politburo diktat 2.0

RATHERGATE UPDATE

Comrades, you must read Kevin Drum. If you ever find the main conservative blogs to be a bit of an echo chamber, and cannot abide the irrational Atrios, Kos, DU set, go read Kevin Drum.

Here’s what he says about Mary Mapes new book:

If the first chapter of Mary Mapes’s new book is any indication, she’s still clinging to the notion that the infamous Killian memos that were broadcast on 60 Minutes last September are real.

For chrissake. Yes, it was attack politics, but there were plenty of good questions about the appearance and provenance of the memos that were legitimate regardless of who was asking them. The memos were typed in a proportional font with a centered header, something virtually impossible for a small office in 1972. Killian’s secretary — who believes George Bush is “unfit for office” — has testified that she typed all his memos and did so on two machines with fixed pitch fonts. She also says she never typed the memos that 60 Minutes aired. Bill Burkett, the source of the memos, is a stone Bush hater, the farthest thing imaginable from CBS’s original description of him as an “unimpeachable source.” What’s more, Burkett’s story didn’t even make sense to anyone who had followed this story for a while — which Mapes had — and he later admitted that he had lied about where he got the memos.

This is ridiculous. Mary Mapes went to air with a story that was full of obvious holes and hadn’t been checked adequately. There is tons of evidence that the memos are forged and not one single piece of evidence suggesting they’re real. If Mapes is still trying to defend them, she’s delusional.

And for any of the rest of you still holding out hope that just maybe the memos are real after all, let me put it this way: the evidence that they’re genuine is about equivalent to the evidence that Intelligent Design is a better theory than evolution. If you’re part of the reality based community, it’s time to face the facts on this.

I don’t have to agree with everything a blogger says; he just has to be rational.

My favorite part of what Mary wrote in Chapter One:

I was incredulous. That couldn’t be possible. Even on the morning the story aired, when we showed the president’s people the memos, the White House hadn’t attempted to deny the truth of the documents. In fact, the president’s spokesman, Dan Bartlett, had claimed that the documents supported their version of events: that then-lieutenant Bush had asked for permission to leave the unit.

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.

All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing, material that seemed to spring up overnight. It was phenomenal. It had taken our analysts hours of careful work to make comparisons. It seemed that these analysts or commentators—or whatever they were—were coming up with long treatises in minutes. They were all linking to one another, creating an echo chamber of outraged agreement.

I was told that the first posting claiming the documents were fakes had gone up on Free Republic before our broadcast was even off the air! How had the Web site even gotten copies of the documents? We hadn’t put them online until later. That first entry, posted by a longtime Republican political activist lawyer who used the name “Buckhead,” set the tone for what was to come

She reminds me Butch Cassidy when the new Pinkerton agents come after him, “Who are those guys?”