POLITICAL DIARY
September 10, 2004
James Taranto is on the road promoting his book, "Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House," (the book is available at the OpinionJournal bookstore). Best of the Web Today returns Sept. 13. Today we are offering e-mail subscribers Political Diary, the editorial page's daily e-mail newsletter. Click here to subscribe to Political Dairy.
In today's Political Diary:
Scoop: Karl Rove Caused Kerry to Say He Spent Xmas in Cambodia!
When Scoops Go Bad
Dean Provides Comic Relief
CBSer Protests: We're Not All Morons (Quote of the Day I)
Democrats and War (Quote of the Day II)
St. Ralph Goes Ballistic
Here Are Some Dems Who Really, Really Want Kerry to Win
When in Doubt, Blame Karl Rove
The widow and son of the late Lt. Col Jerry Killian both say they don't believe the documents CBS News used to claim George W. Bush failed to meet performance standards during his Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard are genuine.
For now, CBS is standing by its claim that the documents are from Lt. Col. Killian's files and that it consulted "a handwriting analyst and document expert who believes the material is authentic." But CBS won't reveal the name of the expert and the network's claims are challenged by several other experts who say it is almost certain the documents were generated by a computer that wouldn't have been in use in 1972.
But CBS has begun an internal investigation after reports surfaced from inside CBS that the documents may have been brought to the network's attention by Democratic National Committee opposition researchers. Today, the network also trimmed back its statements to rival news organizations about how "convinced" CBS is of the documents' authenticity. If the documents indeed turn out to be fakes, it won't be the first time CBS has been snookered by partisans in a presidential race.
In 1992, Bill Clinton's presidential campaign was nearly ended when tapes between the Arkansas governor and cabaret singer Gennifer Flowers were released. At the time, KCBS, the network's owned-and-operated affiliate in Los Angeles, took the tape and submitted it to private detective and forensic tape expert Anthony Pellicano for analysis. Mr. Pellicano's conclusions that the tapes were "misleading" and "not credible" played a role in Mr. Clinton surviving the controversy.
Only later was it learned that Mr. Pellicano had no formal training in evaluating tapes and was at the time being paid by Democratic sources to squelch "bimbo eruptions" surrounding Mr. Clinton. In other words, Mr. Clinton's own private eye was able to discredit one of the most damaging eruptions that preceded Monica Lewinsky. In his own memoirs published this year, Mr. Clinton confessed to the Flowers affair, contradicting his fierce denials at the time.
Years later, Mr. Pellicano did demonstrate facility with tapes when police investigating threats made against Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch uncovered evidence that Mr. Pellicano had been involved and had also illegally wiretapped her conversations. Mr. Pellicano is now serving a 2 1/2 year federal prison term for possessing firearms and explosives. A federal grand jury is still investigating allegations that he wiretapped Hollywood celebrities. CBS would be wise to conclude its internal investigation quickly. If it results in bad news, it should cut its losses immediately.
Meanwhile, former Clinton and Gore operative Chris Lehane, an acknowledged master of the black arts of opposition research, is already making the rounds on television hinting that Karl Rove could have planted fake National Guard documents to embarrass Democrats. If CBS is offered that scoop, my advice is simple: Don't take it, no matter how many documents with Karl Rove's signature you are shown.
--John Fund
Quick, Kick CBS While It's Down!
Perhaps "60 Minutes" reporters will finally learn the wisdom of consulting their own company's in-house lawyers, who've proved better, more skeptical journalists over the years than the journalists themselves. Here's a bet they would have taken one look at the purported Bush-incriminating National Guard documents and asked why they didn't look the way paperwork did in the early 1970s.
The same legal office finally stopped the network from going off the cliff in 1995 with a story about tobacco "whistleblower" Jeffrey Wigand, who claimed he had been subjected to a death threat for spilling the industry's beans. Never mind that an FBI investigator had already told the network that Mr. Wigand had faked the death threat himself. Never mind that the FBI also reported that his probable motive had been to entice CBS to run his story by adding a dash of sensationalism. Mike Wallace and Co. ignored the evidence and prostrated themselves before a "source" who was a liar and scam artist, forcing network suits finally to intervene to vet and all-but-kill the story.
No, the truth never got much traction. Mr. Wigand went on to be played with flair by Russell Crowe in "The Insider," while CBS reporters and producers tried to turn themselves into martyrs of the first amendment. That won't happen this time.
The purported National Guard documents were instantly ripped apart by Internet bloggers. An army of experts on fonts, typefaces and the history of typewriters materialized in cyberspace to do the detective work. Honorable mention also goes to two mainstream news organizations, ABC News and the Washington Post, which didn't ignore reality yesterday and lent a hand to exposing the dubiousness of CBS's scoop.
The enduring mystery remains. Whom does CBS hire as its "news producers"? Mr. Wigand's substantive revelations were ho-hum commonplaces even at the time, and appealing to CBS News only because they were dressed up in the faux personal drama of a hunted industry turncoat. Likewise, anybody who looks at archival documents with any frequency is smacked in the eyes by the difference between typewritten and computer generated documents. The real problem here, though, is the hunt by TV news producers of mediocre intelligence for "scoops" -- which increasingly means artificial attempts to infuse information with drama suitable to an entertainment program.
