Posted on 09/21/2004 4:16:55 PM PDT by L.N. Smithee
Posted Sunday, September 27, 2004
Having caught the scent of a juicy story from the MSM (mainstream media) to bite into, the bloggers were waiting to pounce like a pack of hounds behind the butcher shop. On Sept. 7, the day before the CBS broadcast, left-leaning blog talkingpointsmemo.com announced that 60 Minutes was to air "documents that shed light on Bush's guard service or lack thereof." The following afternoon, bloggers at freerepublic.com, a conservative website, began anticipating the coverage with comments such as, "CBS should have to register as a Democrat [campaign organization]." Minutes into the broadcast, another Free Republic blogger (known as a freeper on the site) questioned the authenticity of the CBS documents. A few hours later, yet another offered plausible evidence of fakery: the CBS documents could not have been produced by typewriters available at the time. "These documents are forgeries," said the writer. "This should be pursued aggressively."
The comments were penned by someone known online as Buckhead. And they might have languished had it not been for powerlineblog.com, a well-trafficked right-wing website that linked to Buckhead's claims. The rumblings filtered up to Matt Drudge, who linked to Power Line, setting off a surge of publicity. Soon 500 other blogs had linked to Power Line. Among the assertions: 1970s-era typewriters couldn't have produced the superscript th that appears in the memos (this was later disproved). The next afternoon, both the Washington Post and ABC News carried stories about the postings. The mysterious Buckhead had become a folk hero among red-blogged Americans.
But the mystery didn't last long. As first reported in the Los Angeles Times, Buckhead is Harry MacDougald, 46, a conservative, big-firm lawyer from Atlanta with a history of pugnacious activism. As an advisory-board member for the Southeastern Legal Foundation, he helped write the group's petition to disbar Bill Clinton and worked with former Clinton prosecutor Kenneth Starr to challenge a federal campaign-finance law. As the online avenger Buckhead, he has described Clinton as the "Ozark Caligula." Now identified, MacDougald shuns media attention; as one of his postings claimed, perhaps disingenously: "It wasn't me, it was the swarm."
—With reporting by Mark Coatney and Nathan Thornburgh/New York and Viveca Novak/Washington
Hope it's online so we can all read it. BTW, was there a press bloodhound hunt to find out who "Silence Dogood" was?
GO FLYERS!
Vicious partisans both of them.
This guy, too.
No, we're looking for a publisher. I'm sure we'll find one. Currently, we're kind of holding off, both to get this story fully developed for a chapter, and for "Patriot's History of the United States" to be released in late Dec.
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1595230017/qid=1092168718/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_5/104-1461869-1776712?v=glance&s=books)
Later disproved?
We have all seen the difference between the two th's.
Why doesn't the story state the the only typewriter in 1972 that had purportional fonts and a th cost $3000!
Keep in mind that this is 1972.
$3000 could buy a brand new Oldsmobile sedan! How many National Guard Units bought a typewriter that cost more than a car?
Especially the blind Amish lurkers.
When I started coding, we only had 1's and 0's. Sometimes the boss wouldn't even fund the 1's.
Buckhead bump!
I guess they can't figure out what to call us...BBS'ers instead of bloggers? Course, they are still probably thinking AOL is the internet...LOL!
(Insert 14.4 kbps dial-up noise)
How was Buckhead identified and by whom?
Let's say "Hi. TIME" We know your watching.
Its high time that TIME stop reporting so "disingenously", and present complete forgery as such, and not as a partially possibly genuine forgery "proved" less than absolutely implausible.
"To the trWth...with a Capitol W."
I wrote a lot of papers in Wordstar when working my MDiv.
I think that from this point forward, Rather should be referred to as a "BBS'er" (the first "B" is for "Big").
Ah - Kaypro - my first machine.
That really dates us.
The L.A. Times reviewed his posts over the past couple of years, gleaned his self-description, his work, and trivial info, and pieced it together. He also served as one of the legal team defending FR from destruction through the Times' and Washington Post's joint copyright infringment suit against Jim Robinson, so the LAT rats' lawyers may have been familiar with him.
LOL! I remember in 11th grade in 1981 we had 6 or 7 "networked" TRS-80s , and ONE WANG 2200 (I very explicitly remember it having a green screen). That was my baby! That's where I played the text-based Star Trek game! Such memories!
I was going to say something about gerbils, but thought better of it.
We used to "chat" on a green screen...with a blinking, blinking, blinking cursor.
Actually mine was amber. And they used call it a BBS. Used to be a SYSOP.
However, most sadly, there was no FreeRepublic. :)
So Time is saying the old media, which includes Time, would not have picked up on it?
It's a revealing comment.
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