Another request from comments: this time, asking “Would love to hear what you think about the CBS forged documents scandal”.
This story has taken many twists and turns in the ten days (yes, just ten days) this story has existed. First, the letters and allegations, then “experts” claiming the letters were forged, then Killian’s secretary saying they’re recreations but the sentiment is accurate, and now hearing that the original questioner of the documents is a Republican operative who helped get Clinton disbarred.
Yeesh.
I hate repeating what other folks have said on the topic, so I’ll point you to Mark Kleiman and Josh Marshall and Tim Noah have said on the subject. But I will add these things to the debate.
* It certainly is possible to frame a guilty man. And just because someone may have been framed doesn’t mean that he’s innocent of the crime in question. Doesn’t ANYBODY remember O.J.?
* Every so often, bad guys try a fake frame of themselves to divert suspicion from themselves later.
* The White House, upon initial release, either thought the memos were genuine, implying that they thought all the charges in them were accurate; or were in on the gag, and were setting people up for a later takedown.
* Why would the White House think they were genuine? Because George W. Bush knows what happened during his tenure in the National Guard. Even though he has yet to come clean about it. If he filled in the missing gaps in his time period, this entire mess would go away. Which implies that either the mess is a useful distraction or that he/they thinks there’s something worth hiding.
* George W. Bush has a known prediliction for going after guys “who tried to get my daddy”. Exhibit A: the guy who had nothing to do with 9/11, but ran Iraq instead. I point people back about 12 years ago and the famous on-air confrantation between Bush I and Dan Rather, and remind people that CBS was also the news organization that broke the Abu Gharib prison scandal photos.
Oh yeah– is the document a forgery? Maybe. I don’t have enough evidence; and neither do most of the folks commenting on it, they haven’t examined the document in question, certainly not to the standards of even a civil trial. Let’s go on to another question then: is what is contained true? After all, whether a book is a first edition or a reprint that someone’s trying to sell as a first edition doesn’t affect the words on the page. I would dearly love for THAT to be a focus of investigation.
I’m a little surprised that you don’t offer readers an opportunity to make up their own minds. Here, courtesy of that well known right wing rag The Washington Post, is a comparison of the CBS “memos” with known actual memos signed by Lt Col Killian– http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/graphics/cbsdocs_091804.html
The original questioner was a republican??? Omigod! Do the moderators at Freerepublic.com know that one of THEM manged to slip in??? I wonder what the party affiliation of the person who forged the memos was? Guess we won’t know, since CBS is protecting the identity of the forger. After all, if forgers can’t be assured that their names won’t make the papers, they will probably stop supplying CBS with fake documents and a fine kettle of fish THAT would be. (If one wishes to speculate, one could make the argument that perhaps CBS knows that high level Kerry team people were in on it and that revealing the truth would pretty much sink a campaign already taking on more water than it should)
Why did the White House not immediately denounce the documents and save CBS from the humiliation of the last week? Um, are you serious? As a wise person once said, never murder a man who is committing suicide.
Kerry fans should just admit the memos were faked and MOVE ON!!! The longer they desperately try to hold out for that 1% chance that somehow these things are genuine the longer the story stays to the Republican’s advantage. If there were a typewriter from 1972 that could have made those docs don’t you think that CBS would have produced a facsimile of them by now?
As for the idea that the letters were a fake frame…now just HOW could the republicans have KNOWN that the fine folks at CBS would rush the docs on the air without checking them thoroughly? It’s not like they could have known that CBS has some kind of desire to make Bush look bad and…oh, right. My bad.
We Kerry fans don’t care if they were fake or not. We know the issues behind the memos were true. Bush got special treatment to go into the Guard. We can even extrapolate this from common events at the time. People who went into the National Guard during the war had help. There are questions about periods of time he served and he did not take a required physical. Since this is all well known, the memos themselves are redundent. The only part of the memo that was new was the fact that the Col. was being pressured to write a good evaluation. This is something that may or may not have happened, but again, was common. Inflated performance reports were not unusual when I was serving active duty in the 80’s and I’m sure that didn’t happen overnight. We also would like to get beyond the distractions of events that happened 30 years ago and concentrate on what is going on today.
Well, maybe I should have said this Kerry fan. I apologize to any Kerry fan who thinks this is more important than a distraction.
“We Kerry fans don’t care if they were fake or not.”
You should. If partisan fraud becomes an acceptable standard for network news it will affect all of us. Would you care if Fox news faked up some news about Kerry? I would.
I’m sorry, that’s not how I meant it. I really meant I don’t care about the documents whether they are real or fake. They are a distraction. I wish they’d never aired. Yes, any news organization should be held accountable for the stories they tell.
Well, CBS has finally admitted they were in error and apologized. They received the documents from Bill Burkett who is (to paraphrase Rather) a “partisan operative” for the Democrats.
I hope this ends the story. I think most people are satisfied that – since the miltary discharged Bush and Kerry honorably – these stories are pointless.
Also, you bring up the point that GWB was after Rather because of the confrontation between GB41 and Rather. Did it occur to you that maybe it was the other way around?
Jeez, Glenn, you sound like Rather. “Even if the document is fake, we like the charges so much we don’t care!”
While this question has nothing to do with this post, it’s because I can’t find an email address…
Are you the fella that used to run Bibliobytes? If so, I’ve got some important questions for ya. You can help stop the resurrection of Open Market.
Rick