Posted on 09/15/2004 12:09:47 AM PDT by kattracks
DAN RATHER of CBS News appears to have been snookered by a source. As the evidence of fraud piles higher, Rather hunkers deeper into his defensive position and manages to look even more foolish.On “60 Minutes” last week, Rather showed several papers as alleged proof that President Bush used connections to skip some National Guard duty. Immediately after the story aired, some bloggers (a term for people who write Web logs, or journals) analyzed the papers and pronounced them fakes.
Most tellingly, blogger Charles Johnson at www.littlegreenfootballs.com, a widely read and respected conservative blog, produced an exact match of one of the CBS letters simply by typing it in Microsoft Word. The Washington Post also found that the documents appear to be forgeries. Not only are the fonts different from those used in 1973, but the letters contain factual inaccuracies.
The expert CBS said it used to authenticate the papers told The Post, “There’s no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them.”
CBS and Dan Rather got themselves into this mess by inverting a standard rule of journalism. Instead of presuming that things are not what they seem until they are proved to be, Rather and CBS assumption that the documents were authentic, then stubbornly held on to that belief when challenged.
We suspect that CBS and Rather failed to thoroughly screen the documents because their strong anti-Bush bias clouded their judgment. Now they are in the unenviable position of defending obviously fraudulent documents. And this embarrassment is compounded by the humiliation of having the fraud pointed out by amateurs.
To top it off, George Stephanopoulos, currently of ABC News and formerly of The Clinton administration, said on Friday, “A lot of Democrats suspect this was a set up, something set up by Republicans.” So we see that NH Democratic Party Chairman Kathy Sullivan is not the only one to spread unfounded rumors about Republicans.
We will have to wait to discover whether this was a sinister partisan plot or a poorly executed hoax by some well-connected pranksters. What we do know is that the dwindling credibility of CBS News has taken another serious blow.
Allahpundit, I believe, was the one to get this. I excerpted on this, but it's still a lot to get through.
An attitude like that at ABC will get CBS some company...
NO way Rove could be fingered for this one. cBS provided them to the WH, not the WH to cBS!
She knows...
She's allowed to lie about sex under oath. So said Brilliant Constitutional Scholars (TM) at Clinton's impeachement hearings.
I agree. IMHO, the Kerry camp had it's "Fortunate Son" attack ready to go. 60 Minutes II was an opening salvo to be followed by a broad front opened by the DNC, the Kerry camp and various 527's. All using the charges in the "memos" as their foundation.
If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck....
As a former officer Burkett could have done much better than these fakes. He would not have made them up out of whole cloth, but would have used orders he had seen about other matters as a template. What continues to strike me about these documents is how bad they are. I've prosecuted blue collar defendants who turned out letter perfect proof of automobile insurance certificates on their home pc. The were caught only because they actually got in an accident and someone called the (legitimate) 1-800 number on the certificate and found out that they were not insured. These fakes are about 1/2 a notch above the notes Mr. Kotter used to get signed "Epstien's Mother."
You're out of date: Over 85 now.
No.
OETR = Officer Education Training Repository. It's building at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH
The only source of OETR, other than the forgery itself, is from democratic-linked web sites that are duplicating a mis-typed header from a "hole-punched" USAF form.
See the other FR threads.
I'm not saying there were "originals," hand-written or otherwise. I'm saying the secretary may have been an unwitting source of early 1970s TANG office topics. I'd like to know if Burckett or anyone else had contacted her in the last year or two to chat about the old days, (and fish for dirt on Bush, to use in these memos.)
True. Burckett & Barnes. Typing from her "memories"?
Burckett was Army, NG, had motive to use Barnes to get to Rather.
If there were, in any place, originals of any kind, they'ed be visible by now.
There were no originals. The originals were on a CRT screen. But I do think the secretary may have been the source of some of the factoids, (Stodges, etc) working from her memory. I'd like to see her phone records for the last year, and see if she was in touch with any 'rats.
BTW, John Fund's new book on voter fraud is out. I heard him on a radio show, he mentioned the Palm Beach ballot spiking, and Bush's missing 15,000 votes. We need to get a copy of the book, and permission to post that chapter.
Don't you just love it. Now we know. Snooker did it :-}
Read your link re: OETR. THANKS!
Rats would be silly if they weren't so dangerous.
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