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i particularly enjoyed listening to robert novak, who disclosed the identity of a working CIA operative, possibly putting that agent and her team’s lives in danger, and refused to disclose his source….

then…

with this whole forgerygate, or whatever the hell we are calling supposedly faked documents about bush’s service record, novak demanded CBS disclose its sources….

wow…..truly the republican lap-dog.

Isadora,

This is an independent and non-partisan organization?

Measuring media trends without interference from subjective bias and opinion?

Would you say there are an equal amount of conservative and liberal viewpoints at Mediatenor? Or is it mainly staffed with likeminded folks?

Does the word Projection come to mind, Eric? :-D

Isadora,

Did you know that Brit Hume has known John Kerry since they were 5 years old ?

I don’t know why that matters but he said that on a broadcast one day while discussing Kerry.

There’s nothing wrong, per se, with anonymous sources. We still don’t know, decades later, the true identity of “Deep Throat.” But the Watergate scandal didn’t depend solely on Deep Throat, whose real utility was in pointing out leads that could be tracked down and verified by conventional reporting and facts that were otherwise in the public arena.

Never have I seen Fox, or any media outlet for that matter, do something as frightening and threatening to our public life as what CBS is currently doing—using forged documents provided by an anonymous source to launch political attacks right before an election. And then refusing to be held accountable for their actions. This is worse than anything in the Patriot Act—it’s utterly Orwellian, and I believe a real and present danger to democracy.

Martin, millions of us feel the same way about the SBVT. But it is a land of free speech, and lying, deceiving, stretching the truth and hiding it, has always been the order the day before elections.

I am not shocked by any of it. Only that so many folks swallow it whole without chewing it a bit to see if tastes right or not. With all of this middle class education, I am still shocked that so many can be so misled by so few.

David, I can see getting upset by the SBVT if you disagree with their message, but they’re not a licensed television network entrusted with the public airwaves. So there’s no comparison whatsoever.

But if they were bandying about forged papers, that would be another thing. If further, they were caught doing so and said that their fictitious documents don’t matter because their “larger story” is true, then they’d be laughed out of town. As CBS now must be.

I’m sorry about it, because I sort of liked Dan Rather, even though I suspect I disagree with him about most everything. I still remember being moved by some of his broadcasts after 9-11, when tears welled up in his eyes. But I’m sorry, what he’s doing now is unforgivable. Those are the public airwaves, and this isn’t Communist Russia.
The man has to go. For taking us down this Orwellian road, it’s no longer enough that he go. He has to leave in disgrace.

He seems to being doing everything possible to destroy is othewise distinguished career. A truly sad sight, but such actions must not be allowed to stand in a free society.

CBS’s stand on the documents now appears to be that they are fake but the content is relevant and Bush should answer the charges. ? Orwellian indeed. It’s pure newspeak. Up is down, down is up, cats and dogs living together, and all that.

At least the Swift Boat Veterans were out there themselves making the charges, not this underhanded forgery of documents by the DNC and hiding behind a puppet newscaster to sling the mud.

An 80+ year old lady’s eye witness statement as that the content is true is not good enough to warrant further investigation, Eric?

I say its good enough to validate the veracity of the claim, regardless of the documents, in light of all the effort Bush, by Excecutive Order went to to seal his own and his Dad’s records, and all the mismanagement by the DoD regarding the records for a very long time now. The whole thing screams cover up and this old lady who remembers the content as being true is good enough for me.

Now, can we move on to issues facing our future? It is pretty clear to 1/2 of the population that neither candidate is a paragon of virtue, what with coke sniffing at Camp David and all. I want to know what kind of future my daughter has to look forward to.

The man has to go. For taking us down this Orwellian road, it’s no longer enough that he go. He has to leave in disgrace.

Didn’t I hear this same line from Republicans about the Washington Post when they persued the Watergate story? It’s called investigative journalism.

