PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

CARTOON --

"THE OTHER SICK MAN"

UPDATE: CBS News producer Mary Mapes is involved -- CBS is peddling not only fake documents but fake examinations of fake documents!!

TELL THE TEXAS RANGERS

BILL BURKETT'S

First posting -- "An Important Message from the Family of Bill & Nicki Burkett." Scroll down for additional remarks from Burkett's wife.

The site certainly appears genuine. (I doubt Dan Ra^ther typed this up last night in his PJ's -- the thing is blustering with hostility for the conduct of CBS News.) And the site is taking donations for Burkett.

(via Ace).

UPDATE: Beldar has some blogging advice for Bill Burkett and the Burkett family.

SCALIA AT

it is blindingly clear that judges have no greater capacity than the rest of us to decide what is moral.

I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.

More on Scalia at Harvard here, here and here.

STEVE LEVY

Also worth a look -- today's Bleat. Quotable:

how do they vote? .. you�ll find that most journalists drift to the left. They range from traditional Democrats to moderate-to-indifferent Democrats to fiercely partisan Democrats to DINOs who might well be Republicans if the idea of voting GOP didn�t make them feel as if Mom would rise shrieking from the grave and accuse them of making FDR cry. There are a few Republicans in any newsroom, but they harbor the love that dare not speak its name.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JOE DEMOCRAT:

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with bottled water because he knows that the municipal water system supplies water that occasionally has e coli and other natural organisms that will make him ill -- after all his mother died from drinking water that was polluted by sewage after a heavy rain. Joe tried to sue, but was told that the city had sovereign immunity from such suits as a result of state law. If the water he pours from the bottle he bought at Safeway is polluted, he knows he can sue the manufacturer and collect big, so he feels pretty sure that it's clean.

Joe grinds his coffee beans carefully because they're very expensive as a result of the U.S. government-enforced international coffee cartel that exists to protect the jobs of coffee importers -- heavy campaign contributers to Congress. He's also careful about how much sugar he puts in his coffee because it costs seven times the world price of sugar as a result of the U.S. government imposed import restrictions on sugar to protect the domestic sugar beet and sugar cane industry.

Some mornings he drinks a coke instead, although it hasn't tasted as good since the manufacturer substituted corn syrup for sugar as a sweetener, since sugar is so expensive.

With his first swallow of coffee Joe takes his daily medication for his liver cancer. His doctor assures him that it is the best medication available in the U.S., although more effective medicines are used in Europe. Joe has a life expectancy of only two more years, but it will be a decade or so until the FDA tests on those other medicines are complete and they are allowed to be sold in the U.S. Joe feels protected anyway; after all, he might lose his hair or suffer some dizziness from the new medicines.. The FDA will protect him from that eventuality. Besides, the medicines he takes are paid for by money that his employer would have otherwise paid him in his regular salary. Since he never sees that money, he doesn't realize that his medicine isn't really subsidized by his employer after all ...

Can anyone top Sam's effort on this? Give it a shot and email me. And compare -- "A Day in the Life of Joe Republican."

TRANSCRIPT --

Whether or not there�s any reality to there being a draft, is almost besides the point.

The truth of the e-mails were absolutely irrelevant to the piece.

Compare how CBS News reported on these bogus fears being spread to influence the outcome of the election -- this time CBS didn't report the fear, they reported the truth. How do the stories differ? In prior case the false rumor target Bush, the later instance the false rumors target Kerry. By coincidence both stories are told -- not in a way to maximize truth -- but in a way as maximze damage to President Bush, the truth be damned.

UPDATE: Another TRANSCRIPT -- "An Interview with Mr. Enobakhare" -- Dan Ra^ther pursues another email lead:

Ra^ther: Mr. Enobakhare, where are you from?

Enobakhare: From Sierra, Leone, which is right next to the Kingdom of Zamunda.

Ra^ther: And your family has fallen on some hard times?

Enobakhare: Yes, Before the death of my father, he deposited the sum of Twelve Million United States Dollars in a Finance and Security Company.

But don't expect CBS to cover this "Democrat Moms Worry That John Kerry Will Raise Taxes and Outlaw Christianity."

MORE -- this is simply unbelievable. CBS News is doctoring their own broadcast transcripts.

CBS NEWS AND THE FAKE

IT IS A CRIME CASE --

In Texas, the state in which Burkett concedes the false National Guard memos originated, it is a felony to make or present two or more documents with knowledge of their falsity and with intent that they be taken as a genuine governmental record. Under the U.S. Code, use of an interstate telephone wire, such as the one used to transmit an image of the forged documents from Texas to CBS headquarters, triggers federal jurisdiction .. CBS has cause for concern, too. The documents were not just forged; they were obviously forged to the generation over age 40, which has used both a typewriter and a computer to write; CBS did not have to be misled about the source of the documents to be tipped that the documents were not real. While Burkett might have been willfully blind to things that would indicate that the memos were fake, there is mounting evidence that even CBS' experts told producers of 60 Minutes II that they could not verify that the documents were real. The story was aired � or in the terms of the Texas forgery statute, "presented" � in spite of this.

NY POST --

The CBS newscast averaged 6.9 million viewers across the country last week � down 7 percent from the week before and down 8 percent from the same week in 2003.

FROM THE LEFT --

BREAKING NEWS

Just this week I received an e-mail so upsetting that I forwarded it to all my friends, who then forwarded it to all their friends. We are now a good size group.

CITIZEN SMASH

"REPUBLICAN MOM FEARS DRAFT"

More from Powerline here and Little Green Footballs. UPDATE -- Drudge is now linking. Instantly this is national news. (heh). See also the account of the CBS draft scare from the Media Research Center.

Betsy Newmark was on the false "draft" rumors story a week ago -- CBS News ran with the false rumors, ignored the factual debunking. Who's surprised? Maybe David Broder?

UPDATE: PoliPundit points out that Ra^therBiased.com could use a donation. Their site is down again due to overwhelming traffic. Won't you help?

UPDATE II: If CBS News had a fact-check dept., they might have learned this and this about the bogus draft rumors being spread by Kerry supporters.

"THE BALLAD OF UNCLE DAN"

"NEVER FORGET"

ANOTHER NEW ONE.

The desire for and pursuit of liberty is a key thread in both human and intellectual history, argues Novak who goes on to say that despite the relative lack of liberty in the Muslim world, the concept of liberty has deep roots in Islam .. The intellectual bulk of the book lies in his assessment of the philosophical, theological and economic values that drive liberal democratic capitalism. Novak, also the author of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, shines when fleshing out these concepts, including "moral ecology" .. using it as a way to engage the much-debated "clash of civilizations." Novak is particularly keen in .. gauging the extent to which religion will play an increasingly large role in world affairs during the 21st century. He cogently compares Catholicism's relative incorporation of democracy to the differing applications of Islamic law today.

Fewer : How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future by Ben Wattenberg

And if your getting me a book for Christmas, this would be it:

An Empire of Wealth : The Epic History of American Economic Power by John Gordon.

ADDED LATER -- Here's another one on a similar theme: They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators from the Steam Engine to the Search Engine by Harold Evans

I've liked books about entrepreneurial creativity and success since I was a kid. I ate them up by the handful mixed in with books about explorers, athletes and statesmen. I don't know why, there are many more books for adults on all these later topics, and very few on the people who really made the material life of the country. I find the story of Singer or Hershey or Borden a much better tale than the life of most sports stars and politicians.

One more I'd like to see under the Chrismas tree:

My Life as a Quant : Reflections on Physics and Finance by Emanuel Derman, the story of "one of the first high-energy particle physicists to migrate to Wall Street."

UPDATE: Add this one to the list:

The Pentagon's New Map by Thomas Barnett.

JOE BARTON,

Barton said it concerned him that news anchors like Ra^ther also are the news directors of their organizations. "Here you have Dan Ra^ther the on-air reporter going to Dan Ra^ther the off-the-air CBS director of news saying: 'Mr. Ra^ther, I have this story in Texas about the presidential campaign. I think it's true, and I want it to be true, and I want to report it as true. What do you think?' Dan Ra^ther says, 'Well, as director of CBS News if you say you think it's true, and you want it to be true, go ahead and do it.' There's no safety valve there."

In Houston, radio station KPRC reacted by taking Ra^ther's 4 p.m., five-minute newscast off the air .. In its place, KPRC is now airing a five-minute newscast produced by Fox Radio News. Listeners have been "99 percent supportive," Charles said, showering the station with hundreds of congratulatory e-mails.

JUST RELEASED:

In stores next week: How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) by Ann Coulter -- already #19 at Amazon.

And this looks fun: The Know-It-All : One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by Esquire editor A. J. Jacobs:

Imagine, the original Berserkers were "savage Norse soldiers" of the Middle Ages who went into battle stark naked! .. Intrigued? Well, either hunker down with your own Encyclop�dia Britannica, or buy Esquire editor Jacobs's memoir of the year he spent reading all 32 volumes of the 2002 edition � that's 33,000 pages with some 44 million words .. Apart from the sheer pleasure of scaling a major intellectual mountain, Jacobs figured reading the encyclopedia from beginning to end would fill some gaps in his formal education and greatly increase his "quirkiness factor." .. As his wife shunned him and cocktail party guests edged away, Jacobs started testing his knowledge ..

AN INTERVIEW

Ra^thergate is a microcosm of the main idea of this book, which is that ideology makes smart people fall for stupid ideas. Had Dan Rather and his underlings at CBS been motivated by getting at the truth rather than advancing a specific political agenda, they would have never fallen for the forged memos.

Intellectual Morons breaks new ground in a number of areas. Specifically, all of Margaret Sanger�s major biographers fail to mention her very detailed plan for American concentration camps housing millions. I do. None of Alfred Kinsey�s biographers even bothers to interview one of Kinsey�s child victims. I do.

The individuals discussed in the book all have massive cultural import, and have fallen for or propagated foolish ideas. Sex pervert Alfred Kinsey�s reports helped launch the sexual revolution. The modern feminist movement began as a result of Betty Friedan�s Feminine Mystique. Stalinist W.E.B. Du Bois finds his face on a U.S. postage stamp, his life the subject of two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies, and his name gracing the tallest library in the world at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst .. Paul Ehrlich touted a coming environmental apocalypse and received foundation prizes and bequests well into the seven figures; appeared frequently on The Tonight Show, Today, and other widely watched television shows; and sold millions of books .. Herbert Marcuse, the guru of the New Left of the 1960s, waged war on language by renaming intolerance as tolerance, violence as nonviolence, and dictatorship as democracy. Marcuse�s Newspeak led to the Left rationalizing censorship, acts of violence by radicals, and support of totalitarians like Castro or the Palestinian terrorists�all while claiming to advocate tolerance, non-violence, and democracy .. Leo Strauss is the Right�s deconstructionist. He saw the entire history of philosophy as a massive conspiracy theory, in which nearly all of the world�s great thinkers � Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, etc. � dishonestly advanced one message suitable to the masses while encoding their real message �between the lines� to other wise men. Strauss purports to find these hidden messages by using a form of numerology, searching for implied contradictions, projecting special meaning on the first and last words of a text, and adding importance to passages in certain locations of a book.

WHAT DAN

TRANSCRIPT --

O'REILLY: A "Time" magazine investigation says, 3 million illegal aliens crossed the Mexican border, and we talked about this four and a half years...

BUSH: We have. I know it's a issue that you're concerned about.

It's really tragic for our nation that this country doesn't have two viable political parties. A one party state just doesn't cut it.

UPDATE: Don't miss this.

KEYNES WAS WRONG.

Noneconomists imagine that God has so poorly designed the world that a lack of thrift, even tending to avarice, is, alas, necessary to keep the wheels of commerce turning, to "create jobs" or "keep the money circulating." .. It's the alleged paradox of thrift .. Dorothy Sayers, who was more than a writer of mysteries, though not an economist, complained in 1942 as a Christian about "the appalling squirrel cage . . . in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries . . . a society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going." To tell the truth, many economists in the era of the Great Depression had reverted to this noneconomist's way of thinking. The theory was called "stagnationism." It was a balloon theory of capitalism, that people must keep puff-puffing or the balloon will collapse ..

FEARMONGER,

Is it a coincidence that Dan Ra^ther's script takes a phrase directly from this "Rock the Vote" briefer on the draft?

Dan Ra^ther is looking as his last chance to effect the outcome of an election, and this time he's pulling no punches.

GREYHAWK --

here's what I noticed in the DFAC today: young faces. Young determined faces. Not much older .. than the crowd at a high school lunch room. You can tell without asking what these guys think. They look you in the eye. And if you can stand to look back you'll see into the eyes of the undefeated. There is no quit here, no early out, no cut and run. These are young men with an ugly job, America's finest sent to do our worst and best, and they make me feel old and inspired all at the same time.

CHEAP ENTERTAINMENT.

THE QUESTION OF THE DAY.

Clich here for music and lyrics.

More Kerry and Oompa Loompa pictures here (from July!) And Infinite Monkeys highlights these Kerryesk lyrics from the song:

There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going.
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing.

THE TOP 125

And here is The Truth Laid Bear blog rankings by average daily traffic. PrestoPundit is consistently in the top 125 without linkage from big guns like InstaPundit or Lucianne (I'm not on Glenn's blogroll, which seems fixed in time, circa May 2003). With linkage from Glenn or Lucianne or Hugh or Andrew, traffic shoots through the roof. Right now with Ra^thergate, the election and the continuing Swift Boat controversy I'm holding steady in the 2,000 - 3,000 daily visit range, most of that traffic now coming from browser bookmarks, rather than blog links. If you're a PrestoPundit regular -- or even if your new -- I'd appreciate your email letting me know what you think .. what you like or don't like about the site. It goest without saying that reader input is a very helpful thing.

PrestoPundit is currently ranked #324 according fellow blogger linkage with inbound linkage from 227 other sites. I'd like to thank those who've linked, I will be updating my own links soon, and I'd welcome those who'd like to add a link.

One of the funnest things a blogger can do is send a (mini) tidal wave of traffic to a new blogger with a trickle of regular readers. Last week I gave a Prestolaunch to The Discerning Texan and I couldn't have been more tickled. It looks like he's also gotten new linkage from other sites. Good. One of the things I like about the blog is that he's always got great cartoons I haven't seen elsewhere, and of course today he's got another one.

UPDATE: Who doesn't love fan mail? Kathleen writes:

I thoroughly enjoy your blog and now go to it first before even checking out Drudge.

I found your page during Ra^thergate, and having been reading it ever since. It's excellent, and I've put a link to you on my page.

GLENN REYNOLDS

Broder blames bloggers, politicos, good writers--everyone except those who actually did the screwing up. Projection! The obvious possibility he doesn't want to consider is the one Shafer hammers: That the practices of Broder's profession were never that terrific.

what worries me [is] the thought that, maybe, it's been this bad all along and we just couldn't tell before. . . .

What explains the poor performance of the press? Bias played a big part. But the biggest problem was a profound lack of background understanding. Almost always the storyline was pre-written, and this directed reporters away from getting the background understanding which would help them avoid errors and get the story right. In other words, pre-existing assumptions wrote the story in advance, and this pre-defined story prevented big media reporters from doing their job -- investigating and finding out what the real story was. Bias also played another role. Reporters were biased against those involved -- and this prevented reporters from making use of those with expert knowledge or solid local knowledge on the ground. That is, reporters were self-cocooned -- within their pre-written story and hermetically sealed against the penetration of any outside expertise or local knowledge.

MSM --

DAN

"THE SICK MAN OF THE WEST COAST"

HUGH HEWITT --

See also N.Z. Bear's MEMO TO STEVEN LEVY.

"The audience is made to feel stupid."

And compare this from ANN ALTHOUSE.

ECONOMIST AMARTYA SEN

A DAMAGED VET REMEMBERS

THE TIP

"I wasn't planning on working for Wal-Mart the rest of my life."

IN CALIFORNIA

See also this.

"THE OTHER SICK MAN."

What I find interesting is to see law professor Glenn Reynolds head for the 'nuance boy" high-grass of the "go along to get along" academic guild member when it's his own peers who get caught. I first read InstaPundit when he began covering the big academic plagiarism scandals of two years ago. If there was this much nuance in the past, I don't recall it.

UPDATE: Tribe admits he did it, apologizes. Quotable:

University President Lawrence H. Summers told The Crimson in an interview last week � before the allegations against Tribe surfaced � that he did not see �a big trend� of plagiarism problems at the Law School as a result of the charges against Ogletree and Dershowitz, but indicated that a third case would change his mind. �If you had a third one, then I would have said, okay, you get to say this is a special thing, a focused problem at the Law School,� Summers said of the recent academic dishonesty cases ..

But both Ogletree and Dershowitz jumped to defend their colleague from the charges leveled against him ..

ROBERT ZELNICK:

my initial sentiment when a major news organization like CBS botches a big one is both sympathy and empathy .. But I felt a sense of professional betrayal as Dan Rather and colleagues defended their "60 Minutes" report .. Unconscionably, Rather vouched for the documents' authenticity and attacked critics as "partisan." Even after acknowledging he could no longer defend the papers, he offered no retraction of the story .. post-debacle inquires at the New York Times, USA Today and CNN have resulted in personnel changes up to the very top. CBS, a monument to the arrogance of fading network power, might look better with that sort of makeover.

JOHN KERRY

"THEIR GAME

TOM BROKAW --

"TRIBAL WISDOM"

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."

However, in government, civic and charitable groups, education, unions and corporate America more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.

3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.

5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.

6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.

7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.

9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse's performance.

11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.

12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

13. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position

HOW BLEEPIN' STUPID

And why would any self-respecting newspaper print such crayola? Maybe Broder does have a point. Maybe major newspapers are becoming more blog-like -- -- moonbat lefty blog-like. And speaking of the moonbat blogs, read this.

THE RESPECTED SACRAMENTO BEE

THE LEFT ANGELES TIMES

And your quiz for the day, how stupid is the Los Angeles Times?

BIAS IS LIKE BREATHING

DIGITAL BROWNSHIRT NEWS

Who needs National Socialist Radio, anyway?

THE KERRY PHOTO

"THE MYSTERY MEAT KNOWN AS FANNIE'S FINANCIALS"

ANDREW VS. TINA --

what would you rather be doing - writing a fun blog that makes a difference, or appearing on an unwatched and largely unwatchable cable news chat show?

MARK HATFIELD'S OREGON --

BETSY

GEORGE BUSH

TODD BUCHHOLZ,

Books: Bringing the Jobs Home: How the Left Created the Outsourcing Crisis -- And How We Can Fix It

AS PRESTOPUNDIT READERS KNOW,

Goldwater's nomination was in part the result of brilliant "grass-roots" organizing among the party's youth wing. As GOP delegates gathered in San Francisco to choose the party's nominee in July 1964, it was clear that the party's Eastern establishment and its candidates could not withstand the energy, enthusiasm, and high spirits of the Goldwater kids and their Arizona standard-bearer. The media didn't see enthusiasm. They saw Hitler youth.

"OUR WORLD CHANGED."

BILL DYER

But enough introduction. Go read Bill's latest "Swift Vet / Kerry in Vietman" piece, "A challenge to those who claim that the SwiftVets' allegations have been "debunked" or are "unsubstantiated"." It's brief and to the point. And not to be missed.

Read also this. Quotable:

Those who dismiss critics of John Kerry's Vietnam service as just a bunch of right-wing Republicans out to advance George W. Bush's cause don't know what they are talking about -- or they are engaged in wishful thinking. Okay, I may have once thought that about the critics, too. But after poring over the large volume of e-mail I received after my Aug. 28 column, "What Matters About Kerry and Vietnam," I don't any longer.

BILL BURKETT

And it seems Burkett's former attorney David Van Os has a small conflict of interest.

"DO-IT-YOURSELF JOURNALISTS

Dan Rather's remarkable imitation of Wile E. Coyote gripping dynamite with a burning fuse could be a good thing for our country. I'd be happier if my livelihood weren't in his blast zone ..

By recklessness and its absurd defense - claiming the documents were "fake but true" - CBS squandered credibility banked by all journalists. I make my living at a newspaper that makes money by being credible. I don't expect readers will confuse our news offerings with Rather's storytelling. But it is reasonable to fear that, by some margin, readers' trust in what all journalists say and opine will be reduced.

Rather's credibility .. was based partly on the long preparation and diligence that got him his job, and in part on the fact that most mainstream journalism faces at least one editor, and usually more, before publication. Rather's betrayal tarnishes all of us who gain credibility in these traditional ways ..

It is bad enough when people assume the press routinely errs on trivia; it is fatal when they assume we bear malice in grave matters. They do assume it. It is a near-universal assumption among my non-journalist friends and my relatives that I work in a Jurassic Park of [leftists], surrounded by McGovernosauruses. Not exactly true. A few people are apolitical; there's a surprising number of quiet conservatives. But the profession has long drawn many [leftists] and their perspectives. The cure, I'd tell my ranting relatives, is to recruit conservative journalists.

Well, they've shown up - online. The Washington Post offered splendid coverage of Rather's distress, but the dissection began, famously, on the Internet. And it was through Weblogs' compilations of bits of reporting from this professional source or another - in a newsroom, we call this "news editing" - that the story gained momentum, stoked by Web-available commentary. Take Power Line, for instance. It compiled mainstream media reports as they broke, and it broke a few itself - one of its readers dug up the key anachronism about an officer's retirement date, notes John Hinderaker, one of the men running the site.

