It takes ten minutes or even less to find any 'fact' you like on the web. And that's why there will never be another Walter Cronkite.

The IBM Selectric was by all evidence not in use at the AFB in question. And it could not make a document that could easily be reproduced in MS Word using the default settings. Futhermore, there are no other contemporaneous documents that can also be easily reproduced in MS Word using the default settings.

The CBS letters are the only known letters from that time that can be reproduced in that way, and they can be reproduced exactly, except for the distortions introduced by faxing.

The letters were fake. I don't know who faked them or why. If they were planted by Rove to discredit the Bush story, then Rove was completely sucessful. The story is now completely discredited, thanks to the failure of CBS to question the doucments. If they were planted by anti-Bush persons, then they are just another example of idiots on parade.

If we cannot accept fact, then we cannot accept truthful reporting from anyone. We also won't have a sane society. And we're getting there quickly, just check out all those Republicans who believe in spite of all evidence that Barack Obama is a Muslim born socialist fascist commie atheist Kenyan. We may laugh, but if we won't accept facts either, then we will end up in a similar place of stupidity.

...it took me ten minutes of searching on the Internet to find out the moon landing was 'faked.' And yet Walter Cronkite reported it as fact.

You don't need to rely on what so called experts say about the CBS letters; all you need is MS Word, pdf copies of the letters, and your own mind.

You'll find:

1) You can easily recreate the letters in MS Word using the default settings, in all its particulars.

2) If you attempt recreate any other letter (with proportional fonts) from the time period, you'll find that you cannot do it with the default settings. You'll have to find another font, plus resort to manually adjusting the spaces between the individual letters and even then you'll probably fail.

The letters were fake and that is just a fundamental fact. Salon should know it and Joan Walsh should know it. It's not hard to find out! Apparently, what's hard is for Walsh and Salon to face the facts and tell the truth.

If we as a society cannot accept and admit easily provable fact, then we have much bigger problems then whether George Bush went AWOl or not or whether we'll have another Walter Cronkite or not.

You'll note that I didn't say the fake letters exonerate Bush. What I do believe is that the letters condemn the credibility of Salon and the left, if Salon and the left really want to claim the letters were not fake.

Every bright young person with a computer and MS Word can now find out for themselves if Salon is full of shit or not. This is the very meaning of 'demonstrable fact' and Salon is unfortunately on the wrong side of the demonstration.

The Bush administration, btw, is over. Stupidity, however, is not over and if the left wants to indulge in stupidity then it will never be over. And insisting those letters were not faked or that it doesn't matter is in the same stupidity class as Obama's birth certificate or the 9/11 truther nonsense.

The right side of the country got into the sorry way they are now by ignoring or denying fact. If we don't want to get into the same boat of stupid, we better not start ignoring or denying facts either.

Bush is over, so the story itself is more or less moot. And the credibility of anyone who wants to discuss it while ignoring or denying the fake letters is just not going to rate very high with most fair minded people. If the letters were fake, then what else was fake? If they were faked, then who faked them and why won't CBS tell us the source of the letters? If Rather won't admit they were fake, then what is his credibility on anything?

If you want credibility, you just can't fake documents or support them. Some things are just not acceptable no matter what else might be wrong, b/c accepting those things will just make everything else worse.