I watched Dan Rather yesterday with the 80-year-old former secretary. It was painful. What are the chances that she has such precise recollections of what someone else thought of a second lieutenant who she rarely actually met herself? I don’t doubt that she believes most of what she says, but even recent eyewitness testimony is notoriously false. Her evidence is what courts would classify as hearsay. The only thing she can testify directly on is that SHE DID NOT TYPE THOSE MEMOS. If poor Dan Rather is basing his defense on thirty-year-old hearsay that supports him, and direct testimony that his sources are forgeries, he has no defense.

Meanwhile, Dan Rather is trying to say that the story should not be about him, but about what Bush did or didn’t do. He is wrong. His whole story was based on the NEW documentation. Otherwise, it was old news and hearsay. If the initial documentation is invalid, everything that is based on it is also invalid. This is a simple rule of evidence. You don’t have to – you can’t - make a judgment as to whether the underlying facts are true or false. CBS is just left with nothing. Dan Rather cannot argue that IF the documents were valid then … It is like saying IF I won the lottery, then I would give you a million dollars. The IF part is what counts. Don’t start spending that money.

Now he has jumped the rails entirely, but the Dan Rather train has been wobbling for some time. Consider this from today’s Washington Post, “On the second night of the Republican convention, Rather, perhaps determined to use some canned ad libs no matter how inapposite reality made them, declared that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speech had “slapped opponent, Senator John Kerry, around like a hockey puck.” The number of times Schwarzenegger mentioned Kerry: zero.

The whole focus of Rather’s blockbuster story was on the documents.

When first confronted with the evidence that they may have been forged, he tried to change the focus, saying that it was up to the President to clear it up — guilty until proven innocent.

Now he wheels out a former secretary who remembers precisely what a former boss was thinking 30+ years ago and suggests that this proves what the forged documents said.

I was a big fan of former Ohio State coach Woody Hayes. However there’s no question but that he should have retired long before he took a swing at an opposing player on national television. He disgraced himself and his team that day.

The same can be said of Dan Rather. I think he may have just taken his last swing.

Isadora-

As a regular watcher of the Brit Hume show Special Report I don’t recall very much use of confidential stories regarding Kerry’s service in August. In fact, much of the reporting centered on the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and this group has publicly documented their charges via a book. I realize that this is anecdotal, but without knowing which sources you are talking about that’s about all I can provide.

I will concede that the Swift Boat story was discussed more on Special Report, but there are a couple of reasons for that. 1) Special Report is both a news reporting program and a discussion format with a panel. It’s also an hour long. This format difference, as well as the additional 20 minutes of broadcast time per day, allows Special Report to spend extra time on certain topical subjects. And the panel includes both sides of the story. 2) There was an obvious attempt by the “big three” to avoid the Swiftvet story for the first week. This paralleled the Kerry campaign’s strategy in dealing with the subject matter, and you can draw your own conclusions on that.

David:

I’m a bit embarrassed for you at your admission that the 30+ year old recollection of ONE person as to the thought process of another person is “good enough to validate the veracity of the claim”.

David, on that basis, you’d have to accept as truth any comment I might make about you and your thoughts, since I have been reading your posts for some time. Does that mean I know what you think? Does that mean that my personal biases might not reflect into my characterization of you?

I’ve come to respect your opinion, even when I disagree with it. But if you truly beleive that one witnesses 30 year old memories are valid as proof, then how do we assess that. How do we assess what Kathleen Willy and Juanita Brodderick remember about Bill Clinton? How do we evaluate what the SBVT remembers about Kerry?

That the documents were presented front and center by Dan Rather says that CBS thought they were important. Now they say they don’t matter. Should we accept that the underlying proof of the argument is completely falsified, yet still accept the argument anyway? That opens a lot of doors, my friend.

Since this discussion has veered strongly away from what Fox Nes reports and has centered on CBS’s documents concerning Bush’s military service….
Seems to me CBS should be doing everything it can to explain their research into these documents if the the network has any hope of maintaining integrity — and relying on an 80-year-old woman’s memroy, however sharp it is, isn’t going to do that.
CBS has been embarrassed, but by whom? Kerry’s campaign machine or a misguided supporter? Or — bear with me here — by the Bush machine? If you think about it, it would be a genius move: Put out an obviously fake document, which will be snatched up and aired, and watch as everyone who wants it to be true discredits himself.
Maybe I’m just too cynical or too paranoid, but it seems like just the sort of canny move I’d expect from the Bush machine.

