That's the title of an opinion piece Brent and I wrote that's now up at Insight Magazine.

It's even eliciting hate email -- presumably from those peaceniks that flock to Brother Jimmy.

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John Leo's latest column contains a telling story about one of his past encounters with Dan Rather:

"Years ago I was part of an odd panel discussion sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. It was a flat-footed version of those role-playing dramas that Fred Friendly constructed so brilliantly for PBS, the ones where he would walk around the room posing hypothetical questions that often tied famous journalists up in ethical knots. I was assigned the role of a newspaper editor who had the option of running a political expose that would have had many wondrous effects on his town but that simply did not check out as true. I said I wouldn't run the story until my reporters nailed it down. This apparently unexpected position brought the whole poorly thought-out hypothetical to a screeching halt. No complex ethical dilemmas could be built on it. The Fred Friendly stand-in that day, assigned the role of badgering me to run the big story that didn't check out, was Dan Rather [emphasis added]."

It can't be said too often: Given Rather's raw partisanship and low ethical standards, how many other Rathergates have their been over the past 20 years? There's a great article to be written by a student of journalism with access to a good news archive.

Meanwhile, John Podhoretz's column in this morning's New York Post brings the latest Rather story to a wide audience (see yesterday's final post below). While there's nothing new in it, per se, it's good to see him on it, especially on the day of the first debates.

As Podhoretz asks:

"Is he [Rather] a moron, incapable of learning anything from the forged-memo fiasco?

"Or just a Democratic shill?

"On reflection, what difference does it make?"

Hermits, unite!

Power Line is reporting, via Little Green Footballs, that CBS News is once again relying on discredited documents to attack President Bush.

When I first saw their report, I thought I was misreading it; but no, it really does say that CBS has used discredited documents to claim that the administration intends to bring back the draft.

According to LGF:

"In a story that was a textbook example of slipshod reporting, CBS reporter Richard Schlesinger used debunked internet hoax emails and an unlabeled interest group member to scare viewers into believing that the U.S. government is poised to resume the draft. At the center of Schlesinger’s piece was a woman named Beverly Cocco, a Philadelphia woman who is 'sick to my stomach' that her two sons might be drafted. In his report, Schlesinger claimed that Cocco was a Republican and portrayed her as an apolitical (even Republican) mom worried about the future. Schlesinger did not disclose that Cocco is a chapter president of an advocacy group called People Against the Draft (PAD) which, in addition to opposing any federal conscription, seeks to establish a 'peaceful, rational foreign policy' by bringing all U.S. troops out of Iraq. Like Schlesinger’s Cocco, the group portrays itself as 'nonpartisan' although its leadership seems to be entirely bereft of any Republicans. The group’s domain is registered to a man named Jacob Levich, a left-wing activist who in a 2001 essay compared the Bush Administration to the totalitarian government portrayed in George Orwell’s 1984. CBS News also reported that there are two bills in Congress to reinstate the draft, but failed to mention that they were both introduced by Democrats."

To boot, via Power Line, the Selective Service overtly denies any intention of bringing back the draft.

CBS News has problems with the Internet on two levels. First, they still haven't learned that they're going to be fact-checked like never before -- something you'd think might make them more cautious. No matter how much antagonism they may have toward President Bush, they're not going to bring him down with bad reporting. Did Richard Schlesinger think he was avenging Dan Rather?

Second, note that this story originates with an email hoax. They're fooled by an email hoax? Will we be asked to believe that CBS was thrown off the trail by some trickster using modern technology which, in fact, isn't so new any more? (I began using email at Michigan around 1990.) Doesn't everyone at CBS have a PC with email and access to the Net? Haven't we all received such junk day in and day out, for years?

Perhaps CBS figures it has lost all credibility with the technologically literate (or semi-literate) and is gunning to capture the unplugged. But there's FNC, so maybe that means they'll have to go for those without cable. Of course, there's the telephone (and backyard chats), so that might reduce their potential demographic to non-phone-owning hermits. With electricity (or a generator).

Given their current ratings, I'd say they're well on the way to achieving those goals.

I'm working on a large non-blog project, so blogging will continue to be lighter than normal until Friday. But with the advent of blogging and email, most of us probably write more today than we did ten years ago. All that writing (and, hopefully, reading) should alert us to grammar. Yes, grammar, and the degree to which the New Media has allowed non-journalists to send their thoughts around the world editor-free. I'm not objecting to that, mind you, just taking note of it and the consequences it has on the quality of writing.

A small prediction: As blogging becomes more mainstream, bloggers will pay closer attention to the quality of their writing. When huge stories are breaking, as with Rathergate, scrambling will trump carefully crafted composition, and that's not altogether bad given the medium and its primary strengths (speed, few rules). But as the shake-down of bloggers continues, and as the talent pool grows, the scoops and critiques that have made bloggers all the rage will need to be conveyed through well written blogs that, while not formal essays, reflect a level of professionalism that's heretofore been rare.

In other words, think fast, write fast, write well.

Erin O'Connor at Critical Mass has some pertinent observations on this matter, since her young students today are probably little different from those of the past many years. Plus, I suspect, her experience is quite similar to that of teachers and former teachers around the country.

"My colleague and I distributed the worksheet as an informal diagnostic, a way of gauging just where on the grammar curve our students are. What we discovered did not surprise us particularly. I won't discuss details for reasons that should be obvious, but I will say that after ten years of teaching, I am moved to generalize: Most high school students these days are not on the grammar curve at all. The parts of speech are largely mysterious to them; the rules of punctuation and agreement are likewise unfamiliar. Semi-colons, colons, and dashes do not come into play in their writing because they do not know what they are for. Sentence fragments abound because many do not know that a sentence requires a subject and a verb, nor can they tell reliably when something is a subject and when something is a verb. Forget about objects and indirect objects, simple and compound sentences, subordinate clauses and participial phrases: such terminology is Greek to the vast majority of them.

"Don't get me wrong. Kids today are as smart, creative, and sharp as ever. Their grammar deficit is not their fault. They can't be blamed for what they were never taught. It's increasingly unfashionable to emphasize grammar and the rules of syntax in school, the reasons ranging from the hang-loose notion that the rules of usage are confining and binding and irrelevant anyway since language is a living, breathing thing, to the feel-good notion that grammar is boring and mind-numbing and kids will be turned off to reading and writing forever if they have to learn it."

If you've taught writing at the college level, and I've been privileged to teach some pretty high-octane students, you know that the very best are eager to know why their writing isn't what it should be and what they should do to improve it. Re-writing is the answer, along with strict grading; the last thing any student needs is an undeserved pass lest their tender psyches be crushed.

That's a real problem on most campuses (and I know Erin is talking about high school students, but the differences aren't great, at least for college freshmen), because so many professors aren't willing to spend the time it takes to work with students to polish essays. To boot, if you've picked up a copy of just about any academic journal, you'll know that academics are often terrible writers who rely on jargon and cant to speak to a small audience while excluding non-guild members.

Which is why I think blogging can become a means to improving the way thinking Americans write: Our medium demands that we satisfy a broad audience of non-specialists. We're the anti-academics, in that sense, even though many of the best bloggers are themselves professors. That is, the worst vices of the modern professoriate can be overcome (or just ignored) by bloggers. And the same can be said of the clan of professional journalists, who've learned a thing or two from bloggers these past few weeks.

So bloggers, clean up your prose, omit needless words, and watch your punctuation. Buy Strunk and White, digest it, and make it your own. And remember that professionalism doesn't have to mean professionalization.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that bloggers should beware of attempts by MSM to paint the Swift Vets as the moral equivalent of the promulgators of Rathergate or of the long-discredited Kitty Kelley. In particular, Michiku Kakutani and Elie Wiesel did their best to create a new way for the left to weasel out of any valid argument over the Swift Vets' charges. Wiesel penned (in French!) a vapid cri de coeur for everyone to hold hands, sway, and sing Kumbaya rather than engage in political debate, while Kakutani placed the Swift Vets on the same moral plane as the loathsome Kitty Kelley.

Allan Murray of CNBC and the Wall Street Journal, trying desperately to bring up the rear, weighs in this morning with a Journal column ($) that again does the old moral equivalency two-step. But the content of his piece undermines his own story.

That's because in "Kelley, O'Neill Books Bashing Bush, Kerry Rate Unfit to Read," a funny thing happens on the way to the conclusion. The 811 word column devotes only 89 words to a critique of O'Neill's book versus 623 to Kelley (the other words make up the introduction and conclusion).

Murray exhausts his critique of John O'Neill in the second paragraph, which follows a "woe is us" introductory graph. Here is the full text of his supposed take-down of O'Neill:

"Mr. O'Neill's hatred for John Kerry, nurtured over three decades, oozes out of every page of 'Unfit for Command' and makes it difficult to take the book seriously. Perhaps his account of what happened on the Bay Hap River -- he says Mr. Kerry 'fled the scene' like a coward -- is more accurate than the account of Jim Rassmann, who says Mr. Kerry risked enemy fire to pull him out of the river and save his life. But I'm inclined to go with the guy in the water."

(Does every page ooze hatred? In the interest of sartorial preservation, I hope Murray had changed out of his suit before picking up the book.)

The next 623 words are devoted to an admirable dissection of Kelley's vacuous charges against the Bush family. It's an example of the kind of writing an able reporter can do when he's not toeing the official line. For example, to the charge that Laura Bush both smoked dope and sold it while she was a college student at SMU, Murray writes:

"I had a long talk with Mr. Nash [Kelley's quoted source] on the phone last week, and he says he doesn't know Laura Bush, and to his knowledge isn't friends with any of her SMU classmates. Instead, he's a longtime Austin resident whose name was passed on to Ms. Kelley by a mutual acquaintance in Washington. The author called him for help in chasing down a number of rumors she had heard about the Bushes, including that Mrs. Bush had smoked marijuana in college. Mr. Nash said he had heard that rumor, as well as a rumor that she had sold marijuana to friends.

