OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today: "When in Doubt, Blame Karl Rove"

LOL! Khaaan!

Credit to Blackfive for that one.

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Axon Update: 489/777

This story just gets better and better! Now the daughter of Ben Barnes, the man Dan Rather interviewed the other night concerning the Bush memos, is saying her father is doing this for purely political, opportunistic reasons!

"CROWLEY: So, I hate to put you in this position, but I will ask you, do you think your father, Ben Barnes who was on '60 Minutes II' with Dan Rather last night - do you believe that he lied on the air to the American people last night about President Bush?

BARNES; Yes, I do. I absolutely do. And I think he's doing he's doing it for purely political, opportunistic reasons - trying to get John Kerry elected and trying to make Bush look like the bad person. ... Like I said, he's going to be trying to promote his book that he's got coming out."

Roger L. Simon points to an article written by Victor Davis Hanson entitled "The Whole World Is Watching".

"Ask yourself: What do a Russian ten-year-old, a poor black farmer in Darfur, an elderly pensioner in Israel, a stockbroker in New York, and a U.N. aid worker in Afghanistan have in common? In the last three years, they have all died in similar ways: Unarmed and civilian, they were murdered by a common cowardly method fueled by a fascist ideology."

Hanson continues...

At some point, the leaders of the Western world (if there are any left besides George W. Bush and Tony Blair) are going to look at all this madness worldwide and come to the bitter conclusion that there is a disgusting pattern: Not every Muslim is a fascist terrorist, but almost every fascist terrorist is a Muslim.

and...

Only the elite radical American Left is either too timid or too morally bankrupt to condemn the new fascism in the Middle East or the Arab genocide in Sudan, preferring instead to whine about Bush's "lies" and all the other non-issues that the most secure and leisured people on the planet protest about for an hour or two before calling it a day.

Roger L. Simon: Howell Raines resigned. So should Dan Rather!

I just can't imagine steely Dan will quit over this.

From Tech Central Station, Blogs vs. 60 Minutes...

One day. That was all it took for the ranks of citizen journalists to swarm and then thoroughly discredit a story which ran in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and on a network news magazine.

From the Kerry perspective a scandal involving forged documents is a disaster. Kerry had yesterday to get in front of the story and he missed that boat. Instead of being able to stay on message and trying to beat down the post convention pulse which has sent Bush several points ahead in various opinion polls, Kerry is likely to face questions about who was responsible for the forgeries. While it would be astonishing if anyone inside the Kerry organization had a hand in them, it is a question that will be asked. Moreover, the spectacle of Kerry announcing that his campaign organization and the Democratic Party had nothing to do with issuing those documents will occupy several critical news cycles and focus attention on character -- exactly where Kerry does not want to be.

From the perspective of the establishment media, this, too, is a disaster. CBS will have to explain: where did the documents come from? What were the bona fides of the source? Who was the source? Which expert looked at the documents? How closely?

Those are the starter questions. The more basic question is how could a rabble of bloggers, in one day, provide hard core proof of forgery when major news organizations took those documents at face value? Most fundamental of all, why did the New York Times, the Boston Globe and CBS allow themselves to be used for such a transparent attempt to slander President Bush? Out in the blogosphere there are a swarm of people rooting for the answers.

The Mudville Gazette has a write-up on Rick Rescorla. He survived the Ia Drang Valley with the 2/7th Cavalry (see "We were soldiers..."), but never made it out of the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Yowza! The Prowler is reporting that CBS received the Bush national guard memos from the Kerry campaign. Oh, if this could prove true! See ya JFK!

The CBS producer said that some alarms 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. "This was too hot not to push. If there were doubts, those people didn't show it," says the producer, who works on a rival CBS News program.

This is a case of the mainstream media (MSM) outhustled by citizen journalists, according to the New York Post.

Threshold-55 notes that the MSM is now going the bait-and-switch route with the Bush memos and Bush's piloting abilities.

A Threshold -55 examination of the Chicago Tribune website reveals that the newspaper appears to have quietly removed all references to a September 10th front page article that called into question President Bush's military service during Vietnam. The article, "Questions Raised About Bush Guard Service" has been completely replaced with a new article titled, "Bush Piloted Guard Trainers Before He Quit". The new one tries to paint the President as a poor flyer who frequently required multiple approaches to land his jet.

Now the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian's wife is doubting the authenticity of the memos.

Is the evil genious Karl Rove to blame? LOL

More on the CBS memos. From a forensic document examiner via INDC...

"'90%?' Again he said it's 'hard to put an exact number, but I'd say it's at least that high, sure. I pretty much agree that that font is Times New Roman.'"

Times New Roman is a modern PC font. Was the National Guard using PCs in 1973?

Interesting timeline over at the Mudville Gazette.

Operation Truth is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that seeks to educate the American public about the truth of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the perspective of the soldiers who have experienced them first-hand."

Stolen Honor goes live today.

“And they, the interrogator went through all of these statements from John Kerry. He starts pounding on the table. “See here, this naval officer, he admits that you are a criminal.”

Powerline posts an interesting comment from a reader regarding the vailidity of teh new memos 60 Minutes recently offered as evidence to discredit the President.
{note: Powerline was Drudged this afternoon, so access is unreliable.}

Blaster has posted a copy of the new and old memos. Sure looks like the new memo is a recent production.

More on this at Kerry Spot.

I can't believe that CBS and some major national newpapers would have run a story if it is based on forged documents. And the blogosphere fisked this out in less than half a day? There has to be a good explenation for the documents in question. I can't wait to here the truth on this one when it comes out.

Mickey Kaus is not happy with his candidate and writes,

"'Department of Wellness'! Spirit-crushing foolishness from my candidate, John Kerry. The nation is trying to figure out how to fight global terrorism and he's talking about having 'not just a Department of Health and Human Services, but a Department of Wellness.' How about a Department of F***ing Perspective? If Bush is smart he'll be ridiculing Kerry about this for the rest of the month. ...Thanks, Iowa!"

Belmont Club: "Delete from TbPerps Where ..."

Ouch! How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?

Vice-President Cheney made this bold statement yesterday...

"'It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States,'"

What will Bush and Cheney say if they are re-elected and a terrorist attack occurs on US soil? People are already making the distinction between the two campaigns regarding the way they will likely handle terrorism. Cheney should have kept this one to himself.

I'm not sure where the Dowbrigade is getting it's information, but I believe it is quite skewed against what is being reported from people on the ground in country...

"Worse, we have lost the support of the people we have come to liberate. The scale of our destruction has been so awesome and indiscriminate that the rank and file, the teachers and bakers and washer-women, the millions of peace-loving people of Iraq, see us as an evil army of death and are increasingly willing to feed and hide the insurgents. As anyone who has tried to help an alcoholic or drug addict who hasn't hit bottom knows, saving someone who doesn't want to be saved is an impossible quagmire."

If they are peace-loving people, wouldn't they want to be saved?

Hmm. Lower standards. If an Apple is hacked and no one is using it, does it matter?

Google Toolbar version 2.0.114 is available.

The flip-side of video-conferencing advancements.

Congrats to the Randall Gay for making the 53-man roster in New England! Fellow Tiger Eric Alexander was placed on the Patriots practice squad.

"I think he showed enough in training camp and the preseason, both in terms of
the way he played the position and also his versatility, I think he can do a
couple of different things for us," Belichick said.

More on Gay here.

Matt Mauck made the Broncos roster too.

Bad news for Stephen Peterman though.