Of course, this is not the first critical juncture of the election in which the conservative press has become willfully blinded by partisanship. Its clips from the Democratic Convention, and particularly its reviews of Gore's acceptance speech, which produced one of the largest post-convention bounces in modern history, are downright embarrassing. Too busy spouting the party line to realize that Gore's well-received address had in an instant changed the dynamics of the national race, conservative pundits followed the script -- right into the swamp.

National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru wrote, "That smell in Los Angeles isn't just the whiff of patchouli wafting over from the protesters; it's the stench of death emanating from the Gore campaign. The speech was a failure."

Robert Novak agreed, labeled the speech "a flop" and erroneously predicted Gore would come out of the convention facing a six-point deficit in the polls. Fox News' Morton Kondracke did him one better when at the conclusion of the convention, certain he had "witnessed Al Gore kicking away the presidential election," predicted Bush's Labor Day lead would be 12 points. According to Newsweek's Labor Day poll, Kondracke was off by 20 points -- Gore led by eight.

Peggy Noonan, whose once-sharp analytical skills have been dulled beyond recognition by her obsession with all things Clinton, wrote, "Al Gore's acceptance speech was a rhetorical failure and, in my view, a strategic blunder of significant proportions."

That's serious political analysis from some of the supposedly brightest minds in the business? The columns read more like writing submissions for an opening on the RNC communications staff.

That same furious party-line spin was in full view when Bush's DUI story broke a week before the election. Second thoughts about a candidate for president who failed to disclose that he'd been arrested for drunken driving? Please. The right couldn't care less about what the episode said about Bush as a man or a potential leader; they were only interested in one thing: conspiracy theories. Was the Gore camp behind the DUI disclosure? (It wasn't.)

Read in hindsight, the head-scratching dispatches mostly prompt amused chuckles, but at the time, they were supposed to represent serious political reporting. As the story broke, National Review Online weighed in with a breathless account that nearly 25 years ago Maine Democratic activist Tom Connolly, who discovered the DUI information on his own and provided it to a local reporter, "probably knew" Gore communications director Mark Fabiani. The clandestine connection? As college students they "were present together" at the same National Debate Tournament. (Connolly went to school in Maine; Fabiani in California.)

The Wall Street Journal's John Fund, when not busy writing November columns predicting a Rick Lazio victory in New York, noted ominously that Connolly denied knowing Gore spokesman Chris Lehane, even though Lehane "is from Maine."

And what about Dallas Morning News reporter Wayne Slater's contention that he asked Bush point-blank whether or not he'd ever been arrested since 1968, and Bush told him no? National Review editor Rich Lowry took care of that one: "When asked about it most directly -- in the 1998 interview -- Bush more or less owned up to it" (in a non-answer that seems meant to have been readily interpreted as a "yes").

And they say Clinton parses his language.

Arguing in Bush's defense, the New York Post wondered if "getting pulled over and having a ticket written counts as an "arrest"?

No matter, wrote Lowry, since "it's difficult to see how this 24-year-old story will hurt Bush."

Of course, based on exit polling and the extraordinary number of late-deciding voters who went with Gore, it's now clear Bush's DUI story is responsible for today's protracted recount. Without the arrest report (25 percent of the fence-sitters cited it to exit pollsters), Bush would have been declared the winner on Nov. 7.

You'd think scores of conservative observers who have followed Bush's campaign for more than a year would ponder that postscript in print. But apparently, during times of tumult, the conservative press frowns upon independent thinking.

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