Power Line: CBS Lets Down the Side

September 14, 2004

CBS Lets Down the Side

Tomorrow's Los Angeles Times features an editorial criticizing CBS News for letting down the liberals by publicizing a forgery--well, not so much a forgery, but an obvious forgery: "A Black Eye for CBS News":

CBS News has been had. It's hard to reach any other conclusion about newly discovered documents that CBS and anchor Dan Rather are defending as revealing the truth about George W. Bush's military service.
Despite Rather's statement Monday that the network "believes the documents are authentic," the evidence keeps mounting that they are not. As The Times reported, conservative bloggers detected glaring inconsistencies, such as a Microsoft Word type style. So many other discrepancies have since emerged that it would require a willful suspension of disbelief to take them as merely coincidental.

What outrages the L.A. Times, however, is not so much that CBS tried to perpetrate a fraud, as that it failed to help the Kerry campaign, as it intended:

CBS' real error was trying to prove a point that didn't really need to be proved. It doesn't take documents for anyone to realize that Bush pulled strings to get into the National Guard. And, during the Vietnam draft, nobody went into the National Guard out of passion to defend his country. It also doesn't take new documents to establish that Bush shirked even his National Guard duties when he moved to Alabama and then to Harvard Business School.
CBS may have managed to place Bush's Vietnam-era service off-limits as a campaign issue, after weeks when John F. Kerry's impressive record has been under savage attack. Bush gave a smirky speech Monday to the National Guard Assn., waxing on about the patriotic sacrifices of the Guard's men and women over the years.

It's somewhat revealing that the Times acknowledges that President Bush's inadequate National Guard service "didn't really need to be proved." Really? Why not? The Times says it doesn't take documents to show that Bush "pulled strings to get into the National Guard," but the fact is that there is no evidence whatsoever, documentary or otherwise, of such string-pulling. And the Times' claim that Bush "shirked...his National Guard duties" when he went to Harvard Business School is ridiculous, since he had been honorably discharged from the Guard by that time.

And what's with the "smirky speech" to the National Guard Association, in which President Bush was "waxing on about the patriotic sacrifices of the Guard's men and women"? Is it really news to the Times that National Guardsmen make sacrifices? Is there something inappropriate about the President recognizing those sacrifices? And what, exactly, was "smirky" about the speech? What sort of speech does the L.A. Times think a President of the United States should give to the National Guard Association?

It is revealing that even a hard-left, unreconstructed Republican-hating organization like the L.A. Times, while gnashing its teeth in impotent rage over what looks like the impending defeat of its candidate, John Kerry, still feels compelled to admit that the CBS News documents were forged.

Posted by John at 10:35 PM |

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/mt/mt-diespammers.cgi/7901

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference CBS Lets Down the Side:

» Norma Rather, your camera shot is ready from Darleen's Place
A picture of how Danny-boy will be spending his retirement days. [Read More]

Tracked on September 14, 2004 11:44 PM

» Document Experts Warned CBS Prior to Broadcast from bLogicus
While the media feeding frenzy is well on its way there likely to be a an awkward inconsistency in the articles by those who want the story to be true even though the evidence is false. [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2004 12:01 AM

» Nice Attempted Save from damnum absque injuria
The Dallas Morning News reports that Marian Carr Knox, Jerry Killian's former secretary, has confirmed the Dan Rather's memos are definitely fake, but then prattles on about how the basic idea of the forged documents was right anyway. Lest anyone ta... [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2004 03:08 AM

» Archimedes Was Wrong from Babalu Blog
He should have said: Give me a blog, and I will move the world.... [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2004 06:34 AM

» Big Media and Rathergate from MartiniPundit
Powerline has been doing yeoman work on the Rathergate story. They have a devastating look at the LA Times which is very, very angry at CBS: It is revealing that even a hard-left, unreconstructed Republican-hating organization like the L.A. Tim... [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2004 10:03 AM

» CBS Stands By Emperor's Wardrobe Claims from Winds of Change.NET
ABC News, The Washington Post, and Frank "Catch Me If You Can" Abagnale weigh in on the memos, and we have a satire too. The story is definitely shifting away from the memos' content, and toward CBS' malfeasance, denials and cover up. [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2004 02:29 PM

Tracked on September 15, 2004 02:30 PM

Tracked on September 15, 2004 02:44 PM

Tracked on September 15, 2004 07:20 PM

» C BS. C BS Run. Run, C BS, Run (Part 5) from Les Jones Blog
New York Observer interview with Dan Rather. WizBang has the much more informative letter CBS sent to its affiliates. It includes the name of the previously-undisclosed document examiner, James J. Pierce. It also includes this statement: "Two of the ex... [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2004 09:11 PM

Tracked on September 15, 2004 09:12 PM

» C BS. C BS Run. Run, C BS, Run (Part 5) from Les Jones Blog
New York Observer interview with Dan Rather. CBS had a lame statement today concerning the documents. Here's the transcript. WizBang has the much more informative letter CBS sent to its affiliates. It includes the name of the previously-undisclosed doc... [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2004 09:18 PM

Tracked on September 15, 2004 09:25 PM

Tracked on September 15, 2004 10:10 PM

» C BS. C BS Run. Run, C BS, Run (Part 5) from Les Jones Blog
New York Observer interview with Dan Rather. CBS had a lame statement today concerning the documents. Here's the transcript. SayUncle finds this cryptic text in the transcript: We established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate or we would... [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2004 10:13 PM

Tracked on September 15, 2004 10:14 PM

» C BS. C BS Run. Run, C BS, Run (Part 5) from Les Jones Blog
New York Observer interview with Dan Rather. CBS had a lame statement today concerning the documents. Here's the transcript. SayUncle finds this cryptic text in the transcript: We established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate or we would... [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2004 11:06 PM

Tracked on September 15, 2004 11:52 PM

Tracked on September 16, 2004 07:07 PM

Tracked on September 16, 2004 07:26 PM

Tracked on September 16, 2004 07:33 PM

Tracked on September 16, 2004 07:57 PM