Alejo

The old saying, “you can’t cheat an honest man” applies here. No matter where the documents came from (and I don’t believe they came from either the Bush or Kerry camps) CBS news bought them because they wanted to suspend belief.

Jack,

There’s no arguing that the media hasn’t become frenzied for the latest and greatest scandal, so much so that they’ll air anything. It’s a shame, since it means the viewers are left to try to find the truth. But who do you think did perpetrate these documents?

OK, I think I’m finally getting to understand how things work now.

An 80 year old woman says she knows the content of the memos, from 30 years ago, are what this officer was thinking, she is to be believed at all costs and Bush needs to be ridden out of town.

But when two women in their 30s or 40s say they were sexually harrassed within the last 5-10 years, they are liars and should not be believed, no matter what evidence there is.

Makes sense to me.

Tim writes: “An 80 year old woman says she knows the content of the memos, from 30 years ago, are what this officer was thinking, she is to be believed at all costs and Bush needs to be ridden out of town.

But when two women in their 30s or 40s say they were sexually harrassed within the last 5-10 years, they are liars and should not be believed, no matter what evidence there is.”

Who says this?

Alejo:

It is appearing that a prime suspect is Bill Burkett, who has made past allegations about Bush’s service or lack thereof. I’ve heard that the memos are traced to a Texas Kinko’s copycenter within a few miles of Burkett’s home. He’s not admitting it, and CBS is not saying where they got the documents, but he is a prime suspect at this point. He is a Kerry supporter.

Note: This information is so far unsubstantiated.

@nd note: Wouldnt it be great if CBS would use things like note 1?

Alejo
The first paragraph is about Bush and his guard service memos on CBS.
The second paragraph is about Flowers and Jones.

I was just wanting to know why it is ok to now believe the old lady and her recollection of 30 years ago but was wrong back then to believe Flowers or Jones and their recollection from 5-10 years before.

Joe, what’s “note 1”?

-Cf

Chris:

I intended to number the two notations at the bottom of my post….Note 1 and Note 2.

I ended up not numbering note 1 and capitalizing the 2 in Note 2 to read Note@.

Tim —

I understood what you were referring to, I just wondered who was claiming we should listen to an 80-year-old woman but we shouldn’t have listened to Gennifer Flowers. Who said that? I haven’t heard anyone say it.

Alejo: The DNC, liberal talking heads and the such. They are saying “we cannot discount this lady, she was there” but in 1997, they were saying “we cannot believe these women, they were there, but they are lying”

I am not choosing sides either Alejo. Today the right is saying the exact opposite of what they said then also.

Both parties are corrupt and will say whatever they need to in order to protect “their” man. It doesnt matter if what that person did is right or wrong, lawful or unlawful, just as long as they protect him.

Tim —

Your closing paragraph is very apt. I think the thing that gets me is that each candidate (and his supporters) claims he is telling the truth and the other is lying, and anyone with half a brain knows they’re both lying and scheming. And the fact that the DNC is trying so hard to keep Nader off the ballot shows what levels they’ll sink to.
Speaking of third parties, would even a plausible third-party candidate have a shot? I’ve got nothing against Nader — I think he’s smarter than the other two put together — but he’s too radical and too lacking in charisma to have a chance.
Can’t ANYBODY produce a candidate who is interesting, intelligent, charismatic, and at least apparently honest? I feel insulted by what we’re offered for leadership.

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Joe, tell me something: Why is the woman’s memory on what she typed and didn’t type good enough for you when it confirms forgery, but not when it so ironically confirms the information in them?

And no, don’t hit me with the double standard argument, because I never said that the SwiftVets remembered things wrongly because of the age of the memories. I implied that it was their focus on other things during the events in question that allowed them to forget the gunfire. Those who were involved in the firefight remember the gunfire. Those who were dealing with the boats remember the boats, simple as that.

