[holden]

It wasn't planned to fail, but if it did fail eventually, Burkett would be the fall guy. The point is it was needed to be the catalyst for the inculcated perception that Bush was a Fortunate Son in military, and when push came to shove, he not only shirked going to Viet Nam, but was booted off jets because he was too busy helping daddy win an election to have time to follow orders. That was a concocted lie, of course.

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

[dalight]

Well, if Burkett was "planned" to be the fall guy, what a bad pick. I think at least CBS thought these documents would just be a catalyst and that the story would move onto the solid ground of parsing Bush's real service documents.

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.