CBS recently ran a story about how worried some people are that the U.S. might reinstate a draft. According to the story, much of that worry was built around a series of e-mails that claim there's a secret plan to bring back the draft.
Even before the story aired, these e-mails had been debunked.
In a subsequent interview with InDC Journal, the lead CBS reporter of the story said
The fact is, they were going around. I know several people that got them, and it’s gotten people all riled up. Whether or not there’s any reality to there being a draft, is almost besides the point.
Okay. Great. Now CBS has become that annoying friend or colleague you know who is constantly forwarding the latest urban myth e-mail to everyone in his address book.
What's next, CBS? A story on how air travelers should fear being drugged and having their kidneys removed? That grocery shoppers should be wary of flesh eating bananas?
Why does anyone still watch this network?
I don't know about you, but if a week goes by in which I haven't been lectured in ponderous tones as to why Americans are so hated, I feel all empty inside. So to fill the gaping void in my soul, I rooted around and found this article, in which the author ponders "the reason which has prompted growing distaste for us in a country which is our oldest ally and dearest Continental friend." Here's a sampling:
Before World War II the writer once engaged in argument with the buxom, faintly mustachioed patronne of a small Paris bistro. "Ah," said she by way of summing up, "you Americans were chics in 1917 -- not now."
We who were so chics in 1917 and again a quarter of a century later are no longer popular in France. This is one of the disappointing features disclosed by the present crisis. On both extreme Left and extreme Right an ugly current of anti-American feeling is running. Why?
I know, you're thinking that you know the answer to this one. It's because of George Bush -- his arrogant smirk, his swaggering unilateralism, and his obsession with oil (the French would never let their foreign policy be tainted by oil concerns) caused our faithful friends the French to turn away in disgust, right?
Well, there's just one problem with that theory: the article in question was written in 1958, when George Bush was ten years old. If you're scratching your head as to how the French could have come to hate us without the help of Chimpy McDeath, here are the reasons given by the author:
-The relative changes in the international stature of America and France. "No nation likes to see itself slipping on the scale of grandeur. It is human nature to resent those that replace it."
-Our opposition to the French at Suez, and the supplying of small arms to the Tunisians (i.e., interfering with their ill-gotten colonial booty).
-The lack of contacts by the French with everyday Americans, leaving them to garner their impressions of us from "films, books, soldiers, business men and tourists." One French journalist quoted in the article notes - with requisite disdain, naturellement - that the uncouth Yanks "drink Coca-cola among the most magnificent vineyards." Quel horreur!
-And, lastly, the deliberately distorted image of Americans painted by European intellectuals, charicaturizing us as a nation obsessed with, among other things, rock and roll, juke boxes and stock car races.
So there you have it. If only we didn't behave like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, everybody would love us. Now that we have that solved, I'll leave you with this:
There is no hate for the United States in France. France remains friendly to the United States. But the French people just don't like the American people.
That little tidbit was said by Charles de Gaulle. Leave it to either a Frenchman or John Kerry to come up with the nuanced position of "our country doesn't hate your country, our people just hate your people." Whatever.
After half a century of debate over school reforms inspired by the free market, are we any closer to a truly competitive marketplace in education? If not, why not? What does it really take to create an effective, universally accessible education market?
I'll be joining a group of education policy colleagues at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday morning to try to answer those questions. You can watch a simulcast of the presentations on the web. (I'll be on around 10:30am ET, in case yer innerested). The official title of the conference is: "Creating a True Marketplace in Education."
My contribution to this event is a Market Education Metric. It's a ranking system for school choice reforms that is designed to predict the quality and scope of the market that a given proposal is likely to create in the medium to long term. You type in a few dozen data points that describe the details of the proposal, and it spits out a number, from 0 to 100, ranking that proposal.
The rough draft of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet capable of computing the metric, along with my paper explaining it, can be found here.
It is certain to have a few kinks in it, and the weightings and functions that make it up could stand to be refined, but it's a start.
Here's a taste of my latest commentary for the Mackinac Center. You can read the whole thing on the Mackinac website.
Should You Fear School Choice?
You probably oppose school vouchers. On the other hand, you probably support school vouchers. These are the conflicting results of two different public opinion poll questions published in the past few weeks.
When the education magazine Phi Delta Kappan asked, "Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?" just over half the public said it was opposed. A poll conducted by the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation asked the same question and got the same answer.
But the Friedman Foundation also asked, "Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose any school, public or private, to attend using public funds?" Nearly two-thirds of the public favored the idea.
This volatility can also be seen in voters’ responses to school-voucher ballot questions. In 2000, opinion polls initially showed vouchers enjoying considerable public support in both Michigan and California. Both measures eventually went down to resounding defeats.
These dramatic swings in public support for school choice can be traced largely to a single factor: fear of the unknown.
Critics typically portray comprehensive school-choice programs as new and untested. They predict that such programs will fail to improve overall academic achievement, hurt poor families, tear apart the fabric of society and drive up the cost of education. They forecast doom, and the public retreats in fear.
The critics may believe these things to be true. They are not.
[...]
As someone who spent the early days of the War on Terror glued to my TV, looking back on that time brings to mind two things: endless Bowflex commercials, and Steve Harrigan's eerie, green-tinged night-vision communiques from Afghanistan. I've only recently discovered that Mr. Harrigan has a blog, which is every bit as fascinating as his battlefield reports. In Tuesday's entry, he describes some of the things that don't make it into the reports of his print-journalist colleagues in Baghdad:
In today's article about the beheading of an American hostage one key detail does not even make it into the story: the reporter and his translator watched the murder together on an internet website. While watching it, the translator threw up.
