Conservative Noise Machine at Work Again
The Washington Post and the New York Times, not to mention our own local Arizona Daily Star, have been taken in again by the shuck and jive of the Right Wing Media Noisemaker. The bloggish rumour that four of the memos recently released by CBS regarding the President's Guard service are forgeries quickly got sucked into CNS, WorldNetDaily, TownHall, and Drudge. From there the buzz became so loud that the mainstream media couldn't ignore it.The galling part of all this is that we have seen this pattern of disseminating misinformation to the mainstream media many times before, most notably in the completely bogus Kerry intern affair story. Taking a plausible premise and spinning it endlessly without any real facts into a hot story is a favored modus operandi and is characteristic of this case, as well.
But even worse is the simple fact that it doesn't matter one whit if these documents are forged. They are not the thrust of the indictment against Bush. These documents only suggest political pressure to cover up Bush's record and the state of mind of Bush's commander. The records speak for themselves: Bush failed to complete his Guard obligations. If these memos did not exist, that fact would not be not changed. The smokescreen provided by this 'forgery' controversy hides the main point: Bush is a deserter.
In fact, the effect of these 'forgery' allegations upon the converage of this story is so distracting that I am begining to suspect that Bush operatives planted these memos with CBS themselves in order to provide a distraction from the real story of Bush's desertion from the Guard. What better way to deal with a story for which there is no real defense than to create a conspiracy of forgery around some salacious, but ultimately irrelevant documents, in order to discredit the entire story in the minds of a distracted and lazy press and public?
Either way, the Bush campaign will continue to amplify the forgery charges, and duck the real issue of Bush's failure to fulfill his obligations until they make it to the finish-line of November 2nd.
posted by Michael Bryan @ 9/10/2004 09:08:00 PM
1 Comments:
As I said in HAIL DUBYUS! (http://blogs.salon.com/0002786) I originally thought that the machines needed to create these documents in the early 70s were rare, and that if anyone was likely to have perpetrated these forgeries, it would be Karl Rove...how else better to throw discredit on the question of whether or not The Shirker performed his guard duties and tar Kerry with the forgery brush, while at the same time seeming to be completely innocent?
But now it looks as if other people's research shows that these memos COULD have been produced on IBM Selectric typewriters of the time, Executive models C and D as well as Composer. While I stand at my original surmise, that IF these documents ARE FORGERIES, then no one would have more to gain than Rove and Bush. But IF they do turn out to be genuine--and it seems much more likely than it did at 6 am Friday morning, then Bush & Co have a lot of 'splaining to do...or rather, perhaps they'd better recognize that by castigating the beam in Kerry's eyes and ignoring the mote in their own, somebody else has already done it FOR them.
Gregorius alexandrensis... haildubyus@yahoo.com
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