Laughably Fake
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

A few weeks ago, Thomas Oliphant of The Boston Globe was on PBS’s “Newshour” explaining why the hundreds of Swift boat veterans’s allegations against Senator Kerry’s conduct in Vietnam were unworthy of his attention. “The standard of clear and convincing evidence,” he said, talking to Swift vet John O’Neill as if he were a backward fourth-grader,” is what keeps this story in the tabloids – because it does not meet basic standards.”
Last week we got a good idea of what Mr. Oliphant’s “basic standards” are. Dan Rather and the elderly gentlemen at “60 Minutes” were all a-twitter because they’d come into possession of some hitherto undiscovered memos relating to whether George W. Bush failed to show up for his physical in the War of 1812. The press had been flogging this dead horse all spring, but these newly “discovered” memos had jump-started the old nag just enough to get him on his knees long enough for the press to flog him all over again.
Unfortunately for CBS, Mr. Rather’s hairdresser sucks up so much of the budget that there was nothing left for any fact-checking, so the “60 Minutes” crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo conveniently called “CYA” which Mr. Bush’s commanding officer had written to himself 32 years ago. “This was too hot not to push,” one producer told The American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swift vets who’ve signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera – that’s way too cold to push; we’d want to fact-check that one thoroughly, till, say, midway through Mr. Kerry’s second term. But a handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign operative – that meets “basic standards” and we’ve got to get it out there right away. The only problem was the memo.
Amazingly, this guy at the Air National Guard base, Lieutenant Colonel Killian, had the only typewriter in Texas in 1973 using a prototype version of the default letter-writing program of Microsoft Word, complete with the tiny little superscript thingy that automatically changes July 4th to July 4. To do that on most 1973 typewriters, you had to unscrew the keys, grab a hammer and give them a couple of thwacks to make the “t” and “h” squish up all tiny, and even think it looked a bit wonky. You’d think having such a unique typewriter Lieutenant Colonel Killian would have used a less easily traceable model for his devastating “CYA” memo. Also, he might have chosen a font other than Times New Roman, designed for The Times of London in the 1930s and not licensed to Microsoft by Rupert Murdoch (The Times’s owner) until the 1980s.
Lieutenant Colonel Killian is no longer around to confirm his extraordinary Magic Typewriter, but his son denied the stuff was written by his dad and his widow said her late husband never typed. So, on the one hand, we have hundreds of living veterans with chapter and verse on Mr. Kerry’s fantasy Christmas in Cambodia, and, on the other hand, we have a guy who’s been dead 20 years but is still capable of operating Windows XP. It took the savvy chappies at the Powerline Web site and Charles Johnson of “Little Green Footballs” about 20 minutes to spot the eerily 2004 look of the 1972 memo, and various Internet wallahs spent the rest of the day tracking down the country’s leading typewriter identification experts.
Bombarded with accusations that CBS had fallen for an obvious hoax, Dan turned to his trusty Smith-Corona and bashed out a few emails: “For the umpteenth time,” he said angrily, “this is the kind of sleaze I had to put up with when they scoffed at ‘What’s the frequency, Kenneth?'”
Are Dan Rather and “60 Minutes” a bunch of patsies suckered by the Kerry campaign? Not exactly. According to The American Spectator, “The CBS producer said that some alarm bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story. “Hey, why not? Who’s going to spot it? If CBS says it’s so, that’s good enough for Thomas Oliphant’s Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, all of whom rushed the story on to their front pages because it met their “basic standards.” On Friday morning, Paul Krugman, the New York Times’s excitable economist, filed a column called, “The Dishonesty Thing,” and for one moment I thought he was about to upbraid CBS for rushing on air with their laughably fake memos. But no, he was droning on about how the National Guard story demonstrated Mr. Bush’s “pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn’t.”
The tragedy for Messrs. Rather, Oliphant, Krugman & Co. is that even if the memos were authentic, nobody would care. Their boy Kerry had a crummy August not because he didn’t hammer Mr. Bush for being absent without leave in the Spanish-American War but because the senator’s AWOL in the present war. The news industry is trashing its own reputation in service to a man who can never win.
After the 2002 election, I wrote, “Remind me never to complain about ‘liberal media bias’ again. Right now, liberal media bias is conspiring to assist the Democrats to sleepwalk over the cliff.” The press and the Democrats sustain each other’s make-believe land. Mr. Rather tells his staff, “Kerry’s told me there’s nothing to this Swift vet thing.” Kerry tells his, “Rather’s assured me this Swift vet story’s going nowhere.” Mr. Bush ought to wake up every morning and thank the Lord the press is not on his side.
Remember the Adolf Hitler Diaries? They turned up in the 1980s. Only problem is they weren’t by Hitler. But by then various prestige publications had paid a fortune to serialize them. Among them was The Sunday Times of London, owned by Mr. Murdoch, who wasn’t happy. He called the editor, Frank Giles, into his office, and said, “Frank, I’m promoting you to editor emeritus.”
“I’ve always wondered,” murmured Mr. Giles, “what ‘editor emeritus’ means.”
“The ‘e’ means you’ve been given the elbow and the ‘meritus’ means you bloody deserve it,” said Murdoch.
I have a feeling that after November, CBS News will be promoting Mr. Rather to editor emeritus. Either that, or next week’s “60 Minutes” – “Exclusive. Handwriting Expert Says Bush Wrote The Hitler Diaries!” – will have much better fact-checking.