So let’s see what you’re suggesting… You’re suggesting that Republican operatives faked up memos, then FAXed them from a Kinkos in Abiline so that evenually Burkett would be fingered? And somehow they magically knew that A) CBS would fall for some badly doctored memos, and B) the forgery would be discovered afterwards, thus discrediting John Kerry somehow, even though he had nothing to do with them?
This is serious tinfoil hat stuff. First of all, if I were the evil Karl Rove and I wanted to make up some fake memos that would pass muster at CBS, I damned sure wouldn’t make them so obviously fake. I’d make them look *very real, but put a fatal flaw in them that wasn’t likely to be discovered by CBS, but which could be pointed out anonymously on a message board.
The fundamental flaw with this nutbar theory is that these memos were so badly faked that no one should ever have assumed that CBS would run them. It was journalistic negligence of the highest order that got these on the air in the first place.
No, wait! Maybe there’s a Republican MOLE inside CBS! Maybe Dan Rather himself is a deep cover Rove agent. Lord knows, Rove must have thousands of them across the country, considering all the things he’s been accused of over the years. I think he controls the weather, too. Those hurricanes in Florida? Karl Rove did that. Natural disasters help the incumbent. Everyone knows that.
For reference, this is the Free Republic thread where “Buckhead” made his observation in post 47 (I’m not a FR reader; it took thirty seconds of Googling and link-following to find this):
Nowhere does he claim expertise as a typography expert.
His observations are actually fairly commonsensical: I, too, would have been surprised to see proportional spacing in a typewritten document from the early '70s (one of the interesting factoids I’ve learned from this little brouhaha is that, to my surprise, such typewriters did exist at the time, although they were apparently very expensive).
One needen’t be an “expert typographer” to make the observation Buckhead made; one only needs an eye for things looking a little out of place. Indeed, it wasn’t until later that people with typography backgrounds started chiming in. Buckhead’s initial observation is almost irrelevant at this point – its importance is in the fact that it caused others to look more closely at the documents.
Well, now I know what it’s like to be a guest on Hannity and Colmes (when Colmes is off and Ann Coulter is filling in). Thanks for the experience, guys.
Do you have proof, or are you just “repeating an insinuation”?
Why so? If they didn’t take the bait, no loss.
Not MacDougald per se. But someone, somewhere along the chain of procural. Why is that so improbable?
Um, isn’t that sort of what happened?
Where did I suggest that? Isn’t it good enough for us to honestly disagree? Why do you need to mis-characterise?
Anyway, I’m not discounting/denying Burkett’s involvement, so I’m not sure why I’m being Hannitized.
As I said before, if CBS ended up not taking the bait, what’s the loss? And obviously, someone assumed correctly because they did run them.
I guess it’s just difficult to believe that CBS would be that stupid, or that blindly partisan. It’s possible, but it’s also possible that there is more to this.
Well, yeah. That was his purpose for posting - not some arcane interest in typography. And his comments were sent around, not stumbled upon. It went mainstream media in less than 12 hours.
Because large news orgainzations like CBS do not recieve anonymous faxes and use them as the centerpiece of thier stories. It is inconcievable that they simply got these memos from some source unknown to them and accepted them without question. We know, for instance, that their own document experts raised serious question about them. Why would they still go to air with them? On could argue that they were so partisan that they did not care if the accusation was a lie. I am not arguing that. In fact, I think that is wrong. The only reason they still went to air is that they had enough confidence in their source for the documents that it outweighed their expert’s concerns. That is, they either knew that their source was in a direct position to know the facts, or they trusted him enough to believe that he was.
Believing that Rove or MacDougal found some random conservative willing to dupe CBS means that you have to believe that CBS would really through out all of its skepticism. I find that difficult to swallow.
Think about the sequence of events. You are Dan Rather, or more likely one of his producers. You get an anonymous fax containing these memos. Or, more likely, you get an unanonymous fax containing them. But, you get them from someone you have never heard of. The person says he got them because he was involved with Killian somehow. So, this person was either Knox or some other collegue of Killian. I think we can be pretty sure it was not Knox. But if the source did not have a relationship with this producer, he would have had to have some bonefides or at least a story explaining how he came about them.
CBS looks at the documents and their experts question their authenticity. They interview Killian’s family and they doubt the existance of the memos. You are going to go back over your sources story or his bonefides pretty carefully, no? Whatever it is, you are going to have to have pretty good faith that his story is true. Not his story about Bush getting special treatment, but his story about how he has direct knowledge of this treatment.
Now, maybe Rove and MacDougal cooked up these memos and found some past associate of Killian’s who was willing to pass them on. He would have to be pretty trustworthy. Because at this point, you are not only going over your source’s story, you are going to go back at him to get your pound of flesh. Even if you still believe him, you are now concerned that you will be fired in discrace. Are there really that many former Killian associates still alive that Rove and MacDougal could trust that much?
There is another option. Rove and MacDougal could have found someone with a relationship with you (the CBS producer) strong enough to overcome any objections. But again, they’d have to be pretty sure that their relationship with this source was stronger than his relationship with you.
Finally, if Rove and or MacDougal were going to go to this much trouble, why the heck did they not simply find an old typewriter to create these things. The issue with the general’s date of retirement would have been enough to cast serious doubt on the memos.
I’m sorry, annaplurabelle, but the interpretation of the facts that the memos were a republican plant requires some very large leaps of faith. You have to believe that Rove and or MacDougal are geniuses bordering on the clairvoyant, and or that CBS was so rabidly anti Bush that they were willing to throw away thier reputations and futures on very slim to no evidence.
Isn’t it much easier to assume that they simply got the story wrong? Okham’s razor and all that.
