Posted on 09/22/2004 5:07:18 PM PDT by SwinneySwitch
David Van Os said that it was CBS’ intention from the outset to cast Bill Burkett in an unfavorable light. “Dan Rather and CBS were intending all along to use the interview to dump on (Burkett),” Van Os said. “What we got was a bunch of mealy-mouthed bull****.”
Van Os said that Burkett had to think long and hard about what to do with the documents in his possession. “Bill was very reluctant to give CBS the documents; because he did not want to become caught up in what he knew would be created if he did,” Van Os said.
“Bill did not go to CBS, CBS came to him. CBS spent all summer trying to pressure and coax Bill into letting them have copies of the documents that they believed he had
---I'm with you on the call from Kerry/DNC/Lockhart being the trigger to "go." But what I can't figure is how CBS knew of Burkett in the first place.---
Perhaps the same people that saw to it that Burkett got the documents tipped CBS. Burkett was just a blind drop to launder the documents, a patsy in case things went wrong. I've maintained that it was the Kerry campaign that got the memos to Burkett, but it may be more likely that it was the DNC during their spring campaign.
Remember Terrible Terry was going after Bush big time and a lot of the MSM were talking the points. The DNC might have slid the memos to Burkett thinking he would be only too anxious to alert the press. Instead he went paranoid and sat on them until CBS weaseled them out of him.
This is just a supposition, not really up to the standards of FR, and is pieced together from lots of reading of other blogs over the last ten days - can't give an explicit hattip, but a general one to all blogs - and if I get Ouch'ed I will accept and correct.
I believe this was just Step One - the set-up.
It is established that Rather was to fly to Washington and present the memos to the WH, but couldn't get out of New York because of the weather. Instead the doc's were faxed to McClellan, who only had three hours to review them, so said nothing and faxed them out to the world.
It was expected by Rather that Bush or the WH would "deny" the veracity of the memos. Rather would show a clip of the denial.
Rather already had the tape of Marcel Malvey's (?) "authentication" of the signatures in the can.
Can you hear it? In 60 Minutes, eyebrow-raised tones, "Really, Mr. President? Well, that's not what our handwriting expert says." . . . [Cut to tape]
Bush would then be established as a liar. How many times did McAuliffe call Bush a liar the day after the show? A shirker and deserter? They wanted to goad him into a response - pure bully action.
Next came Kitty Kelley - Bush snorted Cocaine at Camp David . . . (breathlessly). They hoped for another denial.
Can you hear it? "Reallllly Mr. President?" Of course we now know she had no tape of the "interview" - and who knows what falsehood they had up their sleeves.
My guess - and it is pure speculation, is they really intended to run with the COCAINE story, escalating the FAKE order to report for a physical into a "fear of detection so skipped the physical" claim. That played the first day or two, then died away.
Imagine the media outrage - the last two days Kerry has used "the "irrational insistence" by Bush that everything is OK in Iraq" line - Kerry's "Bush is in a dream world" riff is out there TODAY! But it would have been He's not just out of touch, he's high on drugs!!
The story would have expanded from "Fortunate Son" to a fortunate, DEBAUCHED son who never really did stop abusing substances. After all, once an addict always an addict, right?
Didn't Babs shriek in June, "He could start drinking again tomorrow!!!?"
They might even have faked some "abortion" correspondence of some kind. That rumor has been floating around for years, too.
But to start the first step they had to have documents. I'm not sure we'll ever know why they used these obvious forgeries - maybe they really DID get snookered. Or maybe they've just convinced themselves that the doc's are real.
As a sidebar, I asked a very bright associate with real 'Nam experience why Kerry would EVER lead with that. My associate thinks that after all these years of lying about his heroism and altering his service record, Kerry has come to believe his own story. That's why he is so enraged over SBVFT - it is a mental illness - really, a delusion - and the deluded brain cannot accept exposure of the truth.
Fortunately, there never were any real documents. We know Pres. Bush earned enough service points to legitimately complete his service and obtain an Honorable Discharge. He did not miss a physical in March, 1972, nor did he disobey an order. None of the "charges" is worth an answer.