"It was sheer gossip, says a now-distraught Mr. Nash. 'She is taking a kernel of cocktail chatter that was ill-advised and stupid on my part,' says Mr. Nash, 'and she has blown it up.'"

Unwilling or unable to maintain this level of journalism, though, Murray reverts to form in his conclusion to take a swipe at bloggers and other new media:

"Recent screw-ups at the New York Times, USA Today and now CBS News have cast a cloud over the 'mainstream' media and its ability to serve as an effective filter for consumers of news. But without such a filter, anything goes. Let the reader beware."

Well, it seems that, within the mainstream, anything went. Or, at the risk of a metaphor alert, if the filter's clogged, should we count on it to remove undesirable material?

Murray's a smart guy, and at his best he's a capable journalist. But his claim that John O'Neill is no more reliable and legitimate than the gossip-mongering Kitty Kelley is belied by his own inability to critique them equally. If O'Neill's book really is as porous as Kelley's, why the tepid response? Why the fact-based and lopsided column that easily wipes out Kelley while offering only a subjective opinion about O'Neill's claims? Why did he limit his investigative skills (making phone calls, checking sources) to Kelley's claims? Perhaps because he couldn't lay a glove on O'Neill?

By leaving the Swift Vets unscathed, Murray solidifies their claims. And through his over-reaching attempt to draw a moral equivalency between the claims of O'Neill and Kelley, Murray indeed reminds us of why the reader should beware. The herd mentality rides on, but these days its stampede isn't kicking up as much dust.

Hugh Hewitt cites recent polls showing Bush gaining strength as reason for concern that a desperate Kerry might pull a stunt of some sort.

"When Kerry tries a stunt and Lehrer let's it pass or abets it, watch the blogosphere turn on Lehrer and the PBS brand he carries. As I wrote yesterday, this is the first debate to be blogged, and Lehrer could be next week's Dan Rather with any sort of performance that smacks of a Kerry bias. The vulnerability of the PBS 'network' to internet activism is huge, given the overwhelming importance of a handful of stations that must be responsive to public outrage because of the ever-present fundraising appeals."

As always, Hugh's right on target. Remember, too, that this is the same Jim Lehrer who blinked as Bill Clinton lied to his face about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky (he misled Lehrer by using the present tense -- something he admited to Lehrer this summer).

It's not that most of us, I suspect, see Jim Lehrer as a conniving partisan determined to lie, cheat, or steal in order to harm the President. It's that his brand of liberalism -- the old, stuffy, sanctimonious form one associates with Adlai Stevenson -- allows its practitioners to remain unaware of their biases. It's a faux cerebral liberalism that could once be passed off as a high-minded, superior form of being there. That's why losing wasn't a sign of rejection; indeed, it was a sign of victory, of virtue, of truth.

But, as Hugh has also noted, today we have easy access to legions of brainy types who don't need the imprimatur of media high-priests to disseminate the results of their research far and wide. Calling a spade a spade is much easier than it used to be, as it seeing straight through to the core of those keepers of the MSM flame. It's a whole lot easier to get burned these days.

When I was in high school in the '70s, the news was filled with reports about the CIA and rogue missions. This was mostly an orchestrated effort (we can say that with more confidence post-Rathergate/Mapesgate) by big media and Senate libs to weaken the agency's ability to fight the spread of communism in the Western hemisphere.

Today, however, the term applies to an agency grown hidebound and reactionary. Robert Novak reports an extraordinary effort by CIA agent Paul R. Pillar (and he's listed in the Federal Staff Directory, as Novak points out) to undermine the Bush administration on Iraq.

"A few hours after George W. Bush dismissed a pessimistic CIA report on Iraq as 'just guessing,' the analyst who identified himself as its author told a private dinner last week of secret, unheeded warnings years ago about going to war in Iraq. This exchange leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other.

"Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, sat down Tuesday night in a large West Coast city with a select group of private citizens. He was not talking off the cuff. Relying on a multi-paged, single-spaced memorandum, Pillar said he and his colleagues concluded early in the Bush administration that military intervention in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility throughout Islam. This was not from a CIA retiree but an active senior official. (Pillar, no covert operative, is listed openly in the Federal Staff Directory.)

"For President Bush to publicly write off a CIA paper as just guessing is without precedent. For the agency to go semi-public is not only unprecedented but shocking. George Tenet's retirement as director of Central Intelligence removed the buffer between president and agency. As the new DCI, Porter Goss inherits an extraordinarily sensitive situation."

Hindrocket at Power Line says that Pillar is their old friend and Power Line blogger Deacon's old roommate, but he observes:

"[I] don't see what possible justification there could be for leaking the report after the fact--except, of course, that it was another blow in the CIA's war against the Bush administration. No wonder Bush takes information he receives from the Agency with a dose of skepticism.

Intelligence agents are becoming known less for their ability to serve a sitting administration (and far less for their knowledge of other parts of the world) than for their reactionary impulse to protect their own fiefdoms at the expense of American security. Do they have any sense of honor? Certainly Pillar seems to have lost any inhibitions or sense of professionalism.

We've read about how the KGB blackmailed top Kremlin officials and called many of the shots in Soviet policy, both foreign and domestic. Not to exaggerate, but are we reaching a stage in American statecraft in which the permanent bureaucracy, long a bane to every administration, will attempt to undermine U.S. foreign policy during a time of war -- all in the name of petty turf fights?

This imbroglio is further proof of the innovative approach the Bush team has taken to many bureaucratic problems. Step on the toes of career agents, and they kick back, even if their target is the President himself. Don Rumsfeld is despised by many survivors in the Pentagon precisely because he dared to modernize their decrepit old Cold War strategies. Powell seems (unfortunately) much more in step with career fogies at State.

This round, it's up to Porter Goss, and the President's men, to drag the CIA into the 21st century whether they like it or not. Having blown most of their predictions during the Cold War and failed utterly in the run-up to 9/11, CIA types could at least put the well-being of their country first. Anyone have a big broom?

Wilfred McClay has penned a thoughtful, lively critique of big media at the blog for Touchstone Magazine (and it's quite a good blog day in and day out, too).

"We all have known for a long time how shows like '60 Minutes' operate, and the degree to which their effectiveness depended on the sheer volume and scope of the networks' megaphones, the absence of any similarly equipped opposition, and the inability of their targets to expose CBS's manipulations, dishonest editing, and prosecutorial one-sidedness. I recall a wonderful New Yorker cartoon that made this point beautifully. A man is leaning out from the balcony of his high-rise apartment, which is surrounded by several other high-rise apartment buildings, all with similar but empty balconies. He bellows into a megaphone, "The following is an opposing point of view on a CBS editorial!" It's funny, but the humor derives from the man's utter impotence. In that sense, it was all too accurate.

"In Dan Rather's case, the coverup was far more damaging than the crime. But he had every reason to think that when he brazenly presented the source of documentary evidence for his slander of President Bush as an "unimpeachable" source, no one would be able to challenge him. He offered a naked argument from authority. And he did it with all the confidence of an experienced riverboat gambler, secure in the knowledge that no one would ever check his sleeves. After all, this tactic has worked wonderfully well in the past. And what a glorious way to end his career, breaking a story that would bring down a loathed Republican president!"

The entire piece, which isn't too long, is well worth your time.

Can't say that I'm always a fan of Washington Post columnist Colby King, but I do admire his honesty. The left-of-center columnist today writes why the Swift Boat Veterans concerns are legitimate, and it has less to do with where John Kerry was on Christmas 1968.

Like the rest of his mainstream media counterparts, King had taken the Swift Boat Vets to task in his August 28 column , calling the accusations in "Unfit for Command" the predictable "swan dive into McCarthyism."

Amazingly, after receiving countless letters from Democrat and Republican veterans explaining just why Kerry irks them, King admits he was wrong. Particularly so when former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force under Clinton, Rodney Coleman, wrote King to say:

"I vividly recall Kerry's antiwar testimony in April 1971. I was a White House fellow at the time, on a leave of absence from active duty, as were five of the 17 fellows selected. Two of them had Vietnam experience with Silver and Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts awarded for their heroism. In early April 1971, I volunteered to go to Vietnam after my year as a White House fellow. I could have very easily taken steps to forgo a tour in 'Nam, but as an Air Force captain committed to the ideals of the oath of office I took, Vietnam was the only game in town."

He continues:

"When Kerry made those critical statements of the war," Coleman wrote, "my parents, God bless them, went ballistic about their son going in harm's way. My military colleagues in the fellows program who had been there and were shot up were incensed that a so-called military man would engage in such insubordinate actions. At the time Kerry made those unfortunate remarks, America had POWs and MIAs, among them my friend, Colonel Fred Cherry, the longest-held black POW of the Vietnam War. How could a true American fighting man throw away his medals, while thousands he fought alongside of were in the midst of another example of man's inhumanity to man?"

Coleman wraps up to say, "Kerry still hasn't satisfied me and many others. . . . It's September and I'm still conflicted. Speaking for myself, it is NOT enough that he served!"

King rightly concludes that the concerns of Coleman "aren't the thoughts of a Republican-funded, right-wing, over-the-top Swift boat veteran."

Sunday's Daily Telegraph is reporting that Syrian president Bashir al-Asad has harbored "about 12" mid-level Iraqi nuclear scientists and their families since before the fall of Saddam's regime. They were sent to Iraq and now Asad believes they've become a liability in his effort to dodge American wrath for his failure to stop terrorists from crossing the Syrian border into Iraq, where they attack Coalition and Iraqi forces.