There have always been thousands of scattered people, each with bits of truth, as Hinderaker sees it. The Internet lets them bypass the unreliable filters of the old media and connect.

The Rather disaster has revealed the outlines of this new body of newspeople. This attention may draw in more volunteers to dig, to comment, to watchdog the professionals. So, fertilized by CBS' offering, do-it-yourself journalism blooms. If you like free speech, it's good to have more of it.

Some is dubious, purveyed by the unqualified, scantily edited, scandalously written. The mainstream media are not innocent of these faults, however. The Internet, by opening the field to people who don't happen to own a press, at least broadens the choice of voices. That's what propelled Power Line's Hinderaker and his Web partner, Scott Johnson. They're Minneapolis attorneys - though Hinderaker jokes online that he really lives in Milwaukee, thanks to business travel - who had written some punditry for magazines such as National Review. Hinderaker said the Web offered a quicker, easier outlet for their comments on the news.

Behind this gush of news commentary is the assumption that public affairs are important. "We're not doing this for our own amusement," Hinderaker told me on Wednesday. It's that he feels the news is that critical. That attitude, at least, should be a balm to people in the news business. We need it. It's hard enough to see an institution we love lose readers and influence. Now Rather, star journalist, looks like a Democratic Party dupe. It's good, then, to see more people who still think news is something worth doing.

"WE DON'T YET

Broder then goes on to talk about why this embarrassing performance has come about -- but in my judgment Broder dares not look at the truth lstaring him in the face. His thesis? Journalists like Dan Ra^ther have sought to satisfy others, and not themselves. How rich is that? I can't imagine a more fanciful hypothesis. 3rd place Dan Ra^ther, as Bernard Goldberg never tires of reminding us, has done everthing he can to neglect and abuse large segments of the American news audience. In other words, David Broder is 180� off target. Journalists have NOT sought to please their customers -- they instead have abusively pumped out slanted and incomplete "news" to please their own class biases of politics and culture, without regard for the news consumer. Indeed, the mainstream news producers have regularly insulted the intelligence and background knowledge of their consumers. Example? Deeply ignorant and biased reporting of military matters, which many in their news audience have deep understanding of but which the journalist class often reports on as if they had just landed from Mars. This is standard fodder for the blogosphere, but Broder seems completely oblivious to this sort of critique.

Broder, if truth be told, is so much a part of and so tightly wrapped within the cocooned of the left/Democrat journalistic community that he has no idea just how out of touch with reality he might be.

Compare this piece by John Leo, "Making CBS play fair." And this on CBS News and the blogosphere is worth quoting:

When the mistakes-were-made semiapology finally came, Rather emitted the phrase "if I knew then what I know now." But all he had to do to know it then was to turn on his computer or pick up a copy of the Washington Post. The network hostility to Internet commentary was obvious. One [former] CBS news executive referred to bloggers as people writing in their pajamas .. Ra^ther associated them with rumor and propaganda. This seems to mean that many in the mainstream press still don't understand bloggers and tend to associate them with the Drudge Report on its worst day. Bloggers make their case with hyperlinks to primary sources and other data. Arguments without authority count for nothing, and soft-headed analyses and hoaxes are quickly exposed. As RealClear Politics said, it's a fast-moving, "very transparent, self-correcting environment ultimately based on facts."

Often contrasted with the entrenched big-time media, the bloggers are becoming part of the mainstream. Think of them as the outsourced post-publication checking department of the big-time news media. Dan Ra^ther, or somebody at CBS, should surely take a look.

HOT! See also this and this from Ace. Got to love it! MORE -- N.Z. Bear does a Fisking. [Note to self: Never piss off the Bear].

UPDATE: Todd Zywicki, "DAVID BRODER--FIRST HEAL THYSELF.":

Given Broder's track record of sloppiness and bending the truth to score his own political points, however, his complaints seem somewhat misplaced .. Broder's track record seems anything but consistent with this admonition to ask "What's your proof?" Consider his column published in the May 19, 2002 Washington Post, "A Bipartisan Outrage," which was a discussion of the long-pending Bankruptcy Reform Bill. Although it obviously has been awhile since this column was published, Broder's complaints about the sloppiness "the other guys" in the news business forces me to blow the whistle. Broder's column contains an astounding number of half-truths and distortions.

Broder is saying that the introduction of the internet undermined "the skeptical and self-disciplined ethic" of the MSM. If it weren't for Buckhead and those scurrilous pajama-wearing bloggers, Rathergate never would have happened!

.. In Broder's addled brain, the charges of the Swift Boat Vets (many of which have been proven true) are just as "implausible" as the fake memos used by Rather and Co. He thinks the MSM rushed to air the allegations of the Swift Boat vets just as eagerly as it did the Burkett memos. And he apparently believes the MSM did not subject the Swift Boat vets to tough scrutiny.

Somebody give this guy a watch and ship him off to a retirement home in Boca Raton.

LOCKHART

READ

Self-described conservative academics .. say they face unique challenges among a sea of hostile [leftists]. They lament the professional opportunities they have missed and the social ostracism they face. The perception that they are "evil" by virtue of being conservative ranks high on their list of grievances. As Mr. McWhorter, a former Berkeley linguistics professor turned pundit, says, "There's nothing I'd like better than if most people who gave me that label didn't mean asshole."

ACADEMIA

Anyway, Prof. Natelson took questions today on the Chronicle of Higher Education web site from its readers. The questions and the answers are both eye-opening. When Bernard Goldberg says that there is more diversity of thought among the Taliban than there is among the staff at CBS News, he could say the same of the average American college faculty and be just as on the mark.

I found particularly noteworthy this question from "Jeff", an adjunct at several colleges:

.. many of my colleagues have shunned me because they "discovered" that I am a conservative and that I like G. W. Bush. I am in the music field, and soon after being "outed" as a Republican, I have not been invited to picnics, after-concert gatherings, etc. I have heard this crowd .. openly berate other highly-regarded academics and performers because they were conservative or Republican to other colleagues and students. While we are told that this doesnot exist, it does. It is ugly, and those committing the acts are very often the same ones who take up the cause of other persons who feel discriminted against or otherwise neglected. How do we bring up this topic in our departments without causing even more ire from our colleagues?

BELDAR

And Beldar has this on today's Kerry/Brinkley press release, which is stamped with the disclaimer "Paid for by Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc.":

I appreciate the frank attribution on this press release; but it ought to also appear on Brinkley's book, Tour of Duty, and perhaps also be tattooed on Mr. Brinkley's forehead to help keep him in sync with the party line.

"UNFIT FOR COMMAND" --

IN THE EYE OF THE STORM --

And don't miss this cartoon.

BRINKLEY SHOCKER:

Every American now knows that there's something really screwy about George Bush and the National Guard, and they know that John Kerry was not the war hero we thought he was.

Brinkley is the author of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War.

UPDATE: The Kerry campaign is circulating the following retraction from novelist Douglas Brinkley:

"A story in the September 24 New York Times leaves the false impression that I think John Kerry was not 'the war hero we thought he was.' Nothing could be further from the truth. He was a great American fighting man in Vietnam and deserved all of his medals. Over the past year I have vigorously defended Kerry's military record and will continue to do so.

"My comment was meant to be about the political consequences of the anti-Kerry Swift boat attacks vs. the anti-Bush National Guard ones. I was speaking about public perceptions not my personal beliefs."

Paid for by Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

worse than all that was Rather's ten-day denial of reality, culminating in the surreal half-admission that the phony documents could not be verified as accurate. That's the equivalent of saying that a corpse cannot be proven to be alive.

It has taken a lot to end the credibility of the [leftist] dynasty, inasmuch as there were many prior provocations � Peter Arnett airing a blatantly dishonest 1998 mythodrama on CNN about Americans using Sarin gas in Laos; Dan Rather giving a flawed 1988 account of American grotesqueries in Vietnam (The Wall Within), replete with phony veterans spinning lies about horrific war crimes. But then we have not quite seen anything like the shamelessness of airing forged documents backed by unhinged witnesses and verified by suspect "experts" � all in a time of war and with the intent of smearing a sitting conservative president.

.. there also began a professional devolution, as questionable legal and ethical methods were excused in the name of the greater good. We got the Ellsberg pilfered documents, the blank check of "unnamed sources," trips to Hanoi and Paris to meet the enemy, Peter Arnett broadcasting gloom and doom live from Baghdad � all culminating in the two-bit forgeries used for the "higher" cause of unseating George Bush. Daniel Ellsberg, Jane Fonda, and CBS may have done things that were legally wrong .. but in postmodern logic they were morally "right" given their superior knowledge, character, and [leftist] intentions.

CBS NEWS

NOW PAYPAL

This is getting out of hand folks.

BELDAR

To support his claim that there was incoming enemy fire, Sandusky referred to records showing damage to PCF 94; Odell pointed out that those records referred to damage which PCF 94 had sustained on the previous day, and that PCF 94 actually ended up being the boat that towed the striken PCF 3 to safety .. Sandusky had no explanation for how the Swift Boats could have survived the supposed "5000 meters" of heavy enemy fire from both banks without any of the boats or their crew being hit during the hour-plus time it took to rescue and medevac out PCF 3's injured crew ..

NOT VISITED INSTAPUNDIT

The Clinton spin lie machine looks particularly ugly when unleached during a terror war.

ANOTHER ANTI-MOORE FILM --

ANDREW SULLIVAN ON CRACK:

A blog called Powerline immediately claimed that the documents were hoaxes; within hours, Drudge had picked up the story. CBS defended its story, but as of the end of last week, no proof of a hoax had been provided.

A reader suggests that it is only fair to note here that Sullivan's piece is dated Sept. 12, 2004. But it's also fair to note that the blogosphere -- which Sullivan claims to represent -- had the dead-to-rights goods on the fake documents by at least Sept. 10th. Seem my "Fourth Estate" PrestoPundit archive. I was calling the documents "FORGED" on the 10th of September. And I consider myself rather conservative on this issue. Although I was following the Powerline story Friday morning, I didn't think they had enough -- and Drudge posted on this before I did. But it was "stick a fork in it" time if you were following things by at least the end of the day -- and certainly by Sept. 10, the next day. Sorry folks, that's the way I see it -- and Andrew in my judgment being too soft on old media, and doesn't give the blogosphere its justified due. Something which, as I say, was clear by Sept. 10, and certainly by Sept. 11th.

BURKETT SAYS LOCKHART ASKED FOR THE DOCUMENTS:

During a single phone conversation with Lockhart, Burkett said he suggested a "couple of concepts on what I thought (Kerry) had to do" to beat Bush. In return, he said, Lockhart tried to "convince me as to why I should give them the documents."

Also this from CNN:

Burkett also said "the central part of my agreement with CBS was that they use their massive and superlative abilities to authenticate and verify the documents prior to broadcast in order that I and my source not have to be identified."

"OUTING"

SOMEHOW

The story begins in March, when Mr. Burkett, who had just been on MSNBC's "Hardball" discussing Mr. Bush's Guard service, received a call from a mysterious woman he calls Lucy Ramirez. Previously, Mr. Burkett had identified the source of the memos as one George Conn, another former Texas National Guard officer, conveniently abroad in Europe. In an e-mail to USA Today, Mr. Conn denied any involvement with the Killian memos. Mr. Burkett himself admits that he had lied about his source as a way of protecting her. In their conversation, Lucy Ramirez explained how she had in her custody damaging documents to Mr. Bush and scheduled a meeting with Mr. Burkett to hand them over. That meeting occurred on or around March 3 at a livestock show in Houston. But, according to Mr. Burkett, Lucy Ramirez didn't show up. Instead, as he told USA Today, an unknown "man handed him an envelope and quickly left." After receiving the memos, Mr. Burkett said he stopped off at a Kinko's store in Waco and made copies. In the parking lot outside, Mr. Burkett said he then burned the originals, pursuant to Lucy Ramirez's wishes. Over the next few days, Mr. Burkett said he hid the copies "in cold storage" at an undisclosed location 100 miles from his home in Baird. Then, apparently, five months go by. Five months in which this very vociferous anti-Bush partisan sits on the most damaging documents yet found that all but seal a case he's been making for years. Consider, also, that on Aug. 13, in an online post, Mr. Burkett wrote: "I have found no documentation from Lt. Col. Killian's hand or staff that indicate that this unit was involved in any complicit way to ... cover for the failures of 1Lt. Bush." Then suddenly, on or around Aug. 21, Mr. Burkett contacts former Sen. Max Cleland, indicating that he had potentially damaging information about Mr. Bush's service. Mr. Cleland apparently told Mr. Burkett to contact the Kerry campaign directly. According to Mr. Burkett, he then "gave them the information." In another online post, Mr. Burkett said he contacted the Democratic National Committee, but they were apparently "afraid to do what [he] suggest[ed]."

GOOGLE ADS

Our AdSense representatives review all AdSense applications according to our Terms and Conditions and our program policies. I apologize if the prior disapproval of your application was made in error. I have now reviewed and confirmed that hayekcenter.org/prestopundit/ meets all of our policies. Your application has been approved.

And I'm also left wondering why I should want to do business with these people. They did reverse their error on "internet time" -- within hours. But will they have PC cops looking over my shoulder everyday? I'm a rather mainstream "classic liberal" blogger who enjoys gently poking the left with a stick. If this throws up giant red flags for the Google company, then we are all in trouble.

BILL BURKETT

Bill Burkett, a former commander in the Texas Air National Guard and a critic of Bush's past service in the Guard, told the Star-Telegram in an interview that he still believes that memos he gave to CBS are authentic. But he said that he had warned the television network to independently verify the reports before it aired them ..

Burkett said he thinks that CBS and anchor Dan Rather have tried to make him the "fall guy" in the dispute. He said Rather interviewed him for 3 � hours last week but used only portions of the tape that made Burkett look bad. He also said that "CBS duped me" by identifying him as the source of the documents. "Dan Rather ruined me in front of 70 million people," Burkett said.

CONTROVERSIAL TEXAS RANCHER SAYS LOCKHART WANTED DOCUMENTS // The source of a disputed CBSNEWS report claimed Thursday that Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart tried to "convince me as to why I should give them the documents." Texas Army National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Burkett tells the FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM that he has suffered four seizures since being identified as CBS' source and dogged by the media... Developing.

THE SMOKING GUN --

>>>> BREAKING -- There is NO smoking gun. Go here for details. And read InstaPundit for commentary. <<<<

GOOGLE ADS

>>>>BREAKING -- Google Ads now acknowledges its error. See "UPDATE II below for details.<<<<

According to the PC folks at GOOGLE, PrestoPundit contains "sensitive content":

Issues:

- Sensitive content

We've found that your website contains content that we don't allow at this time. AdSense policy doesn't currently accept sites that advocate against any individual, group, or organization.

UPDATE: Now I'm paranoid. Perhaps the PC police at Google thought I should have censored this, or this or this. I'll just scream if I think I have to worry about PC censors from Google looking over my back every day. Why did I ever think I needed ads, for Crimany sake. I have my readers and they continue to generously donate enough to pay for most of my bandwidth. And book sales cover the rest. Don't expect to see Google ads here soon.

UPDATE II: Google Ads writes:

Our AdSense representatives review all AdSense applications according to our Terms and Conditions ( http://www.google.com/adsense/terms ) and our program policies ( http://www.google.com/adsense/policies ). I apologize if the prior disapproval of your application was made in error. I have now reviewed and confirmed that hayekcenter.org/prestopundit/ meets all of our policies. Your application has been approved.

MARK STEYN --

Yet more Dan Ra^ther cartoons. (via the terrific PoliPundit).

GLENN REYNOLDS --

CBS, like most broadcast networks .. is staffed by people who lean Left and who don't like Bush. That makes them disposed to find even obviously bogus claims about Bush .. credible, despite the evidence. Worse yet, they tend to talk mostly with people who share their beliefs. The result is an insular culture, rife with the prejudices of the New Class, which believes all sorts of absurdities and peddles them to the public in the sometimes honest, if often unfounded, belief that they are true. Even when they are exposed as false, the response is often to assert, as Rather did for a while, that the story may have been false, but that it was justified because the underlying point .. is nonetheless true. After all, everyone they talk to thinks so.

If there's an analogy to this phenomenon, it's probably the open-source software movement, which tends to produce far more reliable products via the same process of distributed criticism and relative freedom from groupthink. But I'm afraid that the internet's threat to cocooned old-media organisations is far greater than the threat that Microsoft poses to Linux. That's because writing software is hard. Journalism -- particularly journalism practised as it's practised at CBS .. is easy. Those who have lived within the comfortable big-media cocoon have done so not because they possess unusual talents, but because they have had access to the tools for disseminating news and opinion, tools that were until recently so expensive that only a favoured few could use them. They had the megaphone; the rest of us did not. Those days are over. Nowadays everyone has a megaphone and those with something interesting to say often discover that their megaphone can become very large, very fast. Meanwhile, those in the legacy media are discovering that their megaphones are shrinking as the result of journalistic self-abuse. With the tools now available to everyone, the biggest asset is credibility, something they have already squandered in the belief that no one would know the difference.

LOTS OF

For example, she links to this excellent piece by Ross Mackenzie, "The Ra^ther Memos: On Operative Double Standards in the Mainline Press." Quotable:

Dan Ra^ther's outrageous display of ideological irresponsibility has highlighted yet again the double standards and has driven yet another - the final? - nail into the coffin of the once-proud mainline press.

IS THE CHAIRMAN

UPDATE: "The story is out there" -- the story went out over LA station KFI640 yesterday afternoon on the John & Ken show. The program has about 1,000,000 listeners. The story will hit newstands in Southern California today in the LA Weekly.

UPDATE II: See my latest update here.

ANOTHER PAPER

YOU WON'T

PATTERICO

BELDAR

Brinkley's book [Tour of Duty] says nothing about Kerry ever meeting with representatives of the North Vietnamese government or Viet Cong in Paris.

from my own admittedly cushy perspective, [the word] "betrayal" [used in the Swift vet ad] is still a stronger word than I would yet feel comfortable using, and it conveys a more damning moral judgment than I am yet comfortable making. Although the circumstantial evidence is powerful, it still requires the drawing of an inference to conclude that there was an express quid pro quo or agreement between Kerry and his VVAW comrades and the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong representatives in Paris. Kerry's resolute silence on all the details of his discussions, what was actually discussed, how and through whom the meeting(s) were arranged [does however cut] against him.

ANDY ROONEY --

"Don't trust the competence of anyone over 70."

CBS NEWS

SWEET ANN --

DAN

FILM LEGEND

He made one film after another, all of them involving unlikely plots, incongruous settings and abundantly voluptuous actresses. "Where do you find those women?" I asked him. "After they reach a certain bra size," he said, "they find me."

COMING TO THEATERS

KARL

"[Dan Ra^ther is] probably the only person in America that still thinks there's a possibility these are true and accurate documents."

WNIS-AM in Norfolk

WNIS-AM [is] switching to ABC because of the Guard story. "Our listeners have clamored for a change," said spokesman Dave Morgan, adding that CBS's credibility has been "seriously damaged by the ongoing scandal."

DAN

"This is not verbatim," Mr. Rather recalled. "But I said: 'Andrew, if true, it's breakthrough stuff. But I need to do something unusual. It may even be unique. I have to ask you to oversee, in a hands-on way, the handling of this story, because this is potentially the kind of thing that will cause great controversy.' He got it. He immediately agreed.''

RATHERBIASED.COM

Maarten Schenk, a blogger in Belgium, emails to tell us about a new Movable Type plugin he's written which automatically superscripts the letters "th" in Dan Rather and also puts quotation marks around the word news in CBS News.

More Ra^thergate cartoons here.

ALLAH PUNDIT's

FReepers in pajamas protesting in Washington, D.C.

SWIFT VET

DAN

THE COWARDLY SILENCE

they have had 13 days to react to this story, and Hewitt has not said a word. Eighty-six-year-old Wallace is capable of rage against inspectors from the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, but he cannot bring himself to call for his colleague to step down for the good of the institution of CBS News.

HOW ABOUT

"SOMETHING WENT SERIOUSLY WRONG"

Burkett's lawyers, David Van Os and Gabe Quintanilla, on Tuesday completed the story of how their client obtained the memos. They gave this account: Burkett received a phone call in March from a former Guard employee named Lucy Ramirez, who said she had heard Burkett's allegations against Bush and had the documents that could help prove them. The two then arranged a document drop at a Houston livestock show, with Burkett actually quickly receiving the copies, in a manila envelope, from a man he did not know. He copied the papers and stored them in a meat locker, burning the originals to prevent anyone from tracing them back to Ramirez. The Times could not locate Ramirez, identify the mysterious man who purportedly passed the memos, or verify any of the other details of that account.

SUMNER REDSTONE,

UPDATE: MTV weighs in on Dan Ra^ther vs. the blogosphere.

DRIP, DRIP,

"THE FUNDAMENTAL POINT

those tend to be people who are all peas out of the same pod, people with the same perspective, the same interest, the same ideology.

UPDATE: "This must have been what it was like for the Catholic Church when movable type was invented" -- MORE "Bloggers keep eye on the news" (USA Today).

UPDATED II: 55% of Americas report "Not very much" or "None at all" when it comes to confidence in the full, accurate, and fair reporting of the news by newspapers, T.V. and radio. About 1 out of 2 Americans think these news sources are too far to the left.

