September 10, 2004
What the...?
Just came back in to check what's going on and our blogroll has vanished.......? What the......?
Another Nail In Dan Rather's Coffin
NPR News right now is airing a story on the forged CBS docs. The piece (now done) is remarkably balanced.
Man, when Brian Naylor is running with the story, you know it's all over but the eulogy.
But let's not let these forged documents obscure the #1 issue in the campaign: gay marriage
Ordinarily king of the Mardi Gras parade that is blogger triumphalism, Andrew Sullivan is a bit subdued today. How far has Sully descended? Well, he's linking to Kos arguing how the docs are legit, you know, for balance.
I'm looking for a lot of beagle, BF, and exploding toilet commentary from Sully to try to change the subject....
UPDATE: The good Reverend Pixy weighs in. "What's the font size, Kenneth?!?" indeed!
A Grand Coalition
Blogs for Bush passes the 1000 mark. Congrats to the entire BFB staff and to everyone else who has worked to make this phenom happen!
Henry V Blogging
Steve-O sometimes calls me Prince Hal to his Jack Falstaff here at Llamabutcher Central. I've always taken that very kindly.
Perhaps fittingly, the radio is currently running William Walton's Suite for Olivier's movie version of Henry V. As a rule I don't much like Walton's music, but I've always enjoyed this piece.
I have three specific favorites:
First is the Globe Theatre music. I suppose I like this because of its mock-Tudor style. I frequently whistle the fife melody heralding Henry's first entrance on to the stage.
Second is the charge of the French cavalry at the Battle of Agincourt. Walton's music perfectly captures the essense of the gathering wave, as the knights start from a walk and gradually build up to an all-out gallop. A truly spine-tingling sequence. (This, btw, is one of the weaknesses in Branagh's cut - not enough emphasis on the size and strength of the wall of metal and horseflesh bearing down on the English.)
Third is the Te Deum that accompanies the aftermath of the battle. This is another movement that gradually builds, gaining strength as it does so until it hits that climactic clash of cymbals and triumphant statement of the theme by the horns. To me it represents the weight and momentousness of the battle as a milepost in the course of history and also the sense of God's intervention in that course in that place and on that day. In this way, it backs up Olivier's panoramics of the carnage on the field and the long, annoymous line of soldiers marching towards the distant castle. Not to be persnickety about it, but this is another weak point in Branagh's version. His long walk with the boy in his arms, while moving, is self-centered, suggesting we should only view the day from the point of view of the individuals who fought there. Given this, it is rather odd that he should accompany the shot with a choral Te Deum. That is, unless he is being snide about Henry's stated belief that God fought on his side.
Mmmmm.....could be!
Make room over the mantle, Bill
Bill wants "The Rock" to play him in the movie, although I have a feeling it will be more likely to be Dustin Diamond aka "Screech"....
UPDATE: See what I mean? This works so much better...
Where's What must be the crankiest geezer on the Vineyard
Remember this gem from last month?
Lamenting the lack of depth in television news, the man considered the most trusted person on TV, Walter Cronkite, ends his current job this coming Tuesday right back where he started, as a newspaperman.In his final column in a year-long stint writing for the King Features Syndicate, Cronkite, 87, calls his decades as the nightly news anchor for broadcast network CBS "rewarding," but "not entirely satisfactory" due to time limitations that prevented deep reporting of any one story.
"We're talking about covering one of the most complicated and important nations of the world ... and it's patently impossible to do an adequate job of covering the major stories of the day, around the world, in 17 minutes," Cronkite recently told Reuters, alluding to the on-air time in any half-hour news telecast.
The veteran reporter, who has covered presidential elections and armed conflicts from World War II to the Vietnam War, said he would like to see the numerous news "magazines" on TV devote more time to "instant documentaries" of current topics instead of "so much coverage of sex and Hollywood and crime."
In his farewell passage for King Features, Cronkite writes that because newspapers can provide depth and breadth, they can become a "custodian of our history."
"The decent newspapers try to be fair and present both sides of a disputed story in the community and our nation, and that is the essential of our history," he said. "It is where historians go to do their research. This is an absolutely vital link in the chain of culture that we call our democracy."
BROADCAST VS PRINT
There are some things that each medium -- television and newspapers -- does distinctively. Television, of course, gives viewers a better sense of how people look and act, but newspapers provide a record that can be stored for people to read and study events for years to come.
In the case of presidential elections, Cronkite said the TV industry should be forced to give away air time to candidates to avoid multi-million dollar TV ad campaigns and keep offices from being up-for-sale to the candidate who raised the most money.
