Posted on 09/13/2004 8:26:47 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Bush Air National Guard Documents Could Be Intentional Hit On Kerry
Despite Dan Rather’s insistence on conducting what amounts to his last stand (he’ll be “urged” by CBS to pack it in after yet another scandal), the alleged Air national Guard documents are beginning to look like sucker bait that Rather took hook, line and sinker. And that sucker bait came from the left, it appears.
The problem with the documents is that many aspects of the “facts” are too easy to disprove and may have intentionally been planted to implode Kerry’s credibility and campaign. Consider the fact that the font typesetting was easily recognized within hours by bloggers and there happened to be an antique IBM typewriter fanatic who has a web site called “Selectric.Org” that is utterly the last word on what font types were available when, what those fonts looked like and even postings of examples of every font available for IBM Selectric typewriters way back when. Strike one.
Then there is the pesky little fact that the principles allegedly involved with the memos are all dead and we are supposed to believe that Lt. Bush’s commanding officer, Lt. Colonel Killian, just happened to have “personal files” that some diligent person searched and came up with the memos. But, according to Killian’s ex-wife and son, the former Bush commanding officer couldn’t even type and to their knowledge had no personal files anywhere. Also, the documents writer’s use of military titles such as “Lt. Colonel” for Killian and “1st Lieutenant Bush” for the president are references that no military man would ever use. Just ask anyone who has been in the military: “LCol” or “Lt.Col” is what is affixed to documents to denote the rank “Lieutenant Colonel” and “1Lt.” Is usually what the Air Force uses to refer to a First Lieutenant. The use of improper titles for Air National Guard officers is so inept and transparent that it could only have been intentional – no document forgers in their right minds would fail to note the proper abbreviations for officers on real documents while committing the forgeries. Then there is the pesky matter of the organizational headers on the memos. The memos that do have headers simply have them typed, another no-no that numerous military types are currently telling the few media outlets willing to listen. Strike two.
Colonel Walter Staudt, who allegedly had Colonel Killian write reports favorable to George Bush had retired a full eighteen months before the date on the Air National Guard (ANG) documents. The left-wing newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, has articles and records that prove Colonel Staudt left the Texas ANG long before the memos were allegedly written at his behest. And the Dallas Morning News had investigated that way back in 1999. Ooops. But the mainstream leftist media is, necessarily for their ‘cause’, leaving all that out. I suppose the logic of the NYT, LAT, WP et al is that to ‘feed’ all of the truth too quickly would be counter to what their pals in the DNC have indicated they would like done. Oh, the truth will bubble to the top of the cesspool – and the Media-Elite know that – they just want to manage the drip-drip so the facts will get lost against other, intentional ‘background noise’ they manufacture. Strike three.
Now strikes four, five, six and seven. The forgeries were allegedly “investigated” by CBS News. But it turns out the investigation went no further than a handwriting expert who appeared to authenticate the Texas ANG documents. But the “expert” is simply a handwriting analyst and stated he cannot comment upon any other aspect of the documents. Hmmmm. Given the astonishingly short time in which the bloggers spotted discrepancies, it is possible that CBS did have document experts examine the memos but CBS decided to omit their findings and protest that CBS’ “integrity” should suffice for any doubts you may have. I assume that’s the same integrity CBS exhibited in the “documentary” The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, little more than a crude smear against the character and honor of General William Westmoreland, who commanded all U.S. Army ground forces in Vietnam. Perhaps CBS is hoping, with clenched teeth and crossed fingers that no one will remember they were sued big-time over the Westmoreland smear and finally admitted the smear had been edited to skewer the general. Elite-Media is ‘forgetting’ to remind any of us of that fact. Not one mention appears anywhere that I can find – that CBS has had monstrous problems with lying and credibility in the past, especially with The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.