According to the Telegraph:

"The Iraqis, who brought with them CDs crammed with research data on Saddam's nuclear programme, were given new identities, including Syrian citizenship papers and falsified birth, education and health certificates. Since then they have been hidden away at a secret Syrian military installation where they have been conducting research on behalf of their hosts.

"Growing political concern in Washington about Syria's undeclared weapons of mass destruction programmes, however, has prompted President Asad to reconsider harbouring the Iraqis."

"American intelligence officials are concerned that Syria is secretly working on a number of WMD programmes.

"They have also uncovered evidence that Damascus has acquired a number of gas centrifuges - probably from North Korea - that can be used to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb."

And: "Under the terms of the deal President Asad offered the Iranians, the Iraqi scientists and their families would be transferred to Teheran together with a small amount of essential materials. The Iraqi team would then assist Iranian scientists to develop a nuclear weapon.

"Apart from paying the relocation expenses, President Asad also wants the Iranians to agree to share the results of their atomic weapons research with Damascus."

A nuclear Syria, a nuclear Iran? This collusion cannot stand. And with the help of Iraqi nuclear scientists -- creatures the left in America deems mythical?

Find the scientists and bring them to justice, either via trial or through giving them jobs and new identities in the West. I don't know enough about their plight, their guilt, or their levels of expertise to say what would work best, but they can't be allowed to sell their knowledge to the highest bidder, especially in Teheran or Damascus.

Power Line links to superb a piece by William Kristol titled, aptly, Disgraceful. Hindrocket cites and comments on Kristol's take-down of Kerry for his rude, and potentially damaging, comments about Prime Minister Allawi's visit, so I'll note Kristol's hit on Kofi Annan's own disgraceful performance:

Kristol: "On Tuesday, President Bush spoke to the United Nations General Assembly. Senator Kerry decided not to say anything supportive of the president as he made the American case to the 'international community.' Nor did he simply campaign that day on other issues. No. Less than an hour after President Bush finished speaking in New York, Kerry was criticizing his remarks in Jacksonville, Florida: 'At the United Nations today, the president failed to level with the world's leaders. Moments after Kofi Annan, the secretary general, talked about the difficulties in Iraq, the president of the United States stood before a stony-faced body and barely talked about the realities at all of Iraq. . . . He does not have the credibility to lead the world.'"

More: "Then Kerry was asked about Kofi Annan's description of the war in Iraq as an 'illegal' invasion. Kerry answered: 'I don't know what the law, the legalities are that he's referring to. I don't know.' So the U.S. government is accused of breaking international law, and Kerry chooses not to defend his country against the charge, or to label it ridiculous or offensive. He is agnostic.

"Then Kerry continued: 'Well, let me say this to all of you: That underscores what I am saying. If the leader of the United Nations is at odds with the legality, and we're not working at getting over that hurdle and bringing people to the table, as I said in my speech yesterday, it's imperative to be able to build international cooperation.' It's our fault that the U.N. is doing almost nothing to help in Iraq. After all, according to Kerry, 'Kofi Annan offered the help of the United Nations months ago. This president chose to go the other way.'

"Leave aside the rewriting of history going on here. The president of the United States had just appealed for help from the United Nations and its member states to ensure that elections go forward in Iraq. Kerry could have reinforced that appeal for help with his own, thereby making it a bipartisan request. He chose instead to give the U.N., France, Germany, and everyone else an excuse to do nothing over these next crucial five weeks, with voter registration scheduled to begin November 1. If other nations prefer not to help the United States, the Democratic presidential candidate has given them his blessing."

And John Kerry expects us to take seriously his pledge that the U.N., France, and Germany wouldn't run American foreign policy under his administration? After all, this is the same Kofi Annan who turned a blind eye -- or worse, actively covered up -- the well-documented corruption of the oil-for-food program in Saddam's Iraq.

If you haven't already read it, don't miss Claudia Rosett's latest on Kofi's corruption, this time with a simple formula: baby food. As in stealing money meant for feeding babies in order to line the pockets of cronies -- and of course Kofi's buddy Saddam. What does Kofi's other buddy, Kerry, think of that?

Then again, and Victor Hanson wrote the other day, who really cares about the U.N. any more? It's a multilateral disaster, as David Brooks writes this morning. I guess only an elite could see its purpose, beyond providing jobs and cover for elites.

We've written here often about the ongoing decline of cultural institutions long run by self-righteous early-Boomers. John Kerry's own Vietnam quagmire, the attacks he's suffered from the Swift Vets, and of course Rathergate, which may be seen in generational terms, all point to an ongoing shift of power. Or, as I wrote the other day, a wresting of the torch from the older folks.

So it's worth noting that Victor Davis Hanson has written another sophisticated look at this collapse in "The Fall: A Bankrupt Generation is Fading Away." And it's flattering to see that great minds agree with folks you know and, at times even, with your own ideas. Most notably, Hanson cites the Oz theme as the means some bloggers, most notably our own Wilfred McClay, have explained Rathergate and the larger revolution of which it's a part.

"Commentators have envisioned Rather's fall as symbolic of a 'paradigm shift' and the 'end of the era' — an event that has crystallized the much larger and ongoing demise of the old establishment media. Allegories from the French Revolution and the emperor without any clothes to the curtain scene in The Wizard of Oz have been evoked to illustrate Rather's dilemma and the hypocrisy of all that went before. We have come a long way since the 1960s: The once-revolutionary pigs taking over the manor are now bloated and strutting on two legs as they feast on silver inside the farmhouse."

Few commentators in any medium have a keener eye for elite blather than Hanson, who nails their pedestrian sophistry that one time passed for sophistication:

"Elites may lament that someone who did not go to the Columbia School of Journalism can affect more readers than the Times, but instead of the usual aristocratic snarls they should ask themselves how and why that came about — and why, for example, watching a PBS documentary by Bill Moyers or listening to Garrison Keillor on NPR is now to endure a publicly subsidized extension of their silly rants at lectures and in op-eds."

And Hanson calls the left out for it's moral nihilism that allows them to implement a "end justifies the means" approach to the most vexing problems of our times. This leads, inevitably, to chaos and decline. No generation, no matter how strong in numbers or headstrong, can simply change the rules of civilization. No group, regardless of their wealth or self-proclaimed sophistication, can beat into submission the citizens of a huge, rich, and free republic that rests on an educated middle class.

What Hanson, McClay, and others celebrate, in some sense, is the triumph of middle class virtues over upper class vanities. Again Hanson:

"Those who profess to be Democrats are reaching historically low numbers. Many prominent Democrats are hypocrites: Feminists Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton were uncouth womanizers; the principled war critic Senator Byrd cut his teeth in the Klan; and the self-proclaimed moralists Senators Harkin and Kennedy have both been caught in postmodern problems with the truth. Being rich and a lawyer helps too. Most prominent Democrats and their enablers are either lawyers or multimillionaires, and now often both. Running a hardware store may explain your Republicanism; inheriting the profits from a chain of 1,000 hardware franchises will likely make you a new Democrat."

Other writers have addressed this truth lately, including Karl Zinsmeister in the WSJ earlier this month. His conclusion:

"So we're in an interesting new era. The right has become a thinking party, with rich intellectual resources, that is simultaneously dead set against political elitism and cultural snobbery. Conservatism has laid claim to America's quiet but multitudinous middle class. And during the same period, the left has come to dominate among the overclass and underclass that bracket the conservative middle.

"As a result, the old way of thinking about U.S. politics--little-guy Democrats vs. wealthy Republicans--is about as accurate and relevant today as a 1930 weather forecast. New fronts have moved in. Expect some major squalls ahead."

I also recommend Daniel Henninger's columns in both yesterday's WSJ and in the paper's August 13 edition. In both he contrasts the suffocating elitism of the left with the common-man conservatism that increasingly rules the country. For the latter, the New Media represent a means to a virtuous end -- something I think more and more people intuit and believe.

Today's Fort Worth Star-Telegram's story about Bill Burkett is highlighted at Drudge because Burkett claims that Joe Lockhart asked him for the documents. You'll recall that Lockhart told the AP earlier this week that he didn't recall discussing the TANG documents with Burkett, a tale that seemed unbelievable at the time since they were put in contact with one another by discredited (and scapegoated) CBS producer Mary Mapes as she produced the "60 Minutes" episode on -- what else -- TANG documents. Of course, as Polipundit notes, Lockhart could release his phone records to let us see whether or not that call really lasted only four minutes.

According to the Star-Telegram: "Burkett, a West Texas rancher and known critic of Bush, denied that his work with CBS was done at the behest of Democrat John Kerry's presidential campaign.

"He said, however, that during the meeting in which he gave the documents to CBS, he was also told by a producer that his phone number would be passed on to Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart.

"'I was absolutely and clearly told that that was as far as anyone could go without crossing the line of [journalistic] ethics,' Burkett said.

"During a single phone conversation with Lockhart, Burkett said he suggested a 'couple of concepts on what I thought [Kerry] had to do' to beat Bush. In return, he said, Lockhart tried to 'convince me as to why I should give them the documents [emphasis added].'

"According to the Associated Press, Lockhart said he listened to some campaign advice from Burkett for a few minutes and does not recall talking about Bush's National Guard records."

This helps explain Joe Lockhart's decision to admit his contact with Mary Mapes, something I addressed this past Tuesday. Lockhart was attempting, Clinton-style -- to get in front of the story, frame it, and create a situation in which his word would be put up against that of the discredited Burkett.

But CBS's willingness to use Burkett, who has a history of mental illness, didn't end with their outing him as a source, something Burkett says they promised never to do.

