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?
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.