Please let me know what you come up with. I sent icwhatudo’s article out to a bunch of people by email, and if there are corrections to be made (e.g. children are on scholarship, house was purchased for a fraction of current price, etc.), I want to send those out, too.
I don’t have time to do any research on it. Just wanted to try to slow people down a bit, before this backfires badly (and before icwhatudo finds himself facing a lawsuit funded the Dem machine). There are unverified reports that an unnamed aide to Harry Reid said the children were on scholarship and only paying $500 tuition each. Sounds a lot more plausible to me than the claim that they were paying full sticker price (most of these schools have a huge percentage of students on at least partial scholarships). As for the house, that’s too complicated to calculate unless the family releases verfiable financial info. What did they pay for it? What is it worth now? Do they have a second mortgage or other liens on it? Was it to some extent part of their business, i.e. woodworking as part of the renovations, with a plan to resell for profit — so that they might have gotten caught in the tumbling real estate market, with a house they have a lot money tied up in and hadn’t been planning to keep after renovations were complete?
Personally, I don’t have a lot of respect for the parents, since they let their child be used by politicians when he’s too young to have any real opinions of his own on these matters. But I don’t like seeing the credibility of the Pajama Brigade damaged. The Buckhead/Little Green Footballs Memogate coup was excellent precisely because it stood up beautifully to careful, well-funded scrutiny. And that was because the info they put out stuck to the facts and wasn’t embellished with lots of wild speculation stated as fact. They described and documented the remarkable coincidence of how Microsoft Word’s default settings in 2004 produced a document identical to the one CBS was presenting as having been typed in 1972 on a military-issue typewriter, and noted the characters and spacing that couldn’t have been produced by the typewriters being used by the military in the 1970s, and then left CBS to be battered with demands for an explanation from all quarters.
Sometimes less is more. The funniest part of Memogate was how the White House firmly refused to dignify the whole thing with a response of its own — absolutely refused to come out and say the memo was fake. This emboldened the dimwits at CBS, who continued to protest for weeks that it was real, ultimately making colossal fools of themselves, and making the whole country realize that the “guys in their pajamas on the Internet” were a more reliable source of information than CBS. Bush and the rest of the White House crew must have been laughing uproariously off-camera, but impressively managed to keep perfectly straight faces whenever the topic came up in press conferences. In the end, this strategy was a lot more powerful than coming out and saying the memo was fake could ever have been.