I started reading the stuff about the CBS documents on W’s National Guard service, mostly because the situation seemed so odd. The best thing I found on the issue of authenticity is the Flash overlay between a CBS document and the same thing produced by MS Word using default settings. (I’m told versions by people other than Little Green Footballs are also available.) The next best thing is a screen grab of the CBS evidence for a key point in their defense, that at the time some military typewriters did produce raised superscripts.
In 1973 it would no doubt have been possible to produce the CBS documents at some cost, with some degree of effort, and for some weird reason. But even assuming all other issues away, how likely is it that by chance anything produced in 1973 would turn out to look just like default MS Word documents? The CBS defense, like most defenses of bad conduct, just makes things worse. Their comparison shows what a raised superscript done by a typewriter at the time would have looked like. It would have been placed within and not above the row of lettering produced by the key striking the roller. If it had been above, the key striking the roller would have struck the page at a slant and not given a good impression. So the CBS defense drives home the point it was intended to rebut.
It’s clear the documents are forgeries. CBS willingness to treat them as a major story without seriously investigating their authenticity, and their evident belief they can bluff and stonewall their way out of the situation, is extraordinary. It seems it must show something. But what?
CBS Motive
CBS is a fraud. I know I am repeating the obviousness of Mr. Kalb’s article, but I want to support his conclusion. This has been going on since I was a baby; it is miraculous we Catholics and Americans still exist.
Forgeries
Purely for arguments sake; if 100 experts examine the originals produced by CBS and they are found to be genuine, how much crow will all of you eat? Will you apologize for your comments?
If it’s “purely for argument’s sake” we need more info to reply.
In response to Mysterious Stranger’s post of 5:49pm: Let’s see it happen first. Then we’ll talk. (Are the experts transparently Dem partisans? Is their reasoning convincing? And so on.) There are extreme radical leftist “experts” so blinded by political ideology they run around claiming, for example, that the different races don’t exist, that men and women are exactly the same, and that preborn babies are nothing but dead tissue that happens to be attached to the inside of the pregnant woman’s body. (BTW, Mysterious Stranger, you may want to check out the motto below, just above my signature…)
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
CBS’s motive
As somebody who has spent all my working life in the so-called mainstream media, what it shows is clear enough, as it seems to me.
The elite media for decades have been an auxiliary of the Democrat party. There were able to get away with it before now because they had a virtual monopoly with TV and radio network news, major newspapers and newsmagazines. CBS hasn’t adjusted to the fact that there is competition via the Internet and talk radio and, to a lesser extent, Fox News. They could have pulled this off 20 years ago. They can’t do it today because they are no longer the absolute gatekeepers and censors of what may and may not be discussed. CBS and other Democrat partisans are burning with anger at the success of the Swiftboat Veterans’ ads. This kind of effective dissent from the party line is not supposed to be possible…and yet, it happened. This forgery is an ill-conceived attempt to get the discussion back on track (as CBS and other Democrat partisans conceive it), namely, to Bush’s own shortcomings.
One is tempted to use words like “hubris” and “o’erweening pride” when presented with spectacles like this. Personally, I am happy to see the big lumbering arrogant elephant of CBS humiliated in such fashion. I only wish it could be a mortal wound.
CBS and the MSM
I second Mr. Williamson’s wish for CBS’s (I actually go beyond and with for all of Viacom) demise. The Swiftboat ads bring up an interesting – and ironic – point, though.
George Soros shelled out good money to get the blatantly unconstitutional “Campaign Finance Reform” law passed, and set up all of the “527’s” to destroy Bush accordingly. I imagine that neither Soros, McCain (who co-authored the law), Bush (who signed it), or the nation’s Supreme legislator Sandra Day O’Connor (who upheld the law in violation of her oath of office) – expected a bunch of grizzled Vietnam Vets (whose chief voted for Gore and calls Bush an “empty suit”) to set up this organization which so effectively torpedoed the SS. Kerry ( a fellow Bonesman of GWB).
The irony lies in the likelihood that Kerry would be in a much stronger position if all of the “reform” supported by both the leftist MSM along with Bush and the Republican establishment had been as effective as envisioned in silencing all opposition to the ruling elite and its grand designs.
Don’t expect contrition from this crowd of Marxists, by the way.
“It seems it must show something. But what?” (— from the log entry)
It shows that these people see themselves NOT as doing journalism, but as fighting evil, and any means employed in that fight are fair. Don’t anyone think, by the way, that this scandal is embarrassing anyone at CBS. They’re only saying to themselves, “Drat! We’ve been caught! Let’s start working on our next lie as quickly as possible—there’s not much time left before the election! And let’s not get caught this time, guys, OK?” These people have slimed the profession of journalism and are slime themselves.
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.