As Steve points-out, this telling little detail deserved to make it into that reporter's story. We've heard an endless amount about the activities of the Al-Zarqawi acolytes. Shouldn't we also have a chance to see how an ordinary Iraqi responds to that?
Drudge is reporting that Bill Burkett now says that the Kerry campaign's Joe Lockhart tried to convince him to give the Rathergate memos to him. Lockhart has previously claimed that he only spoke with Burkett as a favor to CBS producer Mary Mapes, and that he "does not recall" discussing the memos during their telephone call.
Update (11:44pm PT):
Newsmax has a longer article with more information.
Update II (11:54pm PT):
The State (via Allah) has even more.
Update III (6:33pm PT 09/24/04):
The San Jose Mercury News has now retracted this story. I suspect that the contradictory and changing storylines from Bill Burkett will continue as long as he continues speaking with the press. On the one hand, this is a boon for CBS with respect to the lawsuit that Burkett is purportedly preparing against them. On the other hand, its terrible for CBS in that this is, apparently, Mr. Rather's "unimpeachable source."
This is the week when everyone notices John Kerry's woman-troubles:
George W Bush is poised to re-write American political history with the help of tens of thousands of women such as Dina Murphy, a young mother from the swing state of New Hampshire.
By her own admission, Mrs Murphy is "not very political". In the last three presidential elections, she voted Democrat, most recently for Al Gore in 2000, and she was far from alone.
[...]
Possibly to her slight surprise, Mrs Murphy attended a political rally for Mr Bush this week in the New Hampshire town of Derry.
More than anything else, Mrs Murphy was looking to be reassured.
"I don't feel comfortable voting for Kerry," she said. "It's just a feeling, a comfort level. I trust Bush more to lead our country."
Meanwhile, Naomi Wolfe (via Power Line) is blaming Theresa Heinz-Kerry for much of her husband's difficulties, arguing that her habit of wearing black, her insistence on keeping her previous husband's name, and her decision to focus on herself at the democratic convention have served to undermine John Kerry as a candidate.
With President Bush garnering the support of 48% of registered female voters versus Kerry's 43% in a recent poll, even The New York Times has been forced to acknowledge the problem.
As a female, I think I can address this topic more succinctly: it's the "liar" factor. All nutty, hyperbolic "Bush Lied, People Died" invective aside, Bush comes across as the honest guy. Kerry doesn't. And I think men have a higher tolerance for liars than women do.
I first got the "ersatz Nixon" vibe from Kerry back in January. I had lost interest in the democratic primaries once it became obvious that my dream candidate, Joseph Lieberman, would never be able to muster enough "Joementum" to win-over the Michael Moore wing of the party. But my interest was piqued again after the New Hampshire primary, when John Kerry showed up at a press event looking like something from the Awful Plastic Surgery website, and then had the gall to later tell an interviewer that he had never even heard of Botox. It was a classic case of "who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?"
Now, I don't actually have a problem with a political candidate making aesthetic improvements. It's the blatant lying about it that knocked me sideways. If Kerry had simply told the reporter that it was none of his business and, by the way, could we please stick to the issues like health care and the war in Iraq, I would have been fine with that. Likewise, if he had acknowledged having work done and then said something along the lines of, "It's sad, but the reality is that, ever since the Nixon-Kennedy debates, appearances have mattered in politics," I would not only have concurred, but would have admired his forthrightness (while still retaining the right to mock his freaky visage, of course). But no, that simply would not do for John Kerry. Only a bizarre, borderline-confrontational denial of easily-observed reality would suffice.
Let me put it this way: President Bush seems like the kind of guy who, if busted with some lipstick on his collar, would look at you for a moment, burst into tears, and then spend the next forty years of his life trying to make it up to you. Kerry comes-across as the sort who, in the same situation, would blow his top, fume about having his fidelity questioned, and then spend the next forty minutes pompously lecturing you about your failings as a wife...all while continuing to assert his innocence.
In short, he comes across as a creep. A lying creep. And I don't want this country married to him for the next four years.
Just saw Matthew Klam discussing bloggers on Dayside with Linda Vester. I didn't see the very beginning of his interview, but the portion I saw had him saying only nice things the phenomenon. Linda even asked him whether bloggers really sit around in their pajamas. On the upside, it sounds like he has a piece about the blogging trend in an upcoming issue of The New York Times Magazine - presumably this Sunday, since he was plugging it today. On the downside: when the audience was asked if any of them had read a blog, it looked like only one person raised his hand.
Law professor Brian Leiter is out of sorts. He is peeved at bloggers (or, as he calls them, "moral cretins" who are "full of shit"), for attacking Dan Rather's use of fake documents to impugn president Bush's National Guard service. [via Ann Althouse]
Leiter finds this attack spurious, particularly "when the facts about his [president Bush's] National Guard 'service' are equally well-established by other kinds of evidence routinely ignored by Instaignorance and co.)."
I'm not a lawyer, but does it really help your case to say that your evidence is just as good as somebody else's fake evidence? Does this mean Leiter's evidence is equally dubious?
Actually, yes.
Leiter's supporting link for his aforementioned claim is the website of self-consciously-styled bad-boy "journalist" Greg Palast. Palast, in turn, presents two bits of evidence to make his own Bush-bad-Guardsman case: the claims of Ben Barnes and a poor quality picture of an anonymous undated document that repeats the claims of Ben Barnes.
The irony here is impressive: Legal scholar Leiter wants us to accept the thrust of the CBS story, which was put together by partisan journalists based on the discredited (see below) Ben Barnes and some now-famous forged documents, because another partisan "journalist" also quotes Ben Barnes and has his own picture of an undated, unsigned, and apparently unauthenticated document echoing Barnes' story. (The echo is so good that it even makes the same mistake Barnes has in the past, falsely claiming that Barnes was Lt. Gov. when G. W. Bush entered the guard--Bush entered in '68, Barnes wasn't Lt. Gov. until '69).