--Holman W. Jenkins Jr.
Howard Dean Looks Better Every Day - Not!
Some Democrats, worried about the erratic performance of John Kerry, are even wondering if it might have been better if they'd nominated Howard Dean after all. They should think again. The one-time Democratic frontrunner is stumping the country and, well, proving how undisciplined a campaign he would have run.
"I think that George Bush is certainly going to have a draft if he goes into a second term," he told students at Brown University yesterday. "And any young person who doesn't want to go to Iraq might think twice about voting for him."
After that unsubstantiated riff, Mr. Dean had the nerve to add, "The Republicans have the best propaganda out there since Lenin, and they just make stuff up and they keep repeating it, and hope people are going to believe it." Sounds to me like Mr. Dean is becoming the real expert in propaganda. -
--John Fund
Quote of the Day I
"There is a school of thought here that the Kerry people dumped this in our laps, figuring we'd do the heavy lifting on the story. That maybe they had doubts about these documents but hoped we'd get more information. If that's the case, then we're bigger fools than we already appear to be judging by all the chatter about how these documents could be forgeries" -- unnamed CBS producer, quoted by "The Prowler," AKA at Wlady Pleszczynski (http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=7096).
Quote of the Day II
"You can take McCain's argument (in favor the Iraq war) or leave it. But these are arguments, ideas that inform policy. 'I was a war hero' is a non sequitur that only a party plagued with pacifism for the past 30 years could imagine is a convincing rationale for leadership" -- Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer.
Ralphie In Excelsior
Ralph Nader is getting his revenge for the unprecedented effort Democrats are making to kick him off state ballots by challenging his petition signatures. Mr. Nader says the floundering Kerry campaign is "not laying a glove" on the "most vulnerable Republican administration of modern times."
Mr. Nader told the Baltimore Sun yesterday that the consultant-heavy Kerry campaign is not letting the candidate think for himself. "You lose your identity after a while, and that is very easily perceived by people. Wavering, flip-flops -- all that stuff -- is very perceived." He also warned that unless something is done, Mr. Kerry will be "an anchor" that will sink the candidacies of many promising progressive candidates for Congress.
Meanwhile, some good news finally arrived at Nader headquarters yesterday. He won ballot status in New Mexico, a key swing state. And in Oregon, a state judge ordered his name be placed on the ballot saying that the Democratic secretary of state had made inconsistent rulings on which independent candidates should have qualified. But when asked what the best news he's gotten in the campaign lately has been, Mr. Nader said it is the knowledge that the Democratic ticket has made so many mistakes that few people are likely to blame him again for electing George W. Bush.
--John Fund
Would-Be Kerry Successors Scrounge for Money, Pray for a Miracle
Back home in Massachusetts, the drive to fill John Kerry's Senate seat -- should it suddenly become available after Nov. 2 -- is moving ahead full steam. Governors in the Bay State once had the power to fill a vacant Senate seat, but the Democrat-dominated legislature rewrote the law over the summer to mandate that a special election be held instead within 160 days of any vacancy. Now six of the state's 10 House Democrats are jockeying for position.
Leading the fundraising "primary" is Rep. Martin Meehan. He's amassed an impressive $4 million war chest, more than his top competitors combined. He obviously hopes to scare off Rep. Edward Markey who has raised $2.15 and Rep. William Delahunt who's raised $1.75 million. One who's unlikely to be scared off, though, is Rep. Barney Frank, known to have a considerable national fundraising network of his own.
Mr. Frank hasn't even begun shaking the money tree yet, however, because he's apparently waiting to see how recent revelations about an old sex scandal hurt him. Back in 1987 Mr. Frank came out of the closet amid allegations that his bunkmate Stephen Gobie ran a gay prostitution ring from the congressman's apartment. What's new is that Mr. Frank now admits he took Prozac and saw a therapist as the scandal raged. "I was pretty dysfunctional for five or six weeks," Mr. Frank told the Boston Globe last month. The revelation is hardly earthshaking by today's standards, but Mr. Frank is just making sure there aren't any landmines left for him to step on. Like a smart politician, he's also re-airing the old scandal on his own terms, hoping to forestall any uncontrolled resurfacing later.
In addition to this congressional gaggle of contestants, the widow of the man who held the seat before Mr. Kerry is thinking about throwing her hat into the ring. Nikki Tsongas is now dean of external affairs at Middlesex Community College. Mrs. Tsongas has never held elective office, but she says she learned how to campaign watching her husband run successful Senate races and a failed presidential campaign in 1992. There's also a push to put the seat in the hands of a woman. Massachusetts has never elected a woman senator and the last woman to represent the Bay State in the House was a Republican back in the early 1980s.
That's one reason why former state Treasurer Shannon O'Brien -- the party's 2002 gubernatorial candidate who lost to Republican Mitt Romney -- and Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley are also thinking about running. Ms. Coakley can take encouragement from the fact that Mr. Kerry was able to use the Middlesex's DA's office as a springboard into the lieutenant governorship and then the Senate after losing a congressional race 30 years ago. Of course, all of this hinges on Mr. Kerry getting his campaign going again, not a good bet at the moment. |