Because you knew your OP was bullshit when you posted it?
:dubious: Ya, its a big mystery where I’m coming from when someone is posting tinfoil thinly disguised as a ‘debate’. Or perhaps you are refering to my well known Bush connections… :rolleyes:
Um, ok. I’ll be a little more clear this time: the fact that buckhead is “linked” to republicans is not evidence that Karl Rove was behind passing off forged documents to CBS.
I also don’t think that the forger contacting the Kerry campaign is evidence that the Kerry campaign was behind the whole the thing.
I was mockingly claiming that these two “links” must prove a ludicrous conspiracy between Bush and Kerry to topple Dan Rather. I made this claim to try and show you how foolish your musings were. Apparantly, I failed.
Well, I agree with what you’re saying here. But that is why assuming it was Burkett who forged the docs doesn’t make sense: Why would they trust Burkett as a primary source?
He has been public with his story since 1998, sitting for numerous interviews, but never offering physical evidence, and admitting that he had none. Even if they found Burkett credible, why would they trust that he had suddenly “found” documents to back up his story? Also, his original allegations didn’t focus on Bush receiving special treatment, or defying a direct order - his claim was that Bush’s official records were “cleansed” to avoid embarrassment. He only claimed to see some docs in a trashbin prior to shredding, specifically some pay stubs and performance reports. So where is his link to Killian’s private files? Why assume he would have access to those docs? (Assuming he would have to had seen them in order to forge them)
So, who would have had access to Killian’s files, if not Burkett?
BTW, here is a WaPo article that outlines how 60 minutes developed the story. Apparently, the source came through Dallas-based producer Mary Mapes, the same producer who broke the Abu Ghraib story (obtaining the photos). She’s been trying to break the ANG story for 5 years. So, consider the possibilities of where her sources originate.
Well, forget MacDougald for now. He served his purpose by posting and passing along to mainstream media - he’s too public for anything else. A certain number of people had access to Killian’s files. Why would you assume that all of them would be Bush detractors? If that were so, this should have surfaced sooner. The reasonable conclusion is that some Bush supporters were also aware of the Killian docs.
We know that Bush’s official file is missing docs. Is it so improbable that copies of Killian’s docs were some of the ones that were “cleansed”? (or “lost” or “misplaced”, if you feel better about those terms)
Even so, consider that “previously missing” docs keep turning up periodically. Apparently, there is no central location - where are they coming from? How to be sure what’s still out there, ready to surface?
Is it so improbable that someone (in a position to do so, within the chain of procural), decided to pre-empt the ramifications of outing either the original Killian docs - or even more damaging docs - by making these forgeries available? Let’s face it, if anything else comes out now, the “forgery” meme is already in the public’s consciousness. And, even if authentic, the Killian docs aren’t the worst case scenario of what might come out (ie why Bush didn’t take the physical).
Part of CBS’s confidence rested on the validation feedback of people who knew Killian (Hodges and Strong). Look at what Knox (the secretary) said - “the contents are true”. Perhaps some (yet unnamed) sources had actually seen the orginals a long time ago, and verified them (by content) as well. So, the doubts about typography were downplayed.
Another - admittedly long-shot - scenario, is that the docs are real. Couldn’t Killian have re-copied/typed them just prior to retiring? As you suggest, a professional forger would have taken pains to reproduce them under ideal typographical conditions. A retiring commander putting his (private) files in order would not be thinking that way.
I agree. I am not yet convinced that Burkett forged the documents nor that he is the source. I think the news organizations are a little embarassed not to have caught this before the bloggers, and they may be a little trigger happy.
I’d rather not. After 5 years there could have been quite a bit of pressure to come up with a payoff.
Ok, but doing so simply enlarges the conspiracy.
But you are now assuming that such documents are extant. I made no assumption about documents existing nor about the political affiliations of those with access to them.
Yes.
Your using the wrong mental picture of “Bush’s file”. There is no manilla file anywhere with all of the documents relating to Bush’s service in the National Guard. There are documents created 30 years ago. Some of them exist where they can be found, others do not, others still are lost forever.
Yes, it is. He would have had to have an improbable confidence in his ability to fool CBS as well as an improbable confidence in his ability to get away with it. Removing MacDougal does not make the conspiracy more likely, it makes it less likely. You still have some random person makeing claims to CBS with no reason that CBS should believe them.
Yes, but any “preemptive strike” would have to have clairvoyance to see that this would be the result of forging some documents.
But this is actually the most puzzling thing about the story. If CBS had sources which could testify to the validity of these memos, why did they procede with the memos at all? Remember, they did not have Knox in the original story.
Well, yes. There are all sorts of long shot scenarios that could account for these documents. IMHO you stray far from reality when you go too far down that road. Mind you, I’m not one to shy away from long shot scenarios. But simply showing the political affiliation of the original blogger who broke this story does not a conspiracy theory make.
If you wanted to discuss the different possible explanations for these memos, you could have worded your OP differently. Simply asking for speculation would have been a good start.
Well manny, looks like you may get your proof soon:
Simple as that… but how stupid!!!
No matter how much I lower my expectations of people, it’s never low enough.
In hindsight:
This is why they deserve the heat. They used the memos to get the statements from Hodges and Strong. And, you’d think after 5 years they would’ve thought to look up Knox…but if they did, they wouldn’t have been able to use the memos.
I thought the final question was asking for speculation. But agreed. I’m a crap OP writer (which is why this is only my second thread). I didn’t intend for it to come off as “evidence” of a CT, but reading about MacDougald was the trigger for my “whodunit” curiousity. I think in tangents - but I should have been more careful in crafting a debate.
