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Home Front: Politix
CBS'S BIG BLUNDER?
2004-09-10
Headline should read "Rather takes gaspipe"
By JOHN PODHORETZ
THE populist revolution against the so-called mainstream media continues. Yesterday, the citizen journalists who produce blogs on the Internet — and their engaged readers — engaged in the wholesale exposure of what appears to be a presidential-year dirty trick against George W. Bush. What the bloggers and their audiences did was call into profound question the authenticity of four documents proudly trumpeted by CBS News in a much-heralded investigative report on Wednesday night's edition of "60 Minutes" about the president's National Guard service in the early 1970s. These were "previously unseen documents . . . obtained by '60 Minutes,' " the network bragged Wednesday night on its Web site. Their author, supposedly, was Bush's squadron commander, Jerry Killian, who died 20 years ago.
... which puts him conveniently out of reach of questioners...
They "include a memorandum from May 1972," CBS reports, "where Killian writes that Lt. Bush called him to talk about 'how he can get out of coming to drill from now through November.' " A document dated "18 August 1973" complains that Killian is being asked to "sugar coat" Bush's record. "I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job," the document says. Liberals went wild with glee about the story, especially after the onslaught on John Kerry's Vietnam record by his fellow Swift-boat veterans. Kevin Drum, the most talented of the left-wing bloggers, wrote: "This story is a perfect demonstration of the difference between the Swift-boat controversy and the National Guard controversy. Both are tales from long ago and both are related to Vietnam, but . . . in the National Guard case, practically every new piece of documentary evidence provides additional confirmation that the charges against Bush are true." Drum simply assumed that the documents were above-board. So did The New York Times and The Washington Post, both of which put the story on its front page on Thursday. They were doubtless swayed by the fact that CBS said " '60 Minutes' consulted a handwriting analyst and document expert who believes the material is authentic."

Maybe "60 Minutes" should have tried another expert or two. CBS made the four documents available in their original form on its Web site Wednesday night. And by yesterday morning, they were being examined with a fine tooth comb. The Minneapolis lawyers who run powerlineblog.com were on the case early. Two of the blog's readers directed their attention to a note left on an Internet bulletin board on the freerepublic.com Web site — the 47th posting on the topic there. Post No. 47 pointed out that there was something off about these documents from the 1970s: The spacing between the letters and the words was proportional, and only a few IBM electric typewriters could achieve that effect back then. From there it was off to the races. Once anyone who had had experience writing and typing in the 1970s began examining the documents, it was impossible not to see some weird anachronisms that suggested they had been crafted not on a 1970s typewriter, but using Microsoft Word. Charles Johnson, who runs the wonderful littlegreenfootballs.com, simply typed one of the memos over using Microsoft Word's New Times Roman font and, lo and behold, the document came out exactly identical to the one on the CBS site, down to the letter spacing. The documents contain such features as superscript lettering, which is done automatically by Microsoft Word, and curly quotation marks. A brief glance at a Web site called selectric.org, run by an amateur typewriter fanatic, reveals dozens of IBM electric typefaces — and none of them has curly quotation marks.
Posted by:Fred

#3   Oh, forgot to add that I read (think on Drudge) that Benny Boy's OWN daughter called Bullshite on him on a local radio station and said that he had bragged about doing this for the past couple of weeks.
BOY! Can Kerry put together a team or what? At least we know who'll fill that new Intel Chief post in a Kerry Administration. Bet Benny Boy already writes all his new memos in invisible ink.
Posted by: 98zulu   2004-09-10 2:36:18 PM  

#2   Dan Rather: "DAMN YOU BILL GATES!!! DAMN YOU TO HELL!!!!!"
Posted by: 98zulu   2004-09-10 2:32:00 PM  

#1  "... what appears to be a presidential-year dirty trick against George W. Bush."

A dirty trick would be swapping out the sugar with salt for his coffee. Isn't this forgery illegal in some sense? Can't most of these lies be prosecuted in some way? Or is it just those dern Democrats havin' some fun? Yuck, yuck.
Posted by: nada   2004-09-10 11:55:13 AM  

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