Mark Steyn: CBS defense of Rather hints at bigger story (FR and Buckhead mentioned)

Chicago Sun-Times ^ | September 19, 2004 | BY MARK STEYN

[MeekOneGOP]

Mark Steyn in top form, as usual!:

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From the article:

The following day Charles Johnson of the Little Green Footballs Web site drove a stake through your phony '70s memos by overlaying them with modern MS Word documents, whose automatic word wrap is amazingly an exact match with Lt. Col. Killian's ''typewriter.'' And every document expert agreed with Johnson your memos are junk, including your own analysts.

By now just about everybody on the planet also thinks they're junk, except for that dwindling number of misguided people who watch the ''CBS Evening News'' under the misapprehension that it's a news broadcast rather than a new unreality show in which a cocooned anchor, his floundering news division and some feeble executives are trapped on their own isle of delusion and can't figure out a way to vote themselves off it.

So the only story you're in a position to break right now is: ''Late-Breaking News. Veteran Newsman Announces He's Recovered His Marbles.'' And, if last week's anything to go by, you're in no hurry to do that.

Instead, Dan keeps demanding Bush respond to the ''serious questions'' raised by his fake memos. ''With respect, Mr. President,'' he droned the other day, ''answer the questions.'' The president would love to, but he's doubled up with laughter.

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[RayChuang88]

The conspiracy to commit fraud must go higher than Dan Rather. The network exec could overrule Dan the Doyen at any time. And the Viacom owners could overrule the networks. They haven't. Why??

You have to remember that Viacom CEO/President Summer Redstone and COO Leslie Moonves are big-time Democrats. However, Moonves has experienced this type of fiasco before (remember The Reagans miniseries?) and Moonves--wanting NOT to see Viacom stock value take a nosedive--may ask Rather to go on paid leave and may even ask Bob Schieffer to step down as moderator for one of the Presidential debates.

[MeekOneGOP]

Wow. I just looked a little bit ago and seems Pokey78 hasn't been on FR since September 10th.

No wonder I haven't been getting pinged to these lately.

Hope he's off on vacation or something good having fun .....

[Helms]

We're all a school of Idealogical pirhana bump !*

* This per Bill O'Reilly last evening. This includes Rush L. and most Free Republic posters

[aculeus]

So why aren't they? The only reasonable conclusion is that the source -- or trail of sources -- is even more incriminating than the fake documents. Why else would Heyward and Rather allow the CBS news division to commit slow, public suicide?

Exactly. As O'Reilly and assorted jackasses do not understand: Rather and CBS may have been originally duped by others but they are now on record as de facto participants in the coverup of a felony.

[Tall_Texan]

If you DO make any public appearances, be sure to show up to the interview in pajamas.

[Rocky]

Another great Steyn column.

I'm wondering what else these media shills for Kerry had stored up. I'm wondering if someone else will spring it, now that CBS has lost their credibility. Has anyone heard a follow-up to the story from Kerry Spot:

PIERCE TELLS REPORTER CBS GAVE HIM 'LOTS MORE DOCUMENTS'

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1218801/posts?page=1

[aculeus]

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES' TIM RUTTEN as quoted on Instpundit: Watching Dan Rather unravel over the past week has been something like watching a train wreck unfold: You know it's all going to end badly, but you just can't look away until you've seen how many cars ultimately go off the rails. Well, now we know, and there's not much left to do but wave at the caboose as it careens over the side. . . .

Inevitably, bad things happen to good news organizations. The test of a serious journalistic enterprise is how it reacts to internal crisis.

The Los Angeles Times had its Staples Center scandal; the Washington Post Janet Cooke's fabricated Pulitzer Prize-winner; the New York Times had Jayson Blair; and USA Today, Jack Kelley. In each instance, the organization immediately and exhaustively investigated what had gone wrong and put the findings in their entirety before their readers. CNN did precisely the same thing after its so-called Tailwind scandal, as did NBC in 1992, when its "Dateline" newsmagazine was caught broadcasting staged events.

Thus far, no such action has been undertaken by CBS executives, which is worse than inexplicable. . . .

CBS' initial report on President Bush's National Guard service was an embarrassment to Murrow's legacy. But the implications of that mistake pale alongside the potential consequences of the network's continuing refusal to do what the situation now demands: to forthrightly admit error, to undertake an independent inquiry and, then, to give a clear public accounting of how this happened. If the current custodians of CBS News willfully refuse to keep faith with their viewers, they will have disgraced Murrow's memory.

