Posted on 03/09/2005 6:43:07 AM PST by Pikamax
Texas is conservative but when she produces a liberal, it usually the most virulent strain. LBJ to GungaDan to ??? Be afraid, be very afraid.
Sounds like gossip, rumor and innuendo were floating around Camp Mabry to me. People always are eager to float around something juicy they've heard--until they have to come up with proof or sources.
I agree that the MSM doesn't seem interested, not like they are about who outed Valerie Plame. Trying to derail a presidential campaign using forged documents is vastly more serious than that.
ping...
To me this is a flat admission that this entire group had a tacit mission to install Kerry as the next president.
Right on!
Add to that..In the late October tape, Mr. Rigler suggested that CBS News was only interested in the documents if they could get them before the Presidential election.
Proof positive.....
WHERE ARE THE INDICTMENTS?
Or his discharge document, or his multiple conflicting citations including a one for a non-existant medal.
Your question is what drives me nuts about this whole story. After 8 years of Clinton, a president that openly and admittedly dodged the draft, why is the Bush service even an issue? Yes, Bush sought the ANG to avoid being drafted. So what? Kerry signed up with the Navy while still at Yale to avoid being drafted. Being drafted meant carrying a gun as a Marine or Soldier in the rice fields of Viet Nam. You did not get drafted to serve as a stateside pilot and a low level officer on a ship.
It would be nice to know the truth, whatever it is.
MoodyBlu
Excellent points. Agree!
On Sept. 2, 2004, Mr. Smith and Ms. Mapes met with Mr. Burkett and his wife, Nicki Burkett, in a Whataburger restaurant in Clyde, Tex. They discussed the possibility of procuring the Bush National Guard documents. Mr. Smith had worked with Ms. Mapes on a number of 60 Minutes and CBS Evening News pieces starting in 2000. He was hired again as a freelancer in August to work on the National Guard story.
"The road to the White House leads through the Clyde Whataburger" was the group’s joke.
This is blatant evidence that the intention was to bring down President Bush, yet the "panel" declared they could not find political partisanship as motive.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, I think Dick Thornburgh disgraced himself with the report this panel issued. Even without the above admission from the group that the reason for the story was to elect Kerry, it was clearly possible for the panel to have reached that conclusion based on the evidence we had on the public record.
"It was so well known for years at Camp Avery about Bush and his failure to serve in the Texas Air National Guard," he said, referring to the base where Mr. Bush had been stationed in the early 1970’s. "It was just so very, very common. You know, he didn’t even show up out there during his whole eight-year tenure as governor and commander in chief of the Texas Air National Guard—not once did he go to Camp Avery. So most people just sort of looked at him as a draft dodger. They didn’t hold him in very high regard at all."
He continued: "The story—and I’m talking to some people at Camp Avery—the story about the files, the non-service, the memos, stuff like that, had floated around for years. For that reason, it makes you think it’s likely true."
Boy! I'm glad Rigler didn't bother us with dreary details like names when he made these claims about what "people" have said. Evidently he wasn't asked for them, either, as I don't see any reference to "Mr. Rigler refused to name the people he claims made these statements".
And we've had to be subjected to lectures from the MSM about what constitutes "real journalism"? We're not going to take it anymore. We demand documented facts.
Adios you fruitcake! Believe me, you won't be missed.
That's the short version of this article, in case anyone wants the Cliff's Notes.
CBS has never been interested in finding out the true origins of the forgeries; furthermore, CBS is not interested in looking itself in the mirror.
I wonder how any reasonable reporter, hell even ones with giant biases, could go with anything Bill Burkett handed them.
Burkett had a well known grudge against Bush and was unstable as any of them could see.
I would not be at all suprised if Burkett himself made the "documents" himself and sent Rigler and everyone else on a snipe hunt. That is an explanation that fits the facts better than these vaporus "leads" he gave them.
I am comming to the conclusion that these CBS reporters are every bit as stupid as they are biased.
What's with "Camp Avery"? That sounds like an Army Gaurd facility, not an Air Base. I thought Bush served most of his time in the TANG at the Ellington Field in Houston.
I can find no links for a Camp Avery. Any Texans know where/what it is?
If I were investigating this, Burkett would be the prime suspect. He is both obsessed with Bush and demonstratively unstable enough to have fabricated the documents without considering the consequences.
There is no indication that anyone even considered the possibility that Burkett made them. He handed them the documents that went on the air and lied about their provenance. That should have set off alarm bells.
Unless their collective stupidity rises to heights I cannot believe and I am speaking of their basic skills as reporters and sense of self preservation,not their political views, they must have so much invested in the authenticity of these documents they have to proceed as if they are real.
If Burkett simply fooled them, as is certainly the case in part, and probably in total, they look even worse. They went with bogus materal from a dubious source and do not even have a conspiracy beyond Burkett to blame it on.
Gosh, you're right! I wonder how that slipped by a "real journalist" like Joe Hagan?
Gosh, to me it raises questions about Rigler, who Hagan informs is a "former FBI agent". How could your obvious point have gotten by this "investigator" that Bush was never assigned to "Camp Avery", and more...I just Googled and can't find a Camp Avery in Texas. Maybe our intreped investigator and former FBI agent got lost...or maybe he's lying.
Did he tell the vaunted "panel" this tale of all of these people at "Camp Avery"? I can see how the "panel" couldn't make any judgements about CBS or their motives.
Color me more disgusted than ever (and I hope my comments are taken with the tongue in cheek tone they are meant to taken as).
What do you think of the posssibility of a prosecutor in Texas or elswhere going after Mapes ,Burkett, et al?
anchor called him at a Holiday Inn in Bozeman, Mont.,
I see a Holiday Inn/Whataburger conspiracy here
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