ALLAH PUNDIT

MARY MAPES

HOWARD KURTZ --

MARY MAPES

DAN

UPDATE: James Pinkerton:

The two key concepts in this never-ending techno-saga are the increasing ubiquity of Internet-based technology and the decreasing barriers to entry into a public forum. That is, anybody with a computer and a modem can be a blogger, and any blogger can be a media-player. So what comes next? The past tells us that techno-change is tectonic change. Prior to the 15th century, the Catholic Church maintained its monopoly in part by controlling Bible production. Bibles were not only scarce but were hand-scribed in Latin, which only priests could read. Then came Johannes Gutenberg, who used movable type to mass-print Bibles, eventually in local languages. Soon ordinary folk were reading the Bible for themselves and thinking for themselves. Protestantism was born. What followed was a century of religious war, but the world was transformed. One of those transformations was the radical new reality that technology would continue shaping events. So today, Rathergate is just so much foam on the surface. The deep current of our time is that the old networks have lost their power to a bunch of scruffy no-names. Techno-change is shaping history yet again.

THE NEW SWIFT VET AD --

LOTS OF

"In an interview Monday evening, a repentant Rather conceded it had been a mistake to broadcast the documents. But even though he could not vouch for their authenticity, he said he still did not believe that they were fakes. 'Do I think they're forged? No,' Rather said. 'But it's not good enough to use the documents on the air if we can't vouch for them, and we can't vouch for them.'"

BILL BURKETT

"I FEEL LIKE HELL."

Ra^ther will take softballs from Democrat Larry King and his pre-screened callers tonight on CNN.

LESS THAN HALF

BUY

I'M NO LAWYER

LINDA JAMES, FORENSIC DOCUMENT EXAMINER: They contacted me on the 3rd, which was a Friday morning, and they brought the documents. They hand-delivered them to me on a Saturday, which was on the 4th. And then I reported my findings to them on the 5th and told them about the problems with the documents and asked them to send me additional documents and information that I needed.

SCARBOROUGH: Now, after you told them they had problems with the documents, did you suggest to them these documents may, in fact, be forgeries?

JAMES: I told them that I could not authenticate the documents, and that the problems were major problems with those documents, and that I needed to have additional documents and information in order to go ahead and analyze and finish my�analyzing the documents.

SCARBOROUGH: What were your biggest problems with the documents?

JAMES: The problem was with the signatures. And I had just two documents that were in question. And there were structural differences between the known documents, what we call�were submitted as known to me for comparisons with the questioned signatures. And if�there was one signature that had an angle at the top, and that was one of the concerns because he always made rounded tops, in other words. And so I needed to find out questions, if he had health problems or if there was something that might cause that, like a broken arm, or whatever. But that was never satisfied to me or supplied to me. And, of course, there was the superscript with the type, and then the body of the handwriting � the typing, rather, did not have the superscript. There was a space that was skipped after the ones and for the .. so that�s always a red flag to us. And the signatures were just not right, or I could not find that within his known signatures. And I asked...

SCARBOROUGH: And when you told them this, did they ever get back to you again after you gave them the bad news?

JAMES: They did not get back to me. I did call and ask them, and they told me that they were going to use the National Guard as�to vouch for the documents, and so I had set it aside thinking that they weren�t going to go forward with us, because�you know, a handwriting expert and document examiner.

SCARBOROUGH: All right, Linda, thanks so much. Let�s bring our panel in to get them to respond, Tony Blankley, Howard Fineman, Pat Buchanan, and Bob Kohn. Howard Fineman, obviously, you are in the news business. Sometimes �Newsweek� has to pull in experts. If these experts tell you not to go with a story, what would push your editors to do what CBS did and say forget these outside experts, full-steam ahead?

FINEMAN: Well, in my experience, nothing. The number of signals that were ignored here is truly remarkable. You just heard one. There are dozens of others, almost literally dozens, family members who said that Jerry Killian wasn�t the kind of guy to keep these kind of notes, factual contradictions in terms of dates, 1972 vs. 1973, etcetera. And keep in mind here, what the key document here says, now almost certainly forged document says, is that George Bush as a soldier contradicted a direct order from his superior, in other words, an offense that was punishable by court-martial. So you are alleging in this document that the now president and commander in chief, when he was a young man, committed a court-martialable offense. That has to have the highest possible standard of proof if you are going to go on the air with it .. And I think the strict accuracy and validity of the memos was almost incidental to them.

Alex Jones, director of Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, said it appeared to be an honest mistake by CBS.

JUSTONEMINUTE

"MICHAEL MOORE HATES AMERICA" --

But easily the most powerful sequence is a visit with Peter Damon, a soldier who lost both arms in the Iraq war. In a transparent attempt to elicit pity, Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 included footage (taken from an NBC News report about a new painkiller) of Damon in the hospital while he was recuperating from his grievous wounds. In MMHA we see a recovered Damon at home with his family, enjoying life, proud of his service. Damon has no patience for those who feel sorry for him. The only anger he feels is at Moore for exploiting him. Asked by Wilson what he would like to say to Moore, Damon addresses the camera: "I don't want any part of your propaganda. I don't agree with what you're doing." At the movie's recent premiere at the American Film Renaissance in Dallas, Wilson said, the audience grew really quiet during this scene: "You could hear a pin drop." But that changed when Wilson asks Damon if Moore had the right to make his movie. Despite his obvious distaste for Moore's film, Damon says without hesitation, "That's the reason we go off to fight � to defend his right to make a movie." At that, Wilson said, the audience erupted into the loudest cheers of the evening.

As of this writing, Wilson is still hammering out the final details of a distribution deal, but he is optimistic that the film will be in theaters by early October.

BURKETT

Bill Burkett .. was [CBS's] source for the memos that were the basis of a 60 Minutes broadcast Sept. 8. Burkett provided the documents to USA TODAY later that night. Initially, USA TODAY and other news organizations took the CBS report at face value ..

In interviews in recent days with USA TODAY, both in person and on the phone, Burkett said he had merely been a conduit for the records purported to be from the private files of Lt. Col. Jerry Killian.. Burkett admitted lying to USA TODAY about the source of the documents but said he did not fabricate the papers.

In earlier conversations with USA TODAY, Burkett had identified the source of the documents as George Conn, a former Texas National Guard colleague who works for the U.S. Army in Europe. Burkett now says he made up the story about Conn's involvement to divert attention from himself and the woman he now says provided him with the documents ..

Burkett now maintains that the source of the papers was Lucy Ramirez, who he says phoned him from Houston in March to offer the documents. USA TODAY has been unable to locate Ramirez.

When Burkett gave copies of the documents to USA TODAY, it was on the understanding that his identity would not be disclosed. USA TODAY honored that agreement until Burkett waived his confidentiality Monday.

"I didn't forge anything," Burkett said. "I didn't fake any documents. The only thing I've done here is to transfer documents from people I thought were real to people I thought were real. And that has been the limitation of my role. I may have been a patsy." ..

Burkett's own doubts about the authenticity of the memos and his inability to supply evidence to show that Ramirez exists also raise questions about his credibility ..

Burkett's emotions varied widely in the interviews. One session ended when Burkett suffered a violent seizure and collapsed in his chair. Earlier, he said he was coming forward now to explain what he had done and why to try to salvage his reputation .. "It's time," Burkett said. "I'm tired of me being the bad guy. I'm tired of losing everything we've got," a reference to his financial and health struggles since he left the Guard. Turning to his wife, Nicki, he said: "We've lost it all, baby. We've lost everything."

Sitting in a rocking chair in his weathered ranch house south of Baird, Texas, Burkett recounted his continuing efforts .. to clean up what he saw as Guard corruption and mismanagement. He said that activity led to a telephone call in March from Ramirez and her offer to provide documents damaging to President Bush. Burkett said Ramirez told him she had seen him the previous month in an appearance on the MSNBC program Hardball, discussing the controversy over whether Bush fulfilled all his obligations for service in the Texas Air Guard during the early 1970s. "There is something I have that I want to make sure gets out," he quoted her as saying.

He said Ramirez claimed to possess Killian's "correspondence file," which would prove Burkett's allegations that Bush had problems as a Guard fighter pilot. Burkett said he arranged to get the documents during a trip to Houston for a livestock show in March. But instead of being met at the show by Ramirez, he was approached by a man who asked for Burkett, handed him an envelope and quickly left, Burkett recounted.

"I didn't even ask any questions," Burkett said. "Should I have? Yes. Maybe I was duped. I never really even considered that." By Monday, USA TODAY had not been able to locate Ramirez or verify other details of Burkett's account. Three people who worked with Killian in the early 1970s said they don't recognize her name. Burkett promised to provide telephone records that would verify his calls to Ramirez, but he had not done so by Monday night.

BURKETT

UPDATE: The AP has it that Max Cleland claims he knew nothing about the contents of the forged documents.

Still, one has to wonder. CBS News reported yesterday that the news organization first approached Bill Burkett about the documents, and that Burkett did not first approach them. How did CBS know about the documents? If the information didn't come from the Kerry campaign, where did it come from? The suspicion that the information did come from the Kerry campaign was first raised by the fact that the Kerry campaign began its most recent attacks on George Bush's National Guard record about a week before the CBS News fake documents story broke ..

More analysis and a timeline here. (via InstaPundit).

THE JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY

Mapes' father sees a political agenda behind his daughter's work. Don Mapes, 76, was a recent guest on a radio talk show hosted by John Carlson on KVI in Seattle. He said, "I'm really ashamed of what my daughter has become. She's a typical liberal. She went into journalism with an ax to grind, and that was to promote radical feminism."

He confessed to being disappointed in his daughter's role in the controversy. He said, "When I heard about 60 Minutes, I suspected she would be the producer of the show." In an interview with Talon News, Don Mapes said his suspicion was because that he believed, "Dan Rather and she have been working on this ever since Bush was elected."

In commenting on the Wednesday's 60 Minutes show, he said, "It was a farce, it was fraud. I'm sorry as a father that my daughter was the producer of it."

.. he also chastised his daughter for being intellectually dishonest. He said, "She ought to look closer at George Soros or Michael Moore."

"THIS REPORT

-- CBS News, Sept. 10, 2004.

"The '60 Minutes' report was not based solely on the recovered documents, but on a preponderance of evidence including documents that were provided by what we considered to be solid sources .. ".

-- Dan Ra^ther, Sept. 10, 2004.

"We are confident about the chain of custody; we're confident in how we secured the documents."

-- CBS News, Sept. 14, 2004.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal:

before yesterday CBS never gave its viewers even a hint that its entire controversial story hinged on the word of someone who has made it one of his main goals in life to defeat Mr. Bush.

UPDATE: This from the NY Times is simply stunning:

The Friday before Labor Day, Mr. Rather said yesterday, he heard that Ms. Mapes had the documents. He was in Florida covering Hurricane Frances, and flew to Texas. In the course of their conversations with Mr. Burkett, the team had grown increasingly confident in his story, he said. Mr. Rather said they had called his friends and neighbors to get a sense of his credibility and were satisfied.

"I knew him before by telephone,'' Mr. Rather said, "and otherwise had checked out what his reputation was in the community that he lived, and even people who disliked him and had arguments with him, including Republicans and supporters of Bush. They all said he's a truth teller."

Mr. Rather said that Mr. Burkett had initially refused to say who gave him the documents, and that CBS pressured him to do so. "We made it clear that the chain of possession was very important to us," Mr. Rather said. Mr. Rather recalled that Mr. Burkett had said he had gotten the documents from a former guard member who was now overseas.

Mr. Rather said producers had tried to get in touch with him, but could not. Knowing his identity bolstered the team's confidence just the same. "It was a person who could have had direct access to Killian's files," he said. "That made it believable."

THE CBS NEWS TRADITION

CBS NEWS

TRANSCRIPT --

The documents were provided to CBS News by a former commander in the Texas Air Guard [sic], Bill Burkett. He did not come to us, we went to him and asked him for the documents ..

Now, if you would misled us about that, which is critical, why would I or anyone believe that you wouldn't mislead us about something else?

I also insisted when I sat down with your staff in the first face-to-face session, before I gave up any documents, I wanted to know what you were going to do with them, and I insisted that they be authenticated.

DID JOSH MARSHALL

This looks less like a meticulously-researched "breaking news scoop" and more like the publicity campaign for a long-scheduled theatrical release -- Fahrenheit 9-08 -- with Josh Marshall serving up the teasers, sneak previews and general pre-release hype..

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

"BILL BURKETT,

Burkett .. also admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents� origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source. Burkett originally said he obtained the documents from another former Guardsman. Now he says he got them from a different source whose connection to the documents and identity CBS News has been unable to verify to this point ..

CBS News and CBS management are commissioning an independent review of the process by which the report was prepared and broadcast to help determine what actions need to be taken. The names of the people conducting the review will be announced shortly, and their findings will be made public.

EXCLUSIVE -- STATEMENT FROM DAN RATHER:

Last week, amid increasing questions about my sanity, CBS News publicly vowed to re-examine the phony documents we at CBS News were using to bring down the Bush Presidency. And we promised to ourselves that we would never let the American public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome.

Now, after extensive additional interviews with myself, I no longer have the confidence in my own mental competence, nor the journalistic integrity of CBS News, and so I can no longer continue vouching for the truth of what we put on the air. I find I have been misled on the key question of just how crazily partisan I really am. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press about my honesty and mental stability, leads me to a point where � if I knew then what I know now � I would not have gone ahead as the anchor of a nightly newscast and I certainly would not have used my audience for blatantly partisan purposes.

But we did use our audience and the American people. We made a mistake in overlooking the power of the blogosphere, and for that I am truly sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of anti-Republican bias without fear of criticism from my colleagues in the mainstream media.

Please know that nothing remains more important to us than electing Democrats to national office, the people's trust be damned.

IS JOHN KERRY RIGHT?

In America in Vietnam, Lewy noted the establishment of a veritable war-crimes industry, supported by the USSR, as early as 1965. As Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian intelligence chief, has recounted, the Soviets set up permanent international organizations � including the International War Crimes Tribunal and the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam � "to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war." Pacepa claims to have been responsible for fabricating stories about U.S. atrocities in Vietnam and "flacking" them to Western news organizations. Lewy writes that "the Communists made skillful use of their worldwide propaganda apparatus . . . and they found many Western intellectuals only too willing to accept every conceivable allegation of [American] wrongdoing at face value."

The VVAW, a small, radical group that never exceeded a membership of 7,000 (including John Kerry) from a pool of nearly three million Vietnam (and nine million Vietnam-era) veterans, essentially "Americanized" Soviet propaganda. When he testified before the Senate in 1971, Kerry was merely repeating charges that had been making the rounds since 1965.

CAPTAIN ED --

IF

UPDATE: If you want the truth, don't read the disreputable NY Times Op-Ed, read the Post.

DAN

HOWARD KURTZ --

REAR ADMIRAL ROY HOFFMANN --

[John Kerry's] propensity for gross exaggeration and lying was legend to those who knew him, even early on at Cam Rahn Bay, his first duty station in Vietnam. In Tour of Duty, Kerry recounts the story of the seas being so rough during the monsoon season that sailors came in "pissing red and that several people have broken bones" - a ridiculous story that was totally unsubstantiated.

Or consider the story of how Kerry, according to Brinkley, stated, "A sampan navigating in the shroud of darkness was assumed to be Viet Cong and would be fired on" - a breach of the U.S. Navy's rules of engagement. That is an outright defamatory lie. The South Vietnamese National Government had established and promulgated well-defined coastal-control zones to facilitate surveillance, illegal activity, and infiltration of enemy arms from seaward. Although our Swift Boats and Coast Guard cutters did diligently enforce the restricted areas, a boat or ship violating a restricted zone would not be fired upon unless attempting to escape inspection, and only after proper warning in accordance with U.S. Navy strict rules of engagement.

Kerry repeatedly embellishes this lie by referring to "U.S. designated free-fire zones," implying that such zones authorized indiscriminate killing, in order to portray the U.S. military as unwanted, brutish conquerors in Vietnam. In truth, free-fire zones fell within the normal rules of engagement and authorized not an order to fire but discretion to fire first if threatened by, or when confronting, enemy forces ..

John Kerry was the only man in the entire Task Force of 3,600 men - officers and enlisted - to request transfer out of country based on three Purple Hearts. Particularly galling to his shipmates was the fact that not one of his minor nicks was debilitating nor resulted in one lost day of duty ..

Kerry is not a hero. He betrayed his comrades-in-arms in time of war. He is a chronic liar and a fraud. This is not about politics; it's about truthfulness, reliability, loyalty, and trust - all absolute tenets of command. John Forbes Kerry is not fit to be Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States of America.

BILL BURKETT'S

POST YOUR DAN RATHER SPOOFS AND CARTOONS HERE.

TUESDAY

WHAT'S

THE

DAN

MEDIA FRENZY

[S]everal reporters and news photographers parked outside the locked iron gate of the Burkett ranch, hoping to get a long-range camera shot or an interview ..

Meanwhile, news that at least one document central to a high-profile national controversy brought unaccustomed attention to the Abilene Kinko's Copies store .. A clerk working alone at the Kinko's counter Wednesday night was interrupted every few minutes by phone calls from the media inquiring about the article.

''I can't even get my job done,'' said the clerk, putting down the phone as she moved to help a customer ..

One local TV station scrambled to meet the request for satellite feeds and other service to national media. ''It's been chaotic,'' said KTXS-TV (Channel 12, Cox Communications Channel 4) News Director Iain Munro. ''Since we have the only satellite truck west of Fort Worth, everybody wants to use it.'' Munro said television stations from around the country called looking for video to use for their newscasts. ''They're asking for us to feed them video from Kinko's, and also Burkett,'' he said ..

The [Abilene] Reporter-News received calls from The New York Times and The Washington Post looking for photographs of Burkett and the Kinko's store. ''I knew we were going to get these calls,'' said Robert Rogers, Reporter-News photo editor. ''It's like running a psychic hot line. I tell them what we have before they start talking."

50 CARTOONS

THE FORGED DOCUMENTS:

WILL THE REAL

More here with detailed document analysis.

FREEPERS ON THE CBS MEMOS --

In the interest of the historical importance of things that happened on this forum last week and, most importantly, to try to provide and document an accurate record of exactly what happened here on the evening of September 8, 2004, and the following morning, I have compiled a listing of ALL of the postings that occurred on Free Republic concerning CBS and Dan Rather 60 Minutes show from 8:00 PM EDT on Thurdsay, September 8, 2004, up until about 9:00 AM EDT on the morning of Friday, September 9, 2004, when the rest of the internet "caught up."

TEXAS ANG

CBS and Rather are standing by the story, saying it's possible the documents were pounded out on a typewriter. But it proved to be Mission Impossible to back up the CBS claims. "There is no doubt this is a forgery," Pittsburgh typeface expert John Newcomer told The Post.

First, The Post tested the IBM Selectric II, which Killian's secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS arrived at the base in the early '70s, when the suspect documents were purportedly produced. The IBM Selectric II was introduced in 1971. In trying to replicate the May 4, 1972, letter, we had a nightmare of a time in just centering the heading � as was done in the CBS document. Without an automatic-centering feature, we relied on the tab key and space bar to line it up.

We were forced to use Prestige font. This is the closest font available on the Selectric II to the Times New Roman used in the CBS documents, according to certified document expert Bill Flynn. And no matter how much we tinkered with spacing, we couldn't fit as many words on a line as CBS's document. That's because the Selectric II gives each letter the same amount of space, whether it's a tiny lowercase "i" or the wider capitalized "W."

Also, in addition to centering, spacing and font differences from the CBS documents, the superscripted "th" in the typing of Bush's "111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron" couldn't be matched. There is no raised "th" key on the standard Selectric II. The pseudo-superscripting we performed required us to type the 111, then roll the page up manually a half-line, then type the "t" and then the "h."

The whole process took us more than two hours � an awfully long time for a half-page memo. And the results never looked anything close to the CBS documents.

Tests run by Thomas Phinney, fonts program manager for Adobe Systems, show that none of the possible font widths available on any typewriter or any IBM device from 1972 are able to produce an exact replica of the CBS documents. "Can they do something 'similar'? Sure," Phinney said. "Could they produce those exact memos? Impossible."

"IT'S THE LAST STAND

HOW

And use this handy guide.

CBS NEWS AFFILIATE

"I'M CONFIDENT

And that, my friends, is all you need to know about American journalism today.

More Ra^ther:

"I have never been more confident of a story in my life."

BURKETT IS THE SOURCE.

A source who worked with CBS on the story said Burkett was identified by a producer as a conduit for the documents. Three days before the broadcast, Burkett e-mailed a friend that there was "a real heavy situation regarding Bush's records" about to break. "He was having a lot of fun with this," said the friend, Dennis Adams. Burkett told a visitor that after the story ran, Rather phoned him and expressed his and the network's "full support."

"WE COMPLETELY ABANDONED

In the early-morning hours of Sept. 8, Dan Rather was preparing to fly to Washington for a crucial interview in the Old Executive Office Building, but torrential rain kept him in New York. White House communications director Dan Bartlett had agreed to talk to "60 Minutes," but only on condition that the CBS program provide copies of what were being billed as newly unearthed memos indicating that President Bush had received preferential treatment in the National Guard. The papers were hand-delivered at 7:45 a.m. CBS correspondent John Roberts, filling in for Rather, sat down with Bartlett at 11:15.