Tick, tick, tick ...

[EmilyGeiger]

He is by far the best commentary writers there is. I don't believe he has ever published a piece that I did not enjoy. Thanks for posting this!

[F.J. Mitchell]

Thank you for outing the truth about those bogus documents, Buckhead, good work.

Maybe those slime bags revealing your true identity will turn into a blessing as well. For one thing, every rational and fair minded individual in America will know to whom the credit belongs.

Isn't it amazing how quickly and proficiently the MSM media can snoop out information when it thinks it serves their agenda. What shall we call that? Maybe, Selective expertice.

[Snapple]

The latest conspiracy theory about these documents is that Karl Rove concocted them and tricked Dan Rather into taking them so that the documents would be proved forgeries and the information in them discredited. Even Maurene Dowd is sniggering up her sleeve about this one. This conspiracy theory of Karl Rove's modus-operendi was first put forward a few years ago by a leftist writer/publisher named Sander Hicks.

PLEASE FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS! We are entering the Twilight Zone of "progressive" political conspiracy theory.

Hicks published the book "Fortunate Son" which makes the allegation that Bush was arrested for cocaine but got off with community service because his father had political connections.

The author, JH Hatfield was a career criminal (financial frauds, solicitation of capital murder) so St.Martin's Press dropped the book and Hicks picked it up and published it. Hicks and Hatfield were on 60 Minutes and Leslie Stahl made fools of them.

While he was out of prison, Hatfield wrote biographies about famous actors and a study of the TV show "The X Files." The cocaine allegation was stuck on to the end of the book as if it were an afterthought to get people to buy his book instead of one published by a Dallas News writer that was coming out at the same time.

If you do a google search for Sander Hicks and add some of the personalities allegedly associated with this story (Burkett, Burke, Gough, Rove) about the possibly forged documents, you will get some interesting hits. Read on and I will paste some in this text.

Sander Hicks has been interested in Bush's National Guard history for a long time. He has posted what purports to be Guard Documents on his site. Hicks is also writing a book about Karl Rove. Hicks hates Bush and thinks Karl Rove is an evil genius. In the past, when Hicks did something stupid, he blamed his stupidity on Rove's genius. This is his personal conspiracy theory to account for the fact that he is a real idiot.

When Hicks' source for the cocaine allegation (Hatfield) turned out to be a criminal, Hicks informed the whole world that Hatfield got his story about the cocaine from Karl Rove. Supposedly, Rove planned that when the story about the cocaine surfaced via a criminal, the story would be discredited. Of course, why wouldn't Hatfield have wondered why Karl Rove would tell him something so damaging about Bush?

Hicks talked to this guy named Gough
http://sanderhicks.com/gough.html about Bush's records supposedly being thrown out by Bush operatives. So he knows about all that. The article mentions this guy Bartlett, whom some suspect of authoring these documents and xeroxing them at a Kinko's near his Texas home.

However, I read that Hicks actually worked in a Kinkos in NYC and used their xerox machines to self-publish books when he was a micro-publisher. Hicks later moved to S. Arizona and started a book about Karl Rove. Or was it Karl Marx? Well, anyway...

Hicks and Hatfield got sued for publishing Hatfield's book, not because they slandered Bush (you can't be sued for slandering a politician), but because they claimed that Hatfield's boss had put Hatfield up to murdering another employee. [Like this wasn't all investigated and rejected by the FEDS when Hatfield was tried for solicitation of capital murder "al la Fallujah" with a car bomb in the downtown Dallas Cotton Exchange.] The facts are that Hatfield's boss passed a lie detector test and Hatfield refused to be fluttered.

A guy named Mike Burke wrote some puff-pieces about the misadventures of Sander Hicks and expanded on the conspiracy theory about how Karl Rove supposedly gave the writer/bomber JH Hatfield the Bush-cocaine story so that nobody would believe it because Hatfield had a "chequered past" as an assassin. Karl Rove, according to the story, went fishing in a rowboat with a car-bomber and told him that Bush used cocaine.

Would you go out in a rowboat with a car-bomber? Probably not unless you were as dumb as Fredo Corleon. But I bet that there are some Fredos that Karl Rove would like to "take out" in a boat!

Personally, I think that Hatfield put the cocaine "bombshell" in his cut-and-paste-epic "Fortunate Son" as an afterthought so he would sell more Bush books than the other guys. The cocaine "bombshell" was pasted in at the end of the book.

