BillHobbs.com is a frequently updated blog of original reporting and commentary by Bill Hobbs, a longtime Nashville journalist and media relations adviser. I am currently serving as communications director for the Tennessee Republican Party, a job I began on Oct. 29, 2007.
CBS has left the flap over purported documents involving President Bush's record in the Texas Air National Guard in this posture: Who are you going to believe, CBS or your lyin' eyes?
To accept CBS's insistence the four documents from the early 1970s are authentic, you would have to believe the following:
(1) That the late Jerry Killian, Bush's commanding officer, typed the documents - though his wife says "he wasn't a typist."
(2) That Killian kept the documents in his personal files - though his family says he didn't keep files.
(3) That the disputed documents reflect his true (negative) feelings about Bush and a contemporaneous official document he wrote lauding Bush did not.
(4) That he typed the documents on a technically advanced typewriter, an IBM Selectric Composer - though that model has been tested and failed to produce an exact copy of the documents.
(5) That this advanced typewriter, which would have cost $15,000 or so in today's dollars, was used by the Texas National Guard and that Killian had gained the significant expertise needed to operate it.
(6) That Killian was under pressure to whitewash Bush's record from a general who had retired 18 months earlier.
(7) That Killian's superior, Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, was right when, sight unseen, he supposedly said the documents were authentic, but wrong when, having actually viewed the documents, he declared them fraudulent.
Now if you can't accept all that, there's another side. To believe the documents are forgeries, you have to believe this:
1) The documents were typed recently using Microsoft Word, which produces documents that are exact copies of the CBS documents.
(2) There's no number 2. All you have to believe is number 1.
That sums it up pretty nicely. The conclusion is inescapable - CBS, a once proud news network respected for its credibility has reduced itself to peddling forged documents in a pathetic attempt to smear a president and influence an election campaign. The big question that needs answered now is this one: Who in the Kerry campaign or the Democratic National Committee fed the bogus documents to CBS?
You forgot some:
(8) That Killian, an experienced officer, did not follow uniform military guidelines for creation of documents, referred to military regulations that do not exist, defined abbreviations that any service member would not need defined, and used non-standard references for units, ranks, etc.
(9) That Killian included an order (directing Bush to appear) in a memo to file, which wouldn't have been called a memo to file, anyway.
(10) That Killian, in a memorandum intended to protect himself against future events, would actually give one memo a subject line "CYA".
(11) That Killian would produce these memos on the Composer machine that his unit paid $4000 for in 1972, but produced all other documents attributable to him in monospaced Courier. Maybe he kept the Composer at home in the office he didn't have for the files he didn't keep related to the work he didn't bring home.
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CBS has left the flap over purported documents involving President Bush's record in the Texas Air National Guard in this posture: Who are you going to believe, CBS or your lyin' eyes?