Earlier in today's Star-Telegram story, Burkett joins the chorus of critics charging CBS, and Dan Rather, with slanting the story -- this time against their "unimpeachable" source: "Burkett said he agreed to a taped interview with Rather on Monday as suspicion about the documents mounted. Key portions of the interview were never aired, he said.

"'He snipped it apart to cover them,' he said. 'That's all that that evening news was -- to find a fall guy. And it was me.

"'By his action and inaction, Dan Rather ruined my reputation in front of 70 million people.'"

The important point here isn't that Burkett had no reputation to ruin -- his own mad web postings had seen to that. It's that CBS, and Rather, allowed a troubled man to provide them with a story damaging to Bush, ran with the story while turning a blind eye to its obvious weaknesses, and then hung him out to dry as soon as the tale imploded.

It's richly ironic, then, that Mary Mapes, who was so eager to use Burkett to harm the President, joins him in the land of discredited scapegoats. And since Burkett is already retired, she gets to face the firing squad all alone.

Power Line critiques an AP story that, if not mendacious this round, demonstrates anew the wire service's anti-Bush bias.

Regarding Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's speech to a joint session of Congress, the AP wrote:

"In an appearance that President Bush's advisers hoped would ease American voters' doubts about the troubled campaign in Iraq, Allawi told a joint meeting of Congress... "

And: "Allawi sought to tie the struggle in Iraq to the larger fight against global terrorism, echoing one of Bush's campaign themes.

After his address, Allawi was heading to the White House for a meeting with President Bush, where the two leaders were to assert from the White House Rose Garden that progress is being made and the future is bright in Iraq."

And concluded: "An assessment of Iraq's future put together recently by U.S. intelligence officials spoke of possibilities ranging from tenuous stability to civil war, and even some senators in Bush's Republican Party have said there is a need for more candid talk from the White House."

As Hindrocket notes, this implies collusion with the Bush campaign and makes Allawi's appearance appear to be little more than a campaign stop by the administration. But of course, we've already learned that, for many modern liberals, Iraqi lives are expendible.

With the death toll in Iraq mounting, and the barbarous beheading of Americans occuring again, readers new to Democracy Project might gain some insight from a two-part blog written by John Agresto and posted here in August. We've also received a fair number of visits from people performing searches for Prof. Agresto. His blog was originally delievered as a commencement address at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, in May.

The first half is here; the second half here.

From Iraq the Model comes an essay by Joseph Ghougassian, who formerly served as US Ambassador to Qatar and CPA Advisor in Iraq. It addresses Kofi Annan's absurd, cynical, and harmful criticism of the Iraq war. I'm not sure if the English below is the ambassador's or the blogger's translation, as there are some grammatical infelicities; the meaning of the words, however, is crystal clear.

Key points:

"Annan calling the war 'illegal' at this point in time has many significant and troubling consequences. The logical inferences are such that if I was to defend Saddam Hussein or for that matter any of the 60 held prisoners belonging to his regime, I would quote Annan and argue that the removal from power of these individuals was illegal; the holding them in custody is illegal; the formation of the tribunal looking into their prior activities is illegal. The declarations made by Saddam that he is currently the legitimate President of Iraq would be considered valid. In brief, I would list Annan as my star witness in defense of Saddam."

And: "Kofi Annan's declaration of the war in Iraq by the US led coalition and its logical consequence of occupation as 'illegal' is ill timed and no more useful in bringing peace than Senator John Kerry's assertions that the US should have not prosecuted the war against Saddam Hussein. Annan and Kerry are playing with the life [sic] of million [sic] of Iraqi people and with the life [sic] of thousands of Americans and that of others in Iraq. This is not the time to demoralize our forces, nor is it prudent to make statements that will be interpreted by the terrorists as a justification to pursue their criminal ends in Iraq as the case happened when the President of the Philippines caved in to the demands of the terrorists by withdrawing her troops from Iraq."

Victor Hanson addresses the corrupt institution Annan leads, the U.N., in today's WSJ (free). Hanson writes with a sense of moral outrage, as he should, but beneath that lies a recognition that, in his words, "Our own problems with the U.N. should now be viewed in a context of ongoing radical change here in the United States, as all theprevious liberal assumptions of the past decades undergo scrutiiny in our post 9/11 world. There are no longer any sacred cows in the eyes of the American public."

One hopes his last sentence is correct upon reading Dan Pipe's "The Islamic States of America?"

"The hardest thing for Westerners to understand is not that a war with militant Islam is underway but that the nature of the enemy's ultimate goal. That goal is to apply the Islamic law (the Shari‘a) globally. In U.S. terms, it intends to replace the Constitution with the Qur'an.

"This aspiration is so remote and far-fetched to many non-Muslims, it elicits more guffaws than apprehension. Of course, that used to be the same reaction in Europe, and now it's become widely accepted that, in Bernard Lewis' words, 'Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.'" (The Lewis link is to an interview, published today in German, by Die Welt.)

Pipes writes of the aspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood -- the Islamization of America. It's a chilling article in which Pipes writes: "This Brotherhood approach is in keeping with my observation that the greater Islamist threat to the West is not violence – flattening buildings, bombing railroad stations and nightclubs, seizing theaters and schools – but the peaceful, legal growth of power through education, the law, the media, and the political system."

Another worthwhile read is (via Power Line) Ralph Peters's Dead Soldiers, which supports the arguments of Ambassador Ghougassian and begins with these blunt words:

"IMAGINE if, in the presiden tial election of 1944, the can didate opposing FDR had in sisted that we were losing the Second World War and that, if elected, he would begin to withdraw American troops from Europe and the Pacific. We would have called it treason. And we would have been right. In WWII, broadcasts from Tokyo Rose in Japan and from Axis Sally in Germany warned our troops that their lives were being squandered in vain, that they were dying for big business and 'the Jew' Roosevelt. Today, we have a presidential candidate, the conscienceless Sen. John Kerry, doing the work of the enemy propagandists of yesteryear. Is there nothing Kerry won't say to win the election? Is there no position he won't change? Doesn't he care anything for the sacrifices of our troops in Iraq? And if he does care about our soldiers and Marines, why is he broadcasting remarks that insist — against all hard evidence — that the terrorists are winning?"

Finally, also via Power Line, Laura Ingram reaches the same conclusions as Hanson about the American public's disgust with Europe and the U.N., both of which still serve as models for culture and (in)action on the left. Her free advice to the Kerry camp:

"If John Kerry wants to turn this election around, he has got to accept the fact that Americans see no reason to trust the rest of the world. Until he and the other Democrats show that they will stand up to anti-Americanism, Zell Miller will remain a hero, and the Republicans will keep getting big cheers for their applause lines about 'not outsourcing our foreign policy' and 'not getting a permission slip from the U.N.' And unless Kerry turns this thing around very quickly, the America-bashers around the world will help put George Bush right back into the White House."

PoliPundit.com has some thoughts on the pessimism of modern liberals, and the optimism of today's conservatives, that echo my comments (and those of Anne Applebaum) below:

"Liberals weren’t always pessimistic. FDR, Truman, Kennedy and LBJ were optimists who had big ideas. In his inaugural speech, FDR said, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Other Democrat presidents similarly exuded hope and optimism. Meanwhile, conservatives were reduced to darkly muttering about things like the ballooning budget deficit.

"Then came Vietnam. Post-Vietnam Democrats are negativist cynics. In their eyes, America can do no good and the world is a depressing place. The ’70s solidified these liberal beliefs. The liberals of today refer constantly to Vietnam and Watergate because those moments define today’s liberalism.

"Meanwhile, conservatives became the Morning in America party. Reagan won the Cold War and defeated recession. Bush 41 prevailed effortlessly in Iraq. Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America implemented much-needed reforms. Conservatives today have big ideas and are confident they can implement them."

Rathergate, as Anne Applebaum writes this morning, marks the "final collapse of network television's dominance over the news." Like her, I "am unable to conjure up a single shred of nostalgia for the once-fabled network evening news programs." Why? Because, like Applebaum, I'm a late-Boomer (and, some might say, late-bloomer as well). There's a world of difference in the two camps of kids born pre- and post-1960, about which I've written before.

Please forgive the self-reference, but I think that, over the past several months, the torch of an older generation is not so much being passed as wrested. In the blog linked to above, I wrote:

"I was a child in the '60s and not a child of the '60s, so perhaps my views are colored by my late-Boomer birth date. But the Boomers born in the immediate post-war period, or at least those who are now in positions of influence in Washington, are for my money the most reactionary generation in American history. All things -- history, literature, art, religion -- must be viewed through the lenses of youth -- their youth (not yours or anyone else's). But that youth, as our rising medical bills and sagging bodies show, was 30 or more years ago."

This morning, Applebaum describes something similar, using Rathergate as her reference point:

"What became clear, as the story wound down to the inevitable apology on Monday night, was that Rather and his fellow network newsmen are stuck in a Vietnam/Watergate-era time warp. Most of us regard network anchors as faintly pompous talking heads, people who read other people's prose off teleprompters. But the anchors, rather extraordinarily, still regard themselves as the conscience of the nation. They aren't mere 'journalists' who have to use authentic documents to prove their allegations but rather people whose fame and large paychecks and unchallenged power entitle them to some kind of automatic credibility, even if their documents are fake."

We're pleased to have many new readers, and for those who haven't already read Wilfred McClay's blog on this topic, "The Passing of an Era?" offers a thoughtful look at the ongoing changing of the guard.

If you Google "honest Joe/Joseph Lockhart," you get a big fat zero. Of course, that doesn't prove he's conniving, or that he has ulterior motives for acting as he does.

