***Ben Barnes Memogate Timeline Is Highly Suspicious***

[counterpunch]

Barnes' timeline is highly suspicious.
Here we see that the discovery of these documents was a deciding factor for Barnes agreeing to speak to 60 Minutes:

Rumors about the memos had circulated in the Democratic Party and media circles for weeks; in fact, CBS had used their existence to help persuade Barnes to talk. He told Democratic friends before the "60 Minutes II" broadcast that if documents the network was hunting for were found—and were authentic—"the election is over."

But now we learn that it was Barnes who called Dan Rather ready to talk to CBS just a few short days before CBS received the documents:

During the Republican National Convention in New York, Rather got a call from Ben Barnes, a onetime Texas lieutenant governor and veteran Democrat who has known the anchor, a former Houston TV reporter, for 30 years. Barnes said he was ready to say before the cameras that he had pulled strings to get Bush a coveted slot in the Texas Guard in 1968. Mapes had long been urging Barnes to tell his story.

On Friday, Sept. 3, the day after the convention ended, Mapes hit pay dirt. She told Howard her source had given her the documents.

If it was the documents that convinced Barnes to do the interview, and he decided to do the interview a couple days before CBS got them, then this would mean that the Kerry campaign -- which Barnes is co-chair of -- got the documents first, then CBS received them a few days later.

The close proximity of these correlated events is almost certainly not a coincidence.

[counterpunch]

I read about that on his site.
It is an odd piece of the mystery, but...
Consider this:

The Democrats put together this little oppo file on Bush.
Who knows where it came from. Clearly it was all pulled out of someone's ass.
"Verbal orders" as if anyone knew what orders were or weren't given to Bush verbally 30 years ago...
They probably put that in there because they knew it couldn't be "disputed'>

The thing to remember about Democrats -- something I think that many Republicans do not grasp -- is that they almost exclusively cater to the ignorant, uninformed, and easily fooled. There is a significant portion of the population who will believe something like that. The Democrats constantly lie and mischaracterize because while they may get refuted in the real world, the rumors and misinformation will still travel through the shallow under currents of pop culture and urban legends. That is their target.

Now as I was saying, we really don't know where these little myths came from about verbal orders and what not, whether they were picked up from the dank basement of DU and liberal grapevines, or planted first by DNC counter-intelligence, or invented by the likes of Michael Moore, but one way or another, they came to be in the Kerry oppo reseach file.

But what if you are looking at it backwards..?
Instead of Kerry's press release being based on these memos way back in April, these memos were based on the press release and/or the same opposition file that it came from?

Perhaps Max Cleland's little trip to Texas was all about the now famous "reassembly" of the mythical records..?
Perhaps Cleland broght the DNC's Bush file with him on his trip...

[Casloy]

Seems as if so many things happened at once regarding the Bush Guard story, the interviews, the Democratic attack ads, the McCaulif speech. It almost looks like it was coordinated between CBS and the DNC.

[counterpunch]

Damn straight it was.
No "almost" about it.