The End?
Topic: politics
Well, ABC lowered the boom on the CBS forgeries last night on the evening news:

Emily Will, a veteran document examiner from North Carolina, told ABC News she saw problems right away with the one document CBS hired her to check the weekend before the broadcast.

"I found five significant differences in the questioned handwriting, and I found problems with the printing itself as to whether it could have been produced by a typewriter," she said.

Will says she sent the CBS producer an e-mail message about her concerns and strongly urged the network the night before the broadcast not to use the documents.

"I told them that all the questions I was asking them on Tuesday night, they were going to be asked by hundreds of other document examiners on Thursday if they ran that story," Will said.

And the Dallas Morning News reports that even the Bush-hating secretary who would have typed the memos is saying they are fake:

Marian Carr Knox, who worked from 1957 to 1979 at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, said she prided herself on meticulous typing, and the memos first disclosed by CBS News last week were not her work.

"These are not real," she told The Dallas Morning News after examining copies of the disputed memos for the first time. "They're not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him."

Mrs. Knox, 86, who spoke with precise recollection about dates, people and events, said she is not a supporter of Mr. Bush, who she deemed "unfit for office" and "selected, not elected."

Howard Kurtz wraps up both these developments in the Post:

In a separate telephone interview, Linda James said that she told CBS the documents "had problems" and that she had questioned "whether they were produced on a computer."

Asked whether CBS took her concerns seriously, James said: "Evidently not."

Frank Abagnale, the master forger who was played by Leonardo di Caprio in "Catch Me If You Can", is saying the CBS memos are lame forgeries:

"If my forgeries looked as bad as the CBS documents, it would have been, 'Catch Me In Two Days.'"

Meanwhile, CBS will reportedly release a statement at noon. It's getting harder to see a way out for CBS other than giving up Rather's head on a platter. This sort of crap:

Rather Rides Out Latest Partisan Storm

Likewise, he [Rather] said, his critics are "people who for their own partisan, political agendas can't deny the core truth of this story ... and want to change the subject and make the story about me rather than have the story be about the unanswered questions about President Bush's military service."

isn't going to fly when you've got ABC and the Washington Post calling you out. Last I checked, they weren't part of the right-wing conspiracy.

Plan B is that CBS just stonewalls, keeps saying the memos are real against all rational opinion, and just becomes the FOX News of the left - i.e. turning its already transparent liberal bias into a selling point.

The other question is what impact does this this have on the election. Obviously, Bush voters are only reinforced in their beliefs, and are now inoculated against any late bombshells like the 2000 drunk-driving story because they know the media is lying to them. The LA Times provides an early indicator of the leftist response in this editorial. They admit the obvious - the memos are fakes:

CBS News was had. It's hard to reach any other conclusion about documents that CBS and anchor Dan Rather have defended as revealing the truth about George W. Bush's military service.

But just because they were fake, doesn't mean they weren't true!

Whatever the truth, CBS' real error was trying to prove a point that didn't need to be proved. It doesn't take documents for anyone to realize that Bush pulled strings to get into the National Guard. And, during the Vietnam draft, nobody went into the National Guard out of passion to defend his country. It also doesn't take new documents to establish that Bush shirked even his National Guard duties when he moved to Alabama and then to Harvard Business School in Massachusetts.

The brouhaha all but managed to place Bush's Vietnam-era service off-limits as a campaign issue, after weeks in which John F. Kerry's impressive record has been under savage attack. Bush gave a smirky speech Tuesday to the National Guard Assn., waxing on about the patriotic sacrifices of the Guard's men and women over the years. All of that is true, but not about him.

And now we see the cocoon at work - "of course, Bush was AWOL; of course, Bush is a liar". I think the left is so used to having the mainstream media as an ally that it takes that advantage for granted, and hasn't yet absorbed the full implications of a major network lying to the public.

I may not be one of them, but there are still a lot of people who think that what comes out of Dan Rather's mouth is "the truth". That number is about to get a lot smaller, and that isn't good news for the Democratic party.

Marc