Hmm. I think prof. Leiter's defense rested a little early (and maybe had a nip or two at the cooking sherry as well).
- - -
In case you've missed the litany of discrediting evidence on Barnes, here's an incomplete synopsis:
Barnes can't seem to remember with any consistency what political office he held in Texas when he was supposedly playing puppet-master for the Bush family; he hasn't explained why he felt it was strategically important to curry favor with George H. W. Bush, a lowly freshman Republican congressman in 1968 (the year G. W. Bush entered the Guard), at a time when Texas was dominated by a Democratic political machine; that Barnes is the "third largest all-around Democratic donor" in America, or that Barnes' own daughter says he told her he is lying about president Bush.
Neither Palast nor Leiter managed to find space in their posts to mention the statement of retired Col. Walter Staudt, the man who swore George W. Bush into the Guard:
"He [president Bush] didn't use political influence to get into the Air National Guard…. I was the one who did it and I was the one who was there and I didn't talk to any of them."
UPDATE: Ventupreneur has discussion
John Hawkins has a post up at ChronWatch that really gets to the heart of why Rathergate is such a milestone for the media:
In fact, the way that CBS has treated these fake memos is particularly ironic in light of the old media's reaction to the charges made by the Swift Boat Vets against John Kerry. If Dan [sic] Killian, the man who was supposed to have written the forged memos, was alive and saying something negative about John Kerry instead of George W. Bush, we could be almost certain that the old media would immediately write him off as untrustworthy.
So why is the old media adopting ''Enquirer'' standards as to what are ''credible'' allegations, when George Bush is involved? Many people believe it's because of this:
''The New York Times conducted an informal poll of journalists at the recent Democratic convention that showed they favor John Kerry for president over President Bush by 3 to 1, while reporters based in Washington, D.C., support the Massachusetts senator by 12 to 1.''
The old media's liberal bias is on display day-in-and-day-out. It's in the questions they ask to each candidate, which stories are on the front page and which ones get buried on back pages, news stories that are filled with liberal opinion, a preponderance of liberal writers on the editorial pages, and a dozen other small ways in which ideologs trump the old media's supposed neutrality.
That's why it makes no difference if bloggers, particularly conservative bloggers, wear their ideologies on their sleeve. CBS, The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post--they all have viewpoints too, but unlike bloggers, they're not honest about where they stand.
First we had Jonathan Klein sniffing that "Bloggers have no checks and balances . . . [it's] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas." Now we have Elmer Smith at the Philadelphia Daily News accusing bloggers of doing the monkey dance:
THEY WERE doing the monkey dance around the still-sizzling corpse of Dan Rather's career yesterday.
It was like that scene from "The Wizard of Oz" where the apes leaped gleefully as the Wicked Witch of the West fizzled into oblivion.
Between conservative talk-radio hosts and acid-penned bloggers, it was a confirmation ball for people who believe the major media are willing tools of the liberal establishment.
Something tells me FrankJ isn't going to stand for this.
Kathleen Parker in the Charlotte Observer has an insightful column on Rathergate, noting what Rather and the rest of the CBS crew seem to be trying to gloss-over: that they willfully ignored what their own document "experts" were telling them about the memos:
CBS may have been misled, but no one at the network was blindly misled. Rather and the network's producers had ample advance warning from their own document analysts that the memos' authenticity could not be confirmed with 100 percent confidence.
Of four experts consulted, two raised questions about various aspects of the documents, and at least one warned that they weren't quite ready for prime time. CBS ran the story anyway.
It's disingenuous for the network to say it was misled as though everything had been airtight. Where there is reasonable doubt about damning documents, especially proffered in an election season against a commander in chief during war, there is no story. No one at CBS doesn't know this.
She wraps up her column with what would surely cut Mr. Rather to the quick: an unfavorable comparison to Donald Rumsfeld:
His apology is what one might expect from a teenager when he gets caught smoking in the garage: "I used bad judgment, and for that I'm sorry." How about this instead: "I knowingly used questionable documents to damage a president during an election, and I have no excuse."
Or this, which is what Americans have a right to expect from adults whose powerful position can sway the course of human history: "These events occurred on my watch. I am accountable for them, and I take full responsibility." Doubtless it was painful for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to speak those words before the Senate Armed Services Committee last May following the story about prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, which Rather also broke on "60 Minutes II."
You'd think Rather might have taken notes.
Ouch.
Over at Fraters Libertas, there's speculation that Time's "Person of the Year" could be...bloggers. Hmm. Would being in the company of this guy and this guy really be a good thing?
I get to make my Hans Brinker reference after all! It looks like CBS may indeed be throwing producer Mary Mapes to the wolves (via INDC Journal):
The fallout from CBS's doomed story about President Bush's National Guard service most endangers a woman few viewers know but who played a key role in two of the biggest television stories of the year.
Mary Mapes, a veteran producer at CBS News, reported most of the National Guard story, including obtaining the documents CBS now says it can't authenticate. She also passed on the phone number of her source, former Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, to the Kerry campaign.
An old co-worker of hers says, "She definitely was someone who was motivated by what she cared about and definitely went into journalism to make a difference. She's not the sort of person who went into journalism to report the news and offer an array of commentary."
Well knock me down with a feather.
I think this may warrant a Drudge headline: a country other than the United States has been blamed for something. Yes, you heard that right. A bad thing happened and the United States was not held responsible:
Protesters from a pro-government political party in Sri Lanka have paraded the body of a murdered activist outside the Norwegian embassy.