But as Rathergate goes into round three (discovery, denial, partial admission), one does have to ask: What motivated famed political operative and Clintonian spin doctor Joe Lockhart to voluntarily come clean with the goods, or at least some of them, regarding the now-public fact that he acted in cahoots with CBS producer Mary Mapes? As chronicled by numerous news outlets, Mapes called Lockhart to tip him off about the TANG story -- a nice way of getting the dirt on President Bush, if only it'd been true. But why repay this back-alley favor by outing her as a DNC mole deep in the bowels of CBS News?

Photos of Lockhart I've seen on the web don't reveal any sign of torture; no journalist has broken a story implicating anyone with successfully blackmailing or bribing him. So what's up, Joe?

Most likely, it's a textbook case of the Clinton damage control machine -- the world's most experienced -- kicking back into full gear. Lockhart, after all, has sufficient connections to be receive personal tips on explosive stories from CBS News bigs -- and before their story breaks. Even the best journalists should wish for such a greased line to insiders. It makes Bob Novak look positively hermitic.

So Lockhart, who's been around this block many times, occupies rarified space even as Beltway angels are measured. This covers his backside as the story unfolds -- it's called "getting out in front of the story" -- and allows him to frame it in a way most flattering, or least damaging, to himself and his kin.

But this implies that the other shoe remains suspended, ready to drop on poor Mary Mapes's head, but not on Joe's. If telling the world you've chatted with CBS about the most explosive con job (that would be by CBS, by the way, not poor Bill Burkett) in memory, one that sought to bring down a sitting president, is the lighter side of the story, what will the remainder reveal? That the DNC (or Dems in general) has received such tips from Mapes and her media allies for years? That Kerry himself knew, or at least was in a position to know, all about it? That the Dems coordinated their "Fortunate Son" attack with Mapes and others at CBS?

To boot, Lockhart is nothing if not a survivor. After all, he both coached and learned from the greatest political survivor in memory, Bill Clinton. Is it too much to think that Mary Mapes wasn't the only media big who dialed him up this past month, perhaps with information considerably more vital to his own future than anything Mapes could offer? A Howard Kurtz or Michael Dobbs, the WaPo's dynamic duo, might just have at their disposal information potentially so damaging that quick action was required by Lockhart to protect himself from the coming lethal fall-out. In that case, the future of the Kerry campaign would be the least of his worries, and Mary Mapes's sacrifice of no greater significance than stepping on a ant on the way to fetch the morning papers.

What are Joe Lockhart's motives? Therein lies the key to this story.

Update: Wizbang, citing a source who is "extremely reliable BUT not exactly in the inner circle," reports that CBS News president Heyward plan to issue a statement about the Lockhart connection. No details known.

The papers, airwaves, and Internet are filled with news and commentary on Rathergate's latest (but not final) chapter. But I want to begin with a story I heard yesterday afternoon on NPR, wherein correspondent Neda Ulaby interviewed Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute and Marvin Kalb of Harvard's Shorenstein Center (and former Edward R. Murrow Professor of Press and Public Policy -- a nice touch to the story).

Kalb is often trotted out to offer wise-man-style commentary on matters of interest so grave that mere journalists can't be relied upon to grasp them, much less explain their significance to an ignorant public. With brow perpetually furrowed (like going on the air sans jacket, it shows you're serious and working hard in the peoples' interest), he's portrayed as one of the straight men of network news.

His explanation of his former colleague Dan's actions? Why, they're all after the story, of course, and at break-neck speed. Like Sandy Berger stuffing his pants with secret documents (that just happen to contain information damaging to the Clinton administration's reputation), Cowboy Dan just got a little SLOPPY with his work:

Kalb: "People are under p-h-e-n-o-m-e-n-a-l pressure to get a story, to get it fast, to get it first, to get it out on the air, to let it be known to alllllll of the bloggers in the world that CBS was two-tenths of one second faster in getting the story on the air than was NBC. This is silly."

Indeed it is. In fact, that's about the silliest explanation I've heard thus far. And take note of the sideways slap at bloggers, who, Kalb implies, are responsible for forcing CBS to rush to air with fake documents in order to damage the president, all the while working in cahoots with the DNC.

Since when did bloggers become concerned with which network wins the race for breaking news? What concerned bloggers, as Kalb knows, was the accuracy of Rather's report, not the speed with which he broke it.

Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute naturally understands the true importance of the story, and he's concerned that journalists will be scared away by Dan's little problem. At the end of the NPR broadcast, Poynter noted that there's "blood in the water," "sharks out in the water," but that reporters must "continue to cover this story of President Bush and his National Guard duty." To which correspondent Ulaby intoned: "That may be difficult in a story that has been so profoundly politicized."

So there you have it -- it's the right that has politicized things here, and by doing so they've (i.e., the sharks) made it dangerous for decent, hard-working journalists, none of whom have an agenda, to get to the real task at hand, which is covering the non-story raised by fake documents procured by a man with a history of mental illness and mendacity. The object of the story, bringing down a sitting president by any means necessary, remains in tact. What's not to understand?

These collective hissy fits aren't the first we've heard, and the petulance so clear here is bound to spread throughout the profession. After all, they all drink from the same trough.

This morning's WSJ (free) says that CBS had better "get to the bottom" of Rather's story itself. That's excellent advice, since it places the emphasis where it needs to be -- on Dan Rather and team -- rather than on the purported story.

USA today has stories here and here that give Burkett ample rope to continue his public hanging, including his make-believe friends George Conn and Lucy Ramirez. I had make-believe friends once, but it was a long, long time ago in a town far away, and I can honestly say I haven't spoken to them in decades.

The second story sited above details the contacts between CBS and the DNC, as does this morning's NYT. This collusion, long-suspected or, perhaps better, assumed by what we'll call the sentient crowd, is of course at the heart of the story and explains the continued stone-walling and sloppy (that word again!) excuse-making from the ancien regime.

According to the Times: "Joe Lockhart, a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry, acknowledged today that he had talked to Mr. Burkett. He said he had done so at the behest of a CBS producer [Mary Mapes], who had promised to help Mr. Burkett, an ardent Bush opponent, relay some campaign advice. Mr. Lockhart said there was no connection between the campaign and the memos."

USA Today reports the scene in greater detail:

"Lockhart, the former press secretary to President Clinton, said a producer talked to him about the '60 Minutes' program a few days before it aired on Sept. 8. She gave Lockhart a telephone number and asked him to call Bill Burkett, a former Texas National Guard officer who gave CBS the documents. Lockhart couldn't recall the producer's name. But CBS said Monday night that it would examine the role of producer Mary Mapes in passing the name to Lockhart.

"Burkett told USA TODAY that he had agreed to turn over the documents to CBS if the network would arrange a conversation with the Kerry campaign [emphasis added].

"The network's effort to place Burkett in contact with a top Democratic official raises ethical questions about CBS' handling of material potentially damaging to the Republican president in the midst of an election. This 'poses a real danger to the potential credibility ... of a news organization,' said Aly Colón, a news ethicist at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

"'At Burkett's request, we gave his (telephone) number to the campaign,' said Betsy West, senior CBS News vice president.

"CBS would not discuss the propriety of the network serving as a conduit between Burkett and the Kerry campaign. 'It was not part of any deal' to obtain the documents, West said, declining to elaborate.

But Burkett said Monday that his contact with Lockhart was indeed part of an 'understanding' with CBS. Burkett said his interest in contacting the campaign was to offer advice in responding to Republican criticisms about Kerry's Vietnam service. It had nothing to do with the documents, he said.

"'My interest was to get the attention of the national (campaign) to defend against the ... attacks,' Burkett said, adding that he also talked to former Georgia senator Max Cleland and Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean during the past 45 days. 'Neither the Democratic Party or the Kerry campaign had anything to do with the documents,' he said.

CBS's web site reports that Joe Lockhart can't recall what he discussed with Burkett, but it sure wasn't about those records or the Guard: "Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart said he had spoken to Burkett at the request of Mary Mapes, producer for the story. But Lockhart said he did not recall speaking about the National Guard to Burkett, and ended the call after taking a few minutes of campaign advice."

Must've been asking Burkett for some good bbq joints around there.

More must-reads this morning include: John Podhoretz, Power Line, and Allah Pundit, Paul at Wizbang, and Hugh Hewitt.

In a time of significant cultural and intellectual divides, Bradford Wilson, associate director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, sends word of his Constitution Day Address (PDF). Here's a short excerpt of the address, which was delivered earlier this month,

"I see in the restoration of the study of liberal constitutionalism exemplified by the Constitution of the United States the only realistic path back to a truly liberating education. For it is through that study that we recover the American principles of public right that stand as stumbling blocks to the postmodernist ethos which has taken over the humanities and much of the social sciences. A new attention to the American Founding, and to the Western philosophical and religious traditions without which the new American nation could not have been imagined, is an antidote to the relativism, nihilism, and identity politics that have effectively closed the doors to Plato’s Academy.

"Questions that are perennial features of the human condition – the questions of how we should live, of the relationship between one’s status as a human being like other human beings and one’s status as a citizen of a particular political order, of the nature of the human and of the divine – these questions are no longer evident in the life of most American universities. If a student seriously engages these questions, particularly by grappling with the profound works of the Western tradition, it is a stroke of great good fortune rather than a consequence of institutional intent and design."

Brad's concerns echo those voiced by Wilfred McClay last week. Dan Rather might want to enroll in a refresher course.

The Big Trunk at Power Line has a cautionary email this morning regarding recent moves by Sumner Redstone to sell some of his Viacom stock. In a word: Don't jump to conclusions over this, lest you misinterpret Redstone's action and give the blogosphere a black eye in the process. He quotes the email of a reader who cautions:

"Hopefully you guys won't fall for this b/s story. Perhaps you are the sole voice of the blogosphere that can try to stop this b/s story that Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom sold 300,000 plus shares of stock with a link to an SEC filing to prove it.

