June 3, 2005

Rather Lies Again

Dan Rather continues to lie about the forged and fraudulent documents at the heart of the CBS "Memogate" scandal involving the 60 Minutes hit piece involving President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

[In case you didn't get to see Rather on Larry King Live because you are one of the rouighly 280 million or so Americans who don't watch Larry King Live, Ian Schwartz has the relevant bits of video here.]

Ed Morrissey nails Rather for his ongoing contention that the documents have not been proven to be fakes.

Morrissey:

Rather flat-out lied about the findings of the Thornburgh-Boccardi report. Peter Tytell, the man hired by the panel, reported unequivocally to Thornburgh and Boccardi that the Killian memos had been created by a computer. This excerpt comes from Page 1 of Appendix 4 of their final report:

Tytell concluded, for the reasons described below, that (i) the relevant portion of the Superscript Exemplar was produced on an Olympia manual typewriter, (ii) the Killian documents were not produced on an Olympia manual typewriter, and (iii) the Killian documents were produced on a computer in Times New Roman typestyle . Tytell acknowledged that deterioration in the Killian documents from the copying and downloading process made the comparison of typestyles "to some extent a subjective call." However, he believed the differences were sufficiently significant to conclude that the Killian documents were not produced on a typewriter in the early 1970s and therefore were not authentic.

The report lists in detail all of the discrepancies found by Tytell between known examplars of true TexANG documents and the Killian memos produced by CBS and their rabidly partisan source, Bill Burkett. That information has been in the public record for over four months. To go on national TV and claim that the CBS report does not render a judgment on the authenticity of the Killian memos is false -- and given Rather's proximity and interest in the issue, one must presume that the falsehood is deliberate.

Does anyone at CBS have an issue with one of their featured journalists appearing on national television and lying to the American public? So far, the answer appears to be no.

Might I add, Rather's larger contention seems to be that that the documents were only "support" for the larger story - a contention that is, to put it bluntly, stupid. As I demonstrated long ago, the documents were not "support" for the story they were the story, and without the documents CBS had nothing. Without the forged memos, the 60 Minutes piece is just two old anti-Bush partisans offering vague, unsubstantiated charges against the president.

You can access all of my past Memogate-related posts here.

Hugh Hewitt has some further thoughts about Rather's rather embarrassing performance on the Larry King show last night.