The question really shouldn't be, "Why did CBS run the story?" - we know they wanted to entrap the President. The question should be, "Why did they stonewall?" The answer has little to do with fear of admitting an error.
By simply not permitting an answer to these ridiculous charges, that evil Rove caused the perpetrators to become so enraged that they completely lost sight of their original objective, and of the risks they were taking by continuing. They, also, have deluded themselves into believing their own story.
A bully can NEVER accept it when you just walk away, can he? You really can't understand the bully's behavior; you walk away, waiting to be hit in the back; and it just doesn't make sense. Then when the bully really gets mad, when he really loses control, you turn and punch him in the nose - and HE runs away, denying that HE did anything to YOU. But the teacher in the corner saw the whole thing, and he's caught - denial is never so vehement as when it comes from the guilty.
The original story - the 60 Minutes set-up entrapment has been done hundreds of times. It isn't so irrational. The abject denial that the memos are forgeries is totally irrational, dangerous behavior.
Rather is a laughingstock and he knows it - his career will always have an asterisk next to it.
Rather is a bully who just got a bloody nose from somebody who he THINKS is smaller - but the teacher caught him in the set-up.
And he's pointing the finger at ANYBODY other than himself.
Mary gave it five years for the documents to surface, and called the Killian household just before she recommended to Danno that they should move on the 60W story.
Rove may well have seen this coming as he mused at the presumptive Kerry's early rantings. People are praying for him.
The whole Fortunate Son thing was a huge conspiracy kicked into high gear with the Kurintongites' arrival. Wolfson is the chief malefactor. They hoped the TANG stuff could be saved as a T-minus-six day DUI story, but other new material wasn't deemed meaty enough when it came up on the schedule. All the slime in the Anti-Bush books wasn't supposed to wash off nearly so quickly. And Kerry has totally muffed the response to the SBVT's.
Kerry is a bitter, spoiled boy who would prefer to be on vacation boinking rich women 90% of the time and poseur ing for the cameras the other 10%.
Working the VietNam angle is the only thing he knows how to do effectively.
HF
---If anything should go wrong, Mary does plan to leave Burkett holding the bag, so Mary, as Lucy, tells Burkett where to receive the documents, but her husband or cohort actually gives them to her, lest Burkett recognize her.
The memos ham-fistedly contain known Army'isms, so as to implicate Burkett. Mary has hours of Burkett tape interview material from which to pour Burkett-sounding "orders." Mary's feminine (?), practiced handwriting pens Killian's signature.
Mary doesn't expect to have the forgery found out because she thinks the whole story will get the Wilson-Pflame and Clarke treatment - a discussion of characters and ideas, not of typography. If forgery eventually comes up, it'll be hung around Burkett's neck, long after the monkey has been on Bush's back long enough to shave him down a point or two in key battleground states come election day.---
That's a very clever take on this and it's quite possible. It fits with the memos being just the pieces needed to fill in the blanks in her story with a nasty twist, but without being too splashy.
We have to remember that Burkett, having been in the Nat'l Guard, is a coward and a draft-dodger by RAT definition.
Danno knows he's right about that, cuz he's talkin' about himself.
Just like Lt. Caffey telling us about Col. Jessup, "He wants to tell us he ordered the Code Red!"
HF
Memogare is a sort of Perfect Storm with the Big Media, the DNC/Kerry Campaign, and select 527 groups all going down in the same ridiculous conspiracy to bring down a sitting President.
Please, Please, PLEASE...DON'T CALL IT MEMO-GATE.
it is RATHER-GATE!!!!!@#@$%%^*!!!!!!!!!!!
Memo-gate was when the Republicans found the DemocRAT memos about blocking the judges vote in the Senate.
That STILL HASN'T been dealt with.
How about a good investigative report on THAT !
Then there's that arrogance. They know what's right for us and if only we knew then these tricks wouldn't be necessary.
Still.. you bring up a good point.. about why Kerry did what he did at the convention. And, the answer is.. this story really started back in Iowa. With the "chance" meeting of Rasmussen and the whole Vietnam vet meme.. took off.. this had been an old standby for Kerry.. but the story of the Hap River Rescue had drama and mythic power. This is how Kerry went form 5% in the polls to being the Dem's unstoppable front runner.
