IASK: Legacy

Anti-Bush documents forged?!?!

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by

senseiken
in

 

Those don’t match…

This is going to get ugly fast, real fast. CBS/60 Minutes recently aired a segment hosted by Dan Rather claiming that they had new documents showing that Bush’ service to the Texas Air National Guard was incomplete and unsatisfactory. Further, they claimed documentation from Lt. Col. Jerry Killian that further supported it. The sound you have been hearing for the last day or two today were people on the left blowing each other over how this was going to put a nail in Bush’s coffin. Other sources picked up the news.

Oops! This might suck!

Except it looks like at least some, if not all of the information is a forgery. I have all the relevant documents at the bottom of this entry, as well as a .doc file you too can use to reproduce the exact same memo’s at home (thanks LGF!)!

“I opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Microsoft’s Times New Roman, tabbed over to the default tab stop to enter the date “18 August 1973,” then typed the rest of the document purportedly from the personal records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian.

And my Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as “authentic.” – quote in context

The web strikes!

There are lots of places to go for the whole story, you should start with powerline blog (see below for specific entry links) and little green footballs. You will notice that it took only from the first post I could find at 07:28 on 9/9 till around 22:32 on 9/9 for the first hint of a CBS freak out happened. What I think is awesome is how fast so much information came together. There is a lot of what they call [[wp:HUMINT]] (human intelligence) on the ‘net and it is starting to pay off. A [[wp:meme]] may spread fast, but counter memes also happen quickly.

Still cooler is that the ebb and play of the [[wp:buzz]] on the ‘net is itself a source of news and an indicator of what’s happening. Fox news did a segment on the forgery thing, tipped of mostly by the web traffic which they also discuss. You can see it at The Daily Recycler and I have a local mirror here as well.

Wait a minute, the aliens did it!

Now it gets even more amusing. With the deafening silence of “screw em” Kos, the guy who would normally be all over this stuff we are left to look elsewhere on the left for a tin-foil hat theory. How can they find a way to blame Bush for their idiocy? Oh wait, its all a plot! Look no further than Kos’s readership or other assorted ‘net spin doctors doing their best. Hell, even Metafilter has some people looking for a way out.

“Who, you might wonder, would orchestrate a hoax that could be so quickly identified as a hoax? Wouldn’t any Kerry supporter realize that they would be caught, and that their candidate would suffer the backlash? Of course they would. And that’s why I don’t think a Kerry supporter is involved.” – quote in context

Of course, they may have come from Kerry’s camp…

“More than a couple people heard about the papers,” says the DNC staffer. “I’ve heard that they ended up with the Kerry campaign, for them to decide to how to proceed, and presumably they were handed over to 60 Minutes, which used them the other night. But I know this much. When there was discussion here, there were doubts raised about their authenticity.” – quote in context

Make up your own mind

The documents in question are saved here so they don’t you know, disappear. You can also find them at the CBS news page they came from.

Blogosphere

The powerline coverage in order earliest to latest:

The Little Green Footballs coverage in order in order earliest to latest:

Allahpundit (he doesn’t title, they are in chronological order)

Ace of Spades HQ

spacetown

Other links of interest