This seems like a rush job to me. If I really had a terrific scoop like that, it wouldn't be inserted at the end. It would be my centerpiece. Hatfield was just in a rush to beat out some other scribbler, so he slapped this lie on quick and got it into the printer.

Sander Hicks' cheerleader Mike Burke is currently conceeding that the current National Guard document may be a fraud, but he is claiming that it was a deliberately bad fraud that was supposed to be discovered and thus discredit the information in the document.

Burke explains that this what happened once before to Hatfield and his publisher Hicks regarding the Bush-cocaine allegation. I wonder if there is a fish story to go with this fable? Did Rove bait his hook in a rowboat on the Rio Grande?

What is kind of odd is that nothing about this National Guard document is on Hicks' "progressive" website. He has long been writing lurid accounts about Bush's National Guard years and posting documents on his site purportedly from the National Guards. Why is he laying low on this? Not his style at all. See www.sanderhicks.com

Mike Burke wrote these articles linked below. Both mention Hicks' and Hatfield's alleged "victimization" by the evil genius Karl Rove and suggest that Karl Rove is behind these documents. [Hatfield committed suicide a while ago because he was about to be rearrested for computer fraud and lose his parole for embezzling federal money from his company his company and soliciting the murder of the supervisor who found out. So he's off the hook.]

Compare them both.
http://www.pacifica.org/programs/dn/030811.html
http://idaho.indymedia.org/news/2004/09/11430.php

I am no expert on documents, but if I were trying to forge something old, I would use old ink, old paper and an old typewriter. Actually, I would use a professional forger. If these documents are forgeries, the forger is certainly not a professional forger. He is an idiot. Being a professional forger requires long years of careful application, dicipline and patience. Whoever did this forgery was just a moron who can't plan ahead at all and never heard of document forensics.

Karl Rove, the ultimate scapegoat for screw-ups is again being blamed for making bad forgeries in order to discredit the "true" information. How does he ever do it?

In reality, the Kinko forgery is just a fraud by some idiot who word-processed his private political fantasy and then xeroxed it over and over at a Kinkos. Now the flimsy forgery has emerged, phoenixlike, as a "brilliant" Karl Rove conspiracy. I guess the transformation somehow makes the mendacious morons brilliant operatives instead of useful idiots.

Is this a great election cycle, or what?

[F.J. Mitchell]

That was a real nice compliment from Bill O'What'shisname.

But I'm still not going to watch the nose pin zone anymore.

[Hank Rearden]

The bumper sticker I made this morning:

See? BS!

(except I vertically-centered and enlarged the text to match the graphic)

[crushelits]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/post?id=1219585%2C213

[crushelits]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/post?id=1219585%2C213

[Cboldt]

16. Broadcast Journalism. Under the no-censorship provision in Section 326 of the Communications Act, the Commission cannot direct broadcasters in their selection of material for news programs, or prohibit the broadcasting of an opinion on any subject. The Commission also does not review the qualifications of anyone to gather, edit, announce or comment on the news; such decisions are a responsibility of the station licensee. The Commission will not act on complaints that news programming has been falsified, distorted, faked or staged unless it receives extrinsic evidence (evidence apart from program content) of such deliberate conduct by a licensee and/or its management personnel. The Commission recognizes that some abuses may occur, but it believes that without extrinsic evidence of deliberate intent to falsify or distort, any interference by it, the government licensing agency, in the editorial or news judgment of broadcasters would be a greater danger. The Commission has emphasized "the right of broadcasters to be as outspoken as they wish, and that allowance must be made for honest mistakes on their part."

http://www.fcc.gov/mb/enf/forms/fcc100.html <-- Link

[F.J. Mitchell]

Everytime those extreme left wing serial conspirators are caught in one of their schemes, they squeal that it's really a right wing conspiracy designed to look like a left wing conspiracy.

The liberal MSM media did everything possible to make the liberal's lies believable. It doesn't work anymore, now that the MSM has been exposed as lying left wing partisan serial, conspirator, enablers.

[tvn]

Thanks...This reference is included in Section 3 (FCC Standards With Respect to News Programming by Licensees) of the MEP Petition, along with additional cites to decisions defining the paramaters of the "public interest" standards in this area.

[Stultis]

Oh, boy. A typewriter repairman is CBS's "document expert," and a libido probing graphologist is their "handwriting expert". We now have a pattern sufficient to project what is next.

The CBS Evening News' new weatherman, Granny Clampett (Cecil the Weather-Beetle not pictured):

And the new medical reporter:

[blackie]

Lady ~ in case you missed this, it's great. :)