Half an hour later, Roberts called "60 Minutes" producer Mary Mapes with word that Bartlett was not challenging the authenticity of the documents. Mapes told her bosses, who were so relieved that they cut from Rather's story an interview with a handwriting expert who had examined the memos. At that point, said "60 Minutes" executive Josh Howard, "we completely abandoned the process of authenticating the documents. Obviously, looking back on it, that was a mistake. We stopped questioning ourselves. I suppose you could say we let our guard down." CBS aired the story eight hours later ..

Asked about a report in The Los Angeles Times yesterday that network officials were questioning the documents' authenticity at a meeting several hours before the start of the "60 Minutes" broadcast, Mr. Howard said: "We were sitting there with the lawyers, asking ourselves a million questions. 'Are we sure we got it right?' And the answers were all, 'We got it right, yes.' '' One mystery among CBS staff members is why network officials remained so confident for so long about the documents as so many questions arose.

During an interview yesterday Mr. Howard said that Ms. Mapes, who broke the news for CBS about the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal earlier this year, continually pledged confidence in her sources, who were said to have access to Mr. Killian's personal file. Mr. Howard acknowledged yesterday that he had not, in fact, known who Ms. Mapes's primary source for the documents was before the report was broadcast. But, he said, "Mary Mapes told us her source made her completely confident about where they came from, and that they were authentic, and that made me confident." Ms. Mapes has not returned calls seeking comment.

For now, Mr. Burkett seems to be a focus of the network's efforts to get to the bottom of the documents' validity, which it hopes it can do as early as Monday. One person at the network, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Burkett had been at the very least a go-between for the documents, but that very few people at the network know from whom he might have obtained them, if anyone .. Mr. Bush's campaign officials, meanwhile, do not seem as if they are going to let up on the pressure. "There's a threshold question," Nicolle Devenish, Mr. Bush's campaign communications director, said. "If a media outlet is about to go on the air with a story, there is kind of an assumption that they're going on the air with documents that are authentic when they attack the president of the United States of America 50 days before a national election."

"THIS HAS CLEARLY HURT US"

More Newsweek:

One problem is that the network has not explained where the purported Texas National Guard records have been for the last 30 years and why they happened to surface in the closing weeks of a presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, reporters continue their around the clock stakeout of Burkett's house in Texas.

Overheard by PrestoPundit at the mall yesterday, "Do you think Ra^ther will be fired?" Response, "No, I think he'll be 'retired'."

The truth -- as they say -- is out there.

BELLY LAUGH OF THE DAY.

Meanwhile, partisan hack Arthur Sulzberger Jr. of the NY Times worries that bloggers might "contribute to the sense that we're in the midst of an opinion-ridden free-for-all." As opposed, I guess, to an opinion-ridden monologue from lefty Democrats as your local monopoly newspaper and the big three networks. More on "pinchy" here and here.

(Thanks to co-conspirator Mike for the email tip on the Tribue article). UPDATE: A Patterico must read:

.. there are quite often little tidbits about reporters that don't get reported. Take, for example, Bill Arkin, who until recently was an L.A. Times reporter on military issues -- and who famously misquoted Gen. Boykin. As I pointed out .. Arkin's e-mail address, listed in his byline, traces to igc.org, the home page for a radical leftist organization called the "Institute for Global Communications."

Or take L.A. Times reporter Ken Silverstein, who I took to task in this post for blatantly misrepresenting quotes in a Sunday talk show. Silverstein's bio describes him as follows:

"Freelance writer, Washington, D.C., contributing editor of Harper's magazine, Washington editor of Mother Jones, contributor to The Nation, Mother Jones, Salon.com, Slate, The American Prospect and Washington Monthly, 1993 -2003."

.. If the mainstream media insists on investigating the backgrounds of the bloggers, what makes reporters immune from such scrutiny?

BELDARBLOG

For example, he's all over the Judicial Watch / John Kerry medals story.

YOUR MORNING STEYN --

FOOTBALL FANS

SEPT. 3 --

Although CBS News notes that Mapes had been chasing the National Guard story for five years, it only came back on the active burner in mid- to late August. That's when executive producer Howard got a call from her, telling him "she was on to something" and wanted to put her other projects aside. Over the next couple of weeks, he said, "she would call from time to time, telling me she was getting closer, not closer, something that she was looking up that was a blind alley � those kinds of things that reporters do when tracking a story. There was nothing definitive" until he got the call from her on Sept. 3, Howard recalled.

As excitement spread through CBS offices on West 57th Street, there was a rush to get the pieces in place. On Sept. 5, Rather hopped a charter flight to Texas from Florida .. to meet Mapes ..

CRACK LA TIMES REPORTER

THE RATS

WATCH

FOX NEWS

Scroll down and don't miss this:

Friday's New York Times noted that Rather, "addressing the charges of liberal bias," claimed: "Anybody who knows me knows I'm an independent." That matched his proclamation in Thursday's USA Today that "anybody who knows me knows that I am not politically motivated, not politically active for Democrats or Republicans, and that I'm independent." Except when he attends fundraisers for the Democratic Party as he did in Texas in 2001? Rather maintained that conservative ideologues, who "can't deny the message so they have to discredit and destroy the messenger," really "know that I'm fiercely independent and that's what drives them up a wall."

MICHELLE MALKIN --

Andrew Ferguson, "Has George W. Bush Killed Off Conservatism?"

LORI BYRD, ACE REPORTER,

BETSY NEWMARK

CBS AFFILIATES

BURKETT LINKED

In e-mail messages to a Yahoo discussion group for Texas Democrats, Burkett laid out a rationale for using what he termed "down and dirty" tactics against Bush. He said that he had passed his ideas to the Democratic National Committee ..

In another message, dated Sept. 4, Burkett hinted he might have had advance knowledge of some details in an explosive segment that aired Sept. 8 on CBS's "60 Minutes." .. "I believe that Bush knows that there is more coming out than Ben Barnes," Burkett wrote.

THE BLOGOSPHERE

BURKETT LINKED

"I spent some time on the phone with the Kerry campaign seniors yesterday," Mr. Burkett wrote on Aug. 21 in an e-mail letter circulated to a list of about 600 Texas Democrats. He complained that he had to "get through seven layers of bureaucratic kids trying to get a job after the election." "I talked with Max Cleland," Mr. Burkett continued, referring to the former senator from Georgia who has been supporting Senator John Kerry's Democratic presidential bid. Alluding to advertisements by a veterans group that deprecates Mr. Kerry's Vietnam service, Mr. Burkett continued, "I asked if they wanted to counterattack or ride this to ground and outlast it, not spending any money. He said counterattack." "So I gave them the information to do it with," Mr. Burkett wrote. "But none of them have called me back."

GEN. WALTER STAUDT --

CORPORATE INTERESTS

A REALTIME

UPDATE: See also the indepth report, "Incompetent or Unethical? The Story of CBS News' Response to Criticism Over the Killian Memos" by Ernest Miller of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School (via InstaPundit)

STANLEY KURTZ --

"CBS IS WRONG, CBS IS WRONG." --

HOUSTON CHRONICLE --

SWIFT VET AD #5.

THE NY TIMES

REMEMBER,

THIS

BILL BURKETT --

BILL BURKETT --

Burkett has frequently posted notes to an Internet message group for Texas Democrats, urging other members to work harder to defeat Bush in the election, but also lambasting Democratic nominee John F. Kerry for "one of the worst run campaigns I've seen in my lifetime." "Many of us have risked everything on this election," Burkett said in a message posted on Aug. 31. "The disappointment is deep and difficult to manage. But we fight on, in spite of incompetence at the top."

BUSTED.

UPDATE: The NY Times corrects a few errors.

WHILE WE

HAYEK SMILED --

If Nobel Prize winning economist F.A. Hayek had been watching last week as bloggers spontaneously responded to fraudulent documents aired by the program "60 Minutes", he would've grinned in humble satisfaction. Hayek's work centered on the effectiveness of spontaneous, decentralized organization, which is precisely what occurred on PowerlineBlog on September 9th. Regardless of the political consequences of the Killian Memo controversy, Hayek's work has been vindicated and his critics undermined.

"IT IS NOT JUST

IT LOOKS LIKE

MAX BOOT --

Siegle, Weinstein and Halperin puncture the myth that democracy works only in rich nations. In fact, many poor countries have freely elected governments (think India, Poland and Brazil) while some rich ones (think Saudi Arabia and Singapore) do not. Far from economic development being necessary for democracy, they argue that democracy promotes economic development. Free countries grow faster than their more repressive neighbors. They also perform better on social measures such as life expectancy, literacy rates, clean drinking water and healthcare. And they are less prone to armed conflict.

Skeptics of democracy cite a few cases of impressive economic performance by authoritarian regimes such as South Korea and Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s. But more common are dysfunctional kleptocracies like Congo, Syria and North Korea. According to Siegle, Weinstein and Halperin, autocracies are prone to wild swings in economic and political performance. Democracies, with greater openness and accountability, generally produce more consistent results. They note that "the 87 largest refugee crises over the past 20 years originated in autocracies," and they cite Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's observation that "no democracy with a free press has ever experienced a major famine."

ANDREW HEYWARD

HUGH HEWITT --

THIS IS

DAN

A RADIO

FINDLAW

FROM BILL BURKETT

"Lt. Col. BILL BURKETT IS

More Burkett rants here and here.

Also this from Burkett: "In each call [from a reporter in the fall of 2002 regarding Bush's National Guard records] , I, in essence scolded media representatives for not doing their homework and reviewing this information before the eleventh hour."

BILL BURKETT --

"The files clearly show a tension had arisen concerning Bush's service with his commander LTC Killian. Killian's comments concerning Bush's Officer Evaluation simply claim that Bush was not observed during this one-year rating period. This is an area that commanders of that day and today all use as their calibration on the issue of Bush's service. We know politics, but we also know that Officer evaluations are critical mass for commanders; especially on political soldiers such as a congressman's son.

* The flurry of activity following Alabama obviously responded to unit pressure, but also indicates a possible violation of trust from Killian toward Bush. This is conjecture, but substantiated by the actions that followed .. "

Bush Shits On Guardsman
by Bill Burkett
(No verified email address) 24 Mar 2003

I had been 'loaned' from the senior staff and state planning officer of the Texas National Guard to the Department of the Army for a series of these special projects after angering George W. Bush by refusing to falsify readiness information and reports; confronting a fraudulent funding scheme which kept 'ghost' soldiers on the books for additional funding, and refusing to alter official personnel records [of George W. Bush].

"THE NEXT REVOLUTION

WSJ --

MARTHA STEWART

"IF THE DOCUMENTS

"This is not about me," Rather said ..

Some friends of Rather, whose contract runs until the end of 2006, are discussing whether he might be forced to make an early exit from CBS ..

Bernard Goldberg, a longtime CBS correspondent .. said he believes that Rather was duped [and that] .. "CBS News is acting the way the Nixon administration did during Watergate. I'm really sad to say that Dan Rather is acting like Richard Nixon. It's the coverup, it's the stonewalling."

NY TIMES --

UPDATE: FISKED!.

BURKETT

Quotable WaPo:

Documents allegedly written by a deceased officer that raised questions about President Bush's service with the Texas Air National Guard bore markings showing they had been faxed to CBS News from a Kinko's copy shop in Abilene, Tex., according to another former Guard officer who was shown the records by the network .. There is only one Kinko's in Abilene, and it is 21 miles from the Baird, Tex., home of retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who has been named by several news outlets as a possible source for the documents.

Blogger and radio talk show host Kevin McCullough: "JUST GOT OFF THE PHONE WITH ABILENE KINKOS: Bill Burkett has a standing account with the Kinkos in Abilene Texas, and while the lady who answered the phone would not be more specific she did say Burkett was in there last week - she waited on him on last (a week ago) Tuesday.... "

I must have the best readers in the world. Kerry Spot reader Roger points out another unusual similarity. "One phrase that struck me on reading the CYA memo that "Killian" wrote referred to him "having trouble running interference and doing my job". "Run interference" struck me as an unusual turn of phrase. So, I google "run interference" and "Burkett" and get two hits: He's used "run interference" in an interview with Kevin Drum (where someone ran interference for him), and described another officer as running interference for Bush, Rove, Albaugh etc. It seems to be a verbal tic with him and it's interesting that it shows up in a memo that "Killian" wrote."

More proof .. that Burkett is the source, and probably the forger. That means Rather's "unimpeachable source" is a nervous-breakdown-suffering, Bush-hating, story-faking, ultra-liberal husk of a man who's been peddling crazy stories about Bush/TANG for several years. Add to that Ben Barnes, of the Kerry campaign, and you've got the forgery-Kerry-Rather link.

And this isn't the first time Burkett has fabricated lies about Bush's guard records.

MORE: "Who is Bill Burkett?" Quotable:

The issue here is not that Bill Burkett is a liberal. It isn't even that he is left wing. The issue is that he is loony left. We are in "precious bodily fluids" territory.

SEN. ROBERT BENNETT --

Emily Will, a documents examiner from North Carolina hired by CBS, said she told the network before the report aired that she questioned handwriting in the documents she was shown and whether it could have been produced by a typewriter. Her main concern was that she was not provided a known sample of the signature to use for comparison. Will said she e-mailed a CBS producer and urged her the night before the broadcast not to play up that a professional document examiner had authenticated the papers. "I did not feel that they wanted to investigate it very deeply," Will told ABC News. Another expert hired by CBS, Linda James of Plano, Texas, told ABC that "I did not authenticate anything and I don't want it understood that I did." James told AP late Tuesday she raised similar concerns about signature samples. "I really pressed that because I knew that other document examiners looking at the same documents would have a real problem authenticating these," she said.

"We would not have put the report on the air if we did not believe in every aspect of it," said CBS News President Andrew Heyward. However, Heyward also said the network will try to resolve what he calls the unresolved issues. "Enough questions have been raised that we are going redouble our efforts to answer those questions."

"I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the News division and that if the cancer was not removed the News division itself would be killed by it," said the former counsel to the President.

JOHN KERRY

IMUS: Did you read "Unfit for Command?"

KERRY: No.

IMUS: Did anybody on your staff?

KERRY: I have no idea.

IMUS: Why wouldn't you want to know what's in it? It's the No. 1 "New York Times," of course, it says nonfiction bestseller.

KERRY: Because they have right wing people to buy them in bulk, and that's what they're doing.

IMUS: No, I understand.

KERRY: Look, it's a pack of lies. It's an absolute pack of lies. It's been proven to be a pack of lies, and I have no interest in reading it.

HUGH HEWITT --

WHAT'S

"I think over the long haul, this will be consistent with our history and our traditions and reputation."

I think the public, even decent people who may be well-disposed toward President Bush, understand that powerful and extremely well-financed forces are concentrating on questions about the documents because they can�t deny the fundamental truth of the story. If you can�t deny the information, then attack and seek to destroy the credibility of the messenger, the bearer of the information. And in this case, it�s change the subject from the truth of the information to the truth of the documents.

"JOURNALISM

(via Powerline).

MICHELLE MALKIN

FOX NEWS

NEW KERRY DOCUMENTS

A newly surfaced document from John Kerry's Navy record says he shot a lone, wounded enemy who was running away in the incident that led to his Silver Star, his highest military decoration.

Members of the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans for Truth say the report vindicates their claim that Kerry didn't show the kind of valor that merits a Silver Star. The after-action report was obtained from the Navy archives by syndicated TV commentator Mark Hyman of "The Point." A Navy official confirmed its authenticity.

John O'Neill, a leader of the Swift Vets running anti-Kerry TV ads, said the document shows Kerry "was pursuing a wounded man and not charging alone into superior numbers and intense fire," as his Silver Star citation claims.

DAN

This thing is become more Nixonian every day.

GEORGE BUTLER'S SWIFT BOAT "DOCUMENTARY"

The movie is based on Tour of Duty, the Douglas Brinkley hagiography that the Swift Boat vets say incited them to action in the first place. More important, Going Upriver seems designed to rebut, one by one, the three campaign ads put out by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: one questioning Kerry's heroism during the war, one criticizing his antiwar testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and one condemning his decision to throw his ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol during an antiwar demonstration. Butler re-edited his film in response to the Swift Boat ads ..

WHAT CRIMES

But perhaps what we really need are new laws covering this matter.

CBS NEWS

HOW WILL WE FIGHT? --

MY WIFE'S IDEA -- THE OFFICIAL:

"I'd Ra^ther be blogging" T-Shirt.

WAS IT

But one person at CBS, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed a report in Newsweek that Bill Burkett, a retired National Guard officer who has charged that senior aides to then-Gov. Bush had ordered Guard officials to remove damaging information from Mr. Bush's military personnel files, had been a source of the report. This person did not know the exact role he played. Mr. Burkett declined to return telephone calls to his home near Abilene, Tex. His lawyer, David Van Os, on Tuesday repeatedly refused to say in a telephone interview whether the officer had played a part in supplying the disputed documents to CBS. Mr. Van Os said "the real story is and should be, where was George Bush?" and that Mr. Burkett "is not the proper object of attention."

CBS AFFILIATES

THE PROWLER --

HOWARD KURTZ --

THE LA TIMES --

REP. CHRISTOPHER COX

SWIFT VET MESSAGE BOARD --

I just got off the phone with the Naval Archives and they have the following on Kerry in their files: (4) Boxes filled with message traffic - CTF 115 messages - COSDIV 11 messages - Kerry awards and admin messages - Command Histories - Misc papers Anyone with an ID can go in and look at the stuff. Copies are .30 a page. It appears the media was wrong about the amount of info released to the public. We need someone inside that Archives!

It looks like the new Kerry documents are coming out of this stash.

"THIS IS

WHO COULD RESIST

DAN

UPDATE: "What did the President Dan Ra^ther know and when did he know it?" -- question asked in 1974 today in the U.S. House of Representatives.

KILLIAN'S SECRETARY --

RE:

Tom Maguire emails:

It's a team sport, baby! And right now, we are the best team in baseball.

CBS NEWS

Last Friday, as caught by CBS's cameras on a Manhattan street, Dan Rather denounced "the Internet" as "filled with all kinds of rumors," but when it came time to find "experts" to claim CBS's Jerry Killian memos are authentic, Rather trolled the Internet. For his CBS Evening News defense on Monday night Rather featured "technical consultant" Bill Glennon and "software designer" Richard Katz.

It turns out that Glennon first made himself known, as someone who would vouch for CBS, in a Friday posting on Kevin Drum's "Political Animal" blog for the Washington Monthly, TimesWatch.org Editor Clay Waters informed me. And the MRC's Tim Graham alerted me to how Tuesday's New York Times reported that Katz called his local CBS affiliate offering up himself for expert analysis.

Monday's CBS Evening News featured this soundbite from Glennon: "Everything that's in that document was, documents that people are saying can't be done, as you said, 32 years ago, is just totally false. Not true. Like I said, proportional spacing was available, superscripts was available as a custom feature. Proportional spacing between lines was available. You could order that any way you'd like."

Blogger Tim Blair today noted Glennon's Washington Monthly blog posting. This blog also noted it.

Glennon's original posting.

Katz ridiculously charged on Monday's CBS Evening News: "There's one document from May of 1972 which contains a normal 'th' at the top. To produce that in Microsoft Word, you would have to go out of your way to type the letters and then turn the 'th' setting off or back over them and type them again." As if a forger wouldn't make such a effort!

Tuesday's New York Times reported: "Richard Katz, a computer software expert in Los Angeles who was featured on the "Evening News" segment, said in an interview that he had called his local affiliate, KCBS, after looking at the memos on the CBS Web site after the initial broadcast, when some experts were saying that the memos looked as if they had been composed using the Times New Roman font in Microsoft Word." For the article in full. The September 14 CyberAlert features pictures of both Glennon and Katz from Monday's CBS Evening News.

AARON DIRECTOR,

[Director] wrote a review of Friedrich A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom," which had a British publisher but had been turned down for publication in America. Mr. Director urged the University of Chicago to publish what would become a landmark paean to free markets by a future Nobel laureate. The book sold more than 200,000 copies and precipitated Mr. Director's own long-held wish to join the faculty at his alma mater.

BELDAR

"Al Gore inherits the wind."

MORE

TIME TO BRING IN THE FEDS.

Dan Ra^ther has indeed become Richard Nixon. And this is Dan Ra^ther's Watergate.

Any lawyers out there who can fill me in on all the laws relevant to the criminal conspiracy Dan Ra^ther and CBS News have become a party to?

UPDATE: Powerline: "In the coverup phase of the story, CBS's stonewalling transforms CBS from the dupe of a con into a participant in the fraud. Is Daniel Schorr available to remind his old friends at CBS that the coverup is worse than the crime?"

UPDATE II: Captain Ed: "This goes far beyond journalistic malpractice and could go as far as libel (or slander). Dan Rather and CBS knowingly broadcast a story they knew to be based on documents that could not be authenticated and were most likely forgeries, advice they received from their own experts."

UPDATE III: "A petition has been placed at Petitions Online to request that United States Attorney General John Ashcroft order an investigation into the authenticity of documents recently used by CBS News anchor Dan Rather .. " -- Tip of the Whip (don't ask me how I found this).

