Bush National Guard Thread pt.2

[mozilla]

Official www.FreeRepublic.com discussion on this topic

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1219355/posts

More juicy speculation

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12687_LA_Times_Slimes_Buckhead_Bloggers#comments

[Mel Brennan]

Mel, can you elaborate on this a bit?

http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showpost.php?p=3005120&postcount=2

[ratdog]

Once again, the U.S. Navy supports Kerry and proves the the Right lies about his service in Vietnam:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/18/kerry.medals.ap/index.html

Meanwhile, Bush still cannot account for his time in the TANG and won't release all his records. Go figure.

[mozilla]

Once again, the U.S. Navy supports Kerry and proves the the Right lies about his service in Vietnam:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/18/kerry.medals.ap/index.html

Meanwhile, Bush still cannot account for his time in the TANG and won't release all his records. Go figure.

Bush has signed Form 180 - all his military records are public (except the fake CBS memos)

Kerry has yet to sign Form 180.

[mozilla]

Bill Burkett, Democrat activist and Kerry campaign supporter, passes information to the DNC;

Kerry campaign surrogate Max Cleland discusses "valuable" information with Bill Burkett;

Bill Burkett talks to "senior" Kerry campaign officials; an apparently unsuspecting news organization uses faked forged memos and an interview with Ben Barnes at the same time the Democratic National Committee launched Operation Fortunate Son;

Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill was among the first to call Ben Barnes and congratulate him after his interview;

Terry McAuliffe was out the very next day blasting President Bush, throughout the day, as a "liar" based on the CBS program (and then kept using the word "sugarcoat");

Tom Harkin calling Bush a liar several times over that same day;

John Edwards demanding that President Bush answer to these fake memos;

The trail of connections is becoming increasingly clear.

They took this stink and rubbed it all over themselves, before and after.

[argentine soccer fan]

You missed my point. The swift boat guys bought a very small number of commercials but were all over TV. Why? Because the news media kept bringing them on to their shows. The media perpetuated it.

I am glad we are discussing the media, because that is the only angle of this story which has any relevance at this point.

SoFla, I didn't miss the point. But I think you are comparing apples with oranges. If you are talking about the boat people appearing with the likes of Chris Mathews, Hannaty and Colmes etc. that is very different from 60 minutes.

Chris Matthews, for example, interviews people who give their point of view, make their allegations, etc. and then he asks them pertinent questions. It is up to the viewers to make up their mind. Hannity and Colmes features two ideologues who interview a happless victim and try to spin whatever is said to their point of view. Again, the viewers know it for what it is, and have to make up their minds.

So, if these types of show interview Boat People, or Kitty Kelley, or the secretary of Killian, we can watch and decide based on what is said.

60 minutes, on the other hand, is a news magazine which has a reputation for doing unbiased investigative reporting. If they were to feature the likes of the boat people, or Kitty Kelley, what they'd do is examine what they say, look at the evidence and then decide if it is the truth, before showing it.

So, when Dan Rather claims he has a story which will feature newly obtained documents which offer fresh evidence about President Bush and his national guard service, It is different than if someone like Mathews interviews a person who claims to have such documents. We expect that Dan Rather must have investigated and found the documents to be truth.

In fact the 60 minutes story was based on these documents. Without the documents, the story is nothing but the same old allegations, so it wouldn't be featured by a program like 60 minutes.

So, when the documents are proved questionable at best, for CBS to present an old typist who says the documents are fake but the content is real, is a huge mistake. It undermines the reputation of a program like 60 minutes. If that typist appears on Matthews or on Hanity and Colmes, and they question her, it is different.

That is my point. An investigative newsmagazine like 60 minutes cannot vouch for the veracity of its claims based on the word of a secretary, and if it does, it is undermining its own reputation as a newsmagazine. It has nothing to do, as far as I'm concerned, with whose side anybody is on. (as you alleged).

[Dan Loney]

slandered the presidentHow so?

[SoFla Metro]

clipped for brevity
You didn't get my point - the fact that those programs allowed the swift boat lying liars on their program after they'd already been shown to be liars makes them no better than 60 minutes.

[argentine soccer fan]

You didn't get my point - the fact that those programs allowed the swift boat lying liars on their program after they'd already been shown to be liars makes them no better than 60 minutes.

I have seen the boat people ads and the moveon.org ads in some programs. But I have not seen an anchorperson actually endorse what they say.

Perhaps you have. I will grant you the point that if an anchorperson actually put their reputation on the line by saying that they believe what the boat people said, then that anchorperson is no better than Dan Rather.

[ratdog]

Bush has signed Form 180 - all his military records are public (except the fake CBS memos)


Ah yes. Bush's "the DoD ate my homework" defense. I don't buy it. Bush can't account for his time. Period. In complete contrast, Kerry has the U.S. Navy repeatedly back up everything he says, proving the slander of the Not-So-Swift Liars For Bush and those who question his medals is wrong. But that won't stop the Kool-aid Brigade from trying to sell us the Big Lie, seeing as lies are all they have to bring to the table.

