A few weeks ago, Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe was on PBS' ''Newshour'' explaining why the hundreds of swift boat veterans' allegations against John Kerry's conduct in Vietnam was unworthy of his attention. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence," he said, talking to Swiftvet John O'Neill as if he were a backward fourth-grader, ''is what keeps this story in the tabloids -- because it does not meet basic standards.''

Last week, we got a good idea of what Thomas Oliphant's ''basic standards'' are. Dan Rather and the elderly gentlemen at ''60 Minutes'' were all atwitter because they'd come into possession of some hitherto undiscovered memos relating to whether George W. Bush failed to show up for his physical in the War of 1812. The media had been flogging this dead horse all spring, but these newly ''discovered'' memos had jump-started the old nag just enough to get him on his knees long enough for the media to flog him all over again.

Unfortunately for CBS, Dan Rather's hairdresser sucks up so much of the budget that there was nothing left for any fact-checking, so the ''60 Minutes'' crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo conveniently called ''CYA'' that Bush's commanding officer had written to himself 32 years ago. ''This was too hot not to push,'' one producer told the American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swiftvets who've signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera -- that's way too cold to push; we'd want to fact-check that one thoroughly, till, say, midway through John Kerry's second term. But a handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign operative -- that meets ''basic standards'' and we gotta get it out there right away.

The only problem was the memo. Amazingly, this guy at the Air National Guard base, Lt. Col. Killian, had the only typewriter in Texas in 1973 using a prototype version of the default letter writing program of Microsoft Word, complete with the tiny little superscript thingy that automatically changes July 4th to July 4th. To do that on most 1973 typewriters, you had to unscrew the keys, grab a hammer and give them a couple of thwacks to make the ''t'' and ''h'' squish up all tiny, and even think it looked a bit wonky. You'd think having such a unique typewriter Killian would have used a less easily traceable model for his devastating ''CYA'' memo. Also, he might have chosen a font other than Times New Roman, designed for the Times of London in the 1930s and not licensed to Microsoft by Rupert Murdoch (the Times' owner) until the 1980s.

Killian is no longer around to confirm his extraordinary Magic Typewriter, but his son denied the stuff was written by his dad, and his widow said her late husband never typed. So, on the one hand, we have hundreds of living veterans with chapter and verse on Kerry's fantasy Christmas in Cambodia, and, on the other hand, we have a guy who's been dead 20 years but is still capable of operating Windows XP. It took the savvy chappies at the Powerline Web site and Charles Johnson of ''Little Green Footballs'' about 20 minutes to spot the eerily 2004 look of the 1972 memo, and various Internet wallahs spent the rest of the day tracking down the country's leading typewriter identification experts.

Bombarded with accusations that CBS had fallen for an obvious hoax, Dan turned to his trusty Smith-Corona and bashed out a few e-mails: ''For the umpteenth time,'' he said angrily, ''this is the kind of sleaze I had to put up with when they scoffed at 'What's the frequency, Kenneth?' "

Are Dan Rather and ''60 Minutes'' a bunch of patsies suckered by the Kerry campaign? Not exactly. According to the American Spectator, ''The CBS producer said that some alarm bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story.''

Hey, why not? Who's gonna spot it? If CBS says it's so, that's good enough for Thomas Oliphant's Boston Globe, the New York Times and the Washington Post, all of whom rushed the story onto their front pages because it met their ''basic standards.'' On Friday morning, Paul Krugman, the New York Times' excitable economist, filed a column called, ''The Dishonesty Thing,'' and for one moment I thought he was about to upbraid CBS for rushing on air with their laughably fake memos. But no, he was droning on about how the National Guard story demonstrated George W. Bush's ''pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn't ..."

The tragedy for Rather, Oliphant, Krugman and Co. is that even if the memos were authentic nobody would care. Their boy Kerry had a crummy August not because he didn't hammer Bush for being AWOL in the Spanish-American War but because the senator's AWOL in the present war. Big Media are trashing their own reputations in service to a man who can never win.

