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Home Front: Politix
Burkett Admits He's Provided Docs to CBS but he isn't the originator
2004-09-20
Posted by:BigEd

#23  Yeah, that's bizarre. So was Rather saying that Burkett was in the Texas Air National Guard. Last I heard, he was Army National Guard, which accounted or a lot of his errors in recreating the memos.

Rather can't even get basic facts straight. It's amazing.
Posted by: Robert Crawford   2004-09-20 7:14:04 PM  

#22  CBS News - Backhanded feed Hewitt via Gherrity
NRO...

Rather : {Burkett} did not come to us, we went to him...

Huh???????

I AM ON THE WEST COAST, SO IS HEWITT
Posted by: BigEd   2004-09-20 6:44:16 PM  

#21  Conduit : David VanOs attorney of Bill Burkett


With Howard Dean (head turned)

with Carville

and

and

and....

Posted by: BigEd   2004-09-20 6:28:13 PM  

#20  Has to be non-military and either very young or very dumb or both.

I'll bet $$ to donuts is a MoveOn punk.
Posted by: lex   2004-09-20 5:18:16 PM  

#19  This is more fun than a new puppy. I'm betting... Begala.
Posted by: Dave D.   2004-09-20 4:58:27 PM  

#18  This Burkett guy was apparently hospitalized a couple of times for mental illnesses. Maybe he could blame his alter ego for supplying him with the documents and then take the Fifth.
Posted by: Tibor   2004-09-20 3:58:48 PM  

#17  CF: My point was that Lumpy is a *skilled* fabricator. And could he be responsible for something so slipshod?

I've had a bit of a re-think on this one. Now that clever, informed individuals, connected through the blogosphere have debunked the documents, they are revealed as an obvious sham. But they passed muster with CBS News--one of our purported arbiters of truth. And this is where Lumpy's tradecraft comes into play. One of the first concepts you learn in Film 101 is "willing suspension of disbelief" on the part of the audience. The intended audience for these documents was CBS News, not an online network of hard case pajama wearing skeptics. (And Lumpy knows his audience.) From that standpoint, the documents worked magnificently. If CBS News had not posted copies to their web site, we would not have arrived at the current state of affairs.
Posted by: Classical_Liberal   2004-09-20 3:56:57 PM  

#16  PS VanOs is Burkett's Attorney, and the Democrat candidate for one of the seats on the Texas Supreme Court.

VanOs has experience with State Supreme Courts.
He worked with Palm Beach County Democrats in the "Recount" in Florida in 2000...
Posted by: BigEd   2004-09-20 3:30:55 PM  

#15  PS VanOs is Burkett's Attorney, and the Democrat candidate for one of the seats on the Texas Supreme Court.

VanOs has experience with State Supreme Courts.
He worked with Palm Beach County Democrats in the "Recount" in Florida in 2000...
Posted by: BigEd   2004-09-20 3:30:47 PM  

#14  PS VanOs is Burkett's Attorney, and the Democrat candidate for one of the seats on the Texas Supreme Court.

VanOs has experience with State Supreme Courts.
He worked with Palm Beach County Democrats in the "Recount" in Florida in 2000...
Posted by: BigEd   2004-09-20 3:30:32 PM  

#13  PS VanOs is Burkett's Attorney, and the Democrat candidate for one of the seats on the Texas Supreme Court.

VanOs has experience with State Supreme Courts.
He worked with Palm Beach County Democrats in the "Recount" in Florida in 2000...
Posted by: BigEd   2004-09-20 3:30:27 PM  

#12  VanOs & Cleland from the Rational Explications Blog

Rational Explications

I don't know much about this blog, but Mr Google turned them up on a search, "Burkett Cleland"
Posted by: BigEd   2004-09-20 3:28:25 PM  

#11  From AP Yesterday :

In an Aug. 21 e-mail to a list of Texas Democrats, Bill Burkett said he talked with former Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia about information that would counter criticism of Kerry's Vietnam War service. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the e-mail yesterday.

"I asked if they wanted to counterattack or ride this to ground and outlast it, not spending any money. (Cleland) said counterattack. So I gave them the information to do it with," Burkett wrote.


So now he is protecting his source? In August there does not seem to be much protecting going on...
Posted by: BigEd   2004-09-20 1:51:57 PM  

#10  CL - in a word -- YES! Forging documents, like everything else Mike Al-moor does (like editing NRA appearances for Bowling for Columbine) is right up his alley.
Posted by: CrazyFool   2004-09-20 1:47:11 PM  

#9  Oh, and in case I didn't say it yet: I think Burkett is being set up as a fall guy.
Posted by: Phil Fraering   2004-09-20 1:46:02 PM  

#8  All I'm going to say is, if the forger of the memos is my age or older, they're really stupid.
Posted by: Phil Fraering   2004-09-20 1:45:15 PM  

#7  Lumpy Riefenstahl is a clever fabricator of images. Could he really be responsible for something as lame as the ficticious 30 year old memo produced with the default settings of MS Word?
Posted by: Classical_Liberal   2004-09-20 1:34:42 PM  

#6  
CBS said that Burkett "also admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source."
Uh-huh. So who's the actual source, Burkett?

Or is that what they're paying you not to tell?
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut   2004-09-20 1:13:50 PM  

#5  In fact, I don't see any comment on Moore's site at all about it. I find this surprising, since he normally doesn't miss a chance to bash Bush, and this is bigger than anything he could have made up. And evidently Burkett is a source for F9/11 . . . scroll down a bit to see the pertinent item. Don't know if Moore would have the balls to do something like this - don't know if he has any at all, come to mention it - but it's interesting, nevertheless.
Posted by: The Doctor   2004-09-20 1:05:20 PM  

#4  Doc! Michael Moore! BRILLIANT!
He's probably stupid enough never to have see an old-fashioned typewriter!
Posted by: BigEd   2004-09-20 1:04:21 PM  

#3  And nobody's surprised by this, because we'd already figured it out . . .

BigEd, put me down for either MoveOn or the Kerry campaign in general . . .

Speaking of which, Michael Moore's stayed awful quiet about this, as far as I know . . .
Posted by: The Doctor   2004-09-20 12:58:15 PM  

#2  This is actually good news in that Burkett can't hide behind press shield laws. The RNC could conceivably sue and force Burkett to reveal the source of the documents.
Posted by: badanov   2004-09-20 12:56:57 PM  

#1  From Above link

Burkett, a retired National Guard lieutenant colonel, provided the documents. In a press release accompanying Heyward's statement, CBS said that Burkett "also admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source."

Let's start a poll...
Who gave the documents to Burkett...

1) James Carville
2) Max Cleland
3) Paul Begala
4) Nurse Fuzzy-Wuzzy
5) George Soros

Other Nominations Welcome!
Posted by: BigEd   2004-09-20 12:47:00 PM  

00:00