Posted on 09/14/2004 8:33:14 AM PDT by BurkesLaw
Are Dan Rather and "60 Minutes" a bunch of patsies suckered by the Kerry campaign? Not exactly. According to the American Spectator, "The CBS producer said that some alarm bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story."
Hey, why not? Who's gonna spot it? If CBS says it's so, that's good enough for Thomas Oliphant's Boston Globe, the New York Times and the Washington Post, all of whom rushed the story onto their front pages because it met their "basic standards" ......
(Excerpt) Read more at iconoclast.ca ...
This is really what it's all about...Dan Rather still thinks the network news is the final word on everything. He hasn't dragged himself out of the early-70's either. He shares that with Kerry.
I almost hate to say this but...
When is there going to be A FREAKIN' LAWSUIT over this.
Surely Killian's family have "pain and suffering" good for $1,000,000,000,000,000.00 against See B.S.
(Especially with a Texas Jury)
Where are the F'in TRIAL LAWYERS here????
Hrmph. The trial lawyers are laying low because they want Edwards to win.
but producers chose to move ahead with the story." It was Rather. No one else.
There's a cartoon I want to do, but I don't have the time now. If features Dan Rather at the helm of a 747, labelled 'Bias', guiding it into a massive building labelled 'CBS'.
They've allowed Rather this kind of power in the News Division...what do you do when he's willing to kamikaze himself?
Somewhere in CBS News is someone who isn't happy about Danny taking them all down. Soon, they will begin to talk.
Who really cares whether or not the memos are authentic?
Even if they are for real (does anyone actually believe they are?), who gives a rat's ass whether or not George W. Bush showed up for a routine physical exam 38 years ago?
GWB never gave aid & comfort to the enemy.
GWB never went before Congress and falsely testified against his fellow officers and enlisted men who were still in combat.
GWB didn't hang out with Jane Fonda under the Viet Cong banner.
They ought to hire Edwards law firm.....what a gas that'll
stir up. Anybody ask the heartthrob...Clinton about this? I did not have a party with Dan Rather..or with
See B.S. There are so many phonies floating around NY
and California..no wonder they all are Demwits. Jake
Unfortunately, by law, you can't slander a dead person. CBS knows this, so they are free to lie about Killian as much as they want. His family would have a difficult time suing CBS unless they could prove that CBS's actions were malicious. However, at the rate CBS is going, that could be an option.
By now, the proof is incontrovertible that the "Bush Documents" are fraudulent. In fact, I saw a comparison between Lt Col Killian's real signature and that of the forged document on Fox News. Not even close! It didn't even take a handwriting expert to point out the glaring differences. Ok, so someone typed up false documents and forged a Lt Colonel's signature - all in an attempt to defame the President of the United States. Dan Blather and CBS will not identify their source. This sounds somewhat to me like a crime has been commited. So, my question is, is this something the FBI would investigate? Could Blather & Co. be subpoenaed?
Remember how the MSM media made a week-long story out of alleged "subliminal messages" ("RATS") in a 1/24th second frame in a Republican ad in the 2000 campaign? (The ad used a "splice-and-pop" technique to ad visual interest to the ad, which resulted in one instance in the word "DEMOCRATS" being split into two fragments, "DEMOC" and "RATS". The media made a big "dirty tricks" issue out of this insignificant, chance event.) But now, they are dragging their feet in asking tough questions about what appears to be deliberate, conscious deception.
This has been around a while and a few times -- but it's good -- so here it is again!
All of it ..............
CBS falls for Kerry campaign's fake memo
September 12, 2004
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
A few weeks ago, Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe was on PBS' ''Newshour'' explaining why the hundreds of swift boat veterans' allegations against John Kerry's conduct in Vietnam was unworthy of his attention. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence," he said, talking to Swiftvet John O'Neill as if he were a backward fourth-grader, ''is what keeps this story in the tabloids -- because it does not meet basic standards.''
Last week, we got a good idea of what Thomas Oliphant's ''basic standards'' are. Dan Rather and the elderly gentlemen at ''60 Minutes'' were all atwitter because they'd come into possession of some hitherto undiscovered memos relating to whether George W. Bush failed to show up for his physical in the War of 1812. The media had been flogging this dead horse all spring, but these newly ''discovered'' memos had jump-started the old nag just enough to get him on his knees long enough for the media to flog him all over again.