'YOU KNOW,

-- Laura Bush.

JONAH GOLDBERG --

The folks at Powerline compare the willingness of Dan Rather to chase a partisan hit job into the land of fiction to the revolution of suicide bombing. The sudden willingness, indeed eagerness, of terrorists to die with their victims changed the whole paradigm of national security. Similarly, Rather was willing to destroy himself in pursuit of a partisan attack. It's an okay analogy, but it misses a crucial point. Dan Rather didn't think he was going to blow himself up. He believed he was invulnerable. He was the equivalent of some powdered-wigged fool who believed that Austria would come out on the other side of a short battle with its reputation enhanced.

CBS's ODDBALL "EXPERT".

DAN

JOHN PODHORETZ --

If you haven't been follow ing the story, then I'll cut to the chase: Four documents used by CBS News last week in a story about George W. Bush's National Guard service are forgeries. When I first wrote about this on Thursday, in a column that appeared on Friday, it seemed likely but not certain they were phony. We called the column "CBS' Big Blunder?" with a question mark just to be careful. There's no need to pull any punches now. I'm going to be blunt here: Anybody who spends an hour reviewing the evidence and the expert testimony knows they're forgeries.

"RARE IBM 72 SELECTRIC TYPEWRITER 1961 GREAT FOR FORGING"

Question -- who needs an vintage IBM Selectric to fool Dan Ra^ther?

SWIFT VET FACT SHEET --

Also this -- and overview of contributions and contributors to the Swift Boat Vet for Truth (pdf).

JOHN KERRY'S

PCF 94 beached in center of ambush in front of small path when Viet Cong sprung up from bunker 10 feet from unit. Man ran with weapon towards hootch. Forward M-60 machine gunner wounded man in leg. Officer-in-charge, LTjg Kerry, jumped ashore and gave pursuit while other units saturated area with fire and beached placing assault parties ashore. Kerry chased VC inland behind hootch and shot him while he fled -- capturing one B-40 rocket launcher with round in chamber.

To work blogosphere!

UPDATE: Here is an ongoing discussion of the document by Swift Boat vets. A seperate ealier thead can be found .

The key issue -- did John Kerry write the report?

CONTRIBUTE TO

THE WASHINGTON POST --

The lead expert retained by CBS News to examine disputed memos from President Bush's former squadron commander in the National Guard said yesterday that he examined only the late officer's signature and made no attempt to authenticate the documents themselves ..

A detailed examination of the CBS documents beside authenticated Killian memos and other documents generated by Bush's 147th Fighter Interceptor Group suggests at least three areas of difference that are difficult to reconcile:

� Word-processing techniques. Of more than 100 records made available by the 147th Group and the Texas Air National Guard, none used the proportional spacing techniques characteristic of the CBS documents. Nor did they use a superscripted "th" in expressions such as "147th Group" and or "111th Fighter Intercept Squadron."

In a CBS News broadcast Friday night rebutting allegations that the documents had been forged, Rather displayed an authenticated Bush document from 1968 that included a small "th" next to the numbers "111" as proof that Guard typewriters were capable of producing superscripts. In fact, say Newcomer and other experts, the document aired by CBS News does not contain a superscript, because the top of the "th" character is at the same level as the rest of the type. Superscripts rise above the level of the type.

� Factual problems. A CBS document purportedly from Killian ordering Bush to report for his annual physical, dated May 4, 1972, gives Bush's address as "5000 Longmont #8, Houston." This address was used for many years by Bush's father, George H.W. Bush. National Guard documents suggest that the younger Bush stopped using that address in 1970 when he moved into an apartment, and did not use it again until late 1973 or 1974, when he moved to Cambridge, Mass., to attend Harvard Business School.

One CBS memo cites pressure allegedly being put on Killian by "Staudt," a reference to Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, one of Bush's early commanders. But the memo is dated Aug. 18, 1973, nearly a year and a half after Staudt retired from the Guard. Questioned about the discrepancy over the weekend, CBS officials said that Staudt was a "mythic figure" in the Guard who exercised influence from behind the scenes even after his retirement.

� Stylistic differences. To outsiders, how an officer wrote his name and rank or referred to his military unit may seem arcane and unimportant. Within the military, however, such details are regulated by rules and tradition, and can be of great significance. The CBS memos contain several stylistic examples at odds with standard Guard procedures, as reflected in authenticated documents.

In memos previously released by the Pentagon or the White House, Killian signed his rank "Lt Col" or "Lt Colonel, TexANG," in a single line after his name without periods. In the CBS memos, the "Lt Colonel" is on the next line, sometimes with a period but without the customary reference to TexANG, for Texas Air National Guard.

An ex-Guard commander, retired Col. Bobby W. Hodges, whom CBS originally cited as a key source in authenticating its documents, pointed to discrepancies in military abbreviations as evidence that the CBS memos are forgeries. The Guard, he said, never used the abbreviation "grp" for "group" or "OETR" for an officer evaluation review, as in the CBS documents. The correct terminology, he said, is "gp" and "OER."

USA Today, which had presented the documents as legitimate on Thursday, featured an article yesterday with some experts surmising they were forgeries. "We're just busy now trying to determine the authenticity, or not," said the newspaper's executive editor, John Hillkirk.

The NY Times also has this:

One of the experts CBS News said initially helped convince it that the documents were genuine, a handwriting expert named Marcel B. Matley, said in an interview yesterday that he believed the signature in the documents to be that of Colonel Killian. Asked if the signature could have been lifted from an official document by Colonel Killian and pasted onto forgeries, Mr. Matley said: "Sure. But we can't draw a conclusion from a possibility."

KerrySpot:

.. some of CBS� news talent who were campaigning for the anchor desk when Ra^ther retires are more than a little pleased with the recent turn of events. These individuals, who, admittedly, have a great personal stake in getting Ra^ther out the door, are contending in internal discussions that the blame belongs with Ra^ther, not with any lower-ranking producer.

This individual also suggests that Don Hewitt, creator of 60 Minutes and who initially opposed the idea of establishing �60 Minutes II,� is as livid as one would imagine. The pressure within CBS is intense and building steadily, the source said ..

I also spent Monday touching base with various reporters and editors at mainstream newspapers and magazines in Washington, and not one would defend CBS�s action in this case. One editor at a publication that covers Capitol Hill said, �Anytime a major media outlet leaps to a conclusion on what appears to be highly questionable evidence, we all pay a price in terms of lessened credibility. Bad journalism is like bad anything � lawyers, doctors or apples. One bad one can taint the whole group.�

BOB KOHN,

I think the real story is, is whether Dan Ra^ther, with his performance [Friday night], has become the Jayson Blair of CBS News. He went on the air tonight and said, I did not have sex with that woman. He�s laid down�he�s made the same political calculation that Bill Clinton did several years ago, and we know how that turned out. He�s taking a huge risk here, because he is declaring � Dan Ra^ther is declaring thermonuclear war on the Internet blogging community without really understanding that community at all.

DAN

Politicalities: I've seen this "fisking" thing before, and it looked like fun, so herewith ..

Ra^therBias.com: "CBS News has gone into full "CYA" mode." (includes full DR transcript -- scroll down)

Captain Ed: "Rather continues to fiddle while CBS burns."

LORIE BYRD ASKS --

HOW DAN

DAN

IT HAD TO HAPPEN.

(via InstaPundit)

READ OF THE DAY --

And here are the typographical details on the proof of forgery.

"I AM OFFICIALLY A PAJAMA-BLOGGER."

Subject: making a difference

Hi Greg,

My name is Lori Talbott and I wanted to express my appreciation to you for the credit to Lori from Texas for the Ra(th)ergate name. It has been an awesome experience to be a part of history in the making. Being from Texas and a mom of six kids, I had been searching for a way to make a difference in campaign 2004. Texas is a "wrapped" state as for electoral votes, so involvement on the local level would not have been a good buy of my time. Involvement on a level outside of Texas was an impossibility. Now, I am officially a pajama-blogger (per J. Klein) that can make a difference from the comfort of my own living room.

Thank you for all that you have done in past years to lay the foundation for this type of forum whereby "common" people like me (per THK) can contribute. It is one thing to have "free speech" as a constitutional right: It is another to have a venue for that speech to be freely heard.

Best Regards,

Lori

WHAT DAN

DAN

A principal source for CBS's story was Bill Burkett, a disgruntled former Guard officer who lives in Baird, Texas .. Burkett may have a motive to make trouble for the powers that be. In 1998, he grew gravely ill on a Guard mission to Panama, causing him to be hospitalized, and he suffered two nervous breakdowns. He unsuccessfully sued for medical expenses.

"Did I lie about Geroge W. Bush's records. No. Of the files that I saw within the 15 gallon waste can were numerous documents which detailed why 1LT George Bush was grounded from flying including a two-page counseling statement signed by LTC Jerry Killian."

Hmm - Googling on that email address, one comes up with this nice little article, where he suggests that Bush and Cheney should be jailed, and that the Mossad knew all about 9/11 beforehand, and told us about it.

UPDATE: Betsy Newmark: "[I]f CBS got its so-called documents from some guy, say Bob Burkett, who claims that he happened to be sitting in a National Guard office in Austin when the incriminating documents were thrown out in 1997, then they got punk'd."

"REGARDLESS

"I'D

A watershed media moment occurred Friday on Fox News Channel, when Jonathan Klein, a former executive vice president of CBS News who oversaw "60 Minutes," debated Stephen Hayes, a writer for The Weekly Standard, on the documents CBS used to raise questions about George W. Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service. Mr. Klein dismissed the bloggers who are raising questions about the authenticity of the memos: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at '60 Minutes'] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing." He will regret that snide disparagement of the bloggers, many of whom are skilled lawyers or have backgrounds in military intelligence or typeface design. A growing number of design and document experts say they are certain or almost certain the memos on which CBS relied are forgeries.

What Dan will be wearing when he finally gets the story right.

(Thanks to Michael Pollard)

Got a better caption? Email me.

A reader emails this:

RATHER: "I think I shall retire now."

"Bedtime for Danzo"

UPDATE: "Dan Ra^ther's last stand."

TANKERKC SPEAKS.

I wasn�t aware of the Washington Post front page story, but I�m glad that a regular citizen can call the big network news outlets on their mistakes.

RAMIREZ.

"CYA"

For those who weren't there, back in 1973 Al Gore hadn't yet invented the Internet. ("CYA" is the subject line of the forged CBS "Bush Memo" dated 18 August 1973.)

A reader writes:

Just had to speak up and say that CYA is most definitely *not* an "INTERNET EXPRESSION". Yes, it's used in email and IM, but even this thirtysomething remembers hearing it during my youth in the 70's (and laughing like a loon at its mere mention because we also had a local youth sports group called the Chantilly Youth Association that called itself CYA). I would imagine that it dates back to WWII, which also produced that other well-known acronym "FUBAR".

UPDATE: The same reader writes again:

Thanks for adding my comments. I should have said up-front that the ONLY nit I was picking was with your description of CYA as an "INTERNET EXPRESSION", by which I thought you meant it's a recent Internet-driven addition to the language and therefore an anachronism that, by itself, shows how bogus these letters are. I definitely agree with the clarification you added about actualities and possibilities, I just don't agree that it's an "INTERNET EXPRESSION". Things like "LOL" and "ROTFLMAO" are better examples of that category. Keep up the great work!

AN UNBELIEVABLY

The prosecution doesn't rest yet; more evidence is still coming in from all quarters. But I'm 100% convinced. If this is a real 'memo for record' from the U.S. Army National Guard, dated 1973, I'm the Aga Khan.

WOULD

$6.7 MILLION

UPDATE: "Anti-Kerry Veterans' group now political machine with big budget."

DAN

Where is my photoshop? I'm asking -- PLEASE MAKE ONE and EMAIL ME!!

I'm already laughing myself silly.

What I'm picturing: Dan Ra^ther in pajamas typing up the forged Air National Guard Documents. The Internet MUST have that picture!

UPDATE: Coming soon -- Blogger Jammies.

And this is a must see -- "Dan Ra^ther's Band of Brothers?"

"ON SEPT. 10, 2004

More Ra^therBiased.com

THE FORGED CBS DOCUMENTS.

CBS & THE FORGED DOCUMENTS --

I don't know how the forged document scandal will ultimately play out. I don't know whether CBS will be forced to acknowledge that the documents are fakes, or whether Dan Rather will resign in disgrace. But I do know this: everyone who cares already knows that the "Killian memos" are low-quality forgeries.

.. within the news business, and inside the relatively small slice of the American population where sophisticated consumers of the news dwell, everyone knows, already, that Dan Rather and CBS News tried to influence the November election by telling lies and publishing forged documents. CBS has been disgraced among its peers.

The fact that CBS was willing to barter away what remained of its reputation in exchange for an opportunity to help the John Kerry campaign requires us to re-examine our assumptions about the mainstream media, just as the emergence of the suicide bomber required us to re-examine certain assumptions about security. We never thought that a vast, powerful broadcast network would destroy its own reputation for political gain. Now we know that it can happen.

PLAYING CATCH-UP.

TODAY --

A gathering of Vietnam veterans from across America at the Upper Senate Park, Washington, D.C. Sunday, Sept 12, 2004 2:00-4:00 PM (ET). Why: To tell the truth about Vietnam veterans and to counter the lies told about Vietnam veterans by John Kerry.

Who: All Vietnam veterans and their families and supporters are asked to attend. EVERYBODY IS ENCOURAGED TO ATTEND.

How are you holding up out there Dan?

DAN

MICHAEL BARONE.

Dukakis was hurt because it was pointed out that for 11 years he supported weekend furloughs for prisoners sentenced to life without parole--a policy for which there is no rational argument. Kerry was hurt because at least some of the SBVT charges proved true. On August 11, his spokesman admitted that he was not on an illegal mission in Cambodia at Christmastime 1968--the memory of which, he said on the Senate floor in 1986, was "seared--seared--in me." His campaign left uncorroborated his frequent claims to have been on secret missions to Cambodia at other times. He has not authorized release of his military records. As this is written, Kerry has not taken questions from the press since August 1. Sometimes there is no good defense, and the only thing you can do is try to change the subject.

REGARDING

Can someone photoshop me a picture of Dangerous Dan in pajamas and email it to me, or post it on the web and email me a link?

"We worked hard, we worked long, we dug hard and did our best to be accurate, to authenticate what we could."

GET THE VERY LATEST

STEVEN HORWITZ --

"people will call this "blogosphere triumphalism" but so be it .. "

UPDATE: See also this: two incentive systems -- new media vs. old.

SUPERSCRIPT

HUGH HEWITT

Elsewhere, the NY Times does some solid reporting on typerwriters and their history.

HANDWRITING EXPERT

"THE HOUSE

A KILLER

(Produced by QandO. Hat tip Betsy's Page)

GET YOUR

Lorie Byrd calls this capitalism at its best.

BETSY'S PAGE

My husband also saw Candy Crowley on CNN talking about how [John Kerry] was avoiding the press. If the media starts running stories on this, he'll have to give in, won't he?

IS

RUSH LIMBAUGH'S

This 50 or 75 years from now will be looked at by nonpartisan, noninvolved, people not even born yet historians, who will write about this is something seminal, as something monumental and momentous in the changing political makeup of this country. This is a time that's going to be looked back on, when a press revolution was completed, when the old media giants fell, when a monopoly was emphatically shattered, and when the new media solidified its right place as one of the great and good forces in American society.

FISKED --

Dan Ra^ther's defense of himself tonight, while probably impressive to shallow observers was far from convincing. Here's a list of things he ignored, did not properly address, or concealed from viewers. Feel free to send us your suggestions to this live fisking.

Tom Maguire, on the other hand, does a Ra^ther takedown from the comfort of home (perhaps in his pajamas):

Dan [Ra^ther] insisted that these documents are only a part of the story, and that we should focus on the real questions that have been raised. Hmm, questions such as whether Bush disobeyed a direct order? But I think the only source for that allegation is a document that might be forged. Maybe we should establish the authenticty of the document before we worry about the White House response.

Missing from the CBS presentation - any mention of the numerous reports of skeptical experts; any document expert specifically addressing the questions that have been raised (except as noted above); any response to the widow or the son, both of whom dispute the documents.

If ABC and the WaPo have any honor, they will hoot CBS off the stage.

CBS NEWS

Retired Maj. General [Bobby] Hodges, Killian's supervisor at the Grd, tells ABC News that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. According to Hodges, CBS told him the documents were "handwritten" and after CBS read him excerpts he said, "well if he wrote them that's what he felt." Hodges also said he did not see the documents in the 70's and he cannot authenticate the documents or the contents. His personal belief is that the documents have been "computer generated" and are a "fraud".

"THERE IS

-- Bernard Goldberg, former CBS Newsman and author of Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite, speaking tonight on Scarborough Country.

CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVE

George W. Bush presents conservatives with a fundamental challenge: Do they believe in anything other than power? Are they serious about their rhetoric on limited, constitutionally restrained government? ..

Quite simply, the president, despite his well-choreographed posturing, does not represent traditional conservatism -- a commitment to individual liberty, limited government, constitutional restraint and fiscal responsibility. Rather, Bush routinely puts power before principle.

$10,000

THE FORGED DOCUMENTS --

All you need to know about the laughable character of Ra^ther's "defense" of his forged documents can be found in this CBS News screen shot and the accompanying commentary from Brian Carnell. (via InstaPundit).

INSTAPUNDIT

CBS NEWS WARNED IN ADVANCED.

UPDATE: The Command Post also has the story, with additional information about Amy Barnes' appearance on the Hannity show.

"DISTRIBUTED REPORTING"

"refers to the concept that "Truth" and "Fairness" and "Accuracy" are too big to be "owned" by a narrow group moribund, lazy, and corrupt old-media organizations or formerly-respected talking-head dinosaurs, but in fact are more likely to be found by the action of many individuals working separately and then sharing their research, opinions, and perspectives freely."

More on this topic here and here.

UPDATE: Robert Clayton Dean --

An awesome glimpse at the potential for distributed intelligence is occurring right now in the blogosphere .. UPDATE: .. Dave Sheridan points out that its not just distributed intelligence, it is actually a glimpse of the face of the true god of liberty, spontaneous order.

MICHELLE MALKIN

UPDATE: More on Malkin at Berkeley here.

PATTERICO --

IT'S A BANDWIDTH STRETCHER

MCAULIFFE --

WHERE'S

DAN

TRANSCRIPT --

MATTHEWS: We�re joined now by James Warner, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Mr. Warner, tell me about why you participated in this documentary ["Stolen Honor"].

JAMES WARNER: In 1971, I was in a camp with 35 other guys, who were all in solitary. They told us we were there to be punished. In May of 1971, I was taken out to an interrogation, a very long interrogation, the longest one I had without being tortured. We talked for a while, and then the interrogator gave me a storyboard. It was a piece of cardboard with a magazine article cut out, pasted to it. I started reading it, and it was testimony that my mother had given at something called the Winter Soldier hearing. I had no idea what that meant. I read it. She didn�t�it was innocuous. She hoped I was being well treated and that the war would end soon.

And then there was some more to the story. And I read that. It was comments by people claiming to be veterans. And I got really incensed that had somebody had gotten my parents involved in something like this. And we talked some more about that. And after a while, he showed me another storyboard. My recollection is this was typewritten. I do not recall that this was Senate testimony. I just remember that he said, This is a Navy officer, John Kerry. I recall that it said, Lieutenant JG John Kerry, but I remember the name John Kerry. And I was told that he helped to organize this hearing, along with Jane Fonda.

And I read this, and it was a recitation. And this, too, must have been�or edited because I thought he was saying these are things that he saw. And it struck me that this showed very, very poor judgment to say this because he had to have known that his words were going to be used against us. And he had...

MATTHEWS: Help us explain, who were never in your situation. What do you mean by �used against us�?

WARNER: All along, the communists told us, Before the war is over, or when the war is over, you will not all go home. We�re going to keep some of you. We�re going to put on trial, and we�re going to execute you if you�re found guilty because you committed war crimes. Now, we spend�after he showed me this, he started�he kept pounding on the table and pointing at this saying, This officer, your own Naval officer, proves that you deserve to be punished.

BELDAR --

CNSNEWS --

THE WEEKLY STANDARD --

MEMO

CBS NEWS --

WHAT A LITTLE DRUDGE CAN DO.

CLICK

AMERICAN POW'S

"When these people came back from the war and were vilified, spit upon and so forth, that was largely due to the efforts of this man [Kerry]," said former POW, Col. George "Bud" Day, who was on hand to promote the documentary detailing how Kerry's claims of daily war atrocities affected POWs. Day, who was held in captivity by North Vietnam for over five-and-a-half years, said Kerry came back from Vietnam masquerading as a war hero "and told the country that we were a bunch of atrocity committing monsters and that these monsters were coming home."

If the powerful documentary featuring highly decorated Vietnam POWs recounting how Lt.(jg) John Kerry's antiwar activity affected them was seen by the huge audience it deserves, Massachusetts's junior senator wouldn't get elected to a sanitation commission.

JOHN KERRY --

And I love this. The NY Times steals a source from the blogosphere -- without attribution. Compare how the NY Times has covered Ra^thergate -- assiduously avoiding any mention of the blogosphere -- with the coverage of the Chicago Sun-Times -- which as InstaPundit notes, " treats Power Line and other blogs as just another news source."