Hundreds of Eelam People's Democratic Party (EPDP) members briefly placed the coffin of Thambithurai Sivakumaran outside the embassy gates in Colombo.
Mr Sivakumaran was shot and killed in an attack over the weekend blamed on the Tamil Tigers.
Norway brokered a truce between the army and the rebels in February 2002.
Poor Norway. Can the violent protests against Nordic cultural hegemony and the occupation of Queen Maud Land and its continental shelf be far behind?
Well, we now have yet another version of the source of CBS' forged documents. Bill Burkett is now telling USA Today that he got the papers from a shadowy figure at the Houston Livestock Show after receiving a phone tip from a woman named Lucy Ramirez:
By Monday, USA TODAY had not been able to locate Ramirez or verify other details of Burkett's account. Three people who worked with Killian in the early 1970s said they don't recognize her name. Burkett promised to provide telephone records that would verify his calls to Ramirez, but he had not done so by Monday night.
An acquaintance of Burkett, who he said could corroborate his story, said he was at the livestock show on March 3. The woman, who asked that her name not be used, said Burkett asked if he could put papers inside a box she had at the livestock show. Often, she said, friends ask to store papers in her box that verify their purchases at the livestock auction. She said she did not know the nature of the papers Burkett gave her, and he did not say anything about them.
Burkett says that, after receiving the documents at the livestock show, he drove to a Kinko's in Waco (note that this was in May and hence should not be confused with the Abilene Kinko's from which the documents were faxed to CBS). After making copies there, he says he burned the originals in the parking lot outside. He then took the copies and put them "in cold storage" in an unidentified location about 100 miles from his ranch - possibly a roundabout way of saying that he gave them to someone else to keep.
So how did CBS eventually get their hands on them? Burkett says that he met with 60 Minutes II producer Mary Mapes and CBS reporter Mike Smith at a "pizza restaurant" near his home sometime in mid-August and gave them two of the memos. He later handed the remaining four memos to Smith at a drive-in restaurant in Baird, Texas (note: Googling shows that there is a Sonic Drive-In in Clyde, near Baird). He says that that was around September fifth. The inference here then is that it was a CBS person, not Burkett, who faxed the documents to CBS from the Abilene Kinko's.
As for fitting all of this in with the existing known timeline, Allah will be the place to watch.
The best part of this whole saga is that Burkett is now using the word "patsy." If I were in his shoes, I would make a point of not getting arrested in Dallas.
Whenever I criticize someone in print (or in pixels) I like to give them a chance to respond. So, after thwacking the Columbia Journalism Review's "Campaign Desk" website for its insufficient and inaccurate coverage of RatherGate, I asked its managing editor, Steve Lovelady, for a response.
Steve was kind enough to send me a short piece he'd written on the subject at another website, and since I couldn't find a link to it on its original site, I have reproduced it on TheGantelope.
If you read it, I think you'll agree that it doesn't address the concerns I raised in my earlier castigation of Campaign Desk.
In his e-mail, Steve pointed to critical coverage of CBS in the Washington Post, ABC News, and the LA Times. But that's beside my point. I was arguing that Campaign Desk had all but ignored the story, and what little coverage it gave was patently flawed. No response on that score.
As for the broader question about the media at large, Steve hasn't convinced me that any of the MSM should be trusted further than we can throw them. Yes, a few news organizations have jumped on CBS's bleeding carcass, but that does not prove that they aren't also producing shoddily researched and biased pieces of their own on a regular basis. Finding fault with someone else is always easier than finding fault with oneself. (That's one reason why I like to let the people I criticize respond to me, to see if I've missed the obvious because of some bias of my own that I can't see.)
Campaign Desk and the big media world have a very long road ahead of them to prove to the public that we should believe anything they say that cannot be independently verified, and to believe that they are not filtering out news that is inconsistent with their biases.
Well, Dan Rather has finally addressed the forged-document kerfuffle. I'm disappointed. I had been hoping that he would lay the blame on his producer, Mary Mapes, so I could post something with the title "Mary Mapes Dodge." Sigh. Oh well.
The most intriguing portion of his statement is his assertion that Bill Burkett "did not come to us; we went to him and asked him for the documents."
So who tipped-off CBS to these forged documents in the first place, if it wasn't Mr. Burkett?
While we're on the subject of John Kerry's older sister, consider this bit from The Villager article:
She is now nongovernmental (N.G.O.) liaison at the U.S. Mission to the U.N. - and she makes clear that prevents her from doing any political fundraising.
(You keep using the word "clear." I do not think that word means what you think it does):
In an intimate club setting (Caroline's) across the street from the fabled Brill Building and around the corner from Aldon Music where Carole King began her career over 40 years ago, one of the world's most beloved pop music icons worked her magic once again winning over a rather dour crowd with her trademark wit, warmth, and musical gifts. For a singer who rarely performs in public, Carole established immediate rapport with the audience. Introduced by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, Peggy Kerry and Bebe Neuwirth, Carole immediately warmed up the gathering of still frozen rush hour commuters who plucked down $500-$150 in support of Sen. John Kerry's campaign.
The author of that site was even kind enough to include photos of Peggy at the fundraiser.
Peggy Kerry, John's older sister, speaking to The Villager back in February:
John won't make the mistake that Dukakis made. You can be sure he'll respond vigorously to every attack from the Republicans.
The Columbia University School of Journalism is said to be one of the preeminent institutions in its field. It awards the Pulitzer Prize. So you might be interested to know how the Columbia Journalism Review's website, "Campaign Desk", has covered RatherGate.
