Smackdown

Well, so much for "The Democrat-surrogates Strike Back."

The story broke on Sunday evening, but before I heard it, it had been debunked by the blogosphere. Hugh Hewitt interviewed a documents examiner on his program yesterday who said it couldn't have been done on any typewriter he knew available in 1972 and 1973. A number of callers who had typed such documents while in the military also cast doubt on the lack of a military form or letterhead. One caller said the dates were in the wrong format. The subject line "CYA" is suspicious as is the P. O. Box 34567 in the heading of one document.

The most convincing piece of evidence to me was Brit Hume's report that one of the Fox News producers had retyped the memo in Microsoft Word and was able to lay it over these and match the words perfectly. Of course, a forger would have made copies of copies of copies to make it harder to detect a forgery, but the likelihood of that kind of match between a typewriter and a modern laser or inkjet printer must be vanishingly small.

Little Green Footballs, The Weekly Standard, TCS, CNSand a lot of others have suggested reasons to be suspicious of these documents which have so conveniently popped up just as John Kerry falls behind in the polls. As always, Instapundit has links to all sorts of other comments.

CBS is standing by the story and claiming that the documents passed examination, but they don't name the examiner. This is bigger than Jason Blair or the other reporter fraud stories, because it involves the "Tiffany Network" and its evening news anchor and the longest running news magazine program on the air and also because a swarm of bloggers have pointed out so many questionable points about it that one has to wonder what CBS was thinking to present them without laying a foundation. CBS and the Boston Globe look more partisan than ever, especially when it is being reported
that CBS got the documents from the Kerry Campaign. Is this a fulfillment of Susan Estrich's threat? It sure sounds like it.

Remember the "Bush Lied!" argument made by people like Josh Marshall and Peter Beinart about Bush's State of the Union Address in which he mentioned that Saddam was shopping for uranium in Niger. They lambasted the claim, which they mischaracterized as being based solely on a clumsy forgery, and therefore the administration had lied to the American people. That claim became conventional wisdom among liberals, but now they're doing the very thing they accuse Bush of doing, except in a much more transparent and clumsy way.

Update: Read Donald Sensing's research on the misuse of military terminology. Also, Fox News is reporting that military sources have told them that it is highly unlikely that the unit would use a P. O. box, a point made yesterday by callers to the Hugh Hewitt Show. The number, 34567, should have tipped CBS off, but they were so eager to smear Bush, they couldn't think. Some producer will lose his job, but its the whole organization that deserves to lose its business for getting so involved in the campaign. Media have been reporting scandals since George Washington, but when they tell you over and over how much more educated, experienced and ethical they are than everybody else and then commit such a penny ante gaffe, it's rotten tomato time.

Sensing also links to this report that Terry McAuliffe is trying to blame this on Karl Rove. ROTFL! I thought they were going to reassign him. Maybe this will speed that up. It's like having a bad clown for your party chairman.