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Posted: 9/12/2004 4:23:26 AM EDT
CBS falls for Kerry campaign's fake memo Sun Times 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. |
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You obviously haven't been visiting DU enough, if you still hopelessly cling to the possibility that they were fake.
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Yes, I have gone to the truest source on the Internet, the authoritative DU, and have seen the light. I even had to correct my father, who was a paper pusher in the Air Force until 1970 and pointed out many inconsistencies. I even had to correct my mother, who pushed plenty of paper at Strike Command at MacDill AFB. I feel better now that I have enlightened them. Woody |
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It's fake. -HS |
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Cliff notes: The Liberal Media was so happy to get anti-Bush evidence that they didn't check it's veracity.
Plus they don't expect people to call them on it. I wonder if any of the big three will adopt the Fox right leaning bias? If your news programs keep losing money, why not suppply what 50% of the population wants? |
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It's fake. Dan Rather and CBS are a bunch of idiot tools. Bush should be grateful about the liberal bias. It's helping him. Good article! |
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It was a great article. Thanks to 4get_No1 for posting it.
Reading comprehension a problem? You know that means you should read more. Of course if you are physically disabled in some way, I apologize. Bob |
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Hey Dan................your 15 minutes ended a long time ago and it's time for you to just go away..................
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It gets better...
seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationalpolitics/2002032742_bushguard11.html Partial quote
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That was good. I wonder if that quote's for real? (Mark Steyn puts a lot of humor into his columns) |
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Na I'm just being lazy this morning, I was up all night fighting crime, but its sleepy time now |
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They're just using this to stir the mud in the water. The 60% of the clueless people in this country haven't a clue as to what a swiftboat is but now know that there's a fake memo about Bush - a wash in their minds. They'll know who started for Philly in last week game and how many medals the US took at the olympics but won't have a clue as to Kerry's war record, his senate record, or the platform. They will vote for the "D's" because that's what their union tells them to do, that's what my daddy did ...
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I don't get the What's the Frequency, Kenneth references.
All I know is we used to sing that to a guy named Kenneth. tony |
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Yep. We have 'em here, too. Ask them if they like their guns, they say Yes. Ask them if they like immigration, they say No. Ask them if they want their taxes raised or lowered, they'll say lowered. Ask them who they're voting for, and you find out they're yellow-dog democrats because thar daddy who worked at Allison Transmission for fitty years was a democrat, and they're by-God democrats too. |
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You're not in your thirties, are you? |
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Nope almost 26. I just Googled the song though, and figured out the reference. I never knew Dan (or rather his attacker) was the subject of that song.
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Sad but way too true. Watch any of Jay Leno's street interviews for proof. |
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You somehow think that anything Leno does is not a setup? |
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I imagine they screen out the more astute ones but don't believe the ones we see are scripted. |
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I imagine they screen out the more astute ones but don't believe the ones we see are scripted. Yeah I've seen one show where they did kind of an "expose" on the street interviews. Some people are actually quite smart. But the dumb ones are definitely not scripted. They just interview a bunch of people and go with the dumb (i.e. funny) ones. |
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I have come to another conclusion.
The passage of the AWB in 1994 was NOT the result of a fickle public opinion being swayed by the scare tactics of the antigunners and Bill Clinton. There was NEVER public support for the ban, the 4 networks then existing FAKED the information. This affair with the forged Bush Memmo is strongly suggesting that this sort of activity has been NORMAL OPERATING PROCEDURE for the news agencies for DECADES- perhaps going back to Vietnam. They may have FAKED much of the public support for the AWB- and we have complained for years how they stonewalled those who wanted access to rebutt them. This means it should be very easy to repeal other anti gun legislation. |
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You're probably right, the public wasn't all that much interest in the '94 AWB, but the press and the liberals just kept on hounding on it, and since Bill C was the most anti-gun Pres... In the old days, it would take many months to find faked documents, by that time it would've been too late today anything, but with the miracle of the interent, things can be scrutinzed by many people over a very short, and frauds will be exposed. The liberal news media does not have a monopoly on disseminating the "news" anymore, ie if "we didn't report it, it doesn't exist" BS. |
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After Pat Purdy shot up that Kali school yard in 89, feinswine found footing after a state ban and took it to the federal level. Between the mid 80's and 94 they had their day. All they've done is caused more gunowners to wise up and fight their bullsh*t. State level legeslation is their only outlet now, but I think there's enough people aware of their efforts to stop it before it gets out of hand. With the internet and so many gunowners networking their idea's there's a MUCH bigger resistance than in 94. |
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Fineswine would never have gotten anywhere if the Internet had existed then. Her hysterical rants would have been coutnered within hours with scans of the FBI Uniform Crime Reports and Patrick Purdy's wrap sheet from a dozen diffferent sites. This was one of the toughest things about the late 80's/early 90's in Kali. I had gone to the library and read the Uniform Crime Reports. I knew everything was a lie. I could never convince anyone of it by telling them to go read the documents... this sticks with me to this day- its why my posts here are so often HUGE because I learned that if you give someone a cite- or a link- they will exercise their ability to not access it and ignore it. But if you copy the whole quote or image and plaster it on the screen, they CANT ignore it. Its there as soon as you open the thread. |
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Funniest thing I've seen in weeks. Nice Job. |
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I didn't invent it, I got it off of Tank Net, and I don't know where they got it either. It didn't have a copyright sign so I snagged it to give it maximum spread. |
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Even more interesting is the implied downfall of the Liberal Media Monopoly. Now that anyone can research the facts and post a rebuttal for all the world to see in mere hours, the days of biased news media are over, and there's nothing they can do about it.
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All I can say is thank God for the Internet.
Seriously. Can you imagine if all this would have happened 10 years ago? kerry=landslide victory. |
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Because of CBSs stubborn, prideful challenge to the internet by refusing to admit they are wrong that is now the goal of the entire blogsphere. Results should be coming soon. |
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I found a page that actually has what they think is the complete obscure "connection" between Dan Rather / Kenneth: Here is the thread: www.ar15.com/forums/topic.html?b=1&f=5&t=273776 |
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Blather got mugged by a schitzo dude awhile back. The looney guy asked Dan (thinking Dan was this Kenneth guy) "Whats the frequency Kenneth?", referring to the microchip he believed was in this brain. REM wrote a famous song about it. |
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No no no, read the link for thread above! Two guys kicked his ass repeating that question. |
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Flashback to 1973, the military is going Volar or all volunteer. There is a massive fear that there won't be enough soldiers to fill the needed slots. Missed duty for 48 hours meant AWOL and instant warrant for your arrest, I don't care what your rank was or who your daddy was. There were no personel computer files and almost everything was on paper. That was the way it was.
Anyone who was in the Military then or even around the military knew this to be a fact. Mistake my ass, IMHO Mr. Rather is guilty of fabricating news and caught red handed. Tj |
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Oh that's good. Real good. OUTFU CKINGST ANDING! |
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Excellent insight old man! |
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