"What they are seeing is a paper transaction of a stock option being exercised, which is the paper sale of some shares at $35 to cover the lower cost ($15) of the option shares. There was no actual sale of shares, no cash gain, and Redstone will not have to pay taxes as a result of exercising his stock option, which is a common practice in corporate America. The reason for the SEC filing is that he is on the Board of Directors of Viacom..."

Professor Bainbridge also offers an explanation for the transaction that rests on business sense rather than any ostensible loss of faith in Viacom.

Should bloggers misinterpret Redstone's actions as a sign that he's bailing out of CBS, which Viacom owns, big media will do all they can to discredit bloggers en masse. Although ABC and the WaPo have produced excellent stories on Rathergate, we can be certain that they're unhappy about having to play catch-up to the pajamas brigades. For that reason, bloggers must be bold when necessary, but must also practice a better brand of commentary and, at times, journalism. The last thing the blogosphere should do is to follow big media's example by creating our own brand of intellectual and moral myopia.

I was out of town over the weekend, so I'm late in acknowledging the plaudits our own Wilfred McClay received on Friday when his work on this blog was touted by James Taranto in Best of the Web Today (scroll about half-way down).

I also want to welcome our new readers from OpinionJournal, Mark Shea's Blog, Touchstone Magazine's Mere Comments section, and other sources who've linked to our work of late. Please stop by often and tell your friends about us.

Via Power Line, the Wash Times's Bill Sammon writes that the White House is voicing anger at CBS for their continued stonewalling on Rathergate. WH spokesman Scott McClellan:

"[F]ired back at Mr. Rather for challenging the president to 'answer the questions' raised in his widely discredited report, which aired Sept. 8 on '60 Minutes II.' The anchorman told an interviewer on Tuesday that such presidential candor would help Bush win re-election.
"'It's always best for journalists to stick to reporting the facts and not try to dispense campaign advice,' Mr. McClellan said."

Of course, that's premised upon a reporter's decision to deal with facts rather than faked documents. And they took note that CBS source Marion Knox's biases weren't stated by Rather, as they should have been:

"White House aides were furious that Mr. Rather did not disclose to viewers that Mrs. Knox told the Dallas Morning News that she opposed the president's re-election, calling him 'unfit for office' and 'selected, not elected.' Bush advisers were also incredulous that Mr. Rather gave such credence to a woman who openly admitted that much of what she was telling the newsman was 'conjecture' and 'gossip.'"

Bernard Goldberg penned an op-ed in today's WSJ recalling his objections to Rather and CBS. I found the piece weak, not because I disagreed with it, but because it contained nothing new. He does note that it's increasingly likely that the source (i.e. Burkett) worked with the Kerry campaign or the DNC and that CBS's reputation is toast; that's obvious, but it's probably good to see it in the WSJ, both because of the paper's weight and because many of its older readers are probably not on the Net.

Jonah Goldberg (via RCP) nails another weakness in Dan's position: "Here's the problem: Rather isn't standing up to partisan political forces. Indeed, among the forces that have been most energetic in making Rather look ridiculous are the Washington Post and ABC News. The New York Times and NPR haven't been as good, but they have hardly ignored the fact that Rather shot himself in the foot and kept holding down the trigger as he worked his way up his body. Indeed, even CBS News has adopted the position that the memos are fakes but the story is true."

And, echoing Wilfred McClay's blog from yesterday, Goldberg says:

"Indeed, Rather's thinking has become axiomatic: Good reporting offends conservatives. I am a good reporter. Therefore, anyone who objects to my work is a conservative. And, of course, conservative objections are, by definition, illegitimate objections. After all, liberal media bias is a myth.

"The fact is, good reporting isn't liberal or conservative - though it can be either. What good reporting does is expose those who would lie for a 'higher truth.' Which, ironically, is why so much of the criticism of Rather is not really 'partisan' at all - it's good reporting."

The Manchester Union-Leader (also via RCP) picks up the nihilism of Rather's defense with the title of its editorial: "In Rather’s World, Reality Is What Dan Says It Is."

Prestopundit has a typically excellent pile of links to Rathergate stories from all over (and welcome Presto readers!), including Van Os for the Supreme Court (of Texas), a rather bizzare and hyper-partisan page by Bill Burkett's attorney, David Van Os. There you'll learn that, "Getting David Van Os elected to the Texas Supreme Court is not just about winning one race. It is about charging straight at the heart of Karl Rove's master plan." Master Karl, what's the frequency?

UPDATE: Michael Hedges of the Houston Chronicle further uncovers Bill Burkett's past:

"Even Burkett has admitted some of his allegations are false.

"Burkett wrote a long indictment against Bush for a Web site in 2003 in which he said he personally was ordered to 'alter personnel records of George W. Bush.' In that article, Burkett said that when he refused he was sent to Panama as punishment, where he contracted a disabling disease.

"But when asked about that charge by the Houston Chronicle in February, Burkett said, 'That statement was not accurate, that is overstated.'"

And: "If Burkett is the source of the CBS documents he must have recently obtained them. In earlier interviews, he described years of fruitless searching.

"One month ago, in an essay posted on a progressive Web site, Burkett theorized that Killian would have been a likely person to know more about Bush's service. But, he conceded, 'I have found no documentation from LTC Killian's hand or staff that indicate that this unit was involved in any complicit way to ... cover for the failures of 1Lt. Bush ... ' Burkett went on to say, 'On the contrary, LTC Killian's remarks are rare.'"

He also compared Bush to Hitler:

"In an article Burkett wrote for the Internet last year he compared Bush to Hitler and Napoleon as one of "the three small men" who sought to rule through tyranny. 'Three small men who wanted to conquer and vanquish,' Burkett wrote. Burkett confirmed authorship of that article in the February Chronicle interview."

[Note: The following blog is by Wilfred McClay, a board member of Democracy Project and the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities and professor of history at the University of Tennesse at Chattanooga.]

Whenever a cultural elite is on its way down, there is a Wizard of Oz moment, when the curtain is parted, and the stern claims of authority that have always been heeded in the past are revealed to be the empty, self-protective posturing of an old liar.

It’s been said, rightly, that in insisting upon the authenticity (or “accuracy”) of the forged documents in its possession, CBS is sacrificing truth and reputation for self-protection. But even such a massively costly strategy is risky, since the self-protection will hold only so long as there is no independent way of verifying the documents’ source. And now, with the emergence of Bill Burkett as the likely source, or conduit, for the very documents that formed the core of CBS News’s latest attack on President Bush, CBS is in danger of having sacrificed all three.

Others will follow up the political and legal implications of all this, including the relationship (if any) of Mr. Burkett to the DNC and the Kerry campaign. But I want to make a larger cultural point, about what this incident, and this presidential campaign, tell us about the parlous state of the Democratic party, and of mainstream American liberalism.

It is not just that CBS should have been more skeptical of Burkett, as a committed political activist who has a long and well-documented record of grievances against George Bush. It’s something far worse. With the addition of Burkett to the picture, we come face to face with the dismaying fact that Dan Rather and his colleagues, who sit at the pinnacle of the American liberal establishment, have been willing to embrace the word, and the world-picture, of a political lunatic. Anyone who doubts this characterization of Burkett, who proudly claims, among other things, to have been a consultant for Fahrenheit 9/11, should consult Prestopundit, which is all over this aspect of the story, and provides link after link to writings by and about Burkett, including articles appearing earlier this year in the New York Times and Boston Globe. Ace of Spades further confirms this picture of Burkett.

What we’re seeing is the bitter fruit of an unchecked taste for false but emotionally satisfying (and politically useful) extremism on the left. I won’t deny for a second that the right has sometimes been prone to the same thing, and may be in danger eventually of creating its own ideological echo chambers. But that is not where the problem is right now. When writers like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman made the claim that the mere factual inaccuracy of Fahrenheit does nothing to vitiate its “essential” truth---and he was but one of many to make similar endorsements---one caught a glimpse of a pathology that has plagued the Left for a long time now, from the “true lies” of Tawana Brawley (whose advocate, Al Sharpton, was a Democratic presidential candidate), to the wild accusations of Howard Dean, and now to the “fake but accurate” fabrications of CBS News.

In one sense, it is simply the latest change to be rung on the oldest of moral temptations, a willingness to say that the end justifies the means. But, as those of us who work in the academy know, the problem goes much deeper, to a comprehensive picture of the world in which the most delusionary visions of political reality enjoy a special indulgence.

Which is where the comparison of Michael Moore Politics to pornography seems to me entirely apposite. Reasonable people can differ about whether or not pornography is always and everywhere a vice. But no one can doubt that when men become addicted to it, to the point where it is not merely the indulgence of a harmless fantasy but a substitute for reality---indeed, regard it as in some sense, a “higher” reality, one more in tune with their deepest sense of their own justified “needs”---it is a debasing, coarsening, and debilitating thing, which renders its consumer pathetic, disoriented, and sometimes even dangerous. It is death to all genuine relationships with other people in the real world.

So with political pornography. It is death to genuine political debate, which is why the academic world, the San Fernando Valley of political pornography, and the most ideologically uniform example of “diversity” that the world has ever known, is so utterly moribund as a source of fresh ideas about the direction of this country.

I frankly doubt whether Dan Rather actually shares the perfervid vision of a Bill Burkett or a Michael Moore. But it may be worse, far worse, to play around with such things, and imply that they present a vision of things that is “true” in spite of its reliance on falsity and fakery. Such playing-around not only exploits people who are too immature or emotionally crippled to face reality. Even worse, it utterly cripples those elements of the democratic Left that are absolutely necessary to the restoration of a healthy political dialogue in this country. Perhaps the coming debacle of this presidential election, and the humiliation of CBS, will give those elements a chance to assert themselves, and end the reign of political pornography. Even confirmed right-wingers should hope for that.

