I get off work at 01:00 or so, get to sleep at 03:00. When I wake up I go online and check the news.
So I see that CBS has some documents that make Bush look bad, Something that the Boston Globe printed on their front page. One look was all it took for me to realize they didn’t look like anything I’ve ever typed up on a typewriter. Really looked fishy to me.
But I see that the blogosphere has jumped all over this with both feet. That’s what I get for needing a whole 5 hours of sleep a day.
Hey, wouldn’t you think that CBS or the Boston Globe would have a few grizzled old hands wandering around? Professionals that were pounding out pages by the thousand and stories by the bucketful in their salad days? People that would have typed up significantly more copy then myself, who noticed that something was wrong immediately even though I’m not a professional journalist or writer?
One would think that a few of them might just have made it all the way to a position as an editor. You know, the guys who have to okay a story before it actually makes it to the website or the front page.
This is kind of ironic, since I read this post on Instapundit where a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer bitterly complains about a “free-floating cadre of rightist warriors.” Seems that we’re bullying the traditional news media so much by fact checking their butts that they’re actually choosing stories that will appeal to our bias. Buying us off with conservative drivel, in other words. This has the effect of slanting the news to the Right, instead of the middle where it would be if we’d just leave the professionals alone to do their job.
I’m finding it hard to swallow that these guys actually believe that crap considering the evidence.
UPDATE
Hold the phone! Our very own Mike Spenis of The Feces Flinging Monkey has typed up his own copy one of the damning memos using Microsoft Word, and then he superimposed it on the smoking gun.
Typewriters don’t do kerning. Letter-quality word processors weren’t available in 1973. End of story, except for naming and shaming the dunce who tried this stunt.
In “Roughing It,” Mark Twain described a common scam involving selling a worthless mine by “salting” it with high-grade ore from someplace else. Twain mentioned one pitiful fellow who tried it using silver dollars. That’s pretty much what I see here.
Okay, it looks like a forgery.
But let’s compare interviews of and the histories of O’Neill (someone they haven’t interviewed) and Ben Barnes (I arrived in Texas as the Sharpstown Scandal was unfolding – that was over thirty and a couple of Barnes’ scandals ago). CBS may want to influence someone other than Texans (they probably see us as mired in our own preconceptions though I might call them truths). Barnes’ series of “entanglements” probably didn’t get much out-of-state press, but this comparison surely leaves CBS’s credibility in tatters.
I read on another blog that Ben’s daughter came out and said he never discussed W, it’s all political and guess who has a book out?
the embarrassing thing is, boston newspapers seem to have a hard time determining what is real and what is fake these days.
first there was the iraq torture thing, which ended up being photos from a porn site.
now, somebody tries to pass off a printout from word as a document from a 70s military typewriter?
lucky for them, a presidential candidate from assachussets probably won’t win the nomination again for another thirty years after this train wreck, so they can regain their sanity.
Don’t count on that. If Bush pulls this out, they’ll spend the next 4 years trumpeting the assertion that he was an illegitimate incumbent, and trying to set up Hillary. A tiger can’t change it’s stripes, and you can’t recycle (a) toilet paper.
I hope to god they DO try to run Hillary, but she won’t run…she give all sorts of reasons but the real, ugly truth is that she knows that she will get her ass handed to her and for the most ironic reason of all. She knows that for all of their self congratulating over how “inclusive” the liberals and democrats are, the shameful truth is that there are ALOT of men on both sides of the row, INCLUDING democrats who will not vote for her because she is a woman and that would seriously undermine their claim of how much more forward thinking they are than those “backwards, racist” conservatives…
Today will be remembered as a turning point; when the SuperScript Veterans for Truth, via blogs, officially ended the reign of the Old Media.
The latest gossip is that Clinton people infiltrated the Kerry campaign and cooked these memos up with the help of a DNC staffer. They fed the memoes to CBS, which was so eager to go for the kill, it neglected to vet the documents.
Game, set, and match to Hillary’s operatives. The road is clear for 2008.
Ah, Blythe, the delicious taste of unsubstantiated conspiracy theorizing. Cui bono? Hillary! Ergo, she must have been behind it all!
The truth about this, if it ever comes out, will be ugly enough. Let’s see how it develops.