[SoFla Metro]

I have seen the boat people ads and the moveon.org ads in some programs. But I have not seen an anchorperson actually endorse what they say.

Perhaps you have. I will grant you the point that if an anchorperson actually put their reputation on the line by saying that they believe what the boat people said, then that anchorperson is no better than Dan Rather.
The Douchebag of Liberty said he believed the swift boat people.

[superdave]

mozilla, since everything was public, there have been at least 3 more releases. That implies a definition of "everything" with which I am not familiar.

[biggyv]

The Douchebag of Liberty said he believed the swift boat people.
To be fair, he is an analyst who is asked to give his opinion on matters. Rather is paid to report the news in an objective manner, just giving facts.

[mozilla]

Maybe CBS tries to sex up its image with the "fake but accurate" line :)

http://coldfury.com/images/sally.jpg

[mozilla]

Of all the loopy statements made by Dan Rather in the 10 days since he decided to throw his career away, my favorite is this, from Dan's interview with the Washington Post on Thursday:

''If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story.''

Hel-looooo? Earth to the Lost Planet of Ratheria: You can't ''break that story.'' A guy called ''Buckhead'' did that, on the Free Republic

http://img24.exs.cx/img24/7233/WhatsTheFrequencyKenneth.jpg

[SoFla Metro]

To be fair, he is an analyst who is asked to give his opinion on matters. Rather is paid to report the news in an objective manner, just giving facts.
DoL is a journalist. He's still expected to tell the truth.

[peledre]

Of all the loopy statements made by Dan Rather in the 10 days since he decided to throw his career away, my favorite is this, from Dan's interview with the Washington Post on Thursday:

''If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story.''

Hel-looooo? Earth to the Lost Planet of Ratheria: You can't ''break that story.'' A guy called ''Buckhead'' did that, on the Free Republic

http://img24.exs.cx/img24/7233/WhatsTheFrequencyKenneth.jpg
Do you always feel the need to word-for-word plagarize righty blogs without even crediting the source?

[superdave]

Here's the website of Buckhead.

http://www.wcsr.com/FSL5CS/Lawyers/lawyers1450.asp

One thing you'll notice is that he graduated from college in 1980. Which would mean he was born around 1958. He looks to be in his mid-40s in the picture, too.

I was kinda hoping he was either younger or older. Younger, and his knowledge of the proportional spacing capabilities of ca. 1972 typewriters becomes exTREMely suspicious. Older, less so. I find it unlikely that a kid who was ~14 at the time had knowledge of cutting edge typewriters, but not so unlikely as to be good evidence that this was a setup.

He has, however, refused to answer any questions. So to me, on the civil case grounds of "preponderance of the evidence," where prior bad acts are allowed as evidence, this is another Rovian setup. But I really couldn't vote "beyond a reasonable doubt."

Not yet, anyway. If he could just explain how he knew about proportional spacing on typewriters so quickly. We now know he was wrong about that, so if you say he used the internet to search, you're wrong. If it wasn't a setup, then he would be writing that based on his personal knowledge of typewriters, and he'd be basing that on what he saw. If you look at what he posted on freerepublic, that's what it reads like he's doing. If he could say, hey, I visited my dad's office and helped out from time to time, and they didn't have those kinds of typewriters, and I didn't know about the models we now know could do proportional spacing, OK. I could buy that.

One thing that has always been puzzling has been the White House's reaction when the story first broke. It was very muted. I can think of 3 possible explanations.

1. They didn't think it was a big deal. The "new" stuff wasn't really that crucial, most of it was just a re-airing of what we know from 1999 and 2000, so they didn't want to fan the flames.
2. They asked Bush if the memos were legit or not, and he said, could be. I was quite the f'up then, and I didn't take a physical, and they were really riding my ass. I shared that with Dad, and maybe he made some phone calls.
3. It was a Rove setup, and they wanted to keep their fingerprints off of everything.

[ratdog]

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

You gotta love the Ridiculous Right in this country. They whine about the "Communist News Network" and create pics of Rather with Kerry campaign posters after years of trying to claim that Fox News is fair and balanced. Hilarious.

[Quaker]

or...

4. The White House wanted to stay above the mess. Talk about the country's future and such, not get into issues that are more than 30 years old.

Look, it doesn't take a genius to know that a typical typewriter advances across the paper the same amount no matter what key is hit. Buckhead picked up on the fact that this wasn't the case on the CBS memos.

The LA Times put this lawyer's age at 46, so he was probably typing his high school papers on these machines and worked with the evolution of technology since the early 70s. And a lawyer deals with all sorts of documents, some of them decades old. I'm not shocked that someone like that put two and two together. I'm actually a bit surprised it took four hours for someone to raise this given how big the show's audience was, how widely distributed to the media the memos were, and how obvious the forgery mistakes were.