I recently read that Liberal media is the only business segment in existence that has allowed business failures and bankruptcies due to ideological leanings. Any other business, the writer stated, would take corrective actions when it was clear the bias was hurting the business model and affecting sales and ad revenues. But Liberal media is the sole exception and newspaper executives have, in the past, let their ships sink rather than take corrective action, which would be an admission of bias and malfeasance. An interesting assertion indeed, and true, if you are possessed of the critical faculties to see and admit the truth. I wonder what the stockholders of the innumerable failed print organs would have thought about saving the paper versus letting it sink in an attempt to save the image of the executive fat cats, who later said something like “changing markets” are to blame for the demise of many daily papers. Never mind many of the people that constitute those changing markets sought other sources of news due to “blatant bias” not “changing markets”, having become weary of the manufactured drumbeats. Consumers, like the oppressed of the earth, will indeed ‘vote with their feet’ and as we have seen the media consumers are voting for Fox News Channel and the few print organs like The Washington Times, The New York Post and the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal as a refuge from Dan Rather and his pals.
The forgeries are amateurish, crude and blatant. It is entirely possible that whoever typed the phony memos into Microsoft Word using default margins and the default Times New Roman font was counting on the rapid exposing of the forgeries. Another sure bet was the fact that neither the Kerry Campaign, the DNC or CBS News would give the documents more than a cursory overview before belatedly declaring them ‘authentic’ and trumpeting the long-sought smoking gun against the president – ‘Gotcha’ campaigning rather than attempting to convince all of us John Kerry could, somehow, do a better job and is more qualified than George W. Bush. Someone at the DNC or within the Kerry campaign apparently has come to distrust Kerry as much as a growing segment of the voters distrust the War Hero. If anything ever reeked of a political setup and hit job, this is it. But it wasn’t the setup and hit job the Democrats believed they were getting…
Them we come to Dan Rather, who been playing his sordid last stand the way many of us envisioned Dan going down. Rather likely believed the memo-gate would be his finest moment: a wonderful last hurrah to go out on, having saved the DNC and John Kerry, who would be eternally grateful and forever treat Dan to the gourmet meals that have turned him into a bloated caricature and keep him awash in bourbon and scotch. For Dan, the Legacy Thing must have played a big part in the current scandal. Like the pathetic Blanche in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Dan’s desperation increased as the years wore on, driving him – like Blanche DuBois – to increasingly desperate acts to attain what it is expected one shall attain – for Blanche, marriage and a family; for Dan, professional respect and esteem. When it appeared that wouldn’t happen, Dan-Blanche opted for whatever came along – only Stanley Kowalski was waiting in the wings to commit an act of rape.
No doubt CBS will let Rather hang on until after the election for the sake of appearances, finally throwing a huge party for the wayward Texan. A party replete with strained speeches by insincere CBS apparatchiks who want to get the whole thing over with and begin their jockeying for Rather’s anchor chair. Dan will sense the insincerity of those around him and catch their furtive glances and pitying stares masked by smiles. A few references to Edward R. Murrow will likely be forthcoming while the participants slosh the booze to blot out the reality of what CBS and Rather, in the end, turned into.
Dan was a War Hero too, remember? Dan could play the combat grandstand in Vietnam as well as any of the other defeatists who followed our soldiers around, shoving microphones in their faces when their buddies were killed, asking inane questions like “How does it feel?” or “Does the war feel worth it now?” Check out Rather’s book The Camera Never Blinks if you get a chance – I have it here on the shelf – and suffer through pages and pages of self-congratulatory stories that show Dan can, hey(!), take on Nixon, stand up to the big boys and fearlessly follow American soldiers he wants to belittle into combat, well to the rear of course. For those soldiers who knew darn well that Rather was one of the defeatist media types preying on their misfortunes, the urge to have their M-16’s accidentally misfire in Rather’s direction must have been a titanic struggle. I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that Howdy Doody Ted Koppel had a few rounds zing uncomfortably close from the wrong direction while accompanying U.S.Army troops in Vietnam. Whether that story is true or not, the sentiments of the soldiers during that time are understandable.
