raised questions about George W. Bush's service in the National Guard. Less than a day later, the guys at PowerLine, with help from Drudge Report and dozens (if not hundreds) of readers, blew CBS out of the water with the revelation that those documents which were so damning were actually forged. And now? ABC is investigating, the Washington Post is running the forgery story on tomorrow's front page, and CBS is holding an inquiry.

All of this while I'm in the middle of writing an op-ed/informative column on why blogs are reliable as sources of information. I'm absolutely stunned.

That's impressive. But what's much more impressive is this: it all happened in a day. Only a few years ago, the CBS story would have run for days, and any questions wouldn't have made it beyond obscure internet bulletin boards. Today - I mean literally, today - the CBS story was fact-checked up-and-down by 'amateurs,' their findings shared, and the conclusions made known to newsrooms in a few hours.