After the 2002 election, I wrote, ''Remind me never to complain about 'liberal media bias' again. Right now, liberal media bias is conspiring to assist the Democrats to sleepwalk over the cliff.''

The media and the Democrats sustain each other's make-believe land. Dan Rather tells his staff, ''Kerry's told me there's nothing to this Swiftvet thing.'' Kerry tells his, ''Rather's assured me this Swiftvet story's going nowhere.''

George W. Bush ought to wake up every morning and thank the Lord the media aren't on his side.

Remember the Hitler Diaries? They turned up in the '80s. Only problem is they weren't by Hitler. But by then various prestige publications had paid a fortune to serialize them. Among them was the Sunday Times of London, owned by Murdoch, who wasn't happy. He called the editor, Frank Giles, into his office, and said, ''Frank, I'm promoting you to editor emeritus.''

''I've always wondered,'' murmured Frank, ''what 'editor emeritus' means.''

''The 'e-' means you've been given the elbow and the '-meritus' means you bloody deserve it,'' said Murdoch.

I have a feeling after November CBS News will be promoting Dan Rather to editor emeritus.

Either that, or next week's ''60 Minutes'' -- ''Exclusive! Handwriting Expert Says Bush Wrote The Hitler Diaries!'' -- will have much better fact-checking.

Posted on 09/11/2004 1:08:54 AM EDT by RatherBiased.com

September 10, 2004, XX:YY:ZZ EDT

Dan Rather's defense of himself tonight, while probably impressive to shallow observers was far from convincing. Here's a list of things he ignored, did not properly address, or concealed from viewers. Feel free to send us your suggestions to this live fisking. For the transcript, click here.

Sourcing problems
The 72-year-old anchor conveniently did not mention the fact that James Moore, one of his key validative sources, is a left-wing activist and author who has written two anti-Bush books, Bush's Brain, and Bush's War for Reelection. Rather referred to him as "author Jim Moore has written two books on the subject."

Not coincidentally, Rather also did not mention that one of its main validators, retired Maj. General Bobby Hodges is accusing 60 Minutes staff of lying to him in order to get him to say the supposed Killian memos were authentic. ABC News has the story:
"Hodges, Killian's supervisor at the Guard, tells ABC News that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. According to Hodges, CBS told him the documents were 'handwritten' and after CBS read him excerpts he said, 'well if he wrote them that's what he felt.'
"Hodges also said he did not see the documents in the 70's and he cannot authenticate the documents or the contents. His personal belief is that the documents have been 'computer-generated' and are a 'fraud.'"
The Washington Post reported earlier today that CBS considered Hodges its "trump card":

"A senior CBS official, who asked not to be named because CBS managers did not want to go beyond their official statement, named one of the network's sources as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents' alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. He said a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone and Hodges replied that "these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time."

"These documents represent what Killian not only was putting in memoranda, but was telling other people," the CBS News official said. "Journalistically, we've gone several extra miles."

The official said the network regarded Hodges's comments as "the trump card" on the question of authenticity, as he is a Republican who acknowledged that he did not want to hurt Bush. Hodges, who declined to grant an on-camera interview to CBS, did not respond to messages left on his home answering machine in Texas.
Looks like jokers are no longer wild.

He deliberately ignored statements from Col. Killian's wife and son who said that he hated using typewriters, hardly ever kept notes, and very much liked George W. Bush. In today's Washington Post, CBS conceded that it had not asked his wife to authenticate the letters it claims were written by her husband. Both Killian's widow and son say that the alleged memos are not characteristic of his style and do not believe they are all authentic.

Rather did not mention that Ben Barnes, the Democratic lobbyist who is now saying he helped young Bush into the Texas Air National Guard (TANG), has changed his story according to his Republican daughter, Amy. She says that Barnes is making his Bush claims in preparation for his upcoming autobiography and to build up his political profile in the hopes of getting hired by a Kerry administration, all of which he allegedly told her.

Also left out by Rather was the fact that one of the CBS documents dated in 1973 refers to pressure that then-Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, had supposedly been applying on Killian to make things easier for Bush. Unfortunately for CBS's case, however, Staudt had retired in 1973.