At 3:48pm on September 9th, the day after the infamous 60 Minutes II episode aired, Campaign Desk had this to say:
the real news made last night by "60 Minutes II" was the revelation of personal memos kept by one Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, Bush's squadron commander in Texas.
Stay tuned, dear readers. Tracking the press performance on this story in days to come will be as interesting as tracking way [sic] the politics of it all unfolds.
That was after bloggers had been pointing to evidence of possible forgery for the better part of a day, and it was more than an hour after Bill Ardolino at InDC had published his interview with respected forensic document examiner Dr. Philip Bouffard. Bouffard, though he had not yet rendered a final verdict, stated that there was at least a 90% chance the memos were fakes.
Four days later, after a Boston Globe headline falsely claimed "Authenticity backed on Bush documents" (it was later forced by Ardolino to retract), after an early pioneer in computer typesetting explained in depth why the memos were laughable fakes, after CBS' "trump card" for authenticating the documents had called them "forgeries," after bloggers at Beldar and Powerline discovered that CBS' lead "document expert" was a handwriting specialist with no apparent typographic expertise, after scores of blog posts by servicemen had pointed to errors in the format and content of the memos, and after Charles Johnson had demonstrated the highly unlikely coincidence that the documents were almost identical matches for ones dashed off in Microsoft Word with the default settings, CJR's website had this to say about RatherGate:
[September 13]
Mostly, the frenzy consists of various bloggers swearing on the lives of their mothers that the Killian memos are authentic, and an equal number of bloggers swearing on the lives of their fathers that the Killian memos are fabricated.
These folks couldn't find a story in a library.
The next day, Campaign Desk finally felt compelled to say something about the flaming pink donkey in the center of the room:
[September 14]
A few readers have asked why Campaign Desk hasn't weighed in on the furor over the disputed CBS documents purporting to show President Bush slacking from his National Guard duties 32 years ago. (Indeed, the Weekly Standard Online today declared the CBS flap "the biggest media story in recent memory" -- having apparently expunged from its memory both the Jayson Blair affair and the press's failure to examine the pre-war rationale for the invasion of Iraq.)
"America's Premier Media Monitor," believes that Blair's plagiarism and fictionalization of stories like the homecoming of Pfc. Jessica Lynch is bigger news than CBS's use of memos that it knew to be questionable in a hit piece on the president of the United States with less than two months to go to the election.
As for "the press's failure to examine the pre-war rationale for the invasion of Iraq," it apparently consists of the fact that critical stories sometimes ran on page A17 instead of page A1. Or maybe there weren't enough of those stories, or they didn't have the right message, in CJR's view. Even if those criticisms are valid, do they trump the apparent efforts of the fifth estate to become a fifth column, deliberately suppressing concerns over documentary evidence in a story that might have affected the selection of the leader of the free world? You be the judge.
Campaign Desk goes on to explain why it has been mum on Dan:
The short answer to the question is, we're not in the business of saying, "You may be a bad boy; drink your medicine." We're in the business of saying "You are a bad boy; drink your medicine."
I wonder which class at Columbia teaches that the role of a media watchdog is to wait for someone else to check out a controversial story and then offer belated commentary?
The Campaign Desk piece then acknowledges the September 13th Washington Post article, but ignores all other sources indicating the fraudulent nature of the memos. They then downplay the significance of the story by lamenting that it is a distraction from the issues:
we do know this: The whole furor has once again turned the campaign press away from the issues that will define daily life for the next four years.
Which is to say, "[t]racking the press performance on this story," is no longer "as interesting as tracking way the politics of it all unfolds," now that the press's performance is starting to evoke the sedition flick Seven Days in May.
As of September 18th, the CJR's last word on the subject is a snide little piece attempting to belittle the contributions of PajamaLand. It cites, with no critical analysis of its own, several left-wing bloggers who deny that the Pajamahaddeen contributed anything of substance to the story. At no point is there any mention of the obvious evidence (some of it linked-to above) that bloggers broke the story with expert testimony and insightful analysis.
Rounding out its September 15th post, the Campaign Desk defends the Los Angeles Times' assertion that "CBS' real error was trying to prove a point that didn't really need to be proved," offering as support:
the Ben Barnes segment of the CBS broadcast, which preceded the Killian document presentation -- not to mention numerous reports from last February confirming what has come to be known as the Alabama Absence.)
They end with a few words of derision for bloggers: "Maybe it's time to change out of those pajamas and get some fresh air."
Apparently the folks at Campaign Desk missed this Associated Press story, also in February, about a National Guard officer who remembers seeing Bush repeatedly in Alabama during the dates in question. Perhaps they were too busy with all that fancy journalism they do to type the phrase "remembers seeing Bush Alabama" into Google. (But then what do I know, I'm just some guy in pajamas).
Nor do they mention: that Barnes can't seem to remember with any consistency what political office he held in Texas when he was supposedly playing puppet-master for the Bush family; why he felt it was strategically important to curry favor with George H. W. Bush, a lowly freshman Republican congressman in 1968 (the year G. W. Bush entered the Guard), at a time when Texas was dominated by a Democratic political machine; that Barnes is the "third largest all-around Democratic donor" in America, or that Barnes' own daughter says he told her he is lying about president Bush. Nor have they subsequently updated their article to reflect the statement of retired Col. Walter Staudt, the man who swore George W. Bush into the Guard:
"He [president Bush] didn't use political influence to get into the Air National Guard…. I was the one who did it and I was the one who was there and I didn't talk to any of them."
So, there you have it folks. If this is what the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has to offer, I think we'd be better off getting our reporters from the Arthur Murray School of Dance.