Here though, you have a very ordered environment, a very prominent favorite son of Texas politic, a significant discipline problem according to substantiated documents, and a woman whose job it is arrange the officers schedules, meetings, and to take dictation on letters and memos embodying her superior’s wishes and opinions. If anybody would be in a sound position to know what Lieutenant Commander Jerry Killian was thinking, it’d be his secretary. That’s who Marian Carr Knox is.

So far the administration’s response has been to concur with parts of the story they shouldn’t have had to concur with, had the story been entirely false, to blame it on dirty politics, to make excuses for obviously unacceptable behavior, and to obfuscate the issue by applying standards to Bush’s performance that either are poor indicators of such, or not sufficient in the eyes of the actual organization to reach the same conclusion.

It’s been my experience that when somebody’s telling the truth, additional revelations should tend to clarify rather than muddy up one’s picture of things.

The more I looked at the SwiftVet evidence, the more I found people making one-eighties in previous opinions, alleging things that critical examination of documents and procedures would refute, and a continual tendency to not let the facts get in the way of a good sharp jab to Kerry’s character. With the Bush evidence, things only come into clearer relief. Details are refined instead of being altogether altered. That, to me, is more characteristic of evidence that tells the truth, than evidence that is made to support ad hoc arguments.

That’s my standard, really- does the information allow me to draw consistent conclusions. If some pattern had built up with the SwiftVets that indicated to me that they were right, and further evidence made the picture less ambiguous, not more so, then I would have sadly have accepted it.

But overall, there was no such compelling picture of things. There was nothing in the evidence that excluded more positive interpretations, and a great deal of evidence backing Kerry’s side of things. It’s no coincidence that it’s the least substantive charge, regarding the Christmas in Cambodia episode, that persists even now. It’s the one where there’s the most room for interpretation.

Even the Swiftvets have come up with wildly varying estimates of where Kerry was. I am always suspicious of stories that require such dark patches of the unknown to sustain themselves. As a reformed former believer in all that Mysteries of the Unknown stuff, I’m acutely of how people use their own ignorance and that of others to perpetuate stories which are not all that well founded in fact. The SwiftVets story smack too much of such conspiratorial discourse, too many hypotheticals, assumptions, and too much reliance on people’s words alone. It’s not that it’s impossible that the SwiftVets are telling the truth. Anything’s possible. It’s simply that there’s no information that compels people not already invested in partisan fervor to accept it.

Stephen:

You created, perhaps unintentionally, a straw man. I dont claim to use Marian Knox’s statement to call the memos forgeries. I use the multiple experts who say they are forgeries, compared to the dwindling list of experts that CBS is trotting out. You see, I’m using PROOF and EVIDENCE, rather than an old recollection.

I think Knox’s recollection DOES count for something, but not without the corroboration through evidence. And so far, the only evidence I’ve seen as corroboration has been forged evidence.

Lets take Dr Louis Letson as an example and see how you view his memory…He’s the doctor who says he treated John Kerry in Viet Nam.
To paraphrase you, if anybody would be in a sound position to know what wounds John Kerry hasd suffered, it’d be the platoon medic. That’s who Dr Louis Letson is.

But Stephen, I dont see any more corroborrating evidence for Letson than I do for Knox. Therefore, I cant conclusively believe either one.

Knox can claim to have written memos similar to the forgeries, but with no evidence, all we have is her word. Letson can claim to have treated Kerry, but without records, all we have is his word.

Stephen, when you apply the SAME standard of proof, you get consistency. When you apply the Democratic standard of proof, you get hypocrisy

I just wonder how many documents have been inadvertantly destroyed about W’s arrest on cocaine possession? Or will W continue to deny that as well? Maybe he was AWOL and would not take the exam(s) while in the National Guard knowing they could detect cocaine in his system.

Mark:

Idle suspicions are okay, but such accusations eventually need to be proven. Bush has admitted a lot about his past, but has wisely kept it a general admission. This allows him to recognize his indiscretions in the past, without giving the media too much to write about.

When you have proof of your accusations, I’ll look forward to reading about it. Until then, its really just a lot of nothing.

For the record, Bush was never AWOL. Being AWOL is a legal charge that has not been leveled at Bush. He has been accused in the media and internet of this, but never officially; therefore no such charge exists.