Power Line | Suicide Bombers and CBS NewsI am not yet prepared to say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the "CBS documents" are forgeries. (They could be: I would say the overwhelming likelihood is that they are.) It's time for someone to produce the originals. But the AP report of the crowd booing when Bush mentioned Clinton's hospitalization is unquestionably, provably false, and someone should be fired over it.
We now know that our richest and most powerful news organizations are willing to blow themselves up--to destroy their own credibility, once considered a news organization's most precious possession--to achieve a political goal. The landscape will never look quite the same again. Those of us who still value truth must look at the mainstream media in a new, more skeptical and critical way, taking nothing for granted. Because, like suicide bombers, the mainstream news organs will go farther to achieve their political goals than we ever imagined.
LATER: Joseph M. Newcomer (site bandwidth swamped, mirrored here) does the font geekery I'm not qualified to do. I say again, overwhelming likelihood. Not even considering the word of Jerry Killian's family, or the deviations from military memo formatting, or the likelihood of Killian (a man who, according to those who knew him, hated to type) using a $4,000 (in 1972 dollars) typesetting machine for "file" memos that no one else would ever see, or the conspicuous lack of other memos of similar appearance from the same time and place--or the continuing conspicuous non-appearance of even one original.
There is one more possible defense, though, and I have a little bet with myself as to when it will surface.
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