September 11, 2004
THEY OUGHTTA SERVE A MEAL ON THAT FLIGHT:
CBS falls for Kerry campaign's fake memo (MARK STEYN, September 12, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)
A few weeks ago, Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe was on PBS' ''Newshour'' explaining why the hundreds of swift boat veterans' allegations against John Kerry's conduct in Vietnam was unworthy of his attention. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence," he said, talking to Swiftvet John O'Neill as if he were a backward fourth-grader, ''is what keeps this story in the tabloids -- because it does not meet basic standards.''Last week, we got a good idea of what Thomas Oliphant's ''basic standards'' are. Dan Rather and the elderly gentlemen at ''60 Minutes'' were all atwitter because they'd come into possession of some hitherto undiscovered memos relating to whether George W. Bush failed to show up for his physical in the War of 1812. The media had been flogging this dead horse all spring, but these newly ''discovered'' memos had jump-started the old nag just enough to get him on his knees long enough for the media to flog him all over again.
Unfortunately for CBS, Dan Rather's hairdresser sucks up so much of the budget that there was nothing left for any fact-checking, so the ''60 Minutes'' crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo conveniently called ''CYA'' that Bush's commanding officer had written to himself 32 years ago. ''This was too hot not to push,'' one producer told the American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swiftvets who've signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera -- that's way too cold to push; we'd want to fact-check that one thoroughly, till, say, midway through John Kerry's second term. But a handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign operative -- that meets ''basic standards'' and we gotta get it out there right away.
The only problem was the memo.
He's dangerous enough without grooving him a pitch. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 11, 2004 8:28 AM
It's Bellesiles all over again. Truth means nothing, or less than nothing, to a Marxist pig.
Posted by: Lou Gots at September 11, 2004 9:08 AMIt's Bellesiles all over again. Truth means nothing, or less than nothing, to a Marxist pig.
Posted by: Lou Gots at September 11, 2004 9:09 AMTo believe the CBS story, and the explanation for the look of the documents, you have to believe that in 1972 Lt. Col. Jerry Killian happened to be in possession of one of the most expensive and unique typrewriters in the United States -- one that could not only do superscript in a Times New Roman typeface with variable font sizes, but could also adjust spacing between letters based on their relative withs and shapes, could maintain uniform spacing between the lines on the letter, and could perfectly center the headings on the letters to the point that documents produced three months apart would line up perfectly when compared side-by-side or in a Photoshop overlay. And the Democrats complained the Penatgon's $15,000 toilet seat back in the 1980s was a luxury -- what was the government doing spending what had to be somewhere in the low five-figures for a wriitng machine that was apparently unavailable to any major corporation (including IBM) for some lowly National Guard officer down in the boonies of Southeastern Texas?
You really have to wonder if you scratched the surface of Dan Rather -- assuming he really believes his explanation for the documents -- how many other moonbat theories currently hidden would come flying out. Walter Cronkite has been bad enough with his flights of fancy since retiring from the CBS anchor chair; once Rather leaves the job and is free to say what he really believes, he could serve up a veritable fountain of logicial lunacy on an almost daily basis.
Posted by: John at September 11, 2004 9:11 AMAccepting evidence, without circumspection, from a convicted fraudster like Barnes is a brilliant manuever. If this obvious ineptitude and bias doesn't get people fired or retired, I'll be amazed. The CBS news division has always fended off corporate oversight because of its purported professionalism. I guess those days are now over.
CBS news reports are about as real as Dan Rather's hair color.
Posted by: Bart at September 11, 2004 9:13 AMWhat are the odds, even if such a typewriter existed in 1972, that the Air National Guard would have it in their budget to buy the latest state of the art typewriter? Not having been in the Guard myself, but I imagine that all of their equipment, from planes on down, were hand-me-downs from the Air Force. They were probably using 1960 era typewriters then, or earlier.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at September 11, 2004 9:58 AMI saw a former CBS executive producer being interviewed yesterday - He said that "60 Minutes" has the highest standards of any news organization, and that the blogging community is a bunch of screwball amateurs.
I'm not sure why he presented it that way, since this isn't a controversy which can be shaped by public opinion; the documents are either fakes, or not.
Once they're proven to be fraudulent, it will mean that the blogsphere, home to people who believe that extraterrestrial aliens walk among us, and that the Illuminati rule the world through the Trilateral Commission, has higher standards than CBS.
Ouch.
Here's a link to a site that actually got someone to try reproducing the documents on the Composer. Looks a bit less likely than Microsoft Word. Composer sample
Posted by: at September 11, 2004 10:25 AMIn order to make the CBS forgery clearer,
we should start using a fingerprint analogy.
We have an exact "fingerprint" match for the
questioned documents in the form of the
MS Word example shown by
littlegreenfootballs.com (LGF).
Dan Rather and CBS are saying "here is
a fingerprint that has a point of similarity
and here is another fingerprint that has a
different point of similarity."
Stated that way, it is clear that their defense
is bogus.
They need to produce a fingerprint
(a typewriter commonly available in 1972)
that matches at least as well as the existing
LGF match. In my opinion, they cannot do it.
There is a Macromedia Shockwave animation that pretty much nails it conclusively.
http://img41.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img41&image=60minbusted.swf
Posted by: Gideon at September 11, 2004 1:57 PMCan the Kerry campaign sue Steyn for libel?
Did I miss something, or did Steyn pull this stuff about a "Kerry campaign operative" out of his hat? Has CBS revealed their source?
Posted by: creeper at September 12, 2004 1:40 AMYou have my admiration, creeper, for valiantly fighting a rearguard action, although the day is lost.
creeper:
The American Spectator had a story about the Kerry camp and DNC shopping the story. Of course, Rather running the story makes it a DNC operative's story and the Lt. Governor in the story is a Kerry op.
Posted by: oj at September 12, 2004 8:58 AM