The convention was this same drama written large with all of Kerry's players telling and reinforcing this story and they felt it would have the same power and resonance as it had with the Dem (non-military) base. The problem is that the Swiftboat Vets announced in May that they were upset as hell. But before that they were making contacts and issuing warnings. Probably March or April. Interesting timing eh?
The Kerry Campaign figured these guys could be held at a distance because every time he has been attacked like this, he has turned this attack against the attacker and actually gotten a boost out of the attack.
The Kerry campaign expected and moved forward with the plan that the President would glom onto the Swifties and push their case. And the Kerry camp prepared "Operation Fortunate Son" as an answering salvo.
However, there was a problem in the core of "OFS." It was old news. Yawn... so it needed a new charge to drive it forward. This charge was that Bush Deliberately disobeyed a direct order. And this was to be reinforced with a plausible why.. because he didn't want to be caught with coke in his bloodstream. (This whole line of attack is an anachronism because drug testing like this really didn't get peoples attention for another decade in the 80's)
Still, it didn't need to be true.. just plausible and salacious. Something to drive the story home. So they looked through what they had from the President's files and they saw hints of what they needed. So they went looking for documents that would say what they needed. What happened next is just lies confronting lies, I don't have a clue at this point. Perhaps the story of Burkett picking up the forgeries in March is true, perhaps something else is true.
But several things went wrong with the plan as it unfolded.
First, the swifties chose to form a 527 and write a book with really well foundationed assertions. This allowed the Swifties to not approach the Administration for help. And, because they did their homework well and because the case is compelling on the face of it. They quickly found enough support to go forward.
Second, The blogosphere and talk radio embraced the swifties with their hearts and spread the stories they had to tell across the country. So that by the time any normal organization would have been just clawing for attention.. Kerry was faced with the Swifties messages already accepted as fact long before "OFS" was ready to roll. It was scheduled to strip the President of his credibility just after Labor day. So, so despite the whole press stating as a point of fact that the Swifties were full of who ha.. folks just shrugged and didn't buy it. They already decided Kerry was just exactly who the swifties said he was.
There is and was a vast communications system still digging and exploring and finding the Swiftboat story more confirmed day by day and the damage is being done to the MSM for ignoring this story. Folks are using its coverage as a barometer of "trustworthyness" of the the news source.
Third, apparently Burkett and Barns were skittish about their place in this drama. I am not sure of this at all. We will have to see.
Fourth, the memos looked real enough for non-technical folks. Its called a scatoma, you can't see certain things because you are conditioned not to notice them. We just accept words on a page without thinking, does this look like it was written on a typewriter? This all screams of a forger who is in his/her 20's. Someone who never wrote a term paper for high school or college on a typewriter. Someone who never even considered that this might be an issue. They just worried about making it look old.
Fifth, Bush had taken a very different tactic vs the Dems on 527's, they were suing to have them put onto the sidelines, therefore they couldn't use them and the Dems had worked out how to coordinate and dispatch 527 funds like artillery. This is transparent and laughable. I remember hearing Kerry's people whine because they were "off of the air" in August. (Not advertising) But this was planned, and coordinated to conserve funds for the after Labor Day campaign. Instead, the 527's and Dem Party was tasked to carry the water. the 527's didn't have anything in the pipe to counter the Swifties in August because they didn't expect for them to be able to cut through, but when they started to, Kerry responded and this set up an echo chamber vaulting "Unfit for Command" to #1 bestseller status. Not the plan.
Sixth, CBS has been carrying the Dems water all year really since Wilson and making millions on the way. Coordinating attacks on the president with multimedia roll outs Books and exclusives and all to great effect Wilson started the "president" lied.. lie right after our triumph in Iraq and this more than anything has lead to the Chaos in Iraq. It gave the rebellious allies a reason to hold back support rather than rolling up their sleeves and making the best of it.
Each one of these attacks doesn't happen in a day. It takes months to write books and film stories and get these things in place to roll. CBS was working on their piece of "OFS" and they needed these documents to make this whole story "NEWS". Wilson's "the president lied" about the Uranium story came from the forged letters from Niger that were planted, we find by the French to discredit Bush and the Coalition, so that the Iraq action could be stopped at the UN.