BETSY NEWMARK:

How amazing that blogs powered by such wonderful researchers and sources as Powerline and Little Green Footballs could gather together enough information to power the story onto the front page of the Washington Post and on that evening's Nightline. I feel thrilled to have been able to witness the new media put another dump of dirt on the grave of the old media. Drudge is reporting that Dan Rather is shellshocked that allegations CBS reportedly spent six weeks investigating should come unraveled within 24 hours. Lawyers, typesetting experts, people from the military, and simply alert bloggers have unveiled an insidious attempt to tarnish President Bush's reputation by people blinded by their contempt for the President such as one of the highest contributors to the Kerry campaign (Ben Barnes) and CBS News. They used to be able to do this sort of thing with impunity. Even the Bush campaign was not willing to challenge the authenticity of the documents. But the blog spoke and CBS quaked.

YOU

"I'M VIRTUALLY CERTAIN

"They looked to me like forgeries," said Rufus Martin. "I don't think Killian would do that, and I knew him for 17 years." Killian died in 1984.

Note well how Kelley [in the Bush National Guard part of the story] is still working hard to "get" George Bush with the "gotcha" stuff about trainer flights and multiple-approach landings. The Kelley bias story is one I've been tracking here for a while now, see for example, this and this and this.

UPDATE: Captain Ed is all over Matt Kelley.

UPDATE II: Here's what the NY Post did with the AP copy.

UPDATE III: NRO's Bryon York takes a closer look at the CBS documents.

UPDATE IV: Powerline: "And distinguishing itself for the worst story of the day on the [CBS documents story] is -- who else? -- the AP."

WHITEWASHING

LEFTISTS

ABC NEWS

.. the authenticity of the memos was questioned Thursday by the son of the late officer who reportedly wrote them. One of the writer's fellow officers and a document expert also said Thursday the documents appear to be forgeries. Still, the documents marked the second time in days the White House had to backtrack from assertions that all of Bush's records had been released.

UPDATE: Paul Krugman is also using the forged CBS documents to play "gotcha" with the President.

CLICK

JOHN PODHORETZ --

MONETARY POLICY IN CHINA

As president, I would take America in the right direction � acting vigorously to end China's illegal currency manipulation without tying one hand behind my back and taking potential options off the table.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER:

The Democrats chose a candidate known for political calculation, a talent for nuance and an unswerving dedication to swerving constantly to avoid political risk. In other words, they chose a cipher ..

How did the Democrats spend the four days at their convention? Saluting the Swift boats. Why? Because John Kerry has taken so many positions on Iraq and the war on terrorism that he has nothing believable or useful left to say. All he can say is "Vietnam."

"THREE YEARS ON.

We have abstained from mounting an effective civil defense. Only a fraction of a fraction of our wealth would be required to control the borders of and entry to our sovereign territory, and not that much more to discover, produce, and stockpile effective immunizations, antidotes, and treatments in regard to biological and chemical warfare. Thirty years ago the entire country had been immunized against smallpox. Now, no one is, and the attempt to cover a minuscule part of the population failed miserably and was abandoned. Not only does this state of affairs leave us vulnerable to a smallpox epidemic, it stimulates the terrorists to bring one about. So with civil aviation, which, despite the wreckage and tragedy of September 11, is protected in an inefficient, irresponsible, and desultory fashion.

Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 per cent of the world�s population to just over 20 per cent, and the population of Muslim nations increased from about 15 per cent to 20 per cent .. Two years ago I said that the terrorists blew apart the �polite fictions� of the September 10 world. A lot of people have devoted a lot of energy to trying to reconstruct them. But it can�t be done. The old world has gone ..

UPDATE: "Ra^thergate" spreads like wildfire around the blogosphere-- and hits the Drudge Report. Credit PolitPundit reader Lori from Texas for the so perfect name.

MORE BAD NEWS

"BARNES: .. He denied this to me in 2000 that he did get Bush out [of Vietnam service]. Now he's saying he did ..

CROWLEY: So, I hate to put you in this position but I will ask you, do you think your father, Ben Barnes - who was on "60 Minutes II" with Dan Rather last night - do you believe that he lied on the air to the American people last night about President Bush?

BARNES; Yes, I do. I absolutely do. And I think he's doing he's doing it for purely political, opportunistic reasons."

UPDATE II: You can listen to the audio here.

KERRY TO APOLOGIZE?

(via The Corner).

THE SON

[UPDATE: Additional Ra^thergate coverage at the PrestoPundit home page.]

>> FLASH UPDATE <<

Now the widow of Lt. Col. Jerry Killian is challenging the authenticity of the CBS documents. Quotable:

"The wording in these documents is very suspect to me," [Marjorie Connell, widow of Lt. Col. Jerry Killian] told ABC News Radio in an exclusive phone interview from her Texas home. She added that she "just can't believe these are his words."

UPDATE: Marjorie Connel was on ABC's NIGHTLINE tonight and she's absolutely livid (her word) at the conduct of CBS News. Drudge has a transcript.

>> FLASH UPDATE <<

For continuing updates on the forgery story see Powerline. And here is an update on the story from WorldNetDaily.

And if you haven't seen it this is amazing: "here�s my image where the original PDF document from the CBS News site is overlaid on my Microsoft Word document, showing the exact match of line spacing, character spacing, and character forms." -- Little Green Footballs. More images here. MORE: Don't miss this flashing image overlay.

UPDATE: The CBS forgeries story has sent lots of folks reeling and Tom Maguire for one is devastated.

UPDATE II: The Weekly Standard is up with it's story on the "Bush memos". Quotable:

"DOCUMENTS CITED Wednesday by 60 Minutes in a widely-publicized expose of George W. Bush's National Guard Service are very likely forgeries, according to several experts on document authenticity and typography .. "These sure look like forgeries," says William Flynn, a forensic document expert widely considered the nation's top analyst of computer-generated documents. Flynn looked at copies of the documents posted on the CBS News website. Flynn says, "I would say it looks very likely that these documents could not have existed" in the early 1970s, when they were allegedly written."

UPDATE IV: Here's the latest AP version of the story, which has this new information:

The personnel chief in Killian's unit at the time also said he believes the documents are fake. "They looked to me like forgeries," Rufus Martin said. "I don't think Killian would do that, and I knew him for 17 years."

CBS stood by its reporting. "As is standard practice at CBS News, the documents in the '60 Minutes' report were thoroughly examined and their authenticity vouched for by independent experts," CBS News said in a statement. "As importantly, '60 Minutes' also interviewed close associates of Colonel Jerry Killian. They confirm that the documents reflect his opinions and actions at the time."

Independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines said the memos looked like they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word software, which wasn't available when the documents were supposedly written in 1972 and 1973. Lines, a document expert and fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, pointed to a superscript - a smaller, raised "th" in "111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron" - as evidence indicating forgery.

Microsoft Word automatically inserts superscripts in the same style as the two on the memos obtained by CBS, she said. "I'm virtually certain these were computer-generated," Lines said after reviewing copies of the documents at her office in Paradise Valley, Ariz. She produced a nearly identical document using her computer's Microsoft Word software.

Finally, Roland Patrick has fact checked evidence which he says proves the CBS documents have to be forgeries.

UPDATE V: Powerline has continuing updates on the CBS forgery story, including letters from former Air Force officers providing yet more reasons to believe the CBS documents are fake.

Also the Washington Post is now on the story.

UPDATE VI: KerrySpot asks: "AT WHAT POINT DOES CBS GIVE UP?"

UPDATE VII: Even the NY Times couldn't avoid this story. Now CBS will surely report on it. Their primary source of news is telling them it's a real story. Who can argue with that?

UPDATE VIII: The Spectator -- "The Anatomy of a Forgery." Quotable:

More than six weeks ago, an opposition research staffer for the Democratic National Committee received documents purportedly written by President George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard squadron commander, the late Col. Jerry Killian. The oppo researcher claimed the source was "a retired military officer." According to a DNC staffer, the documents were seen by both senior staff members at the DNC, as well as the Kerry campaign ..

A CBS producer, who initially tipped off The Prowler about the 60 Minutes story, says that despite seeking professional assurances that the documents were legitimate, there was uncertainty even among the group of producers and researchers working on the story. "The problem was we had one set of documents from Bush's file that had Killian calling Bush 'an exceptionally fine young officer and pilot.' And someone who Killian said 'performed in an outstanding manner.' Then you have these new documents and the tone and content are so different."

The CBS producer said that some alarms 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. "This was too hot not to push. If there were doubts, those people didn't show it," says the producer, who works on a rival CBS News program.

Now, the producer says, there is growing concern inside the building on 57th Street that they may have been suckered by the Kerry campaign. "There is a school of thought here that the Kerry people dumped this in our laps, figuring we'd do the heavy lifting on the story. That maybe they had doubts about these documents but hoped we'd get more information," says the producer. "If that's the case, then we're bigger fools than we already appear to be judging by all the chatter about how these documents could be forgeries."

THE POWER OF

THE DOG THAT DIDN'T BARK.

Governor "girlie-man"?

Another test for free speech.

JOHN KERRY --

UPDATE: The AP smokes out John Kerry for an interview (see the AP story above) and what do they talk about -- health care.

"A TRANSFORMATIVE FIGURE IN THE HISTORY OF THE MODERN CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT."

Here is a defense of the President's domestic program from inside the White House:

President Bush has had a profound influence on America's national security doctrine. He is not only prosecuting an unprecedented campaign to capture or kill terrorists and destroy terrorist organizations; the President has also said that any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime. President Bush is the first President since John F. Kennedy to articulate the doctrine of preemption (President Kennedy did so in his October 22, 1962 speech on the Cuban Missile Crisis). And the President has broken with six decades of American foreign policy in pursuing a strategy to spread liberty to the Middle East. These acts constitute what The Economist magazine refers to as President Bush's "foreign policy revolution."

But these endeavors should not overshadow the President's enormously consequential domestic agenda. In the words of University of Virginia professor James Ceaser, "Bush has pushed a velvet revolution in Republican domestic policy..." Rather than recount here all that has been achieved in the last four years, let me briefly address what more President Bush intends to do. Because if he wins re-election, President Bush will make enormous contributions to modern conservatism.

In his September 2 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, President Bush made the case that many of our most fundamental systems -- the tax code, health care coverage, pension plans, and worker training -- were created for an era long since passed. The President is committed to transforming these systems so citizens are better equipped and better prepared to make their own choices and pursue their own dreams. "Whatever else it does," Business Week wrote, "Bush's throwing down the gauntlet will open one of the more striking debates of the campaign. That's because there's a philosophical gulf between liberals' evocations of social equity and the comfort of a government helping hand vs. conservatives' paeans to individualism and entrepreneurship."

The philosophical underpinning of what President Bush calls the "ownership society" is to provide Americans with a path to greater opportunity, more freedom, and more control over their own lives. This young century will be liberty's century, the President has said, and here at home we will extend the frontiers of freedom. And so the President has embraced the ideas of voluntary personal accounts in which younger workers may save some of their Social Security taxes in order to build a nest egg for retirement and strengthen Social Security; lifetime savings accounts that would allow every American to save as much as $7,500 a year and shield from taxation the investment returns on those savings; health savings accounts, tax-free accounts designed to help individuals save for health expenses; and tax credits for low-income families and individuals to purchase health insurance. The President has also pledged to reform the current tax code, which he calls "a complicated mess." The President wants a new tax code that is simpler, fairer, and more pro-growth. Homeownership in America is at an all-time high (so is minority homeownership) -- and the President will build on that achievement. And in almost every realm -- education, the federal civil service system, drug treatment programs, foreign aid, and much else -- the President is tying public spending to competition and accountability.

All of this is a sharp and necessary break with contemporary liberalism -- and it fundamentally recasts the domestic policy debate in a way that advances conservative principles. One of the core questions of political philosophy has to do with the habits that government encourages among the polity. Contemporary liberalism and the modern Democratic Party embraced policies that led to dependency and an entitlement mentality. The aim of the President's policies is to do the opposite: encourage self-reliance and provide greater opportunity. He believes government should promote market reforms and strengthen liberty -- and underlying all of this is the belief that government must begin with the proper conception of the individual. Government's default position should not be to view citizens as wards of the state, but rather as responsible and independent, self-sufficient and upright. The President's agenda is an extremely ambitious one -- but to once again quote The Economist, "Mr. Bush is nothing if not ambitious. If his new philosophy endures, he will be a transformative figure in the history of the modern conservative movement."

The closest analogue to what President Bush is attempting to do with his emphasis on an "ownership society" may be found in the policies of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In her remarkable 1992 book The Anatomy of Thatcherism, the political philosopher Shirley Robin Letwin wrote this:

"... the Thatcherite argues that being one's own master -- in the sense of owning one's own home or disposing of one's own property -- provides an incentive to think differently about the world... A Thatcherite, whilst not believing that patterns of ownership absolutely determine people's moral attitudes, nevertheless stresses that the two are connected, and sees in wider individual ownership a useful means of promoting the moral attitudes that Thatcherism seeks to cultivate [what Letwin called 'the vigorous virtues']. Nor is it only independence and self-sufficiency which the Thatcherite hopes to encourage by means of wider ownership. Personal energy and adventurousness, critical components of the vigorous virtues -- are also believed by the Thatcherite to be encouraged by wider ownership."

For everything there is a season. At some points in history, the role of conservatism has been to be reactive and to "stand athwart history yelling 'stop.'" At other times, the role of conservatism is to be pro-active, energetic, and optimistic -- to shape history rather than to impede it. This is clearly a history-shaping moment. Conservatism is the dominant political philosophy of this new century. President George W. Bush is making significant contributions to it -- and there is more to come.

Stay tuned.

"IF

"OPPRESSED"

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

MORE

Kerry stated during the Dick Cavett debate with John O�Neill in 1971:

"The fact of the matter remains that after I received my third wound and was told that I could return to the United States, I deliberated for about two weeks because there was a very difficult decision in whether or not you leave your friends because you have an opportunity to go. But I finally made the decision to go back and did leave of my own volition because I felt that I could do more against the war back here." (link.)

Kerry chose to take advantage of a regulation that allows military with three Purple Hearts to leave the combat theater. He states that this was not an easy decision that he made. Yet facts are a stubborn thing. Kerry received his wound for which he was awarded (improperly) his third Purple Heart on 13 March 1969. From documents available on his web site, his request for reassignment was in Washington, D.C. four days later, after having been typed up in An Thoi and signed by the commander there on 17 March, 1969. (link.)

There were no two weeks of deliberation. Kerry had to have made the request (which is not on Kerry�s web site, and is one of the many missing pieces of documentation contradicting the Kerry claim of releasing all records) within a day or two of his last injury. He intentionally abandoned his crew as soon as he could.

"KERRY'S RECORD

JUST DON'T

INCOMPETENT?

UPDATE: Just One Minute has more on the NY Times and the "Texans for Truth" story. Quotable: "Whatever "truth-detector" is issued in the standard Times package evidently failed to sound the alarm when Bob Mintz came knocking with his Bush-bashing story."

FRANCE --

MORE CLIPS

"Contrary to the Boston Globe."

RELOAD.

Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day : The Real Deal on How Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Other Washington Barbarians are Bankrupting America by Joe Scarborough

The Bush Betrayal by James Bovard

Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency by Patrick J. Buchanan

UPDATE: What happened to the "Reagan Revolution"? Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan, Stephen Moore and Pete Peterson take a look at the Federal Government out of control -- TRANSCRIPT. Quotable:

Look at these numbers, Pat. I�ve got these in my book. Spending for the Department of Education since [1994] up 101 percent. Department of Justice, up 131 percent. Department of Health and Human Services, up 81 percent .. Justice, 131 percent. This is since Republicans took control. The Department of Education, 101 percent. Department of Commerce, 82 percent increase. Department of Health and Human Services, up 81 percent. You can keep going. The State Department, up 80 percent. The Department of Transportation, up 65 percent. Housing and Urban Development, up 59 percent ..

JOHN KERRY

This rally may be bigger than its organizers anticipate. Because what they're protesting is not some vague moral principle .. It's personal to men like Tony Snesko, Larry Bailey, Mike Bradley, Denny Baum, and Pete Webster. They were the men serving on the Swift boats, in the infantry. They were the ones who risked their lives, shot and were shot at, and were often wounded. They were the ones who saw their friends killed. What resonates so loudly in their minds is likely to reach many of the other Vietnam vets who don't remember Lt. (j.g.) John Kerry, and don't think much of Senator John Kerry � but who all remember John Kerry, leader of the radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

MICHAEL NOVAK --

Only when they read the accounts published in the campaign biographies by Douglas Brinkley and a team from the Boston Globe did Kerry's superiors and peers, including Captain Elliott, come to see how widely Kerry's perception and self-serving descriptions differed from reality. Beginning then, they started to reevaluate everything they had heard from him back then. The man presented in those books was not the man they knew, and the events were not the events they knew. In wartime, one must trust one's mates. After they saw those books, they saw what Kerry reported to them then in a new light.

I infer that Captain Elliott and others in 1969 took on trust some reports from Kerry, reports they can no longer consider as truthful as they thought them before. In later years, Kerry said in Senate debate that he often sent up action reports whose exact words he later read in Stars & Stripes, except that some of the numbers he had given of enemy casualties had been inflated by higher-ups. He admitted to somewhat inflating his reports himself, but said his superiors inflated them further. To my ears, this sounds like a man without honor later projecting his own weaknesses on others.

Today it is not the Swift Boat Veterans' story that is crumbling, but Kerry's. Two of its five pillars have already collapsed. The story that he said publicly for years had been "seared � seared" into his memory never happened: that so-called "Christmas in Cambodia 1968," when "President Nixon" was in the White House (in 1968, it was actually President Johnson).

Kerry's campaign has also admitted that his first Purple Heart � from December 2, 1968 � was probably not from action under hostile fire, but was from a self-inflicted wound caused by a small shred of shrapnel from a grenade Kerry himself launched at an unseen target. Both the attending doctor and Kerry's commanding officer, separately, refused to recommend a Purple Heart for so minor a wound. To this point, it is not known how Kerry ended up finding someone to award it.

There is no real need to argue over the other disputed points. All could be resolved if Kerry released his entire Navy file. He swears publicly these days that he is telling the absolute honest truth. The records would therefore bear him out. He should release them. Why is the Kerry press afraid to insist on that?

It would be good for all of us if we could simply honor Kerry for his service to his country, as President Bush has already said he does. But it would be far better still to have evidence that Kerry's word of honor is reliable. That evidence could be provided by the records.

38 DAYS.

BRINKLEY'S KNOWING OMISSION.

[John] Kerry's [Cambodia] story is clearly meant as a "conversion moment." A significant divergent detail in the above is that Kerry's revelation was negative. Saul heard a voice speaking truth. Kerry, appropriately, heard a voice speaking lies. Of course, Kerry was not in Cambodia on that Christmas. He has admitted that. The then current President made no such speech. The story was a falsehood in itself. But it was made to illustrate Kerry's own conversion from supporting the war to opposing it. He felt need to dramatize the event and to make it into a moment when he had a sudden flash of enlightenment.

With that as context, Brinkley's book [Tour of Duty] is interesting. Brinkley never mentions the story, which suggests that he knew that it was not true. But it would have made an interesting inclusion. It is dramatic, and it could have been retold in such a way to make plain that Brinkley knew that it was Kerry's fabrication. There was no way to retell it without making plain that it was a stretcher, however, because the story runs directly counter to documented events and also to statements made by Kerry and others in the book. Brinkley did not choose the "flash of enlightenment" path, he chose instead to employ careful billboards of foreshadowing to demonstrate Kerry's shift from accepting at least as reasonable the U.S. involvement in Vietnam to vigorously and harshly attacking it ..

KERRY-KENNEDY.

BUSH SIGNED FORM 180.

A READER

RAMIREZ --

LYING ABOUT VIETNAM

[Steve] Pitkin appears several times in the [VVAW] documentary film "Winter Soldier," where he comes across as vague and somewhat stunned, especially while being questioned by John Kerry in a preliminary interview .. But Steve Pitkin says today that what the film actually shows are his efforts to avoid answering Kerry�s questions at all. During the formal hearings, Pitkin started to slam the press for misrepresenting what GIs really did in Vietnam, but a woman he believes was Jane Fonda shot him an astonished look and started to stand up. Steve could see other members of the group getting ready to cut him off, so he changed course and made up a few things he thought they would be willing to accept. "Everything I said about atrocities and racism was a lie. My unit never went out with the intention of doing anything but its job. And I never saw black soldiers treated differently, get picked out for the worst or most dangerous jobs, or anything like that. There were some guys, shirkers, who would intentionally injure themselves to get sent home, so I talked about that for a while. But the fact is I lied my ass off, and I'm not proud of it."

In a sworn affidavit on August 31, 2004, Pitkin said that he rode in a van with John Kerry, a national leader of the VVAW, Scott Camil, and others from Washington, DC to attend the conference. The event was intended to publicize alleged American war crimes in Vietnam, but Pitkin maintains that he did not intend to speak at the inquiry since he had no knowledge of such war crimes.

Pitkin now claims that Kerry and other anti-war leaders pressured him to testify about American war crimes, despite his protestations that he could not honestly do so. He says that one of the event leaders threatened to leave him stranded in Detroit if he refused to participate.

