CBS News, Where the Sap Runs Deep

longleggedfly ^ | Sep 12, 2004 | JCEccles

[JCEccles]

Apparently nine out of ten professional document examiners and most sensible Americans now agree: Dan Rather and the 60 Minutes news crew published forged documents ("Ra^thergate") in a strained attempt to prove that President George W. Bush used his family connections to skip out on training and military commitments and to make life miserable for his commanders in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s.

Were any criminal laws broken in the fomenting of this phantasm of fraud? In my opinion as a former prosecuting attorney, I suspect there were. At a minimum, I believe Texas State authorities would be justified in opening an investigation into charges of false personation and tampering with public documents. The initial focus of the inquiry would be on the so-far unidentified creator of the forgeries. The focus could be rapidly expanded to include other parties depending on how the evidence develops.

The "George W. Bush was a Vietnam War-dodging 'fortunate son' slacker" claim has been a tenet of faith for liberals for years. The claim gained renewed currency this year after documents viciously critical of Bush were discovered on Christmas day in a Dom Perignon bottle floating in the Mekong River deep inside Cambodia by a windsurfing John F. Kerry on holiday retreat with some old gun-running pals from the CIA.

Okay, I made up that stuff in the last sentence. But it isn't any harder to believe it than it is to accept the truth claims of the Texas Air National Guard memoranda.

To accept the documents at face value you must also believe that a paperwork-hating jet jockey commander, Lt Col Killian, (conveniently deceased now for over 20 years)--who had never been seen near a typewriter keyboard--nevertheless typed and hid away for long-term safekeeping several proportionately-spaced official memoranda about one lowly first lieutenant under his charge.

You must further believe that Lt Col Killian did not use just any typewriter, but the most expensive and sophisticated portable typesetting device available at the time. And then you'll want to avoid actually comparing the text, because it simply doesn't match.

You must believe that it is by spare bald coincidence that the line breaks, character spacing, and superscripts in the memoranda perfectly match the line breaks, character spacing, and superscripts generated automatically by Microsoft Word at its default settings.

Similarly, you must believe that Lt Col Killian made no typing errors and did not use hyphens to break long words or use the margin release to complete short words or sentences as typists typically did in that day. Rather, you must believe that the typewriter-hating Lt Col Killian was blessed with a brain hard-wired to perform like today's most highly sophisticated word-processing programs.

You must believe that it was by some weird and whacky coincidence that Lt Col Killian, whose son and wife said admired and liked George W. Bush, anticipated the Democrats' sour complaints about the president and took care to phrase the memoranda very narrowly and precisely to boost with maximum effect and oomph the political fortunes of Bush's Democratic rival for the presidency some 30 years later.

And you must believe these things without further proof, because Dan Rather and CBS News have flatly refused to allow anyone to go behind the documents to discover who provided them and what their motivations might have been. That is, you must believe them without posing further questions at all simply because the Bush-hating liberal Democrat Dan Rather says that he believes them.

There is principle of logic known as Occam's razor which counsels that when faced with competing interpretations of the same evidence, one should pare away the complex and choose the simpler and more elegant interpretation as the correct interpretation. The Rathergate forgeries are so festooned with the slag of media hubris and the detritus of flagrant fraud, Occam's razor won't cut it. You need Occam's blowtorch.

CBS's stubborn and unblinking denial of the overwhelming evidence of forgery in the Rathergate debacle reminds me of an ATM thief who was court-martialled in the 1980s at an Air Force base in the western US. From the moment of the thief's arrest until he was led away in handcuffs to jail he strictly denied he had anything to do with stealing the money. Never mind the uncontested testimony of multiple witnesses who placed him at the ATM kiosk at precisely the time of the unauthorized withdrawals. Ignore the fact that he had no alibi that would place him somewhere else. The prosecutor had the thief on film. At his trial the accused insisted on taking the stand to deny the theft. On cross-examination the prosecutor dimmed the lights and rolled the film.

"Staff Sergeant Bonehead, isn't that your face we now see on the screen?"

"Nope."

"Then those aren't your ears, the left one slightly higher on the head than the right one, with a clipped appearance at the top?"

No, sir."

And those aren't your glasses, the same pair you're wearing today?"

"Sorry. No"

"And that isn't your nose, with a slight leftward shift from the midpoint down, as if from an old break in the cartilage?"

(pausing about five seconds to peer long and hard at the nose) "No sir, that is a nose, but it ain't mine."

"And that isn't your fatigue shirt, with the name 'Bonehead' on it?"

"Sir, there's a lot of Boneheads in the world. I ain't the only one."

Obviously the thief's name was not "Bonehead." But it might as well have been. And if there is a family tree of Boneheads rooted in the soil of wretched humanity, a good geneologist might place Dan Rather near the trunk, where the sap runs deep.

[JCEccles]

A related article about possible criminal charges may be found here.

[JPJones]

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[jjmcgo]

There were ATMs in the 1980s?

[JCEccles]

There were ATMs in the 1980s?

Of course. Al Gore was busy getting the Internet up and running, too.