Seventh, they expected the Whitehouse to make a big denial. It was suppose to be GWB not Dan Rather doing the deny deny deny thing. Just like what you said.
Eighth, the Pajamahadeen strike. (Much has been said about this.) And break up the news cycle and OFS's wheels literally explode off of the train, but I am convinced ABC had a wiff of what was happening and they were already investigating this. ABC's nightline on the 9th didn't come out of no where. Instead, I think they called the theme of this scandal in an almost erie non-sequitur. The whole show was focused on Opposition Research and what happens if you get it wrong. Essentially blaming the Kerry Campaign for the memo's long before anyone else. This was strangely prescient of the Prowler's piece on how these documents originally came from Kerry's Oppo Research unit. And ABC had a ex-Kerry research staffer. ABC is just biding their time on rolling out the next bits of this, or perhaps they are sitting on this as part of some other Faustian pact. Will we know? The future will tell.
Can someone confirm or refute this--I heard that Kitty Kelly uses these same documents in her book.
I think it would say a lot about where the docs came from if both Kelly and CBS somehow got them.
As bad as I want the Kerry campaign and SeeBS to be caught and punished legally, it all has to be PROVEN LEGALLY for any crime to be filed (a dream come true, need a good informant), but these sneaky people know how to lie out of their legal ills, big-time, and cover real evidence, on top of getting top rate lawyers even if indicted.
Does anyone here think this has ANY CHANCE of going any further than it now is?
There is some weird kind of bait-'n-switch diversionary tactic going on here - - some kind of game. This whole thing sounds really fishy to me, like Burkett is being set up somehow.... For exactly what, I don't know yet.
But it is critical to remember that David Van Os works for the Democrat Party, not Bill Burkett. He will throw Burkett overboard in a heartbeat to protect Kerry and the scumbag Democrats. Van Os takes his orders from Kerry's handlers, and Bill Burkett doesn't know it yet, but he is toast.
So they kept trying to push the story to get Bush or the Whitehouse or the campaign to give them a video clip of a denial or even better an examination of Bush's records by the guys in PJ's going over every comma and nuance trying to prove the negative about Bush.
These folks kept Burkett hidden because they knew exactly who he was and "unimpeachable" and Burkett almost cannot fit in the great state of Texas together. The nice thing about Burkett is that he had a story that would explain how HE might have come into possession of these documents (other than a drop at a Houston Festival) because of his story about the trash can full of Bush papers. It was supposed to go down that Burkett would be found out.. but this would just reinforce the story, at that point, not take away.
Its only the presence of the Forgery charge that makes the track back to Burkett now look like abject stupidity.
The funny thing is that "OFS" had to be in preparation longer than since the Clintonistas have been on board. So did they bring this with them or are they like a bunch of tackles added to do a blitz, to whip OFS scoring 5 or 10 points damage on the president to erase any convention bounce he could have had. I remember Lockhart on the Sunday talk shows predicting that the race would be tied again by the end of the week. He knew what was brewing at CBS.
otherwise, I agree wholeheartedly.
Actually, not. Van Os is in a bit of a pickle. He is Burketts' lawyer. You don't sell out too many clients before you find yourself without clients.
Ok .. sooooooooooooooo how did CBS know Burkett had the documents??
Good catch
Van Os and Burkett are spinning to avoid the FBI and jail. Right now, no prosecutor in Texas or Washington will touch this. But in 6 weeks, if Bush wins, God help them. Van Os knows this so he is busy saving his own ass now.
"they believed he had"
How and when did they come to this belief?
"So," continued Van Os, "Mary Mapes drove from her Irving area home over to Bill's Baird Ranch, tied him up, tortured him with drip-drip tales of Bush winning re-election, and thereby forced, coerced and virtually stole the documents out of his hands."
"All she promised in exchange," Van Os continued, "was a conference call with Kerry campaign insiders and an administrative position to be named later."
Meanwhile, rumors are floating that Mary Mapes may be brought in by the Texas Rangers to be the backroom negotiator for some off-season swaps. The Rangers said they need a dealer who can exploit other ballteams' rosters.
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