Pitkin's affidavit says, "Kerry and other leaders of the event instructed me to publicly state that I had witnessed incidents of rape, brutality, atrocities and racism, knowing that such statements would necessarily be untrue." ..

Pitkin says that on the second day of the conference, he was surrounded by a group of the event's leaders who wanted him to speak. He reiterated that he had no personal knowledge of any of the alleged misconduct. He claims that Kerry said to him, "Surely you had to have seen some of the atrocities."

It was at this point that Pitkin says the group's leaders threatened him. Under pressure from the group that he describes as "menacing." He finally agreed to testify. Pitkin says that group coached him to tell stories about rape, brutality, shooting prisoners, and racism.

TRILLIONS IN WELFARE FOR BABY BOOMERS --

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER --

SWIFT VET JOHN O'NEILL

John Hawkins: Let�s look at some of these specific issues. Now at the RNC, Terry McAuliffe said -- and this is the latest Cambodia story, and I know that it has changed more than a few times -- that "John Kerry went to Cambodia twice. He was over in Viet Nam and at one point he took some CIA operatives into Cambodia." However, to the best of my knowledge, John Kerry has provided absolutely no evidence that he was ever in Cambodia beyond his word. But let me ask you, in the time that John Kerry was in Vietnam, were the Swift Boats ferrying CIA operatives into Cambodia? And if they did so, was it a single boat or would there have been multiple boats involved?

John O'Neill: John Kerry�s story was that he was in Cambodia Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. That is a demonstrable lie.

John Hawkins: Absolutely. You can prove it�s a lie from where he was from everybody that was there. His boat was never in Cambodia in December or January. What he is clearly doing now is trying to devise a story ambiguous enough as to time and location that can�t actually be checked out and he doesn�t even have the courage to do it himself. Instead he uses surrogates like McAuliffe who I suggest has never been in Vietnam and certainly has never been on a swift boat. There�s no way to respond in the abstract; that�s why they have kept it abstract. What is clear is that the time he said was a turning point in his entire life, which he identified as Christmas Eve and Christmas Day; that was a total lie and it was made up. How many people make up the turning point of their life? Now, to be fair, do I know of any swift boat ever going into Cambodia? Absolutely not, nor would anybody use one because you can hear it a mile and a half away.

John Hawkins: Let me ask you one other question. Did they ever send swift boats on missions like that, not necessarily into Cambodia, but alone or did you always go in packs?

John O'Neill: Always in groups of several boats and if a mission like that had ever occurred it would have been with several boats.

John Hawkins: So if the latest Kerry story is true, there should be the people on his boat, people on other boats, there should be tons of people to confirm his story.

John O'Neill: There also should be a record of it and it�s missing and none of his commanding officers all the way up the chain of command have ever heard about anything like this. So it was a very secret mission. It was secret from the people on his boat at least through January and secret from all the people that were there with him to the best of my knowledge and secret from all the officers that commanded with him. It was an extremely secret mission.

John Hawkins: It sounds like it.

John O'Neill: Maybe it was with Santa Claus (laughs).

MICHELLE MALKIN --

KERRY & THE SWIFT VETS --

THE RUSSIANS

AWOL CHARGES

THE AP's MATT KELLEY --

MICHAEL NOVAK --

A PREVIEW

Vladimir Bukovsky, the great anti-Soviet dissident, once reproved me for quoting the old joke about the two main official Soviet newspapers: "There's no truth in Pravda [Truth] and no news in Izvestia [News.]" He pointed out that you could learn a great deal of truthful news from both papers if you read them with proper care.

In particular, they often denounced "anti-Soviet lies." These lies had never previously been reported by them. Nor were they lies. And their exposure as such was the first that readers had been told of them. By reading the denunciation carefully, however, intelligent readers could decipher what the original story must have been. It was a roundabout way of getting information � but it worked.

That is exactly how intelligent readers now have to read the New York Times and most of the establishment media � at least when they are reporting on the "anti-Kerry lies" of the Swift-boat veterans.

"KERRY DECIDED

Via PoliPundit, who also links to "Bush Guard Service, The True Story". And here's a hint. It's not a link to the NY Times.

PATTERICO

MARK STEYN --

SEN. KERRY'S

Purple Heart No. 1, December 2, 1968

The fact is Sen. Kerry was denied a Purple Heart in the issuing hours of the incident and this speaks volumes on this issue. You have someone who was supposedly wounded who visits his commanding officer -- who has no axe to grind at the time -- who was briefed within hours of the incident and determines no Purple Heart was warranted. Furthermore, Sen. Kerry seeks medical assistance for such an obviously minor wound for the sole purpose to document his insignificant wound so he may further pursue his Purple Heart from his next transfer designation ..

There is no documented evidence of any enemy enounter at the time of Sen. Kerry's minor wound and the fact Sen. Kerry himself has cast reasonable doubt for any hostile enemy action being encountered. What was presumed to be potential enemy turned out to be non-combatant civilians. The only chance Sen. Kerry has in making a Purple Heart case is if he had been wounded in the heat of battle. But since there was no heated battle with enemy combatants he would lose this line of argument. Sen. Kerry has released no "after action" report, as one would have been required if there was combat engagement involved. A Purple Heart normally is not requested but is awarded de facto for a wound inflicted by the enemy - a wound serious enough to require medical attention. The Naval Historical Center keeps all documents connected to such awards to U.S. Navy and Marine personnel. Typewritten "casualty cards" list the date, location and prognosis of the wound for which the Purple Heart is given, and they are produced by the medical facility that provides medical treatment. There are two such cards for Kerry - for his slight wounds on Feb. 20 and March 13, 1969, but none for his December 1968 claim.

Thus,it can be concluded that Sen. Kerry's Purple Heart for this incident was awarded in error due to material misrepresentation on the part of Sen. Kerry to the U.S. Navy by declaring his wound was the result of enemy action. Sen. Kerry's Purple Heart should be rescinded by the Department of Defense.

It has been demonstrated that Sen. Kerry was never wounded in his buttocks by a enemy mine. It has also been demonstrated that Sen. Kerry knowingly filed a false casualty report for himself. Sen. Kerry's Purple Heart for the March 13, 1969 incident was not caused by enemy action, but from a careless act of destroying rice for which one eyewitness thought was more funny than serious. Sen. Kerry has been shown in one account of the mine incident to have described his boat as directly hitting a mine and being lifted out of the water several feet knowing very well this wasn't possible. The PCF-94 damage report supports the conclusion that Sen. Kerry had run over an under water obstacle as he kept going at full speed after the PCF-3 had struck a mine, and it was this impact that caused the screws to be curled, chipped and what appeared to the crew to have been the result of a mine explosion. It would appear that Sen. Kerry wanted to use the illusion of a enemy mine explosion to account for shrapnel to his buttocks instead of being self-inflicted.

The entire events as described by Sen. Kerry in his spot reports and by his supporters who was on his boat for the March 13, 1969 incident is exaggerated and riddled with inconsistencies and factually incorrect events. The Department of Defense should rescind the awarding of both Kerry's Purple Heart and the Bronze Star for the March 13th incident due to the above and knowingly making material false statements to the U.S. Navy.

All of these matters are open for discussion at the "Exploring Sen. Kerry's Military Record" forum.

(Via Captain Ed.)

TODAY'S MUST READ --

"KERRY IN CAMBODIA" --

Or maybe they aren't. Bovino adds, "when there's anything reliable to say [on "Kerry in Cambodia"], as opposed to rumors and suspicions, [the staff] intend to report it fully."

Let's take a look at what the NY Times has chosen not to tell their readers about Kerry in Cambodia. First, the fact that the Kerry campaign has said that Kerry never was in Cambodia. Second, the fact all of the Swift vets who served with Kerry say they were never in Cambodia. And third, the fact that everyone who was in Vietnam at the time says that it is essentiall impossible to imagine that John Kerry's Swift boat ever entered into Cambodia.

Three solid facts, three solid instances of the NY Times sellings way its journalistic reputation for the political benefit of John Kerry.

"Just move on past folks, nothing to see here. Move along now. Everthing is being taken care of. Don't worry your little heads. The NY Times has everthing taken care of .. hurry along now .. ."

ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE

The Swifties got the nation's attention with a television ad that aired just 739 times in seven media markets between July 30 and Aug. 23, markets that cover just 2.1 percent of the nation's population, according to the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project and Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

That's 739 in competition with the total of 501,259 ads aired since March 3 by George W. Bush and by a host of John Kerry supporters, including the Democratic National Committee, Media Fund, MoveOn.org, Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO in 100 of the nation's 210 media markets.

The swift-boat story first surfaced, according to the conservative Media Research Center, with a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington and an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by John O'Neill, the Texan who co-authored "Unfit for Command" and who began challenging Kerry's tale of atrocities three decades ago.

"The event received scant notice by traditional media," according to MRC. "CBS News mentioned it briefly and tried to tie the group to Bush. The Washington Post and New York Times had short items about it, as did the Boston Globe. The most in-depth coverage came from Fox News Channel."

When the swift-boat veterans released their first TV ad on Aug. 4, the story began to attract attention. But throughout the month, their allegations that Kerry had misstated events and his Christmas in Cambodia rarely were treated as credible.

Surprising, since members of the swift-boat group and others coming forward, such as retired Rear Adm. William L. Schachte Jr. of Charleston, S.C., were substantial men who had led responsible lives.

Schachte, for example, said that as operations officer and Kerry's superior, he and an enlisted man were on the boat and participated in the event for which Kerry claimed his first Purple Heart. The minor wound was accidentally self-inflicted, he said. Their boat was not drawing fire and, therefore, his request for a Purple Heart was disapproved until after those familiar with the incident rotated out.

The Kerry campaign says Schachte wasn't on the boat. No after-action report exists. It accused Schachte, too, of profiting from a federal contract, something he and the president of the company that got the contract deny.

"I wouldn't know him if he drove his swift-boat into my office," the president of the Philadelphia company, FastShip Inc., told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "I never heard of him."

The Kerry campaign's approach to all who raise questions is to call them liars or pawns of the Bush campaign. The original claims, like Schachte's, are rarely aired or examined [by big media].

The result is that veterans make their case through targeted television commercials, the Internet, cable and the book, which was so popular that the original printing of 85,000 copies has been expanded by 550,000.

FOLKS,

Via Michelle Malkin.

OF ALL THE NEWSMEN

KERRY'S SWIFT VET MEDIA STRATEGY

So far, the Kerry campaign has been forced to back down from at least three components of its Viet Nam narrative:

* Kerry's 25-year-old Cambodian Christmas fable, which has morphed and split into multiple near-Cambodian experiences with Special Forces/CIA entanglements

* Kerry's stealing of Tedd Peck's engagement on 29 January 1969, which he included in his website timeline

* Kerry's and David Alston's stories about Alston serving with Kerry on the 29 January and 28 February engagements, which Captain's Quarters determined was impossible -- and Alston no longer makes appearances with Kerry in telling those stories

Also, as a result of the scrutiny applied to Kerry's narrative, the following medals that Kerry thrust to the forefront of his campaign are now under question:

* His explanation for his first Purple Heart for the "action" of 2 December conflicts with his own journals, which states on 11 Dec that he had not yet been shot at -- and the application for that award was processed long after the event and through a different chain of command than that under which Kerry served on 2 Dec.

* The Navy has launched an investigation of how Kerry had three separate commendations for one Silver Star, including one signed and supposedly written by John Lehman in the 1980s, while Lehman insists he never saw, wrote, or signed it. The Navy is also investigating how Kerry claimed a combat "V" for the Silver Star, a device that does not apply to that award.

The only factual refutations that have occurred so far apply to John Kerry's narrative, not that of the 250-plus Swiftvets with whom he served. So who's lied to the electorate so far? It doesn't appear to be the Swiftvets, which makes the only "egregious" liar in this campaign John Kerry.

QUEUE

UNION

BELDARBLOG

Betsy Newmark is also rolling.

SEN. DODD & SEN. BAYH --

DOUBLE STANDARDS

THE NEWS HOUNDS

CONGRESS

"WITH ONE STROKE

JILL STEWART

And Dan Weintraub considers the possibility -- President Schwarzenegger?

CLINTON TO KERRY:

Meanwhile Kerry remains obsessed with Vietnam and the Swift Vets.

BUSH LEADS KERRY

For the first time, as many voters say that his military service make them less likely to vote for him as say it increases their likelihood of voting for him (19 percent versus 15 percent).

IS IT A SMART THING

UPDATE: The Kerry campaign has removed it's attack on John McCain from its web site -- but you can still read it via a link at Just One Minute, who takes a closer look at just what McCain's lies may be.

Here's the original Kerry press release, a Captain Ed cache.

BETSY NEWMARK

My school, a small charter school in Raleigh, NC, periodically has special days when the kids don't go to the regular classes, but we have special programs that they cycle through. My responsibility Friday was to present a short history of political advertising. I used this great site, The Living Room Candidate, to show the kids ads going back to the first ones for Eisenhower and Stevenson. I thought that my readers might be interested in the reactions of 10th and 11th graders to some famous ads ..

Fast-forwarding to today, I showed them the second Swift Boat ad and the ad that Kerry made to answer the SBVT ads using James Rassmann talking about how Kerry saved him in Vietnam. The ad closes with Kerry saying that he still carries shrapnel in his leg. I was amazed when the kids burst in laughter at that point. They explained that it just seemed so random for him to be talking about shrapnel in his leg and then to end the ad. As one girl explained, she didn't see that he could have been hurt that badly in his leg since she always sees pictures of him biking, skiing, and windsurfing. They thought the ad was ineffective since it was just one guy saying that Kerry was brave compared to all the guys in the Swifties' ad. They thought Kerry should address the specific allegations. I asked them if they were undecided on whom to vote for, would this set of ads make them more or less likely to vote for Kerry, and they almost all agreed that they'd be less likely to vote for Kerry. And most of these kids are [on the left].

Once we look at the details, no matter how Kerry partisans want to spin them, there simply isn�t anything there to distinguish Kerry from any of the other veterans who saw combat in Vietnam.

There is no doubt that the revelations about his fantasies of Cambodia, CIA insertions and moldy hats, the movie re-enactments, et al have also helped damage Kerry in the minds of the voters.

36 DAYS

CAPTAIN ED

I'VE NEVER

UPDATE: Betsy Newmark has some questions for Douglas Brinkley.

BeldarBlog has much more on Kerry's "Combat 'V'", as well as yet more questions for Brinkley. I'm with Bill on the "Combat 'V'" story:

in a target-rich environment for Kerry mistakes and exaggerations, this one doesn't particularly thrill me.

AND AMERICA'S

Sorry Arnold. Your negatives are way too high.

SCHWARZENEGGER

That�s total and complete nonsense. I never claimed to have encountered Russian occupiers in Styria. I remember very clearly: we crossed the Semmering Pass in my uncle�s VW Bug into the Russian sector. There, as a little boy, I saw the Soviet tanks.

And in related news, young Matthew Yglesias has closed his comments section, due to a sustained troll attack. All coming from Glenn and not from me, I trust. I sympathize with Matt. Comments sections can be fun, informative -- insightful. The blogosphere gets a dose of juice from them. But they never stop being a pain in the ass. I've gotten rid of them twice. I miss the good stuff (write me). I don't miss the extra work.

Elsewhere, some folks have no sympathy at all for Mr. Yglesias.

THE LA TIMES

FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES:

Tad Devine, Sen. John Kerry�s senior advisor, told the Washington Times that he does not think that the Swift Boat veterans� ads, which attacked Kerry's Vietnam War record, have hurt the campaign. �Fundamentally, I don�t think they reshaped the race at all,� Devine said. �If they did, the president would be 10 points ahead, not in a dead-heat horse race.�

Time: Bush 52, Kerry 41
Newsweek: Bush 54, Kerry 43

Doh!

BELDARBLOG

No hits for "ouchie," "boo-boo," "kiss it and make it better," "Ghengis Khan," "Hanoi Hilton," "Jane Fonda," "cabana boy," "diddler," "Boston Strangler," or "do you know who I am," either. Twenty-six hits for "Purple Heart," though, which would be approximately 26 more than the stitches Kerry's severe wounds required; zero hits for "stitches" or "stitch." But "Vietnam" pulls 236 hits � hey, did you know Kerry served in Vietnam?

MARK STEYN

One of the most revealing aspects of the campaign this last week were the interviews given by his various surrogates. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman, went on Hugh Hewitt's radio show and was asked about the swift boat veterans' ads, and he laughed and blustered and stalled and floundered. That sounded weird. This thing's been going on a month now, and the Kerry campaign still hasn't come up with a form of words to deflect questions about it. If they had an agreed spin, McAuliffe and Co. would be out using it. But the seared senator feels it's lese majeste even to question him. He can talk about Vietnam 24/7, but nobody else is allowed to bring it up.

Sorry, man, that's not the way it works. And if he thinks it does, he's even further removed from the realities of democratic politics than he was from the interior of Cambodia. Instead of those military records the swift boat vets are calling for, I'd be more interested in seeing his medical ones.

IT TURNS OUT JOHN KERRY

Via Betsy'sPage.

NOT SINCE JOHN ADAMS

N.Z. Bear has the lowdown on the Campaign Finance Reform 60-day window black- out curtain. The idea that we have in this country a 60 day black-out on free speech is an incomprehensible shocker -- the more so when that event is actually up us. I feel sick. I hope others do as well.

A reader writes:

.. that rhetoric makes good copy but it isn't true. I'm sure you've heard the cliche about yelling fire in a crowded theater. That derives from an early 20th Century case in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a conviction of a commie who got busted not for criticizing the draft, but for criticizing the very fact that other people were imprisoned for criticizing the draft in the midst of a war. That's right - criticizing the draft was "yelling fire," and the existence of a war was the "crowded theater."

Not that this makes today's CFR a good thing, or even acceptable, but it does put things into perspective.

PRESTOPUNDIT

THE BOSTON HERALD:

It's time John Kerry chooses between being a whiner and being a leader. His midnight performance Thursday and remarks at events Friday showed he's yet to get the difference in this campaign.

Americans do not want to hear Kerry's whining about being ``attacked'' and ``insulted'' at the Republican National Convention. Americans do not want to hear his childish claims that he was attacked first and therefore he now must attack back. Americans do not want to hear the Democratic nominee call the commander in chief during a war where American lives are on the line ``unfit for office and unfit for duty.''

They want to hear that he is as committed as President Bush to stopping fanatics from taking over American schools and slaughtering children. And if he has better ideas about how to go about doing it than Bush does, Americans want to hear those, too. For this is what we are facing. Anyone thinking the Russian school massacre couldn't happen here underestimates the lack of moral conscience which exists in the likes of al-Qaeda, Hamas and other extremists.

Partisan Democrats, with an air of intellectual superiority, sniff that terror is a tactic, not a cause. They do so to imply that President Bush and his supporters don't even understand the nature of the world's dangers, never mind the correct means to protect against them. President Bush left no doubt that he understands completely in his acceptance speech Thursday night. ``If America shows uncertainty or weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch.''

We bet John Kerry would like to have his Thursday microphone-clutching performance for the cameras back given the Russian horror. His complaints about attacks on his patriotism (as opposed to the voting record critique we heard) would be merely annoying if played only against the backdrop of a political contest.

But the larger contest - between liberty and tyranny, between good and evil - is the challenge against which Kerry's and Bush's leadership will be measured. And on that score, Kerry's thin-skin and oft-used tactic of claiming he's forced to attack because of unfair smears is not only unimpressive, it's offensive. And it's about time someone called him on it.

Defining differences is what campaigns are all about. George W. Bush told the country in no uncertain terms what he will do in a second term. And he told the country how his beliefs and record differ from Kerry's. That's just what Zell Miller did. That's just what Dick Cheney did. That's just what Rudy Giuliani did. Stop whining, Senator, and start telling voters why you believe you're right and these men are wrong.

Wow,

Via Michelle Malkin, who has lots more.

"WHAT

He's also got this:

The American news market seems to be heading the way of the British news market - with outfits such as CNN and the Times bearing an increasing resemblance to loony left shops such as the Guardian. The more the CNN's and New York Times of the American market have been countered by the likes of Fox News, the shriller and more tendentious the CNN's and New York Times become.

JOHN KERRY GETS

And my suggestion? Just keep scrolling and you'll find some great reads on John Kerry and Doug Brinkley's book.

THE AP vs. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER.

From 1945 until 1966 Austria was governed by a coalition of the Socialist and People�s parties. The number of positions each party received depended on its share of votes in parliamentary elections. This framework was extended to the economic sphere, as the state, industry, labor, and agricultural interests developed a partnership and created a modified market economy. Prosperity rested in part on nationalized industries, such as electric power plants and oil refineries; the government also controlled the banks.

Harvard smartie Matthew Yglesias thinks he's been vindicated. It looks like Atrios didn't read Schwarzenegger's speech either, but calls him a liar anyway. And Timothy Noah does a MoDo on Schwarzenegger and says Schwarzenegger "implied" things no sane person would infer. Good job, Tim.

UPDATE: Jan Haugland points out that the historians quoted in the AP article must not have read Schwarzenegger's speech, and adds this:

The historian may be forgiven, at least partly, for not having read the context of the speech when journalists presented him with his former countryman's words. But those left-leaning journalists who presented this can hardly be ignorant of the fact that historical facts support Schwarzenegger's version. His part of the country were not run by the Soviets, but he could (and, he says, did) travel to the parts that were.

