CBS is in deep shit with the fraud docs, here's why

[LarryWiley]

Me thinks this CBS 'story' will backfire on Kerry. The good senator cannot catch a break.

Larry

==============
Ex-Bush commander says Guard memos are fakes

The Sunday New York Times
September 12, 2004


HOUSTON -- A former National Guard commander who CBS News said had helped convince it of the authenticity of documents raising new questions about President Bush's military service said Saturday that he did not believe they were genuine.

The commander, Bobby Hodges, said network producers had never shown him the documents but had only read them to him over the phone days before they were featured Wednesday in a "60 Minutes" broadcast. The contents did reflect some conversations he and Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian had had about Bush. But after seeing the documents Friday, Hodges said, he concluded they were falsified.

Hodges, a former general, was just the latest person to challenge the documents, which CBS reported it had obtained from the personal files of Killian, Bush's late squadron commander at the Texas Air National Guard.

The memos indicated Bush had failed to take a physical "as ordered" and that Killian was being pressured to "sugarcoat" Bush's performance rating because Bush, whose father was then a Texas congressman, was "talking to somebody upstairs."

Some forensic document specialists say the memos appear to be the work of a modern word processor; others say they could have been produced by certain types of Vietnam-era typewriters.

CBS News has said it obtained the documents through a reliable source and that a host of experts and former Guard officials, including Hodges, helped convince CBS News officials of the documents' authenticity.

A spokeswoman for CBS anchor Dan Rather, Kim Akhtar, said CBS had asked Hodges to appear on camera and he declined. As a result, Akhtar said, CBS simply read him the documents, and he responded by saying "he was familiar with the contents of the documents and that it sounded just like Killian." He made it clear, she added, that he was a Bush supporter.

Hodges said he was basing his belief that the records were fakes on "inconsistencies."

He pointed to a memo in which Killian supposedly theorized that the Texas Guard's chief of staff, Col. Walter Staudt, was pressing Hodges to give Bush favorable treatment. Hodges said that was not the case, and that Staudt had actually retired more than a year earlier, though he acknowledged that Staudt might have remained in the Guard in some capacity. Staudt has not answered his phone for several days.

 

[LarryWiley]

CBS falls for Kerry campaign's fake memo

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
Sunday 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.

 

[LarryWiley]

New doubt cast on Guard documents

Military official now says CBS records are fake

By Michael Rezendes and Walter V. Robinson, Boston Globe Staff
Sunday September 12, 2004

The heated debate over the authenticity of documents aired by CBS News purporting to show an effort to "sugar coat" President Bush's military record grew louder yesterday, when the Los Angeles Times reported that a retired major general who was consulted by CBS to verify the records now believes they were faked.

The newspaper said that, after being told by CBS that retired Major General Bobby W. Hodges would vouch for the documents, it contacted Hodges Friday evening only to find that Hodges believes the documents are inauthentic. The Dallas Morning News also reported that a key figure cited in one of the memos as pressuring commanders to give Bush preferential treatment had retired from the military more than a year before the memo was dated

 

[LarryWiley]

There are many more major sunday newspapers besides the L.A. Times, Boston Globe, N.Y. Times, Washington Post & Dallas Morning News backtracking! Looks like to me they are trying to cover their asses.

 

[GAMEFACE]

The docs are forged fakes, game, set, match. END OF STORY.

 

[lander]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by GAMEFACE:
The docs are forged fakes, game, set, match. END OF STORY. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

And, yet, there exists no evidence proving such.
Your hero betrayed his counrty by not fulfilling his duty. Similiar act by us 'common folk' would have us dishonarably dischared.

END OF STORY.

 

[billthecop]

You libs really are pitiful, it's the old "do you believe me or your lying eyes?" when you're confronted with obviously bogus memos. How many people have to line up and refute these documents before you libs will admit they lack authenticity? Your standard answer is "well he lied about WMD, or weaker still, well he didn't take a physical when he was ordered (bogus) 30 years ago" or some other bilge.

Let's face it the Grand Old Party is "in" and the Dems are "out", that's our political system speaking by way of the vote. Get over it, because this is what the future for America is going to be (thank God)!

 

[JudgeWapner]

Bill everything goes in cycles. When Jr is elected and totaly fucks up the economy,the people will look to Dems.

 

[billthecop]

Well, he WAS elected 4 years ago, and the economy is doing just fine. He'll be elected again, so just set your sights on '08 and lets see what you "socialists" (eg, Hillary, et al) will have to offer (not much I expect)!

 

[JudgeWapner]

The economy is doing fine???????
Man you better check that deficit.Somtime or another we are gonna have to get it down.Greenspan says it's the most important aspect and I agree.The President for the next term is gonna have to raise taxes or let it increase.Either way it won't be popular.

