CBS Memos on Bush a Deliberate Hit on Kerry?
Written by Chris Long
Monday, September 13, 2004
Dan Rather continnues to insist on playing out what increasingly sounds like his last stand. The alleged Air National Guard documents on George Bush are beginning to look like sucker bait that Rather took hook, line and sinker. If true, surely he will be ''urged'' by CBS to pack it in after yet another scandal.
The basic problem with the documents is that many aspects of the ''facts'' are too easy to disprove. So much so that one begins to believe that they were intentionally planted to add to the implosion of Kerry’s credibility and campaign. For example, consider the fact that within hours the font typesetting was easily recognized by bloggers. There happened to be an antique IBM typewriter fanatic who has a web site called ''Selectric.Org'' who is utterly the last word on what font types were available when, and what those fonts looked like. His site even has postings of examples of every font available for IBM Selectric typewriters way back when. Strike one.
Then there is the pesky little fact that the principles allegedly involved with the memos are all dead. We are supposed to believe that Lt. Bush's commanding officer, Lt. Colonel Killian, just happened to have ''personal files'' that some diligent person searched and discovered the memos. But, according to Killian's ex-wife and son, the former Bush commanding officer couldn't even type and--to their knowledge--had no personal files anywhere. Also, the documents' writers use of military titles such as ''Lt. Colonel'' for Killian and ''1st Lieutenant Bush'' for the president are references that no military man would ever use. Just ask anyone who has been in the military: ''LCol'' or ''Lt.Col'' is what is affixed to documents to denote the rank ''Lieutenant Colonel'' and ''1Lt.'' is usually what the Air Force uses to refer to a First Lieutenant. The use of improper titles for Air National Guard officers is so inept and transparent that it could only have been intentional--no document forgers in their right minds would fail to note the proper abbreviations for officers on real documents while committing the forgeries. Then there is the pesky matter of the organizational headers on the memos. The memos that do have headers simply have them typed, another no-no that numerous military types are currently telling the few media outlets willing to listen. Strike two.
Colonel Walter Staudt, who allegedly had Colonel Killian write reports favorable to George Bush had retired a full eighteen months before the date on the Air National Guard (ANG) documents. The left-leaning Dallas Morning News, has articles and records that prove Colonel Staudt left the Texas ANG long before the memos were allegedly written at his behest. And the Dallas Morning News had investigated that way back in 1999. Ooops. But the mainstream leftist media is, necessarily for their ''cause,'' leaving all that out. I suppose the logic of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, et al. is that to ''feed'' all of the truth too quickly would be counter to what their pals in the Democratic National Committee have indicated they would like done. Oh, the truth will bubble to the top of the cesspool--and the media-elite know that. They just want to manage the drip-drip so the facts will get lost against other, intentional ''background noise'' that they manufacture. Strike three.
Now strikes four, five, six and seven. The forgeries were allegedly ''investigated'' by CBS News. But it turns out the investigation went no further than a handwriting expert who appeared to authenticate the Texas ANG documents. But the ''expert'' is simply a handwriting analyst and stated that he cannot comment upon any other aspect of the documents. Hmmmm. Given the astonishingly short time in which the bloggers spotted discrepancies, it is possible that CBS did have document experts examine the memos but CBS decided to omit their findings and protest that CBS's ''integrity'' should suffice for any doubts you may have.
I assume that's the same integrity CBS exhibited in the documentary, ''The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,'' which was a little more than a crude smear against the character and honor of General William Westmoreland, who commanded all U.S. Army ground forces in Vietnam. Perhaps CBS is hoping, with clenched teeth and crossed fingers that no one will remember that they were sued big-time over the Westmoreland smear and finally admitted the smear had been edited to skewer the general. The elite media are ''forgetting'' to remind us of that fact. Not one mention appears anywhere that I can find, that CBS has had monstrous problems with lying and credibility in the past, especially with the Westmoreland documentary.
I recently read that the liberal media are the only business segment in existence that have allowed business failures and bankruptcies while protecting their ideological leanings. Any other business, the writer stated, would take corrective actions when it was clear the bias was hurting the business model and affecting sales and ad revenues. But liberal media are the sole exceptions. and newspaper executives have in the past let their ships sink rather than take corrective action, which would be an admission of bias and malfeasance. Consumers, like the oppressed of the earth, will indeed ''vote with their feet'' and as we have seen, media consumers are voting for Fox News Channel and the few print organs like The Washington Times, The New York Post, and the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal as a refuge from Dan Rather and his pals.
The CBS documents have the appearance of forgeries that are amateurish, crude, and blatant. For example, it is entirely possible that the memos were produced with Microsoft Word, using default margins and the default Times New Roman font. One can even speculate that they were produced in the belief that there would be a rapid exposure of the forgeries. Another sure bet was the fact that neither the Kerry Campaign, the DNC or CBS News would give the documents more than a cursory overview before belatedly declaring them ''authentic'' and trumpeting the long-sought smoking gun against the campaign against Bush.
Then, we come to Dan Rather, who been playing his sordid last stand the way many of us envisioned Dan going down. Dan likely believed the memo-gate would be his finest moment: a wonderful last hurrah to go out on, having saved the DNC and John Kerry, who would be eternally grateful. For Dan, the legacy thing must have played a big part in the current scandal. Like the pathetic Blanche in Tennessee Williams’ ''A Streetcar Named Desire,'' Dan’s desperation increased as the years wore on, driving him into increasingly desperate acts to attain professional respect and esteem.
Dan was a ''war hero'' too, remember? Dan could play the combat grandstand in Vietnam as well as any of the other defeatists who followed our soldiers around, shoving microphones in their faces when their buddies were killed, asking inane questions like ''How does it feel?'' or ''Does the war feel worth it now?'' Check out Rather’s book, ''The Camera Never Blinks,'' if you get a chance. I have it here on the shelf--and suffered through pages and pages of self-congratulatory stories that show Dan can, take on Nixon, stand up to the big boys, and fearlessly interview American soldiers.
Have you forgotten that in March, 20004, Rather gave our enemy, Saddam Hussein, a bully pulpit from which to harangue the American people and the rest of the world on Saddam's popularity with the Iraqi people? What on earth could have been the ''news'' value of that? I suspect that CBS assumed Saddam's cause was every bit as legitimate as the cause of the United States--Saddam fighting for his beloved and misunderstood country and the United States mistakenly singling out the perverse dictator.
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