CHRONOLOGY OF CHARACTER ASSASSINATION
RNC research
gop.com
Chronology of a Character Assassination
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The good people over at RNC Research have put together for us an excellent chronology of the Democrat's attempted character assasination on President Bush. You should read the whole thing, but I want to concentrate on just a couple points.
It is my view that the forgery affair ("Rathergate", as some are calling it) could not have been done without the active participation of the DNC and the Kerry/Edwards campaign. I base my supposition upon three points:
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1. The story about President Bush's national guard service had been endlessly investigated by the MSM and the accusations of special treatment had been conclusively proven to be baseless. There was nothing more to be found, and only the creation of new <font color=blue>"evidence"<font color=green> could get the story going again.
2. John Kerry and his supporters were (and still are) very, very angry over the attacks launched by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Talking with Democratic friends of mine, it became clear to me that they believed that President Bush was squarely behind the SBVT accusations and, most importantly in their minds, that the accusations were entirely false. This churning and burning anger led more than one Democrat I know to state that everyone wanted to <font color=blue>"get"<font color=green> President Bush on this sort of issue, and that since <font color=blue>"false"<font color=green> charges had been launched against Kerry at the behest of President Bush, it was only turn-about if Kerry launched false charges against President Bush.
3. At each step of the way in the DNC/Kerry-Edwards attempt to revive the National Guard story, it was a well-connected Democrat who was providing the information to the MSM. The CBS interview with former Texas Lt. Governor Barnes (a gigantic financial contributor to Kerry/Edwards) showed that the Democrats were determined to make the National Guard story come to life again, and that the MSM was playing along with it.<font color=black>
Now we have our handy chronology to make things very clear for us. Two parts of it struck me with especial force:
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4 DAYS BEFORE THE CBS REPORT: <font color=blue>"CBS arranged for a confidential source to talk with Joe Lockhart, a top aide to John Kerry, after the source provided the network with the now-disputed documents about President Bush's service in the Texas National Guard. Lockhart, the former press secretary to President Clinton, said a producer talked to him about the 60 Minutes program a few days before it aired on Sept. 8. She gave Lockhart a telephone number and asked him to call Bill Burkett, a former Texas National Guard officer who gave CBS the documents. Lockhart couldn't recall the producer's name. But CBS said Monday night that it would examine the role of producer Mary Mapes in passing the name to Lockhart." (Kevin Johnson et al., "CBS Arranged For Meeting With Lockhart,"<font color=green> USA Today,9/21/04)
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Note that - four days before CBS aired its story, senior Kerry aide Joe Lockhart was talking with CBS' primary source. We have no evidence that they spoke prior to this date, but at the very least Kerry/Edwards had a four-day advance notice of a CBS report which would dovetail into the character assasination they started ramping up about six days before the CBS report. Then we come to the clincher:
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9 HOURS BEFORE THE CBS REPORT: <font color=blue>"Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe said, 'George W. Bush's cover story on his National Guard service is rapidly unraveling. ... George W. Bush needs to answer why he regularly misled the American people about his time in the Guard and who applied political pressure on his behalf to have his performance reviews 'sugarcoated.'" <font color=green>(Terence Hunt, "Questions Raised About Bush Guard Service," The Associated Press, 9/9/04)
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This provides certain proof that the DNC/Kerry-Edwards were fully aware of what CBS was about to report - there is just no way that it's a mere coincidence that McAuliffe used the same word <font color=blue>"sugarcoat"<font color=black> which appeared in the bogus memos CBS presented in its report.
We don't know at this point who got the ball rolling on the forged memos - ie, we don't know who wrote them. But if the memos did not come from the DNC/Kerry-Edwards, then we are asked to believe in a very amazing coincidence: That the desire of DNC/Kerry-Edwards to revive the President Bush National Guard story just happened to come up at the very moment the <font color=blue>"proof"<font color=black> the Democrats needed about President Bush's National Guard service was working its way through CBS. As for me, I don't believe in coincidences - my view is that the DNC/Kerry-Edwards fabricated the whole thing, including the bogus memos, in a desperate attempt to smear the character of President Bush. An attempt at muck-throwing coming from the campaign of John Kerry, who once upon a time called our magnificent troops back in Vietnam <font color=blue>"war criminals"<font color=black>.
I'd like to think that the Democratic leadership cannot get any lower than this - but experience has shown that we really can't put anything past them. Its going to be a long six weeks, good people - and after six more weeks of contending with the Democratic leadership, we're all going to need a shower.<font size=3>
Posted by Mark Noonan
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