The Washington Post has a nice illustrated guide to the questionable elements of the forged documents. Ipse Dixit calls this article the "Sportscenter highlight reel" of Rathergate. It doesn't cover every single disputed element, but it's a good primer.
Oh goody. Our friends the French are pushing a new international tax (via The Corner)!
I've always said, there's nothing I like better than a little good-old-fashioned taxation without representation. Would it be too much to hope that they'll bring back impressment, too? That would be dreamy! And cholera and corsets - let's keep our fingers crossed for those.
Here's something you won't hear much about in the mainstream media in the U.S.: Kabul, Afghanistan is experiencing a construction boom. If you don't have time to read the article (which isn't very long), at least check out Edward Grazda's accompanying photographs.
This will be an interesting case to watch: Russian authorities have leaned on the Lithuanian government to shut-down the website that was used by Shamil Basayev, the Chechen terrorist, to claim responsibility for the Beslan school siege. This is the first time I've heard of that happening. As far as I know, sites affiliated with Al-Qaeda only disappear of their own volition, or when an individual site host is badgered into doing so (usually by Internet Haganah). This particular website now bears a message stating that it will be out of commission "pending the outcome of a court decision on its legality."
The Telegraph (via Captain's Quarters) is reporting that Rocco Martino, the man who has been pinpointed as having "procured and circulated" fake documents indicating Iraqi attempts to purchase Nigerian yellowcake uranium, was doing so in the employ of - who else? - France:
His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that - by commissioning "Giacomo" to procure and circulate documents - France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the United States to promote the case for war with Iraq.
Italian diplomats have claimed that, by disseminating bogus documents stating that Iraq was trying to buy low-grade "yellowcake" uranium from Niger, France was trying to "set up" Britain and America in the hope that when the mistake was revealed it would undermine the case for war, which it wanted to prevent.
Hmm. When Valerie Plame sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations recommending her husband (Joseph Wilson) for the trip to Niger, she made a point of mentioning that her husband had "lots of French contacts." Oops.
Please help me! CBS, The Boston Globe, and The LA Times are holding me hostage. They've got a gun to my head, and they're telling me that if I don't admit that they are BOTH incompetent AND transparently biased they're going to shoot!
Or that's how it feels, anyway.
Growing up in the '70s and '80s there were two news programs that had my utmost confidence: Nolton Nash's nightly "The National", on CBC, and "60 Minutes" on CBS.
That's where they started out.
Not having watched 60 Minutes or CBS News regularly in years, I no longer had strong feelings about them, but would have given them the benefit of the doubt.
That's when they and the other MSM thugs took me hostage.
CBS bases its recent story on fakes so bad they're not worthy of the word "forgeries," and that suggests incompetence. Then they defend it by trotting out handwriting analysts, typewriter repairmen, and computer programmers who seem, all together, to have about 0.000236 percent of a clue.
Incompetence again.
Then they publish a statement by another expert intended to shore up their story, only this gentleman is unfamiliar with the words "typeface" or "typewritten," writing instead "typed-written" and "typed-face." No one who has ever worked, even briefly, in a modern office in which documents are printed would rely on that gentleman to authenticate documents.
That his statement was not only accepted but published by CBS indicates a level of incompetence on CBS's part that makes Inspector Clouseau look like Sherlock Holmes.
A couple of days ago it came out that CBS had also asked two other document examiners to look at their fake memos, and that both had expressed reservations and that neither had authenticated them. CBS not only ran with the story despite this, it never mentioned their concerns.
That is NOT incompetence. That is willful deception. Since it happened BEFORE the story aired, it cannot be chalked up to ass-covering after the memos were revealed as fakes. They did it in advance and that can only mean that they were so suffused with bias that it was leaking out of their pores. (Can you think of another explanation?)
The LATimes, the Boston Globe and others have tried, at times, to come to CBS's rescue after the fact, and their stories, too, have been ridiculously biased.
My question is: How can they not know how corrupt and idiotic they look?
Anyway, they can put the gun down now. I'm convinced they ARE both corrupt and biased to the core as well as incompetent to a degree I have seldom seen in my life.
Why does Europe hate us? Perhaps it has something to do with their news being filtered through the twisted lenses of biased journalists. Take, for example, Slovakian journalist Petr Bokuvka's Top Ten Things Omitted From Laura Bush Speech On Her Husband At RNC.
Isn't it a real thigh-slapper? I'm particularly enamored of item #4: "I remember our visits to Bill Clinton during Lewinsky scandal, convincing him to admit he slept with his cousin. That is normal down in the South."
How can we, as knuckle-dragging Americans, ever hope to achieve this level of wit and nuance? There is no hope! We've had more than two centuries to learn about ourselves, and it took a citizen of Slovakia to come-up with the idea of making fun of the south! This man could write for Carrot Top. He's that good. I just thank my stars that he works in the media and can thereby spread the word about the ignorant crackers across the sea.
If you haven't already seen it, Mike Nelson of MST3000 fame has a blog now. This week, he mocks the "Rock Against Bush" efforts (at least, I hope this is a joke). Here's a sampling:
Ernest Thomas, who played Roger on What's Happening!!, is doing a one man show called, Hey, Hey, Hey, is Bush Hitler or What? at the Golden Unicorn Puppet Theater in Pipestone, WI. Ten percent of the proceeds of this $6.00 show will go to MoveOnPac.org.
Starland Vocal Band is reuniting for a concert on the mezzanine level of Oakbrook Center Mall in Oakbrook, IL. The concert is free, but Starland recommends that you donate to the Center for American Progress and buy their new CD Afternoon Delighted to Be Back! (Opening act is Phil Montrose's Barbershop and Spoon Band.)
