A Year Late, and Way Short on Logic
Power Line
Mary Mapes, that is. Scott posted on her new book last night. We'll be deconstructing Ms. Mapes's revisionist history, bit by bit, over the weeks to come. For now, let's just pick out a point or two from her book's first chapter to ridicule.
Ms. Mapes writes:
<<<
Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS.
>>>
Really? I did a simple site search, which you can easily reproduce, and found that during the 2 1/2 years of commentary that we wrote prior to September 9, 2004, we mentioned Dan Rather a total of six times--on average, once every four to five months. Hardly "loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS." Moreover, amazingly enough, in our famous post "The Sixty-first Minute," which we updated fifteen or so times on September 9, 2004, the day after the 60 Minutes story aired, and which led pretty directly to the downfall of Dan Rather and poor Ms. Mapes, we mentioned Mr. Rather exactly zero times. That's right, zero. How's that for obsession?
Ms.Mapes isn't done. Her writing reveals that she has no idea what she is talking about; repeatedly, she says that critics of her television program talked about "peripheral spacing" in the alleged National Guard documents. This is astonishing; it's hard to say what is more amazing: that after a year, Mapes still doesn't know that "proportional spacing" is what we and many other bloggers discussed, or that she and her editors
1) know nothing about typography, and
2) on top of that, are too lazy to read our posts.
Ms. Mapes is evidently lost in the far-left fever swamps; she repeats a conspiratorial chestnut that dates to the immediate aftermath of the 60 Minutes fiasco:
<<<
I was told that the first posting claiming the documents were fakes had gone up on Free Republic before our broadcast was even off the air! How had the Web site even gotten copies of the documents? We hadn't put them online until later. That first entry, posted by a longtime Republican political activist lawyer who used the name "Buckhead," set the tone for what was to come.
>>>
Oooh, there is a mystery! Unfortunately, it is easily unravelled by those who are aware of the U.S.'s time zones. But we can do better than that! Buckhead himself, the original skeptic with regard to CBS's slander of President Bush, wrote us to put to rest, once and for all, the liberal claim that there is something fishy about the time at which he began to question the CBS documents. Take it away, Buckhead:
When y'all get around to doing a fuller rebuttal, I hope
you will, among other things, correct her on the time
line. This continues to befuddle people.
FreeRepublic poster TankerKC posted a doubt about the
document during the program based on the formatting of
the signature block, after he saw the document on screen
during the broadcast. He's Air Force and knew the
signature block should have been left justified.
My comment on the fonts was posted later that same night
at 11:59:47 EDT, after the show was broadcast in my time
zone, which is eastern. I did not watch the program. I
read the NYT article on the story when it was posted on
FR. FR poster Howlin posted a link to pdf's of the
documents on the CBS website. I followed that link and
downloaded the docs and looked at them, and formulated my
post, and it went up at the time noted.
The confusion arises because of the way the FR website
displays post times. If you are not registered or logged
in, FR by default shows PDT for post times, regardless of
the time zone from which the poster posted. If you are
logged in and registered, it shows them by your time
zone. In any case, I posted from Atlanta at 11:59:47 PM
EDT. To a non-registered user, this would display as
8:59:47 PDT. The error comes from inferring from the PDT
time stamp that I posted before the program was over on
the west coast.
A very small point, but one that nevertheless is
regularly repeated as part of the catechism of the Fake
But Accurate Society, an organization whose membership
overlaps considerably with the Thorazine Wing of the
Democrat Party.
Over the weeks to come, we will no doubt have more fun with Ms. Mapes and her defenders.
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