OK, here goes at posting back the normal way. Here’s my first “news” one since my absence. First, since I have been away, a quick summary of the issue from Slate:
Rather Suspicious
(Josh Levin, Slate)
On Wednesday night, CBS News released four memos it claimed were written in 1972 and 1973 by George W. Bush’s commander in the Texas Air National Guard. In one of the documents, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian writes that a Guard official was “pushing to sugar coat” Bush’s training evaluation; in another, Killian suspects that Bush is “talking to someone upstairs” about getting transferred. Within a few hours of the CBS report, bloggers were questioning the authenticity of the documents. By today, the doubts were on the front page of the Washington Post.
(via InstaPundit)
OK. Now, my take… I was immediately completely convinced by this. Charles from Little Green Footballs was the first person I saw to do this, although others have done this since. Now, as far as I am concerned Charles is a right wing nutcase, and reading his site often makes me cringe because of just how bad it is and not in sync with my way of understanding the world. However… he opened MS Word, used default settings, and reproduced the docuement exactly (minus fax transmission defects). Done. Convinced. Yes, there may have been the tech to do the fonts and everything else back then. Maybe. But that is just too close a match. I have no doubts in my mind. These are fakes, and bad fakes. They didn’t even try.
People like PowerLine have done much more detailed font analysis. But it isn’t even needed. The little demonstration in Word is all it really takes, counter arguments by Daily Kos aside. That just doesn’t convicne me at all. And it actually seems a bit desperate.
The only defense I could think of that made sense was that these were not actually the originals, and for some bizzare reason CBS had used a retyped copy for clarity. But they are standing by it. And all sorts of voices on left of center websites are desperately trying to research old typewriters to prove that these could be real.
Give it up. I am not a Bush fan. I think he is an idiot. I think the charges about him in the National Gaurd and what he did and didn’t do are most likely true. But these docs do NOT support that case. It is completely and totally obvious they were done in Word. Recently. And that isn’t even mentioning the critiques on other grounds. Anyone who defends these documents at this point is just making themselves look like idiots. Just stop, relax, find other issues to attack W on. This is not it.
I’ve been listening to people call the President an idiot for years, and this is the same man who has run complete circles around the democrat party since the beginning of his administration. These people have demonstrated absolutely no indication of their ability or worthiness to run this country, as evidenced by their positions on the issues only being a positive for them if it’s bad for America. When the stock market goes up, unemployment goes down, more terrorists are killed…where is the democrat who steps up to the plate and says it’s a good thing? Outside of Zell Miller, no such animal exists. Look at unemployment numbers: We’re at 5.4% right now, .2% less than it was in 1996, and that was during Clinton’s re-election when it was supposedly the best economy in 50 years. Their entire political argument is a blatant sham.
The entire case against the President on the grounds that he did not do his duty is completely fraudulent. When Al Gore ran against the President in 2000, he had an advantage as a Vietnam vet who’s service was impeccable. Now as the Vice President at the time, the administration had complete and unfettered access into the military records of the President. During the 2000 election Al Gore made no attempt to question the President’s Guard Service, because his campaign researched the issue and found nothing to use against him. It is way too convenient for CBS to not only have gotten the records the Pentagon, but to also have casually overlooked the errors in the document that made a forgery easy to spot. If Dan Rather was 1/4th the journalist he has always claimed he was, there would have been every serious effort taken on the part of CBS to prove the records were authentic, but he didn’t because the records stated events the he *wanted* to believe.
Every single time the press f*cks up, it attempts to portray their bias and lack of professionalism into a dirty trick or conspiracy on the part of the President or Karl Rove. On one hand democrats try to convince everyone that the President is stupid, then at the same time they try to say that he is an evil political mastermind. It’s so God-damn ridiculous that I can’t even trust their weather reports without checking another source. The entire existence of the press was meant to keep government in check, but all that went out the window years and years ago when they started to take sides.
Hey! Mark! Long time no hear! Glad to see you here. Email and let me know what’s up with you sometime!