Have you forgotten - already – that Rather gave our enemy Saddam Hussein a bully pulpit from which to harangue the American people and the rest of the world on Saddam’s popularity with the Iraqi people in March 2004? What on earth could have been the “news” value of that? I suspect that, in its collective, demented way, CBS assumed Saddam’s cause was every bit as legitimate as the cause of the United States – Saddam fighting for his beloved and misunderstood country and the United States mistakenly singling out the perverse dictator. I hope Rather enjoyed cigars and scotch with the demented Saddam, and I equally hope the disgraced and discredited Rather gets tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a splintered fence rail and treated like the rapscallion he has been for too long, blaming America and giving aid and comfort to innumerable enemies of this country.
Christopher Long Senior Systems Analyst Business Data Systems "Them Georgia Boyz"
There are so many milestones coming out of this "incident" and you've hit on a couple of them. I think you're right about the desperation of the libs. It's the Battle of the Bulge for them right now. They've put so much stock into this election that it could very well mortally wound them if they lose. It's Hail Mary time and their quarterback got sacked before the pass was made.
I've also thought about how much the MSM has gotten away with in the past. They've got the white-hot spotlight on them now with the New Media organized and in their face and it's disgusting to watch how those snakes writhe in their own filth. It's a shame that they got away with it for so long.
Just as long as the don't get elected, I don't really give a rats ass what happens to the democrats party. After 40 years of liberal control and the results of their control......... GOOD RIDDENCE
Bull Shit
I'll second that.
It sure is starting to look like that.
The idea that this is a hit on Kerry makes for a much more complicated conspiracy than the obvious truth, that it was a desperate attempt at a hit on Bush.
Why do people always want to assume that criminals like these are clever or crafty? They rarely are. Especially when they are a Democrat operative.
Whoever did it thought "hey, Killian is dead, so no one will be able to definatively discredit it... afterall, most people know that Bush was AWOL anyways and this will at least get them talking about it. People will finally see the TRUTH!! It will be the end of Bush!"
Maybe they didn't think it verbatim, but pretty close I imagine. That's how the left honestly thinks. Sad but true.
We've established at the very least that this person was a leftist, so we know they aren't going to think logically or rationally. So why would you think that they could hatch a brilliant plot to frame Kerry?
Whoever plotted such a masterful plan would have had to predict every move made by all of the players thus far. They would have to predict that the Kerry campaign and the DNC would be so quick to embrace it, and they would have to predict that the forgery would be exposed. They would have to predict that CBS would stonewall on revealing their sources.
That's a lot of calculations that had to be dead on accurate. Wouldn't it be more likely that the perpetrators just made one simple miscalculation instead?
No one ever claimed Democrats were all that smart.
How does one look up a poster's "posting history"?
Notice how Romenesko only acknowledged this story today.
News outlets are always talking about the supreme importance of credibility. Why aren't they concerned now?
Ridiculous.
That'll teach CBS not to support a non-Clinton for president.
"Could it be that the original source was his daughter? Rats using her to get to dad?"
-- That would explain why Rather is sticking by CBS' claims in the face on mounting opposition. I think you're on to something.
"Hey dad, check this out..."
Click on the poster's name. That will show their profile page. Click on "In Forum". That'll show you their posts. It's the first step of any troll investigation.
Remembering the Mickey Rourke line in "Body Heat": "There's 50 things can go wrong when you commit a crime. You're a genius if you think of 25 of them. And you ain't no genius."
hehehe never saw it but boy that is spot on.
"The forgeries are amateurish, crude and blatant. It is entirely possible that whoever typed the phony memos into Microsoft Word using default margins and the default Times New Roman font was counting on the rapid exposing of the forgeries. Another sure bet was the fact that neither the Kerry Campaign, the DNC or CBS News would give the documents more than a cursory overview before belatedly declaring them ‘authentic’ and trumpeting the long-sought smoking gun against the president – ‘Gotcha’ campaigning rather than attempting to convince all of us John Kerry could, somehow, do a better job and is more qualified than George W. Bush. Someone at the DNC or within the Kerry campaign apparently has come to distrust Kerry as much as a growing segment of the voters distrust the War Hero. If anything ever reeked of a political setup and hit job, this is it. But it wasn’t the setup and hit job the Democrats believed they were getting…
Doesn't this phrasing indicate the writer believes somebody within the Kerry-Edwards-(Hillary-2008) campaign set up the Kerry-Edwards 2004 campaign?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.