Wilfred McClay

Whether the documents are forged or not, recent polls by both Harris and Investor's Business Daily show that questions regarding Bush's National Guard Service are taking their toll with Kerry now holding a slight edge over Bush in the Harris poll and the two candidates being tied in the IBD poll, which means Bush needs to continue with what brought him to a solid lead against Kerry: the War on Terrorism and the global promotion of democracy.

To that end, Max Boot helps keep our eye on the ball with an optimistic piece in today's Los Angeles Times. Boot dismisses the claims of Pat Buchanan, Michael Moore and Paul Krugman "that the stress on exporting American ideals is a plot by nefarious neoconservatives," when actually it is as American as apple pie, a topic Winfield and I addressed here. Boot reminds us that it was Democrat President Woodrow Wilson who said, "The world must be made safe for democracy." We are called this November to ask who will best achieve that end in the next four years.

How has Rathergate pointed up ways that news gathering and reporting have changed with the advent of the blogosphere? (Plus, to be sure, talk radio, various conservative ezines, the rise in conservative publications, FNC, et al.?) What does all this portend?

Let me offer two thoughtful comments from others on this, one a few weeks old, the other new. Since we (like so many other bloggers) have gained in readership over the past few weeks, newcomers may have missed a superb blog by Wilfred McClay from last month. He asks whether or not we're entering a new era, and he did so weeks ahead of most other pundits.

The new comments are from Deacon at Power Line, the blog that has led the way in researching Rathergate. He lists seven thoughts on the impact blogs are having on the networks, and I'll quote number one here:

"1. Blogs like ours don't compete with national newscasts. We don't try to summarize the national and world news, we don't offer live coverage of hurricanes, and we attempt investigative journalism only intermittently. We're more like opinion journals. If one took everything we wrote during a week, did some editing, and changed our format, our blog might end up looking something like a less literate version of National Review or the Weekly Standard. Note that these magazines -- the closest thing we have to major media competitors -- seem to respect and even promote the work of conservative bloggers."

As far as the ongoing story goes, of course the WaPo offers the best news coverage I've read this morning; the NYT also weighs in.

Hugh Hewitt, a lawyer, dismembers the argument put out by Bill Burkett's lawyer David Van Os, who seems to think he's a certain wizard of similar name:

"Asked what role Mr. Burkett had in raising questions about Mr. Bush’s military service, Mr. Van Os said: 'If, hypothetically, Bill Burkett or anyone else, any other individual, had prepared or had typed on a word processor as some of the journalists are presuming, without much evidence, if someone in the year 2004 had prepared on a word processor replicas of documents that they believed had existed in 1972 or 1973 - which Bill Burkett has absolutely not done' - then, he continued, 'what difference would it make?'

"Leave aside 'without much evidence,' which is a standard rhetorical trick; you spin a fib about damning evidence en route to making your final point, so your interlocutor argues that last point and appears to concede the parenthetical assertion. Focus on that last line: 'What difference would it make?'

"On the other side of that question stretches a hall of mirrors a mile wide and ten miles long. Translation: the issue isn't whether the memos are fake. The issue is what the faked memos prove to be true. You want that to be your standard for accuracy?

"Look. They’re fake. CBS screwed the pooch on this one. They pursued the story for years, and in the end they lost perspective, just as lousy pilots become disoriented in bad weather and think they’re flying level when they’re actually heading down at a 45 degree angle. Imagine if the GOP had spent three election cycles trying to impugn Kerry’s service, and finally came up with a Swift Boat Vet guy who said he saw Kerry shoot himself in the foot – and within a day it was revealed that the source spent the entire war in a supply depot in San Diego. End of the entire Magic-Hat / Xmas in Cambodia / V-for-valor/ rice-shrapnel story. The fruit of the poisoned tree, baked in a nice pie, smashed in the face of the accuser. "

Brady has already linked to this morning's WSJ editorial, which is a good, cogent statement on where we are and how we got here. The question now is where we're going.

More thoughts on this soon.

Several friends have wondered whether or not Viacom, CBS's parent company, is liable should Rathergate turn litigious. Via Hugh Hewitt, Stephen Bainbridge, law professor at UCLA, says: "Short answer: NO."

He gives the legal run-down on why he believes this to be the case; his specialty is corporate law.

The Wall Street Journal delivers a powerful and salient editorial today on the collapse of the liberal media monopoly:

Sounds good to me.

I watched Dan Rather's "60 Minutes" interview with 86-year-old Marion Knox this evening. What was originally presented as a report based on recently uncovered documents has morphed into an oral history project. Mrs. Knox denies that the documents are original, but nevertheless believes they contain true information. Drudge has some of the transcript.

Mrs. Knox claims to recall that Col. Killian didn't think too much of George Bush back then, but even her method of recollection (not to mention her contradictions with statements she made to the Houston Chronicle last week) seemed suspect. Oral history is notoriously difficult because the human memory is so faulty. That doesn't negate anything per se, but it's awfully flimsy evidence on which to charge a sitting president and attempt to sway an election.

Mrs. Knox is recalling the years 1971-72. I'm 44 years old, and in those years I was in Mrs. Eugene Snow's sixth-grade class. That's a long time ago, and it's quite a ways back for anyone to recall the particularities of one of thousands of Guardsmen Mrs. Knox must have been exposed to over her years of work.

She struck me as the kind of person who always balances some chips on her shoulder against those whose upbringing was more privileged than her own. Of the other Guardsmen's opinion of Bush -- and she's admitted that she intends to vote against him -- she says that "they'd snicker and so forth as to what he was getting away with." And that they resented him since he acted as if he didn't have to be there, in the Guard, because of his daddy. She also said that it seemed that working in the Senate campaign of '72 was more important to Bush than working for the guard.

Where'd the memos come from, then? Mrs. Knox says: "It seems that somebody did see those memos [the originals -- but she didn't type them and the late colonel didn't type at all] and then tried to change it enough that he wouldn't get in trouble for it." Don't know where a primary source comes from? Why, someone must've gotten it from another primary source, of course.

That's so flimsy, so absurd, that it boggles the mind to think that any news organization, or any sentient being, would accept at face value such a statement as evidence, regardless of the subject under discussion.

Again, whatever CBS may claim about the authenticity of the documents, the originals of which they haven't produced and the provenance of which they won't divulge, their story rests on the oral history of an 86-year-old retired secretary's memory of events that occurred 32 and 33 years ago. A generation has grown up since then, and yet we're asked to accept this as irrefutable proof?

The show was pathetic, truly pathetic.

Drudge is reporting that according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, John Kerry is viewed favorably by only 36% of registered voters -- that's less than Michael Dukakis, Prince Charles, and John Ashcroft.

While other polls are showing Bush with clear advantages against Kerry in the presidential race post-Republican Convention, which was indeed masterfully executed with speeches by Giuliani and Miller written for the ages, what is killing Kerry is himself. Nobody likes him. John Kerry -- despite being a graduate of Yale and Harvard and despite being winner of three purple hearts and despite having tons of money (not to mention how he got it), he's just not likeable. Who wants a President that blames the Secret Service when he falls on his butt?

And while George W. Bush may have been a poor soldier, or a poor student, he's a great leader for critical times. Americans know men like Schwarzenneger, and Giuliani, and Miller don't just heap praise on anybody -- and not just anybody has the determination and will stamp out terrorism. Call it what you will -- simplistic, dogged, or single-minded; so far it has worked.

Update: Dick Morris does a better job of making the same case in today's New York Post in an article titled "Nobody likes him."

I'm working on a couple of non-blog essays, so I'm late to the New Entry site this morning. The most interesting commentary I've seen thus far is on Power Line here and here, where you'll find good round-ups of the latest on Rather's remorseless attacks on the truth. Hugh Hewitt has a characteristically good group of links and cogent commentary, also.

But right off the bat I was most struck by the contrasts in the Post's and Times's treatment of the story. While Howard Kurtz follows yesterday's article with another devastating account of CBS's mendacity and duplicity, the Times goes to extraordinary lengths to verify the possibility that the docs at least reflect the thoughts of a dead man. How do we know? Because his 86-year-old former secretary Marian Carr Knox thinks so, that's why. Never mind that she's contradicting her own statement to the Houston Chronicle last week that she "had no firsthand knowledge of Bush's time with the Texas Air National Guard." Flip-flopping is a way of life for the left in this campaign, so what's the big deal? I suspect, however, that CBS will pay less attention to her contention that the documents are fakes.

Anne Morse has written a well-researched story of an earlier Rathergate involving phoney Vietnam vets making false claims about atrocities they never committed. It ran back in 1988, well before either talk radio or the Net provided the means of correcting the record and getting word out to a large audience.

Rather's record also takes a beating from Eric Fettman of the NY Post (via Power Line). You'll recall the news that broke just last month about the discovery of a spy who ostensibly gave classified national security information to Israel. According to Fettman:

"The story . . . rang all the right bells to gladden a conspiracy theorist's heart: Israel, AIPAC (the leading pro-Israel lobby) and neo-conservative war hawks — in particular, Franklin's boss, Assistant Defense Secretary Douglas Feith, long a chief target of the Bush-bashers. And while Stahl never mentioned Jonathan Pollard, the U.S. Navy analyst caught spying for Israel two decades ago, the comparisons seemed unavoidable.

"But: CBS said arrests were imminent — yet none have materialized. And no one is talking anymore about moles or sinister forces secretly shaping U.S. policy — or even about espionage, for that matter. (Both AIPAC and the Israelis deny having done anything illegal or improper.)

"A grand jury is hearing evidence, but if any charges are leveled, it's unlikely to be anything more serious than 'mishandling classified material.'

