Short bus engine fire

What an amazingly bad week in the Old Media! Most remarkably, Dan Rather reported on 60 Minutes II Wednesday night on newly unearthed Texas National Guard memos purporting to demonstrate that Lt. George W. Bush was trying to weasel out of reporting to drill and the commanding officer was getting pressure from a Major General to "sugarcoat" Dubya's record. Rather also trotted out a former Lieutenant Governor from Texas claiming that he got Dubya into the Guard as a favor to the Bush family, for political and career reasons.

Juicy stuff, no? Except this time instead of taking Dan Rather's word, glance at the documents he's waving around. Do you think that the National Guard had typewriters in 1973 that used proportional spacing? And what typewriters in 1973 used Times New-Roman typeface? What typewriter of that era had curly apostrophes? Mr. Rather, what typewriter has the superscripted 'th' key on the keyboard? What typewriter ever did kerning? Isn't it a remarkable coincidence, Mr. Rather, that typing this same material into Microsoft Word thirty years later yields an exact replica of your assuredly-authentic document? Hey Dan, how is it that a colonel would be worried about "pressure" from a superior officer who had retired the previous year? Hey Dan, why won't you tell us who your "document experts" are? And by the way, why didn't you bother asking the purported author's son or his widow what they thought about the documents' authenticity?

As for Texas Lt. Gov Ben Barnes:

I was a young, ambitious politician doing what I thought was acceptable. It was important to make friends. And I recommended a lot of people for the National Guard during the Vietnam era.

The thing is that apparently Barnes has told his tale about George W. before, and differently. John Podhoretz in the New York Post notes that Barnes has stated on video that he got Bush into the guard when he was Lieutenant Governor, except Bush entered the Guard the year before Barnes became Lieutenant Governor. And in this AP story from 1999, Barnes told a different tale when he had to make a deposition in a corruption case. So that's at least six years of different versions of the story from Ben Barnes, making this latest eruption hardly a sudden breaking of silence. And then there are more pedestrian reasons to doubt Barnes' motives other than an inability to keep his story straight, like the fact that he's one of only eight persons to have raised more than $500,000 for John Kerry, and that he's listed as a Vice Chair of the Kerry campaign on the Kerry-Edwards website.

Now bear in mind that we're talking about the very same fair, unbiased media giants who wouldn't touch the Swift Boat Veterans story with a ten-foot clown pole because, you know, 250-plus veterans are just not enough credibility for such an august news source.

And did we mention that Kitty Kelley will be getting three mornings on NBC's Today show? Let's see, we could put Kitty Kelley and her book on TV, bearing in mind that Kelley is known for airing baseless allegations from unnamed sources (e.g. Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan were having an affair in the White House). Or we could go with John O'Neill and his book, Unfit for Command, backed by hundreds of military veterans who have all put their names on the record. Could the decision to go with Kelley have anything to do with the fact that Kelley is attacking the Bush family? Ya' think?