Conspiracy to Defraud the American People?
I, for one, "question the timing":
[Democratic Political Consultant Howard] Wolfson's operation is well-oiled. His first day at the helm of OFS was Monday, September 6. On September 14, McAuliffe held a press conference and used the "Operation Fortunate Son" slogan for the first time. However, OFS was planned much earlier. Look back at the month before the operation began, and aspects of the Democrats' strategy come into focus, like the outline of a figure emerging from the mist.
On August 11, for example, Bob Tuke, the Tennessee state chair of Veterans for Kerry, told a Nashville radio station that, soon, "We may also know why Bush failed to show up for his medical exam that caused him to lose his flight status." A few weeks later, on September 1, liberal blogger Joshua Micah Marshall reported that Dan Rather was working on a 60 Minutes story about Bush and the Guard. On September 2, the day Bush accepted his party's nomination in New York, the online magazine Salon published an exhaustive investigation into the "unanswered questions" surrounding the president's service. On September 6, Terry McAuliffe issued a press release detailing "what we don't know" about Bush's Guard years. Another DNC release on the same topic followed on September 7. Three more followed on September 8, the day 60 Minutes aired its story featuring the now-discredited Guard memos. One of the DNC releases that day relied heavily on the 60 Minutes report.
Also on September 8, an independent group called Texans for Truth, whose founder has ties to the anti-Bush group MoveOn.org, announced it would run ads on Bush and the Guard in several swing states. A new batch of National Guard documents were released that day, too, and the Boston Globe and the Associated Press both featured stories on the new finds. The Globe story concluded that "Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation." Then, on September 9, the DNC issued two more press releases that again quoted extensively from the 60 Minutes report, including from the discredited memos.
The DNC continued to issue press releases on Bush and the Guard, but, after September 9, the releases no longer mentioned the memos. The absence was noticeable. "I think it's a sign that there is plenty to talk about irrespective of the CBS documents," Wolfson told me. "Many other news organizations have done reporting on this. There's a set of facts that are incontrovertible and are not in dispute."
Hmm... Now, I expect that you, the reader, has a fairly good sense of the scandal which is currently metastasizing, but if you're not up to speed, you can start here.
Caught up? Great. Here we go. If we add CBS News' outlandish behavior to the the conspicuous amount of foreshadowing by the Democrat rumor mill, full court-press media relations strategy in left-of-center outlets, coordinated advertising campaigns by the DNC and 527 group MoveOn.org, and the adoption of the "Operation Fortunate Son" theme by the Kerry Campaign two days before the forged Killian Memos saw the light of day, then the elementary logic employed by Mark Steyn in his latest column adds up to something, well, rancid in American politics.
So the question now is why won't Dan and Co. just admit their docs are crocks and let it go? On Wednesday, CBS News head honcho Andrew Heyward, in a slippery statement, announced that ''we established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate.'' Note that word: not ''genuine'' but ''accurate'' -- i.e., if Lt. Col. Killian had had one of those IBM Model Ds and been willing to remove the carriage return and replace it with a rubber stopper on the front index scale while turning the crank, etc., these are the memos he would have written. Rather and Heyward are adopting the rogue-cop defense: The evidence is planted, but the guy's still guilty. Or as the New York Times' headline put it: ''Memos On Bush Are Fake But Accurate.''
Why has CBS News decided it would rather debauch its brand and treat its audience like morons than simply admit their hoax? For Dan Rather? I doubt it. Hurricane Dan looks like he's been hit by one. He's still standing, just about, but, like a battered double-wide, more and more panels are falling off every day. No one would destroy three-quarters of a century of audience trust and goodwill for one shattered anachronism of an anchorman, would they?
As the network put it last week, ''In accordance with longstanding journalistic ethics, CBS News is not prepared to reveal its confidential sources or the method by which '60 Minutes' Wednesday received the documents.'' But, once they admit the documents are fake, they can no longer claim ''journalistic ethics'' as an excuse to protect their source. There's no legal or First Amendment protection afforded to a man who peddles a fraud. You'd think CBS would be mad as hell to find whoever it was who stitched them up and made them look idiots.
So why aren't they? The only reasonable conclusion is that the source -- or trail of sources -- is even more incriminating than the fake documents. Why else would Heyward and Rather allow the CBS news division to commit slow, public suicide? (emphasis added)
I don't go for conspiracy theories, as they usually seek to explain normal behavior with abnormal speculation. For instance, the U.S. Air Force doesn't want people spying on its super-secret base on Groom Lake in Nevada because it is a testing ground for advanced airplane designs, and they worry about espionage by other nations, NOT because they have a secret pact with aliens who live at the base and help the military to develop extraterrestrial technology in conjunction with the Illuminati, Freemasons, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the UN, or whatever.
Instead, let me introduce a logical precept, a pillar of Western Civilization since Medieval times. It's called Occam's Razor, and it's most common formulation is,
or
"Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity"
Wikipedia notes that in our quaint colloquialisms this principle of methodological reductionism can be rendered as "explanations should never multiply causes without necessity. When two explanations are offered for a phenomenon, the simplest full explanation is preferable."
This means that if a story starts popping up in various media outlets at the same time that a political party begins pushing a theme based on that story, well, they're all communicating about it, if not working together.
My first instinct was that CBS was in collusion with the DNC or the Kerry Campaign on the National Guard story. I reconsidered, thinking, well, perhaps this was just a simple error, caused no doubt by competition to break the story. But, having seen the tell-tale signs of a coordinated media strategy by the Kerry Campaign and the DNC, compounded by CBS' stonewalling over the forged memos, well, there's simply no other explanation for it. They were (with varying degrees of complicity) resuscitating this story in an effort to damage Bush, much like the Swifties damaged Kerry. Any other explanation at this point will be a stretch in the "so-and-so just so happened to do this-and-that at the very same time that whats-his-name coincidentally called whos-that-guy..." variety.
I won't speculate on exactly whose fingerprints are on those forgeries, and feel content to point out that the nexus of odd behavior, breaking news, and too-neat timing indicates that CBS is indeed covering up for a coordinated attack begun by the Democratic leadership. The latter might not have created the forged memos in question, but obviously had begun planning their strategy around them weeks before the story broke on 60 Minutes.
It will be interesting to see if the media organizations in this country have the heart (or the stones) to see how deep the rabbit hole really goes.
UPDATE: Sumner Redstone, Viacom's chair, and thus, Mr. Rather's ultimate boss voices his opinion on the latter's credibility his wallet by dumping about $12 Million in Viacom shares, the night before CBS News honcho Andrew Heyward's bizarro-world statement:
"We established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate or we would not have put them on television. There was a great deal of coroborating [sic] evidence from people in a position to know. Having said that, given all the questions about them, we believe we should redouble our efforts to answer those questions, so that's what we are doing."
Deconstruction of the statement, here.
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