"Still, as Saul Singer wrote in The Jerusalem Post last Friday, 'the anti-[Israel] cabal doesn't care if there are any arrests, because they have already succeeded in portraying Jewish power as something sinister, perhaps even treasonous.'

True to form, Pat Buchanan jumped straight to (his) logical and predictable conclusion:

"Pat Buchanan did precisely that on 'Meet the Press' last Sunday, when he demanded that officials 'investigate whether there is a nest of Pollardites in the Pentagon who have been transmitting American secrets through AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, over to . . . the Israeli embassy, to be transferred to [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon.' (This came right after Buchanan declared that U.S. support of Israel was the direct cause of 9/11 and all other forms of Islamic terrorism.)"

For normal conservatives, this is a perfect example of how the far right can make use of the mendacity of big media to make common cause against a mainstream administration. Buchanan does it all the time, and Brent and I have written about this same phenomenom attempted by others here and here. The upshot: Fact-checking by bloggers and other Net writers reduces the opportunities big media present for extremists on both sides of the spectrum -- not that they're all that distinguishable from one another. Politics will always make strange bedfellows, but knowing they're being watched might keep them from going too far.

A new and troubling line is emerging among the MSM: The TANG forgers and their willing accomplices at CBS are the moral equivalent of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The most prominent sign that this was the new party line arrived with this morning’s New York Times, where Michiko Kakutani reviews Kitty Kelley’s puerile new “biography” of the Bush family, The Family. Still smarting (from her liberal friends) for her admirable take-down of Bill Clinton’s memoirs, Kakutani returns to form in her opening paragraphs:

“Kitty Kelley's catty new book about the Bush family is a perfect artifact of our current political culture in which unsubstantiated attacks on Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War record and old questions about President Bush's National Guard service get more attention than present-day issues like the Iraq war, the economy, intelligence reform or the assault weapons ban.

“It is also a perfect artifact of a cultural climate in which gossip and innuendo thrive on the Internet; more and more biographies of artists and public figures dwell, speculatively, on familial dysfunction and disorder; and buzz – be it based on verified facts or sheer rumor-mongering - is regarded as a be-all and end-all.”

Did you catch the U-word there? “Unsubstantiated” attacks on Kerry? Two hundred and fifty veterans sign on to righting the story of Kerry’s Vietnam story, a best-selling (even by NYT standards) book painstakingly details their account, and the principal author and spokesman for their cause is a Naval Academy grad who was number one in his UT-Austin law school class and a Supreme Court clerk – and we’re given to believe that these charges are unsubstantiated? Even Kerry’s campaign has admitted that the Christmas in Cambodia story was a lie.

And we’re supposed to accept that this well-documented work is the intellectual and moral equivalent of forged documents? Think about the implications of this claim and the consequences if it’s allowed to spread unchallenged. Rigorous research, the recollections of historical actors, and the personal comportment of men in war and peace is held to be no better, no more convincing, and no more important than a half-assed forgery attempt that didn’t last a day after it was posted on the Net.

Ms. Kakutani’s underhanded efforts to bury the Swift Vets’ charges by equating them with the CBS forgeries can’t be allowed to stand. Kerry himself made his Vietnam service the centerpiece of his campaign for the Democratic nomination, a strategy he stuck with long after winning the top spot in March. The Democratic Convention in Boston featured more footage from Vietnam – highlighted by his trip by mock swift boat across Boston Harbor and his “Reporting for Duty” salute – than the average college course on the subject.

To boot, Kerry became a leader of the anti-war movement upon his return to the States. He chose to toss his medals (or ribbons, or someone else’s) over the White House fence; he chose to testify before the Senate about alleged war crimes committed by American troops; he chose to state before the Senate that his memories of Christmas in Cambodia in ’68 were “seared, seared” in his memory.

By contrast, George Bush has never made his National Guard service, or any other element of the Vietnam era, even a marginal element of his campaign, much less its centerpiece. His military record has been unimportant to his entire political career which, after nearly four years in the White House, couldn’t be better known and examined than it is. He has a record, it is in the public sphere, and his Guard service – whatever its shortcomings – are unimportant to his presidency except as the target of a smear campaign which began to fall apart as soon as it was launched.

But Kakutani isn’t alone. Elie Wiesel, an admirable man who has written so movingly on the Holocaust and the nature of evil in the world, penned an op-ed for today’s Wash Post, “Mean Season,” (translated from the French -- I'm not making that up) in an attempt to elevate the “can’t we all get along” message to a more philosophical level. Alas, Wiesel succeeds only in covering the issue with bleeding heart saccharine with lines such as:

“Too many Democrats feel hatred -- yes, hatred -- for President Bush, and too many Republicans fail to hide their contempt for Sen. John Kerry. These two sentiments should be excluded during electoral contests. Once upon a time, politics was a noble pursuit. Working for the polis, the city, the republic or the community signified a desire to give back what one had received. One had to be worthy of this honor. And many leaders were. Nowadays the word ‘politics’ evokes at best a contemptuous smile. We usually say it with a smirk. We instinctively suspect politicians of every sin, of any kind of scheme, of all sorts of manipulation. We consider them somewhat deceitful, a bit hypocritical, more than a little egotistical and certainly consumed with ambition. We watch them as though we expect to surprise them at any moment in flagrante delicto.”

Aside from the obvious historical questions – has he ever read Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Locke (never mind Hobbes), the Federalist Papers – Wiesel draws a moral equivalent between the two camps’ arguments. This is both disingenuous and absurd.

Hugh Hewitt argues persuasively that by this point in the story, everyone – including Dan Rather – knows the documents are forgeries. The implication he draws is that the MSM won’t be rushing to Dan’s defense for that very reason, and he’s right again.

But if they’re allowed to continue in this vein – declaring that the Swift Vets and the forgers occupy the same moral plain – they’ll at least succeed in creating a party line that will be recited for decades to come. “It was an ugly election, and everyone should be ashamed of their actions.” The hell they should. There is a right side and a wrong side to this story, and we’d better act now to ensure that posterity knows which was which.

Late but with added perspective for their tardiness, Howard Kurtz and Michael Dobbs have a devastating article in today's Washington Post in which they delve into both CBS's claims and the problems with the documents themselves (via Whizbang).

It begins: "The lead expert retained by CBS News to examine disputed memos from President Bush's former squadron commander in the National Guard said yesterday that he examined only the late officer's signature and made no attempt to authenticate the documents themselves [emphasis added].

"'There's no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them,' Marcel Matley said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. The main reason, he said, is that they are 'copies' that are 'far removed' from the originals."

It doesn't get any better for Dan:

"A detailed comparison by The Washington Post of memos obtained by CBS News with authenticated documents on Bush's National Guard service reveals dozens of inconsistencies, ranging from conflicting military terminology to different word-processing techniques.

"The analysis shows that half a dozen Killian memos released earlier by the military were written with a standard typewriter using different formatting techniques from those characteristic of computer-generated documents. CBS's Killian memos bear numerous signs that are more consistent with modern-day word-processing programs, particularly Microsoft Word.

"'I am personally 100 percent sure that they are fake,' said Joseph M. Newcomer, author of several books on Windows programming, who worked on electronic typesetting techniques in the early 1970s. Newcomer said he had produced virtually exact replicas of the CBS documents using Microsoft Word formatting and the Times New Roman font."

The Post shows up the sloppy (or mendacious) research that CBS uses to defend the authenticity of the documents:

"• Word-processing techniques. Of more than 100 records made available by the 147th Group and the Texas Air National Guard, none used the proportional spacing techniques characteristic of the CBS documents. Nor did they use a superscripted 'th' in expressions such as '147th Group' and or '111th Fighter Intercept Squadron.'

"In a CBS News broadcast Friday night rebutting allegations that the documents had been forged, Rather displayed an authenticated Bush document from 1968 that included a small 'th' next to the numbers '111' as proof that Guard typewriters were capable of producing superscripts. In fact, say Newcomer and other experts, the document aired by CBS News does not contain a superscript [emphasis added], because the top of the 'th' character is at the same level as the rest of the type. Superscripts rise above the level of the type.

"• Factual problems. A CBS document purportedly from Killian ordering Bush to report for his annual physical, dated May 4, 1972, gives Bush's address as '5000 Longmont #8, Houston.' This address was used for many years by Bush's father, George H.W. Bush. National Guard documents suggest that the younger Bush stopped using that address in 1970 when he moved into an apartment, and did not use it again until late 1973 or 1974, when he moved to Cambridge, Mass., to attend Harvard Business School."

Further into the article, the Post takes aim at last night's CBS broadcast, in which Rather defended the documents' authenticity:

"In its broadcast last night, CBS News produced a new expert, Bill Glennon, an information technology consultant. He said that IBM electric typewriters in use in 1972 could produce superscripts and proportional spacing similar to those used in the disputed documents. Any argument to the contrary is 'an out-and-out lie,' Glennon said in a telephone interview. But Glennon said he is not a document expert, could not vouch for the memos' authenticity and only examined them online because CBS did not give him copies when asked to visit the network's offices [emphasis added].

That's astounding -- CBS wouldn't show the actual documents to their own "expert." What inference can be drawn other than they're afraid he'll conclude the docs are fakes if he sees the real thing?

In any event, Glennon's claims were flatly contradicted by Thomas Phinney, who is "program manager for fonts for the Adobe company in Seattle, which helped to develop the modern Times New Roman font." Phinney said "'fairly extensive testing' had convinced him that the fonts and formatting used in the CBS documents could not have been produced by the most sophisticated IBM typewriters in use in 1972, including the Selectric and the Executive. He said the two systems used fonts of different widths."

Finally: "CBS executives have pointed to [Marcel] Matley as their lead exper