Another criticism is that Austria wasn't run by socialists just after World War II, like Schwarzenegger said it was. The conservatives, historians say, were in power both after the war and just before he left for the US. This is a matter of cultural translation. Somebody will have to tell me how the conservatives are in Austria, but I know that Norway is a social-democratic country whether it is run by the Labour party, which calls itself socialist, or the coalition of Christian-Democrats and Conservatives that are currently in power. The non-socialists, who actually call themselves bourgeois parties (!), differ on some policies, but none oppose the state controlled welfare state we have. That is a socialist country, and I would not be surprised if Schwarzenegger is correct in considering all the major parties in Austria, then and now, socialist, at least by American standards.

ANDREW SULLIVAN

conservatism as we have known it is now over. People like me who became conservatives because of the appeal of smaller government and more domestic freedom are now marginalized in a big-government party, bent on using the power of the state to direct people's lives .. Just remember all that Bush promised last night: an astonishingly expensive bid to spend much more money to help people in ways that conservatives once abjured. He pledged to provide record levels of education funding, colleges and healthcare centers in poor towns, more Pell grants, seven million more affordable homes, expensive new HSAs, and a phenomenally expensive bid to reform the social security system. I look forward to someone adding it all up, but it's easily in the trillions. And Bush's astonishing achievement is to make the case for all this new spending, at a time of chronic debt ..

The whole package was, I think, best summed up as a mixture of Bismarck and Wilson. Germany's Bismarck fused a profound social conservatism with a nascent welfare state. It was a political philosophy based on a strong alliance with military and corporate interests, and bound itself in a paternalist Protestant ethic. Bush Republicanism is not as authoritarian, but its impulses are similar - and the dynastic father-figure is a critical element in the picture .. But unlike Bismarck, Bush's foreign policy is deeply liberal and internationalist: promoting a revolutionary doctrine of democratization abroad in the least hospitable of places. His faith in this respect, if not his ease with using military force, is reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson.

MORE REACTIONS

Pejmanesque

John Kerry has embarked on the loathsome tactic of accusing anyone who differs with his record of sullying his patriotism .. This is desperate and pitiful. Go through Cheney's speech and find me one instance where Kerry's patriotism was challenged or attacked. As for his fitness to serve as Commander-in-Chief--that is a fair and legitimate subject for debate in a Presidential election .. The test of our media will be whether they call Kerry on this reprehensible line of argument. He has no justification whatsoever for making the statements he makes. And the press -- along with the public at large -- should recognize and denounce this kind of BS.

Will undecideds respond to the sight of a guy shouting about a 35 year old war wound as his qualification for the Presidency?

after whining so bitterly about nonexistent attacks on his service record and his patriotism, Kerry proceeded to trash both Bush and Cheney for their service records, invoked the dark name of Halliburton to appeal to the Michael Moore moonbats, and entered my personal history as the wretched purveyor of one of the most pathetic, most lethargically vicious political speeches I�ve ever witnessed.

HOLY CRAP: He just went Michael Moore.. Accusing Bush (or I guess Cheney) of being on the Haliburton payroll!

Of course, not one single Republican accused Kerry of being unpatriotic. Far from it. Speaker after speaker at the Republican Convention went out of their way to praise Kerry for his service to his country .. This is not a difficult concept: Questioning the votes of a United States Senator is not the same thing as saying he is "unpatriotic." But, just as with Max Cleland two years ago, they must now start hammering at the Big Lie that criticism of his voting record is tantamount to accusing him of being unpatriotic. Proof they know they can't defend his voting record.

WHAT LOOKS

Reporter Matt Kelley is on the board of the journalist group UNITY, the folks who madly cheered a speech by Sen. Kerry to the organization. Is Matt Kelley a fully objective reporter without special sympathies for John Kerry and Democrat candidates? I have no idea. But his "band of brothers" in journalism do have those sympathies, and it would be rare indeed if Kelley were to far different from his fellows, nothing more than sociology 101, folks.

The blogosphere continues to document political bias at the AP. If you know anything more about Kelley, send me a note via my email address, there on the right.

"DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

"KERRY LIED WHILE GOOD MEN DIED"

JOHN KERRY'S 'WAR CRIMES' CHARGES

Candidate in this year�s American presidential elections, John Kerry, who fought in the war, went further in his criticism. In a statement to the US� Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971, he said the war crimes committed by US soldiers in Southeast Asia "were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

"REPORTERS

(via Patterico)

THOMAS SOWELL:

Some media pundits say that Senator Kerry's poor showing in the polls is due to his having followed the wrong political strategy in this campaign. They say he put too much emphasis on his Vietnam war record. But what else did he have to put emphasis on?

Can you run for office during a war on terrorism by citing a voting record that includes being anti-military for decades? .. What was left for Senator Kerry, except trying to resurrect Vietnam, with his own spin on it, and making big promises for the future? Moreover, with the media on his side -- 12 to 1 inside the Beltway -- he had little to fear from that quarter.

How could Kerry know that the Swiftboat men who served with him in Vietnam would suddenly emerge to challenge his version of what happened there? .. The media have made such a bugaboo about "negative" statements or "attacks" that you might think political campaigns are supposed to be nothing but happy talk. But which is worse, that some unpleasant facts come out during a campaign or that someone is allowed to lie his way into the White House, with all our lives in his hands, on the basis of image and spin?

144,000 NEW JOBS

And nearly 4 million new jobs have been added to the American economy since George Bush took office. Analysis here.

Where are the new jobs? Well there are 430,000 sellers now selling full-time or part-time at Ebay. I'm guessing most of these jobs do not show up in the W-2 payroll Employment survey.

"UNFIT FOR DUTY"

"Let me tell you what I think makes someone unfit for duty. Misleading our nation into war in Iraq makes you unfit to lead this nation."

Sen. Kerry set up his bare-knuckles attack on the President with this statement: "The Vice President called me unfit for office last night." I defy anyone to find anything close to such a statement in the Vice President's speech. Mr. Cheney did say this, "The President's opponent is an experienced senator. He speaks often of his service in Vietnam, and we honor him for it."

But this is what Mr. Kerry says about President Bush and VP Cheney: "For the past week, [my opponents] attacked my patriotism and my fitness to serve as Commander- in- chief. We�ll, here�s my answer. I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and by those who have misled the nation into Iraq. The Vice President called me unfit for office last night. Well, I'll leave it up to the voters to decide whether five deferments makes someone more qualified to defend this nation than two tours of duty."

Let's see. Kerry sought deferments just like Cheney (they were denied). Kerry entered the reserves, just like Bush. And neither Bush nor Kerry could know how LBJ and the military would choose to use them for national service. Kerry had no reason to expect dangerous combat duty. Flying the plane Bush flew was itself hazardous duty -- men died doing it. And in other wars, air reservists were sent to fight. (Read my "John Kerry" postings for links and details.)

The bottom line of all this is that John Kerry has chosen to take us once again back to the agony of the Vietnam era -- he does want to run on this deeply divisive issue, folks, as he's shown again and again, with his repeated attacks on George Bush's service record during the Vietnam era. That's why he hasn't acknowledged his deceptions about "Christmas in Cambodia" nor apologized to the Swift Boat vets. He doesn't want to put this topic behind him. He wants to use it for partisan political purposes.

Don't be mistaken. Kerry hasn't been shy about using incendiary talking points borrowed from the Michael Moore's of the world. Look at his speech last night -- peppered with references to the Saudi Royal family, Halliburton, lies about Iraq, failures to see combat in Vietnam. It's like the stump speech version of the "Fahrenheit 9/11" crocumentary. As has been said before, the blame for the focus of so much of the campaign on still raw wartime controversies from thirty years ago lies squarely with one man -- John Kerry.

UPDATE: Veteran Dale Franks reacts:

This is outrageous. I reject utterly any contention that Kerry's military service immunizes him against criticism from those who did not serve. One of the key elements of our system of government is the inflexible and inviolable principle that the military is permanently subject to civilian audit.

No one questioned Mr. Kerry's patriotism. They questioned his judgement, and rightly so. For Mr. Kerry to proclaim the valid criticisms he's received over the last four days as a slur on his patriotism is, quite simply, a lie. What makes this even more insulting is that the military service of which Mr. Kerry claims to be so proud now, is the same military service he denigrated as an exercise in atrocity 30 years ago ..

Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam tells us precisely nothing about his ability or fitness to serve as president, and more than the lack of service was a bar to FDRs fitness to be a wartime president. It is specious and pejorative to assert otherwise.

Was this really Kerry's problem? Not enough "heat"? Not enough attacks on Bush? Not enough focus by Kerry on the Vietnam years?

Kerry has � if you'll pardon the expression � gotten stuck in a quagmire. He, and a good chunk of the Democratic party, honestly and totally believed that the best way to prove that he has the best policies to fight the War on Terror is to remind people he fought in Vietnam. To many ears, that sounds like a non sequitur. Military service can be a plus in a presidential candidate, but Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan had little or no military experience and they all did pretty well leading the U.S. during a war.

But Kerry has focused on his Vietnam years almost exclusively, and waved his thrown and apparently re-collected medals around like a magic talisman to ward off all criticisms.

Now the Swift Boat Vets appear, and do a number on Kerry's Vietnam record. It jabs Kerry on a key element of his self-image, and he's responding clumsily and angrily. But getting down and dirty himself with the Swifties and attacking Dick Cheney for taking too many deferments in the 1960s and 1970s will do nothing to help him win over undecided voters and independents ..

John Kerry on Geoge Bush: "All hat, no cattle."

Slings and Arrows on John Kerry: "All hat, no Cambodia."

QandO BLOGS

My thoughts? The best part of the speech was the video with pitch over the plate in Yankee stadium. For me, the speech was long and the President had trouble catching my ear and holding my attention -- I was dealing with the kids, blogging and doing some cleaning during the speech (a long speech).

So I'd have to call it a rhetorical letdown after the home-run speeches by the Mayor, Schwarzenegger and the Senate Democrat colleague of John Kerry. But what do I know -- Chris Matthews really liked it. The tale of the tape will come in the debates. John Kerry has spent his lifetime debating -- in high school, college, about Vietnam, in the Senate, running for office. The President better have his powder dry and his guns loaded, because this little election contest isn't going to get any prettier anytime soon (see below).

ZELL MILLER'S SPEECH --

BACK TO VIETNAM. AGAIN.

CALL IT

DEMOCRATS IN THE PRESS

It took a few years, but on Wednesday Al Hunt on CNN, and Chris Matthews on MSNBC, fulfilled a prediction made in the July 5, 2001 CyberAlert: That if Democratic Georgia Senator Zell Miller "becomes a Republican the national media will then suddenly find it newsworthy to highlight what they have so far skipped over -- his segregationist history."

SCHWARZENEGGER FOR PRESIDENT --

QUACK, QUACK, QUACK.

UPDATE: Ralph Peters lets loose on John Kerry:

YESTERDAY, in front of the American Legion's National Convention, John Kerry made his most disgraceful speech since he lied about atrocities to Congress three decades ago. By making promises he doesn't mean and can't keep, he tried to buy the votes of American veterans.

Had he offered each vet a $5 bill and a shot of whisky for their support, his performance could not have been shabbier.

Before getting to a few examples of his breathtaking cynicism, let's put two crucial questions to the junior senator from Massachusetts:

First question: Sen. Kerry, will you admit that you lied to Congress and the American people when you stated that our troops routinely committed atrocities, and that rape, torture and murder were sanctioned by our military chain of command?

Second question: Will you apologize to our Vietnam-era veterans for the lies you told?

This means a direct, no-waffling, public apology. Will you tell our vets, the living and the dead, that you're sorry?

Of course not. John Kerry wants to have it both ways. But he isn't going to get the military vote. Perhaps the best line making its way around veterans' Web sites these days is: "A Kerry defeat would be the welcome-home parade we never had."

The guy is an eel in a vat of olive oil.

A FULL PAGE AD IN THE MARINE CORP TIMES:

In 1971, I awoke after three days of unconsciousness aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Vietnam. I could not see, my jaws were wired shut and my left cheekbone was missing, a gaping hole in its place. Later, while still at St. Albans Naval Hospital, one of my earliest recollections is of hearing about Kerry's testimony before Congress. I remember lying there, in disbelief, as I learned how Kerry told the world that the Army that I served in was reminiscent of Genghis Khan's; that officers like me routinely let their men plunder villages and rape villagers; that ''war crimes'' committed in Vietnam by my fellow soldiers ``were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.''

Then Kerry went to Paris, meeting with North Vietnamese enemy officials, while our soldiers still fought in the field. The pain and disbelief I felt listening to his words went deeper than the pain I felt from the enemy fire that wounded my face. I was discharged from the hospital 18 months later. The wounds inflicted by the enemy had fully healed. More than 30 years later, the wounds inflicted by Kerry continue to bring pain to scores of Vietnam veterans. Those wounds -- the bearing of false witness against me and a generation of courageous young Americans who fought and died in Vietnam -- are more serious than any warranting a Purple Heart. They never go away.

Today, new generations of heroes are serving our country, defending our freedoms from an insidious enemy. One of them is my son, a Marine Corps weapons officer who flies the F/A 18 Hornet. He belongs to the same Marine Corps that Kerry ridiculed with his 1971 book cover showing protesters simulating the Iwo Jima Memorial, raising an upside down American flag. He flies the same F-18 fighter jet that Kerry voted against in the Senate. Yet Kerry shamelessly drapes himself in the imagery of Vietnam, military service and the support of veterans, devoid of any media scrutiny. Veterans' criticism falls on deaf ears, and legitimate criticism of Kerry's post-war record is discredited as a personal attack or an attack against his service.

Kerry surrounds himself with a handful of veterans and claims overwhelming support from the veteran community. Yet he won't answer or apologize for the wounds he inflicted on them, insisting that his Vietnam experience gives him credibility on defense issues. If Kerry wants to exploit his service, he should at least have the courage to look veterans like me in the eye and give an honest answer on his actions then, his votes since and his plans for the future.

GEORGE WILL --

But the domination of the Republican Party by cultural conservatives did make some conservatives -- libertarians and religious skeptics, among others -- feel uneasy, even unwelcome. Being derided as RINOs -- Republicans in name only -- did not help. And the dominance of the cultural conservatives gave force to the Democrats' and the media's caricatures of the Republican Party as a brackish lagoon of intolerance, a caricature that, like all caricatures, contained a trace of truth.

The reemergence into Republican respectability of conservatism with a socially libertarian cast -- Goldwaterism -- is a development with a large potential to discomfort the Democratic Party. The reemergence can make the Republican Party more appealing to many young and suburban voters, two cohorts in which Democrats have recently made substantial gains.

KERRY vs. KERRY.

Q: Would you send more troops to Iraq?

Kerry : We should not send more American troops. That would be the worst thing. We do not want to have more Americanization. We do not want a greater sense of American occupation. We need to minimize that.

We guarantee every man and woman in our armed forces that you will always be the best-led, best-equipped, and most respected fighting force in the world. You will be armed with the right weapons, trained in the right skills, and fully prepared to win on the battlefield. You will never again be sent into harm's way without enough troops ..

-- (On The Issues.)

TRANSCRIPT.

Zell: Get out of my face! If you�re going to ask me a question, then step back, and let me answer! I wish we lived in a day where you can challenge a person to a duel. Now that would be pretty good. Don�t pull that stuff on me like you did that young lady when you had her brow beaten to death. I�m not her! I�m not her! You get in my face I�m going to get back in your face.

Matthews: Senator can I speak softly to you?

Zell: No, no. You won�t give me a chance to answer. You ask these questions and then you just talk over while I�m trying to answer just like you did that woman the other day. Why don�t why I even came on this program.

Matthews: Well, I�m glad you did. Well let me ask you this�

Zell: No, Are you going to shut up after you ask me! Are going to give me a chance to answer it?

HOW STUPID ARE THE DEMOCRATS

A SWIFT BOAT VET

ANN COULTER

ZELL MILLER VS. THE "WON'T LET GO OF VIETNAM" DEMOCRATS:

Where are such statesmen today? Where is the bipartisanship in this country when we need it most?

Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrat's manic obsession to bring down our Commander in Chief.

What has happened to the party I've spent my life working in? I can remember when Democrats believed that it was the duty of America to fight for freedom over tyranny. It was Democratic President Harry Truman who pushed the Red Army out of Iran, who came to the aid of Greece when Communists threatened to overthrow it, who stared down the Soviet blockade of West Berlin by flying in supplies and saving the city.

Time after time in our history, in the face of great danger, Democrats and Republicans worked together to ensure that freedom would not falter. But not today.

Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator ..

No one should dare to even think about being the Commander in Chief of this country if he doesn't believe with all his heart that our soldiers are liberators abroad and defenders of freedom at home.

But don't waste your breath telling that to the leaders of my party today. In their warped way of thinking America is the problem, not the solution.

They don't believe there is any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself through our clumsy and misguided foreign policy.

It is not their patriotism -- it is their judgment that has been so sorely lacking. They claimed Carter's pacifism would lead to peace.

They were wrong.

They claimed Reagan's defense buildup would lead to war.

They were wrong. And, no pair has been more wrong, more loudly, more often than the two Senators from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry ..

VIDEO -- DNC CHAIRMAN

UPDATE: This blogger clip is making news nationally.

OVER 100,000 PAGEVIEWS

I'd like to thank InstaPundit, Luciane.com, Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin, KerrySpot, The Corner, BeldarBlog, Memeorandum, 2Blowhards, KerryHaters, Betsy'sPage, Patterico, and a host of others I'll be adding though the day.

HUGH HEWITT

"SWIFT BOATS AND DOUBLE STANDARDS."

If the media can scrutinize my legal work, which doesn't even fall under the anti-coordination rules, why can't they scrutinize these Democrats with equal diligence? Think you're getting unbiased, balanced coverage of politics? Or is there a double standard in the way the media treat Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives? My recent visit to the center of a media storm suggests there is. A $500,000 ad buy made by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth brings searing media scrutiny and "proof" of illegal coordination based on a lawyer (me) representing both the Bush-Cheney campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans; on an accountant working for Tom DeLay's political action committee; and on a $200,000 contributor to the group who is not a major donor to Bush-Cheney 2004 but who does know Karl Rove.

Meanwhile, the media give practically no scrutiny to a $63 million, five-month, negative-ad buy done by Democratic "527" groups (the Media Fund, MoveOn.org and others) with a revolving door of connections to the Kerry campaign ..

The coordination law prohibits individuals from "using or conveying" information on the private "plans, needs or projects" of a campaign to a 527 or vice versa. If the media can scrutinize my legal work, which doesn't even fall under the anti-coordination rules, why can't they scrutinize these Democrats with equal diligence?

In a 50-50 nation, how do the media square this imbalance with the claim of being objective, fair and nonpartisan? The double standard in reporting on 527s suggests that some of the withering scrutiny visited on the Swift boat veterans should be directed inward.

"A TOTAL LIE".

Yes it is, isn't it.

BUSH

GLENN REYNOLDS --

It's been apparent for quite a while that Mr. Kerry's Vietnam record would be a centerpiece of his campaign, and it's also been apparent that he has stretched the truth more than a little where parts of it were concerned. In a Boston Herald piece inspired by "Apocalypse Now," Mr. Kerry wrote: "On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in 'Apocalypse Now,' took my patrol boat into Cambodia.

"In fact, I remember spending Christmas Day of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese Allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real." Mr. Kerry made similar claims on the Senate floor in 1986, adding that the memory was "seared -- seared -- in me." He also peddled variations on this story during press interviews over the years.

But the story isn't true. And the Kerry campaign eventually admitted that, but only after prodding from the media. Not from the newspapers and TV networks -- which studiously ignored the story for nearly two weeks -- but from blogs and talk radio. Bloggers researched the story on Google, on Factiva and Lexis, and in libraries. Talk-radio hosts, including some like Neal Boortz and Hugh Hewitt who are bloggers themselves, retailed the findings to the wider world. Eventually the Kerry campaign was forced to respond, which then forced the New York Times and the LA Times, grudgingly, to admit that the story existed and to start their own coverage.

WILL HE APOLOGIZE?

UPDATE: John Kerry's "Houston Moment". Quotable:

Forty-four years ago, Kerry's idol, John Kennedy, traveled to Houston to convince a gathering of Southern ministers that a Massachusetts Catholic could be President. Today, the new JFK has to convince skeptical Legionnaires that a Massachusetts liberal is fit for the job ..

Since the VFW convention, Kerry has absorbed two weeks of brutal personal attacks by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Their newest ad recalls how Kerry once tossed away his military decorations.

The campaign by the Swifties has made a shambles of the war-hero strategy launched at the Democratic convention. Kerry's Swift boat was supposed to speed through the political waters at full steam. Instead, it is foundering. He has been forced to retract his legendary Christmas-in-Cambodia epiphany, and he's under pressure to release his official military records and Vietnam diaries. Most Vietnam vets don't believe that he lied about his military service, exactly, but they are no longer sure he was telling the whole truth, either.

What they are sure of is that Kerry once attacked their war as a criminal enterprise and threw away his decorations. "How can the man who renounced his country's symbols now be trusted?" asks the ad.

Here are Kerry's remarks.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY'S REPUTATION

"UNFIT TO COMMAND" --