Mr. Lifto, the circus freak and Bush hater who toured with Lalapalooza, has gone solo and is now appearing at various bars, clubs and community centers. The highlight of his act is said to be when he uses fishhooks to attach Jim Rassman to his nipples and lift him off the stage floor. (Please check The Journal of Professional Non-Traditional Circus Performers for times and locations.)
By the way, if you haven't yet read Mr. Nelson's Movie Megacheese or Mind over Matters, get thee to Amazon or a bookstore now. You cannot risk going through life not knowing what Mike thinks about "you-fouled talc."
Ernest Miller of Corante has a fairly comprehensive chronology of RatherGate for those who may have taken the time to eat or sleep in the past week, and hence missed some of CBS's self-mutilation.
LeanWrite has a fascinating post that illustrates why blogs are revolutionizing the way we obtain information:
Now, what to make of the whole thing? The first lesson to me is that reading the news has become, with the aid of the Internet, an act that requires active participation. There's no excuse to be a passive reader or listener anymore....the blogosphere, search engines, and online communities have made the talent pool of ideas open to all, and easy to access. While this particular news item is hardly the story of the century, it's amazing to me that in under 24 hours from the time the story made the AP Wire, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people looking it over, and finding items that were curious. Pre-Internet, these notions would likely have languished and amounted to nothing. Today, it's possible to check even the most obscure story without leaving your chair or changing out of pajamas. If the printing press, telegraph, radio, television, cable, or satellite broadened the reach of the mass media, the blogosphere and the Internet are making it deeper and more responsible to the end users, if they choose to use the technology available to them.
Read the whole thing (via Instapundit).
Germans Flock to See Hitler Film
More than 100,000 German filmgoers flocked to see a controversial big-budget movie about Adolf Hitler on its opening night on Thursday.
The Downfall, shown on 400 screens, stars Swiss actor Bruno Ganz as the Nazi leader and sparked debate about portraying Hitler with a human side.
On the up side, perhaps this film will serve to remind the younger generations of Germans what happens when they decide to blame a single group of people for all of the world's problems.
This gem comes to you via the website "News Hounds" (scroll about half-way down).
Some patriot has knowledge of Killian and no doubt is or was close to him and put this out. Notice that no one is talking about the substance of the memo's, only authenticity.
Ah yes, document forgery, a defining element of patriotism from George Washington to Todd Beamer. Now let's all get back to discussing the content of the make-believe memos, like proper patriots.
Sigh.
Veterans of WWII's Battle of Arnhem commemorated the 60th anniversary of the event yesterday. On Saturday, six of these men will parachute into town as part of the celebration. They share an average age of 84.
Arnhem was part of the unsuccesful Operation Market Garden, which is the focus of one of the episodes of the fabulous miniseries Band of Brothers.
Today's "Best of the Web" on the OpinionJournal website is richly upholstered in the finest Corinthian leather. Go ye, and read it, for it is good.
In case you can't come up with the answer to Taranto's "mystery sex" question towards the end, it's "Space Unicorns." Obviously.
This story has already been out in PajamaLand for a little while, but it is so important, I want to repeat it here on the off chance that anyone has missed it.
As reported at Captain's Quarters and elsewhere, a 60 Minutes producer has been trolling for disgruntled members of the military to interview for her "investigation" into possible shortages of supplies and equipment in the military. Read her mail, and decide for yourself if you think that she is doing objective research, or merely hunting for anyone who will support a conclusion to which she has already come:
As per our conversation, I am producing a 60 Minutes piece (with Kroft) which addresses the following:
In light of our recently passed 416 billion dollar defense appropriations bill, I am disturbed to hear stories of lack of the most basic supplies among the troops in Iraq.
These include out of date weapons, lack of radios, inadequate water supplies, problems with vests, humvees, troops forced to purchase their own equipment etc. I would like to hear from any family who knows of such problems. I am particularly interested in shortages within the last few months.
I am also interested in maintenance problems...backlogs of repairs on
vehicles and helicopters that may put troops in danger.
In looking at the stories from the field, I am trying to determine whether the Guard is experiencing more difficulties than other forces and also whether these problems continue regardless of promises to fix them.
If any of the families have documentary evidence of problems, photos from the field , home videos and letters etc, I am of course interested.
my [sic] email is LCCockburn@aol.com. (I am based in Washington DC. 202 342 9488)
And where was Ms. Cockburn doing this trolling? Amongst members of Military Families Speak Out, an anti-war group (no word yet on whether she plans to use blatantly forged documents to support her case). Notice her particular interest in whether or not the National Guard members were being singled-out for neglect. Now, why do you supposed this group of people would be of such interest to her? Hmmm. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that President Bush served in the National Guard, could it? Nah. Mere coincidence, I am sure.
Be sure to check out Blackfive for his take on the allegations (you have to scroll down through this post a bit to get to the relevant portion).
In his Washington Post story "Rather Concedes Papers Are Suspect," Howard Kurtz focuses on Dan Rather's status as a lightning-rod for conservative's criticism to explain the furor over RatherGate.
Wrong. In fact, backward.
The more highly regarded the anchor, the more stunning the story would be. I, personally, am outraged that CBS ignored the warnings of its own document experts and ran with the story anyway, failing even to mention their concerns.
I'm not outraged because the man responsible for this travesty supposedly has a history of left-wing bias--I haven't watched CBS News in years. I didn't think ill of Dan Rather before this: I didn't think of him at all.
What is shocking is that any major news organization would do what CBS News did, and then would try to defend their indefensible "reporting" in such a ham-handed way that anyone with a year of word processing experience will find the latest testimony of their "experts" ludicrous on its face.
Somebody please check the CBS basement for pods.