The newsman said he values the Internet as a research tool, but he finds some stories published on the Web -- scandals especially -- play too fast and loose with the facts.
"I am dumbfounded that there hasn't been a crackdown with the libel and slander laws on some of these would-be writers and reporters on the Internet. I expect that to develop in the fairly near future," he said.
Say goodnight, Walter.
Wow
I just can't keep up with this forgery business, which now looks like it might consume not only CBS News but the Kerry Campaign as well, but I know who can. Keep checking back with Bill at INDC Journal and the guys over at Power Line, who lead the charge on this one. And for divine round-up coverage, bow down before Allah.
Un-freakin'-believable. The Blogsphere: The New Army of One.
Shut Up, Already!
Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple), writing over at The Social Affairs Unit, brings balm to my Tory soul with his thoughts on the rise of mass self-importance.
Yips! to Mr. Enoch Soames, Esq.
Hot Bunnies Here!
(That oughta drum up some serious Googlage!)
Our good friend Chan the Bookish Gardiner passes on another method for dealing with Sauron's Wraith Rabbits. I don't think it should be an either/or proposition between this and resorting to firearms. Rather, I like to think of them in tandem: sending the fluffy little bastards to hell and giving them a taste on the way.
Of course, waving a little bottle of tabasco sause around in the garden probably wouldn't give the neighborhood as much pure entertainment value as Kathy the Cake Eater's suggestion, but I simply can't please everybody all the time.
Not In Front of the Children
Yesterday I was ruminating on the aggravation of getting overstimulated little girls to go to bed and mentioned that on such occassions my parting words to them are often, "Go to sleep, dammit!" My real-life friend Sparky gently commented on this and suggested a milder alternative.
I confess to using a moderate amount of profanity in front of the kids in times of irritation and annoyance - damns and blasts and what P.G. Wodehouse, in The Pothunters, put this way:
At this Jim gave vent to the exclamation which Mr. Barry Pain calls the Englishman's shortest prayer.'My dear sir,' said Charteris. 'My very dear sir. We blush for you. Might I ask why you take the matter to heart so?'
(And speaking of Wodehouse and foul language, I heartily recommend to you the short story "Chester Forgets Himself" from The Heart of a Goof. It is a cautionary tale about the dangers of bottling it all up and features one of literature's funniest golf foursomes, the Wrecking Crew.)
I don't have any legitimate defense for cursing in front of the children except that it's an old habit and I'm getting to be a moderately old dog. At the same time, I'm not particularly worried that it's going to warp them in any way. In fact, it might be to their benefit in the long-run, insofar as I am teaching them by example that it is better for grownups to use these words for venting their emotions rather than something far fouler. (I positively detest obscenity, considering it both crude and vulgar.) In the meantime, they know that Daddy says dammit but that they are not supposed to. I can live with that.
INDC Bill versus the New York Times
Not to sound like a blogger triumphalist type (who we all know need to follow Wonkette channeling Sgt. Hulka's koan: Lighten up, Francis), but today is a singular day in the history of blogs and political coverage: the day that INDC Bill scooped the New York Times. Or the New York Times plagairized INDC Bill.
Let's go to the tape:
"Commander's Son Questions Memos on Bush's Service"
The headline is admirable: one would expect "Right-wing deranged smear-artist hack, probable illegitimate son of Chimperor's former Guard commander, questions (alebit in halting English) documents provided to CBS by Kerry Campaign"
So far, so good.
A day after memos emerged suggesting that George W. Bush received favorable treatment when he was in the National Guard during the Vietnam War, the son of Mr. Bush's squadron commander said he doubted the authenticity of some of the memos his father was said to have written.
The White House, meanwhile, for the second day in a row dismissed renewed questions about Mr.Bush's service as "recycled" and said they were part of a "coordinated attack" by Senator John Kerry, Mr. Bush's Democratic opponent in the presidential campaign, and his associates.
Fair enough so far, although of course you have to admire the objectivity and professionalism of the Times et al that after weeks of ignoring and then dismissing the Swift Vets stories that they leaped on this story like maggots on a meat pinata.
The new fracas over Mr. Bush's service began after CBS News and its program "60 Minutes'' reported on four memos they said were from the personal file of Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died 20 years ago. The memos said that Mr. Bush had disobeyed a direct order to go for a physical in 1972 and that Colonel Killian had felt pressure to "sugarcoat'' Mr. Bush's record.In an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday, the officer's son, Gary Killian, said he doubted that his father had written some of the memos. "I am upset because I think it is a mixture of truth and fiction here,'' Mr. Killian said.
