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

Of all the loopy statements made by Dan Rather in the 10 days since he decided to throw his career away, my favorite is this, from Dan's interview with the Washington Post on Thursday:

''If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story.''

Hel-looooo? Earth to the Lost Planet of Ratheria: You can't ''break that story.'' A guy called ''Buckhead'' did that, on the Free Republic Web site a couple of hours after you and your money-no-object resources-a-go-go ''60 Minutes'' crew attempted to pass off four obvious Microsoft Word documents as authentic 1972 typewritten memos about Bush's skipping latrine duty in the Spanish-American War, or whatever it was.

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.

I was prepared to cut the poor old buffoon some slack a week ago. But Dan's performance has grown progressively more outrageous, to the point where it's hard not to conclude he's colluding in the perpetuation of a massive if ludicrous fraud. Dan's been play-acting at being a reporter for so many years now -- the suspenders, the loosened tie, and all the other stuff that would look great if he were auditioning for a cheesy dinner-theater revival of ''The Front Page''; the over-the-top intros: ''Bob Schieffer, one of the best hard-nosed reporters in the business, has been working his sources. What have you managed to uncover for us, Bob?'', after which Bob reads out a DNC press release. Dan's been doing all this so long he doesn't seem to realize the news isn't just a show.

Round about the middle of last week, he was reduced to shoring up his collapsing fantasy with Bill Glennon, a Cliff Claven figure who was a typewriter repairman in the '70s. But, because every other CBS expert had abandoned Dan's sunk ship, Bill suddenly found himself upgraded to ''document expert.'' This guy's been insisting that you could produce Dan's bogus memos on a 1972 IBM typewriter: ''The Model D had a lever that when pushed put a rubber stopper in front of the keys so they did not strike the paper. You centered the paper using the paper scale, put the carriage on the middle mark of the front index scale, typed your heading and then made note of the number it stopped on. You then moved the carriage back to the corresponding number on the left side of the index scale and retyped your heading and . . .''

Yeah, right. Every time I want to type a memo saying Bush is unfit to be president, that's what I do, too. Look, if Dan thinks this guy's theory is correct, let's put him and his IBM Model D and me and my computer in a room at CBS News for an hour and see which one of us emerges with the closest replicas of these four documents. I'll give him ten thousand bucks for every memo he reproduces exactly, and round it up to an even 50 grand if he gets all four right.

So the question now is why won't Dan and Co. just admit their docs are crocks and let it go? On Wednesday, CBS News head honcho Andrew Heyward, in a slippery statement, announced that ''we established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate.'' Note that word: not ''genuine'' but ''accurate'' -- i.e., if Lt. Col. Killian had had one of those IBM Model Ds and been willing to remove the carriage return and replace it with a rubber stopper on the front index scale while turning the crank, etc., these are the memos he would have written. Rather and Heyward are adopting the rogue-cop defense: The evidence is planted, but the guy's still guilty. Or as the New York Times' headline put it: ''Memos On Bush Are Fake But Accurate.''

Why has CBS News decided it would rather debauch its brand and treat its audience like morons than simply admit their hoax? For Dan Rather? I doubt it. Hurricane Dan looks like he's been hit by one. He's still standing, just about, but, like a battered double-wide, more and more panels are falling off every day. No one would destroy three-quarters of a century of audience trust and goodwill for one shattered anachronism of an anchorman, would they?

As the network put it last week, ''In accordance with longstanding journalistic ethics, CBS News is not prepared to reveal its confidential sources or the method by which '60 Minutes' Wednesday received the documents.'' But, once they admit the documents are fake, they can no longer claim ''journalistic ethics'' as an excuse to protect their source. There's no legal or First Amendment protection afforded to a man who peddles a fraud. You'd think CBS would be mad as hell to find whoever it was who stitched them up and made them look idiots.

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?

Whatever other lessons are drawn from this, we ought at least to acknowledge that the privileged position accorded to ''official'' media and the restrictions placed on the citizenry by McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform are wholly unwarranted.

As for Heyward and Rather, the other day I came across a rare memo from April 20, 1653, typed on a 17th century prototype of the IBM Selectric. It's Oliver Cromwell's words to England's Long Parliament:

''You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!''

Mark Steyn in top form, as usual!:

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.

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 ...

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?

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