Wow. Just...wow. CBS has now put up on the web a signed statement from one of their document "experts." Here, for your edification, is this felicitous bit:
In regard to the balance of the typed-written photocopied questioned documents, the same typed-face designs are strongly similar to corresponding samples that indicate the same typed-face existed prior to the date in question on the photocopied documents.
Is it not a wondrous thing to behold? Do you not marvel? Are you not entertained? Do the references to "typed-face" not make you want to grab yourself a sody-pop and take a drive in one of those newfangled auto-mobiles you've heard so much about?
But seriously....how did it come to pass that CBS -- CBS! -- is now defending itself from charges of using forged documents by quoting a supposed "questioned document" expert who does not know how to use the word 'typeface!' That's like hiring a baseball expert who prattles on about the historical consistency of the stitching on a "fowl ball."
What I'm enjoying is thinking about what is going through the mind of the peon who had to put that .pdf file up on the web. He or she had to be looking at that text and thinking, man, I have to get my resume out tomorrow.
So who is this James Pierce that CBS claims has also authenticated their documents? Could it be this James Pierce? You have to love the part that says, "The jury was strongly persuaded by defendant's handwriting expert, John Cerlanek, and did not believe that plaintiff's handwriting expert refuted any of his testimony." Pierce was the plaintiff's expert.
To quote Glenn Reynolds, "Heh."
UPDATE (8:20PT):
It looks like a poster at Little Green Footballs already saw this. Credit where credit is due and all of that...
Drop by the Mackinac Center's website to see my latest op/ed on the 60 Minutes memo scandal. Here's the first paragraph as a tease :-)
In John Frankenheimer's film Seven Days in May, a cabal of military leaders plots to overthrow the U.S. government because they oppose the president’s foreign policy. The scandal over last week’s 60 Minutes II episode increasingly resembles a remake of that film — with bumbling media mavens standing in for seditious servicemen, and with a band of Internet bloggers acting as the hero who thwarts them. [...]
As always, you'll find tons of supporting links. Enjoy!
UPDATE (4:30 PM PT):
InDC Journal and Powerline Blog have the latest CBS statement.
Old Media is now joining the blogosphere (I prefer "PajamaLand," as it brings to mind images of childhood board games such as Chutes and Ladders, or Uncle Wiggily) in the conclusion that the Killian documents aired by 60 Minutes were indeed forgeries. Thoughts are now turning to the documents’ provenance, and to the question of what Dan Rather knew, and when he knew it.
Jonathan V. Last of Galley Slaves considers the possibilities here, while CrushKerry notes some finger-pointing in the direction of MoveOn.org. Meanwhile, Paul at Wizbang is pondering the issue, Powerline mentions a source who hints: “Keep an eye on Ben Barnes,” and Newsweek – by way of Ace of Spades - is eyeing Bill Burkett. Also, don’t miss the post by Fresh Air (on that same Ace of Spades thread), positing why the forger mistakenly thought Walter Staudt was still in the National Guard in 1973.
The plot thickens...
UPDATE (11:07pm PT):
Shots Across the Bow thinks that Kerry's been fragged!
Neither one bases its actions on sound research. [Here's an excerpt from my most recent op/ed for the Mackinac Center, which has already run in the print edition of the Oakland (Michigan) Press. Visit Mackinac's website for the complete text with links.]
A quarter of Michigan’s charter school teachers are not government certified. At the schools run by Charter School Administration Services, nearly two-thirds are uncertified.
These statistics were the subject of universal hand-wringing during a State Board of Education meeting this month. The Board’s President, Kathleen Straus, called them “pretty scary.” Charter schools spokesman Dan Quisenberry subsequently explained how charter schools’ urban settings lead to lower teacher certification rates, but no one directly challenged the idea that teacher certification is a critical factor in student learning.
In Michigan, the only requirement for initial certification is that the candidate graduate from a government-approved teacher training program. To continue working for more than six years, teachers must eventually complete some additional training classes.
Are teachers college graduates really better at raising student achievement than teachers who lack that pedagogical pedigree? Much has been written on this subject, most of it grossly flawed. After sifting through the research in 2001, Kate Walsh of the Abell Foundation identified seven well-designed studies of the effects of teacher certification on student achievement. All of them concluded that “New teachers who are certified do not produce greater student gains than new teachers who are not certified.”
Needless to say, Walsh’s review of the research sparked controversy. Linda Darling-Hammond, a leading advocate of certification with whose work Walsh had found considerable fault, wrote a harsh critique of Walsh’s findings. That critique was soon persuasively rebutted, however, by a joint response from Walsh and education economist Michael Podgursky. A preponderance of evidence now suggests that college of education degrees really don’t lead to better teaching in most cases.
So what does? [...]
What on earth is going on at CBS? Before Dan Rather's latest performance earlier this evening defending their purported National Guard memos, I just assumed that their partisanship and pride were keeping them from admitting error. After tonight, I am completely at a loss.
I'm going to lay the situation out for you as clearly and logically as I can, but I was sorely tempted to just blast Rather and CBS like this chap. (He's funnier than I am anyway, so you're getting the best of both worlds ;-)
Thanks to RatherBiased.com, we have a transcript of the CBS defense. According to that transcript, CBS presented two supposed authorities who believe the memos are genuine. Those authorities were a former typewriter repairman and a computer programmer.
Huh? Over the past five days, multiple forensic typography analysts and military men have called the memos forgeries or likely forgeries based on their presentation and their content. After all that, CBS wants us to believe the memos are genuine on the authority of an erstwhile typewriter repairman and a computer programmer with no apparent expertise in document analysis?
What are they thinking?
The typography angle has already been dealt with extensively (see the links and evidence from the preceding days' posts), so lets turn to