 

[JudgeWapner]

By the way,I'm not really a socialist per se,but am definately a realist.

 

[Oren1]

I don't remember the specifcs about that planted Iraq intelligence, but how about this one?

"Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq's nuclear program?

Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of senior intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq's weapons capability. It was an important presentation for the Bush Administration. Some Democrats were publicly questioning the President's claim that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction which posed an immediate threat to the United States. Just the day before, former Vice-President Al Gore had sharply criticized the Administration's advocacy of preëmptive war, calling it a doctrine that would replace "a world in which states consider themselves subject to law" with "the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States." A few Democrats were also considering putting an alternative resolution before Congress.

According to two of those present at the briefing, which was highly classified and took place in the committee's secure hearing room, Tenet declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched uranium. The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was buttressed by a new and striking fact: the C.I.A. had recently received intelligence showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five hundred tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world's largest producers. The uranium, known as "yellow cake," can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors; if processed differently, it can also be enriched to make weapons. Five tons can produce enough weapon-grade uranium for a bomb. (When the C.I.A. spokesman William Harlow was asked for comment, he denied that Tenet had briefed the senators on Niger.) "

 

[billthecop]

So your defense of these blatantly forged documents is to site some obscure secret meeting by some unknown participants who were discussing Iraqs potential to obtain nuclear weapons capabilities? How in the world is that germane to CBS's publicizing phoney data on GW's National Guard duty? Is there some sort of nexus between these two unrelated issues that would some how make CBS's actions more acceptable?

I guess if I were in the situation you libs are in, I too might grasp at any straw that would tend to minimize the serious illegal shenanigans of my party.

Bottom line:
Bush-176
Kerry+166

2005
House...GOP
Senate..GOP
Whitehouse..GOP

Get over it!

 

[JudgeWapner]

Bill,if they do control both houses as well as presidency it will be time to put up or shut up and get us out of the world of shit our country is facing.

 

[billthecop]

You know, this "world of shit", as you categorize it, is a result of Islamic-terrorists attacking our country and a strong president taking definitive action to assure it doesn't happen again. This is not so easy when you have an obstructionist (Tom Daschle) leading the minority party which questions every effort the president makes to improve our security. Hopefully John Thune will take care of that little matter on Nov.2nd.

Seriously, if I were a member of the democratic party, I would be very concerned with the direction my party was going. They run the risk of being marginalized to the point that they can no longer be considered a viable party. Inasmuch as I firmly believe in the two party system, this doesn't bode well for the future. I sincerely hope they stop screwing around with these bogus document type of things and get back to real political discourse.

 

[Oren1]

dude, Bush used that shit in his state of the union address! how low is that.

 

[Sonny2003]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by bill the cop:
So your defense of these blatantly forged documents is to site some obscure secret meeting by some unknown participants who were discussing Iraqs potential to obtain nuclear weapons capabilities? How in the world is that germane to CBS's publicizing phoney data on GW's National Guard duty? Is there some sort of nexus between these two unrelated issues that would some how make CBS's actions more acceptable?

I guess if I were in the situation you libs are in, I too might grasp at any straw that would tend to minimize the serious illegal shenanigans of my party.

Bottom line:Bush-176 Kerry+166

2005
House...GOP
Senate..GOP
Whitehouse..GOP

Get over it! <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Posters here keep thinking that Bush will win because of the betting line. You need to remember,the bettors are making this line, not the voters. I am sure the voters far out number the bettors.

 

[billthecop]

There is a demonstrable difference between betting on a sporting event and betting on the outcome of an election. With the acknowledgment that this isn't a scientific study, consider the make-up of the gambling public. Lets assume the public who bets is evenly divided between Reps and Dems. It would seem that the same percentage of bettors would also be voters vis-a-vis the non-betting public. So if about 66% of these bettors (voters) are casting their money ballot for one party, it would stand to reason they will probably not vote against themselves from a dollars and cents perspective.

In other words, we all understand that the amount we bet on one team or the other has absolutely no impact on the outcome of the game. Just because there is twice as much money bet on one side doesn't add one point to the favs chances. But with an election bet people can indeed influence the outcome by backing their financial bet up with their actual vote on the party they bet on. It's unrealistic to think someone is going to put their money on one side, then "bet" against themselves when they go to the ballot box.

My point is, tracking the betting line on candidates is probably more accurate than most of the polls that are taken as they reflect the true intent of the potential voting public who also happen to be bettors.

 

[Redneckman]

CBS has acknowledged that they don't have the original documents. That's because there are no original documents. These aren't forged documents, they are fake documents. Shame on CBS and their all out assault to enter election politics.

 

[GAMEFACE]

The truth is slowing getting out on this one.