Lies and the media who tell them

Posted on September 9, 2004 by Gene

What’s the deal with this National Guard document that CBS released the other day? I can’t quite get my head around this one.
Let’s assume for the moment that it’s a forgery — because it certainly wasn’t typed on a 1972-era typewriter at a Guard post. The question becomes why. Not why would someone forge a document that reflects poorly on Bush, but rather, why would someone forge such a document use the default settings in Microsoft Word? Laziness?
Some conspiracy theorists are beginning to formulate a scenario where the Bush campaign created an incredibly obvious forgery in order to implode the left’s arguments from the inside.
Of course, in the end, the real question is why CBS released this document. It looks like an obvious forgery, so that should have been enough of a warning signal to take a closer look. They said that it had been “authenticated” by typewriter experts and handwriting experts who authenticated the signature. Well, at my office, I have scans of the signatures of the officers of our organization, and I can plunk them into any document. And they’d be authentic.
I’m just saying.

Meanwhile:

In a telephone interview from her Texas home, Killian’s widow, Marjorie Connell, described the records as “a farce,” saying she was with her husband until the day he died in 1984 and he did not “keep files.” She said her husband considered Bush “an excellent pilot.”

“I don’t think there were any documents. He was not a paper person,” she said, adding that she was “livid” at CBS. A CBS reporter contacted her briefly before Wednesday night’s broadcasts, she said, but did not ask her to authenticate the records.

What do you think?