CBS News collaborator Josh Marshall is working feverishly to pump new life into John Kerry's Bush-gave-bin-Laden-a-pass-at-Tora-Bora story:

What you simply cannot say is that the whole thing never happened. And yet that is precisely what the president and the vice president are now doing: Simply denying everything. Who you gonna believe? Me or your lyin' eyes?

They are, in old fashioned English, lying.

His proof point? Old Washington Post stories - stories which had some blatant errors in them (such as reporting that Gen. Tommy Franks ran the war from Tampa. Franks was actually running the war from the "area of responsibility," as his book points out.)

As Franks' second-in-command, retired Gen. Michael DeLong, said to The Command Post few weeks ago, Kerry simply doesn't know what he's talking about:

Sen. Kerry didn’t know what happened. He’s no more better informed than the armchair generals who went after us (on TV.) And what was going on at the time, where bin Laden was in the Tora Bora caves, there was a tribal area that was full of civilians. You couldn’t go up there with soldiers of any force – especially us – because we would have been fighting them to get to bin Laden. Whether we would have gotten to him remains to be seen. This was a tribe on the border, and the only people who were accepted up there was the Pakistani army. You know how tough guarding a border is – with Texas and New Mexico and Arizona for example.

We didn’t kill any civilians unnecessarily up there. We know for a fact from our multiple intelligence sources that we wounded bin Laden. But yes, he did get away. If we had killed a number of civilians, our chances of getting elections in Afghanistan would have never happened. It was a diplomatic, not a political call. It was a call to get this country back together again. We knew the death or capture of bin Laden was important. But getting rid of al Qaeda and getting the country feeling good, feeling nationalistic, was important.

Who ya gonna believe? One of the men who called the shots, or a senator stuck at 46 percent in the polls?

What Marshall doesn't explain is why nobody has seen bin Laden since Tora Bora, or why there have been no major, catastrophic terror attacks on U.S. soil since then.