CBS said in a statement that it stood by its story and the memos' authenticity.
"As is standard practice at CBS News, the documents in the '60 Minutes' report were thoroughly examined and their authenticity vouched for by independent experts,'' the statement said.
I presumed Trevor Roper was, like Franco, still dead: perhaps they had popsicled him up like Teddy Baseball and defrosted him for this last yeoman's labor.
If anyone's seen a defrosted corpse cashing any checks from CBS this week in suburban Arizona please let the Llamas know....
Still, throughout the afternoon and evening, questions arose about the authenticity of the memos as various forensics experts told news organizations, including The New York Times, that the fonts of the documents resembled those of modern-day word processors, specifically Microsoft Word.
I love that line: "Questions arose about the authenticity...." That's the beauty of the left-wing old media's primary weapon of attack: things are never done by reporters, things are always done to reporters. Questions arose like the ghost of Hamlet's father appearing to him (perhaps in the NYT restroom? or the back booth at that NYT bar that Jayson Blair dealt coke to NYT staffers from?) No, these questions didn't "arise" by themselves: they were dug up and put forward by serious amateur journalists.
Will the NYT acknowledge this work that came out yesterday (as the Chicago Sun-Times does)? We wait with baited breath..... It's almost as if this organization has trouble acknowledging the work of others or something.
What follows is the money shot, if you pardon my Sully-ism:
Philip Bouffard, a forensic document specialist from Ohio who created a commonly used database of at least 3,000 old type fonts, said he had suspicions as well. "I found nothing like this in any of my typewriter specimens," said Dr. Bouffard, a Democrat. He also said the fonts were "certainly consistent with what I see in Times Roman," the commonly used Microsoft Word font.
However, Dr. Bouffard said, a colleague had called his attention to similarities between the font in the memos and that of the IBM Selectric Composer of the early 1970's.
But he said it would be unusual for Mr. Bush's commanding officer to have had the IBM machine because of its large size.
Dr. Bouffard said he would see if the fonts match more closely on Friday. "The problem I'm going to run into if this matches and Times Roman matches, to the extent of what we are able to see on these poor miserable copies that are passing around,'' he said, "then I don't think anybody's going to be able to say for sure.''
Compare this interview from today with INDC Bill's interview with Dr. Bouffard yesterday:
“It’s just possible that this might be a Times Roman font, which means that it would have been created on a computer. It’s very possible that someone decided to create this document on a computer... I’ve run across this situation before … my gut is this could just well be a fabrication.”
Needless to say, Bill's interview with the same source, the previous day, is much more hard hitting as it lays out in great depth the problem with the documents, which, of course, the NYT fails to do.
I guess day's like today it's hard to be a blogger who prides himself on being like crisco to donuts.
A senior executive at CBS said said, "We are convinced our source who got the documents had access to them and we trust the source.'' He added, "Can we produce the typewriter they came from in 1972 or 1973? Obviously not.''
Somebody needs to kill Carl Bernstein just so he can roll over in his grave on that one (I'm kidding of course): that quote right there symbolizes the death of serious investigative journalism on the part of old media. If there's any chance that a line of inquiry is going to harm their candidate or exonerate the Chimperor, then, mon dieu!, it must not be pursued.
"We did have a number of experts,'' he said, adding that the producers also showed the documents to numerous people who worked with Colonel Killian and who said the memos were consistent with what he thought and representative of the sorts of documents he produced back then.
Simple: name them. It's not that complicated: who are they? Because it's beginning to sound suspicously like the "top experts" that the feds assure Indiana Jones at the end of Raiders who are studying the Ark: top experts. So expert you've never heard of them.
"It would be unbelievable for a forger to have written documents that could so closely reflect what the people closest to Killian said,'' he said, "that this is his tone of voice, what he thought back then, this is the situation back then. It would be a little odd to think that these things could have just surfaced.''
Think of the naivete in that loaded first sentence: unbelievable? Chucky, that's what forgers do, for chrissakes! You might as well say "It would be unbelievable for the Kerry campaign to deliver us forgeries that confirm our preconceived notions about the Chimperor's AWOL status--why would they do such a thing?"
Because they want to win. You know, it's funny: France tries to forge intel documents on Saddam's search for uranium, and the NYT is all over Bush's gullibility like Oliver Willis on a donut truck, and that's good journalism. But Kerry's people forge documents that the NYT wants to believe and, hey, that just can't happen? Huh? Do they even realize how stupid this makes them look?