CBS's own paid signature expert (the network featured no typographers or typewriter experts tonight or in Wednesday's report), Marcel Matley, directly undermined CBS's case several years earlier in an essay for the American Law Institute:

"Do not passively accept a copy as the sole basis of a case. Every copy, intentionally or unintentionally, is in some way false to the original. In fact, modern copiers and computer printers are so good that they permit easy fabrication of quality forgeries."
In his defense tonight, Rather admitted that "the documents CBS started with were also photocopies."

The original 60 Minutes report as well as Friday's rebuttal did not feature a single person person who was quoted as coming to Bush's defense who was not on his staff, despite the fact that it is not hard at all to find people who say they served with Bush during the period in which he is accused of being AWOL. The only person that CBS did put on camera hardly provided much support for the documents' authenticity. Rather quoted him as follows (read the rest here.

"Well, they are compatible with the way business was done at that time. They are compatible with the man that I remember, Jerry Killian, being. I don't see anything in the documents that are discordant with what were the times, what were the situation and what were the people that were involved."
Reached by the AP today, Strong was even more lukewarm toward the documents' authenticity. His former colleague, Retired Col. Maurice Udell called them fakes: "That's not true. I was there. I knew Jerry Killian. I went to Vietnam with Jerry Killian in 1968."

Typographical problems
Although he tried to minimize the typographical concerns raised by many critics, Rather nonetheless tried to defend himself in this area. He failed, however. On the superscript issue, which Rather tried to explain away by throwing out the red herring that "Critics claim typewriters didn't have that ability in the 70s. But some models did."

The problem with this statement is that Rather fails to list any such typewriters which might have the capability or how a measely Air National Guard office would be able to afford such expensive machines. Simply showing a photocopy of a letter in Bush's official file which originated from the Army's national office is no proof at all.

The split screen image CBS offered of an official Bush document with superscript ordinal suffix and one of its own documents was not very convincing to Sandra Ramsey Lines, a forensic document expert who edits the Journal of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners who told the Associated Press that she "could testify in court that, beyond a reasonable doubt, her opinion was that the memos were written on a computer." She told the AP that she was "virtually certain" the CBS memos are not genuine.

Rather also neglected to mention that all of the documents which were written by Killian himself and his officers relied on simple mechanical typewriters incapable of printing in proportional fonts, let alone superscript.

Despite the fact that Jerry Killian hated keeping notes, hated typing things (see above) that National Guard offices mostly use hand-me-down equipment from the full-time armed forces, and that Killian and his Guard officers have not been observed to have ever sent documents printed with proportional fonts, there is a possibility (OK really, really small) that Bush's superviser might have had access to an expensive IBM electric typewriter.

Assuming Killian somehow had access to an IBM Selectric Composer (or similar model), Blogger Jeff Harrell wondered what one of the CBS memos would look like if typed in one of the re-famous devices. His results are yet more evidence that the CBS docs are forgeries.

Dan also appears unfamiliar with fonts and typography. At one point in the rebuttal, he refers to the font used in the CBS documents as "New Times Roman," when the real name is Times New Roman. Rather also appears to be ignorant of the fact that Times New Roman was never used in typewriters and only came into wide use in the early 1990s when Microsoft licensed the font from the Monotype Corporation in preparation for the launch of Windows 3.0.
Even if Times New Roman had been used in proportional typewriters during the 1970s, the font then was not the same as it is today since its present form actually dates from the 1980s following some changes that Monotype made to the font.

Rhetorical Problems

Rather tried to smear critics who disagreed with him: "Today on the Internet and elsewhere, including many who were partisan political operatives, concentrated on the key questions of the overall story, but on the documents that were part of the support of the story."
Since Rather failed to differentiate between who is a "partisan political operative" and who isn't, it's hard to conclude this line is nothing more than a red herring meant to scare his viewers who have not been following the ongoing story.
Les Jones adds: "Partisan political operatives? That's funny, I don't recall cashing any checks from Karl Rove. Translation: the jury didn't believe the witness, so they ignored the witness's testimony. Therefore CBS is going to claim the jury was rigged."