CBS’s Leslie Stahl made an incredibly unimpressive appearance on Howard Kurtz’s “Reliable Sources” on CNN this morning.

In case you missed it (hopefully you had something more interesting to be doing on a Sunday morning), here was her exchange with Howie about CBS’s original plan to drop the Al-Qaqaa story tonight, on the second to last day before the election.

Kurtz asked: “Wouldn’t it have looked awful to drop that kind of journalistic bomb in the last 48 hours of the campaign?”

Here was her response:

Well, I know there have been questions about that, a lot of questions. I think it all started by some blogger somewhere. But what are you going to do, Howie? You’ve got a story. When you get it, when you can get it organized, when you can get it checked out — you know how hard it is to get people at the Pentagon to return your phone calls. Just to check it out.

This is when it was supposed to be ready. It wasn’t a question of the election. It was how soon can we put these pieces together. Sometimes you can put a piece together quickly, and sometimes you just have to wait until your sources nail it down for you. And that’s what happened in this case. I’m being very specific.

So, what exactly is Stahl saying?

Is she saying that The New York Times, which broke the story on Monday, Oct. 25 — six days ago — did so without nailing down all the facts?

Is she saying that CBS News is a week slower in getting stories on air than the Times is to get them to print?

Somehow, I don’t think she would stand behind either one of those statements, though elements of both could be at work. More likely, she’s absolutely full of it and doing what little she can do to defend the indefensible.

And I love “some blogger somewhere.” Folks over at CBS apparently were really traumatized by Rathergate. Unfortunately, they must still be in shock, because they haven’t modified their behavior.

And when they get caught, they just lie and lie and lie.

AND PS:

When she says, “It wasn’t a question of the election,” does she mean that CBS would have held the story another week if it needed more work? I guess we should give them the benefit of the doubt…