CBS News executives also produced a document released earlier by the White House about Mr. Bush's service that was clearly from a typewriter and had a superscript "th'' in it. CBS said it proved that some typewriters did indeed have superscript keys. But the characters were hard to make out after so much reproducing of the document, a problem, the CBS News official acknowledged, with the documents in the initial "60 Minutes'' program; those documents were not originals and have been copied repeatedly.
CBS News declined to say how it obtained the memos.
But of course. And it is good to know that Carville and Begala have been on the job now for what? three days? and they are already earning their retainer.
'
And now the funny part:
The White House itself did not contest the memos' authenticity and handed them out to reporters. It continued on Thursday to handle questions based on the memos, particularly about the accusation that Mr. Bush failed to take a physical "as ordered." The physical exam was required for Mr. Bush to remain a pilot.Asked about a passage in one memo saying Mr. Bush had failed to take the ordered physical, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, deflected the question and told reporters on Air Force One that such attacks were expected because Mr. Kerry was "falling behind in the polls" and because Mr. Bush had had "a very successful convention."
Chucky, I'd sure as hell love to play poker against you--my kids' college funds would be stocked like a trout stream on the first day of season in no time. Of course they're not going to question the authenticity---because if they do, you write the headline "White House Questions Memos Showing He Went AWOL", arcing the story in a way detrimental to their interests and in favor of your candidate. You know, like you were hoping. Instead, they passed, and let the documents speak for themselves. So you had to scrap the story you had set for today (Day 2: WH in crisis mode as new documents show the Chimperor's Vietnam deceptions) is toast, and you are forced into this story instead. And tomorrow's story will have to be: where did the memos come from? That thing you feel around your neck is rope, dude, and if you've never heard the phrase "give someone enough rope to hang themselves with," well, you're going to undertand it in about another day or so, BIG TIME.
At the same time, Democrats stepped up their criticism of the president. Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat and a Navy flier in the Vietnam War era, called the president a liar for claiming to have fulfilled his Guard duty."This is about George Bush not doing his duty in the National Guard and then lying to the American people about it," Mr. Harkin told reporters at a news conference at the Democratic National Committee.
I guess this would be the same Tom Harkin who repeatedly lied about being a combat pilot in Vietnam in the 1992 campaign?
(Image courtesy of Instapundit)
It's like the NYT has never heard of Google..... Look, Chucky, Mr. Guttenberg has invented this thing that allows us all to read the text and decide for ourselves, instead of relying on you priests to tell us what it all means. Get over it, and get over yourselves.
Understatement of the story:
While the two parties were absorbed with the actions of Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry more than three decades ago, both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry steered clear of the issue on the campaign trail.Neither candidate was available to reporters.
According to Hugh Hewitt, that would make it 39 days since Mr. Kerry made himself available to reporters. I guess his "magic hat" must function as some sort of Cloak of Invisibility or something. Who knew the CIA was sending powerful wizards via Swift Boat into Cambodia....damn that Richard Nixon!
Meanwhile, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which has ties to the Republicans and has attacked Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam, said Thursday that it would spend $680,000 to put up a nationwide commercial that criticizes Mr. Kerry for tossing his war decorations.The spot, which already ran for three days in Florida during the Republican National Convention this month, is to run for seven days on several cable channels.
It opens with film of a rally where Mr. Kerry and other veterans who had turned against the war tossed their decorations, and a voiceover declares: "Symbols. They represent the best things about America." It then shows Mr. Kerry telling an interviewer that same year, "I gave back I can't remember, six, seven, eight, nine."
The voiceover then asks, "How can a man who renounced his country's symbols now be trusted?"
This is the third commercial by the boat group. The Kerry campaign said the Swift boat group was desperate to keep alive accusations that had already been discredited.
Actually, it's at least the fourth commercial: the original one, the one featuring the POWs and the "Jenjis Caaaahn" testimony, and the one on the holiday in Cambodia. If this transcript is accurate......DAMN that one's going to leave a mark!!
And the article ends on a high note:
"This group has less credibility than a trashy tabloid magazine," said Chad Clanton, a spokesman for the campaign.
You mean like Kitty Kelley?
Bravo Zulu, Bill et al!
The forged documents story breaks into the old media (the New York Post, natch, but once blood is in the water it becomes impossible to get it out...) Powerline is mentioned.
YIPS! from Robbo - I went out to fetch my dead-tree copy of the WaPo this morning and damme if the story wasn't on the front page. I laughed out loud. I also see that CNN has posted it on their webpage.
Abso-freakin'-lutely brilliant!