Shots Across The Bow

Like I Said on Wednesday...

If you have to make stuff up to make your point, you're no longer dissenting, you're dividing.

The memos released to such fanfare on 60 Minutes the other day are fake. The fantastic claims they make, including political pressure to "sugarcoat" President Bush's Guard record are all lies. Dan Rather and CBS got taken in by a hoax.

Now, when that happens to a partisan blogger, it's understandable. He's predisposed to believe any story that fits in with his prejudices. We've seen it happen before (Remember the Bush IQ story from a research institute that didn't exist?), but CBS is supposedly a fair and unbiased news organization. They have no agenda other than getting out the news. They don't have the excuse of being blinded by ideology because, as they never tire of telling us, they are above all that.

Yet Rather was blindsided by a fake, and a rather poor fake at that. And CBS, rather than providing any defense of the documents' authenticity, has clammed up about the whole thing. Consider:

• They will not reveal the source of the documents.
  
• They will not provide the originals (or first copies, since apparently there are no originals. Curious, that. If these were memos-to-file, then why would there be copies in the first place?) for examination.
  
• They will not provide the chain of custody.
  
• They will not reveal the names of any of the people they interviewed that claimed the documents were valid. The only people who have gone on record have said the documents were faked.
  
• To date, they've brough forth one "expert" who, aside from the fact that his review violates his own procedures, only compared the signature, and failed to address the myriad of other problems with the document.
  

In short, their entire grounds for proof consists of "We believe these documents are genuine, and we've talked to other people who also believe the documents are genuine.

Somehow, I think that falls short of the usual journalistic standards.

If nothing else, this is proof positive of the media bias that so many try to deny.

But this goes much further than that. It's the death knell for the Kerry campaign. It's all over but the crying. We read where Susan Estrich says that the Kerry campaign has to fight dirty in order to win, and a couple of days later, this blows up. Terry McAuliffe gets up before the cameras and claims that the documents are not forgeries, but if they are forgeries, then it was a Karl Rove plot to take down Kerry and the press.

Looks like the tin-hat brigade just got a new member.

I don't know, but if I were McAuliffe, I'd be embarrassed to admit that my opponent was so far ahead of me.

Posted by Rich at September 10, 2004 9:10 PM | TrackBack