Posted on 12/20/2005 5:29:03 AM PST by conservativecorner
Yesterday reader Randy Porter wrote in response to our post on Mary Mapes's letter to the editor of the Times Book Review. Porter wrote:
I was reading your latest Mapes post and was struck by the irony of the situation she has manufactured for herself -- anyone who buys her story (hence her only daily company of friends and followers) is a fool. And she is quite aware of that fact. It seems a special kind of hell on earth. Colonel William Campenni (ret.) served with then-Lieutenant Bush in the same unit of the Texas Air National Guard. He wrote some key columns debunking the Mary Mapes's fradulent 60 Minutes story on President Bush's service. After we posted a message from Colonel Campenni on Power Line, we received an inquiry from a literary agent asking Colonel Campenni to write a book on Rathergate and seeking to represent him. It appears that our matchmaking efforts have paid off. Colonel Campenni has been hard at work writing the book and updating us on Mapes's continuing pratfalls. Yesterday Colonel Campenni wrote regarding Mapes's letter: This woman is really funny. In her letter she says:
Alter can question our source, as I have, but here's what nearly everyone missed: The overhyped typeface criticisms ingeniously hijacked the story and created a false controversy, which media competitors gleefully exploited as proof that CBS had fallen short. In fact, ALL the evidence supported the documents' genuineness and that holds true today. We carefully vetted their every detail, matched them with official records and corroborated their content with a former commander. Our document analysis has been completely misconstrued by reporters, pundits and the panel: two analysts validated the documents' typing and signatures and two others deferred to them before our broadcast, despite their later characterizations.
I just sent off the book proposal draft for the agent who is going to shop it around. In the chapter dedicated to the fake memos, I gave her a pass on stuff like the typos, fonts, etc., because you guys and others have already proved that. Instead I went against her new defense, repeated ad nauseam, and in bold italics in the above excerpt; that ALL the evidence supports the documents. I was running out of paper in tearing apart her own arguments and exposing glaring errors. One example: Twice in the 6 fakes one finds Bush's service number. Problem here for Mary is that these memos are in 1972 and 73. The Air Force stopped using service numbers on July 1, 1969, and switched over to social security numbers, 3 and 4 years prior. All of Bush's released records had the SSNo blacked out as required by law. But old service numbers from Bush's earlier documents were not redacted...
[The fabricator] grabbed the service numbers from released records, not realizing that they would never show up on a 72-73 document. Irony is, he put the anachronistic service numbers in the wrong format - the FG had to be a prefix, not a suffix, like FG 1234567...For a while we used to put the two letter code FG (means Air Guard; FR means Air Force Reserve, FV means active duty Air Force) as a suffix to the new SSNo ID, as in 987 65 4321FG. Later we dropped the two letter code entirely. [The fabricator's] personal experience was with the 987-65-4321 FV format (actually, the Army Guard used different codes), so when he grabbed the service number from files to add a hint of authenticity to the memos, he probably reverted to habit. Stupid, because if you look at Bush's real records, you will see the letters FG as a prefix - he couldn't even plagiarize correctly!
It's fun tearing apart this delusional woman's aberrant thought processes. I hope to meet her some day to talk about this stuff.
PS: I have never met Mapes and she never called me. She doesn't even know I exist. But in her radio debate with John last week, she launched into a tirade about how I was a Bush insider when Scott Henner simply mentioned my name (he had me on his show in February and September 2004). Now my wife wants to know why we aren't invited to White House dinners if I am such a buddy.
Colonel Campenni describes this item of his analysis as a "tidbit" that will be disclosd in his forthcoming book together with many other previously unrevealed flaws in the bogus documents. His book should make a signal contribution to understanding the fraud Mapes continues to peddle.
Mapes's credibility on a 0 to 10 scale is about 100.
It is like we are getting our Christmas presents early this year.
We can only hope that the liberals continue do themselves in and become like road kill on the highway of life.
Merry Christmas!
Ooops!
This should have posted as: "Mapes's credibility on a 0 to 10 scale is about minus 100."
Thats what I thought :)
Trained by her hero, Captain Dan.
I hope Colonel Campenni names his book:
"Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary"
(Definition of contrary: Opposed, as in character or purpose: contrary opinions; acts that are contrary to our code of ethics.)
Captain Dan Blather must be having a really sad Christmas!
In about one year, he went from the Apex of Screaming Heads on Evening news to out the back door into the alley.
"There is not a jury in the world that would believe Ms. Mapes assertion that these documents are real."
The O.J. jury would. ;)
"How much you wanna bet that this book won't be published by Simon & Schuster? :)"
Thank goodness for Regnery!
Even the secretary who would have typed the documents, a dedicated Bush-hater, has said they're not authentic.
I think Mz. Mapes' problem is that she's old school. She was brought up in an era when the media wrote history. She's roughtly my age, so she probably remembers Walter Cronkite single-handedly ending the Vietnam War, or Woodward and Bernstein taking down a sitting president. She believed in the complete power of the press, not to report the news, but to write history. She saw her chance to take down "Hitler" and take her rightful place in history as the modern-day Joan d'Arc.
Unfortunately for her, the playing field changed between then and now. As-you-like-it history revisionism isn't as easy as it once was, and the sad part of this whole charade is that nobody told Mary that the parade is over.
I looked around to try to find the CBS factsheet on Mapes but no luck. If anyone has access to that document please post it.
'Tis great to see them eat their young.
Too bad it missed for the liberal Christmas gift.
I'm still waiting for the news story concerning why someone in Texas was forging documents, and why a major media outlet was so anxious to buy them. That would be a real story.
I don't have time today to look for the CBS fact sheet.
Do to some of the early threads about her book and first tv interviews. It will be in the replies in those threads.
Rob it didn't take that long, below is a link to a reply by me to Jim Rob re the CBS email about Mapes:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1519980/posts?page=16#16
To: Jim Robinson
Jim, apparently CBS News is sending the following to tv personalites before they interview Mapes about her book.
The CBS News response to her appearance on GMA: This was apparently sent by CBS to Larry King yesterday, and he read it before he interviewed Mapes. Apparently O'Reilly got the same response from CBS News before Mapes was on his show.
"(After yesterday's Mapes' Good Morning America appearance, CBS issued the following statement, which Larry King read to Mapes last night):
"KING: We're here with Mary Mapes, the book "Truth and Duty, the Press, the President and the Privilege of Power." CBS News gave us this statement today.
"Mary Mapes' actions damaged CBS News as an organizational and brought pain to many colleagues with whom she worked. Her disregard for journalistic standards -- and for her colleagues -- comes through loud and clear in her interviews and in the book that attempts to rewrite the history of this complex and sad affair.
As always, revisionist history must be tested against the facts. Not only are those facts contained in the extensive media coverage that took place at the time, but also in the 200-plus-page report of the independent panel which investigated the matter for more than three months.
We believe those facts speak for themselves. The idea that a news organization would not need to authenticate such important source material is only one of the troubling and erroneous statement in her account."
(Mapes only reply was: CBS has been working on that statement for months.)
16 posted on 11/10/2005 11:29:30 PM PST by Grampa Dave (MSM/RATs need to set a timetable for withdrawal in their illegitimate war on Bush. It's a quagmire.)
thanks for the research!
You are welcome. I sent that email to the local bookstores and said that if they had Mapes in their store to push her book, I and others would be handing out this CBS email.
Thanks for posting. And thanks to management for keeping this in News ... where it belongs.
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