Unfortunately for CBS, Dan Rather's hairdresser sucks up so much of the budget that there was nothing left for any fact-checking, so the ''60 Minutes'' crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo conveniently called ''CYA'' that Bush's commanding officer had written to himself 32 years ago. ''This was too hot not to push,'' one producer told the American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swiftvets who've signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera -- that's way too cold to push; we'd want to fact-check that one thoroughly, till, say, midway through John Kerry's second term. But a handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign operative -- that meets ''basic standards'' and we gotta get it out there right away.
The only problem was the memo. Amazingly, this guy at the Air National Guard base, Lt. Col. Killian, had the only typewriter in Texas in 1973 using a prototype version of the default letter writing program of Microsoft Word, complete with the tiny little superscript thingy that automatically changes July 4th to July 4th. To do that on most 1973 typewriters, you had to unscrew the keys, grab a hammer and give them a couple of thwacks to make the ''t'' and ''h'' squish up all tiny, and even think it looked a bit wonky. You'd think having such a unique typewriter Killian would have used a less easily traceable model for his devastating ''CYA'' memo. Also, he might have chosen a font other than Times New Roman, designed for the Times of London in the 1930s and not licensed to Microsoft by Rupert Murdoch (the Times' owner) until the 1980s.
Killian is no longer around to confirm his extraordinary Magic Typewriter, but his son denied the stuff was written by his dad, and his widow said her late husband never typed. So, on the one hand, we have hundreds of living veterans with chapter and verse on Kerry's fantasy Christmas in Cambodia, and, on the other hand, we have a guy who's been dead 20 years but is still capable of operating Windows XP. It took the savvy chappies at the Powerline Web site and Charles Johnson of ''Little Green Footballs'' about 20 minutes to spot the eerily 2004 look of the 1972 memo, and various Internet wallahs spent the rest of the day tracking down the country's leading typewriter identification experts.
Bombarded with accusations that CBS had fallen for an obvious hoax, Dan turned to his trusty Smith-Corona and bashed out a few e-mails: ''For the umpteenth time,'' he said angrily, ''this is the kind of sleaze I had to put up with when they scoffed at 'What's the frequency, Kenneth?' "
Are Dan Rather and ''60 Minutes'' a bunch of patsies suckered by the Kerry campaign? Not exactly. According to the American Spectator, ''The CBS producer said that some alarm bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story.''
Hey, why not? Who's gonna spot it? If CBS says it's so, that's good enough for Thomas Oliphant's Boston Globe, the New York Times and the Washington Post, all of whom rushed the story onto their front pages because it met their ''basic standards.'' On Friday morning, Paul Krugman, the New York Times' excitable economist, filed a column called, ''The Dishonesty Thing,'' and for one moment I thought he was about to upbraid CBS for rushing on air with their laughably fake memos. But no, he was droning on about how the National Guard story demonstrated George W. Bush's ''pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn't ..."
The tragedy for Rather, Oliphant, Krugman and Co. is that even if the memos were authentic nobody would care. Their boy Kerry had a crummy August not because he didn't hammer Bush for being AWOL in the Spanish-American War but because the senator's AWOL in the present war. Big Media are trashing their own reputations in service to a man who can never win.
After the 2002 election, I wrote, ''Remind me never to complain about 'liberal media bias' again. Right now, liberal media bias is conspiring to assist the Democrats to sleepwalk over the cliff.''
The media and the Democrats sustain each other's make-believe land. Dan Rather tells his staff, ''Kerry's told me there's nothing to this Swiftvet thing.'' Kerry tells his, ''Rather's assured me this Swiftvet story's going nowhere.''
George W. Bush ought to wake up every morning and thank the Lord the media aren't on his side.
Remember the Hitler Diaries? They turned up in the '80s. Only problem is they weren't by Hitler. But by then various prestige publications had paid a fortune to serialize them. Among them was the Sunday Times of London, owned by Murdoch, who wasn't happy. He called the editor, Frank Giles, into his office, and said, ''Frank, I'm promoting you to editor emeritus.''
''I've always wondered,'' murmured Frank, ''what 'editor emeritus' means.''
''The 'e-' means you've been given the elbow and the '-meritus' means you bloody deserve it,'' said Murdoch.
I have a feeling after November CBS News will be promoting Dan Rather to editor emeritus.
Either that, or next week's ''60 Minutes'' -- ''Exclusive! Handwriting Expert Says Bush Wrote The Hitler Diaries!'' -- will have much better fact-checking.
It's never been clear to me whether these documents allegedly came from a government file or from the personal files of Killian.
i'd RATher fight than tell the truth!!!
Sounds reasonable to me. Perhaps the lawyers who FReep here could put together a strategy for taking on CBS and we could find a way of getting it to his family.
Outstanding.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
