Letters to the Editor
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Take a valium, gobstruck
The records show that Bush fulfilled his TANG obligation.
If you want to talk about a president who actually partied during Vietnam and then killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, I give you Bill Clinton, sycophant Blumenthal's boss.
Clinton received two draft induction notices and broke his promise to serve in the ROTC. Instead, he went to England, where he smoke marijuana (but didn't inhale--right) and participated in communist-led protests against his own country.
As president, Clinton claimed that Saddam had WMD, had ties to al Qaeda, and was a threat to the U.S. The sanctions that Clinton fought to maintain on Iraq killed 567,000 Iraqi children under five by 1996. Those sanctions continued to be in place until Clinton left office.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1084
Not only did those sanctions kill Iraqis, they led to 9/11 and other "messages with no words."
http://www.ishipress.com/osamaint.htm
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Dan Rather is my new hero!
Talk about keepin' 'em honest. Anderson Cooper move over. The old sheriff is back in town.
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SueinNM
Yeah, because we all know how hitting girls is what really makes a man, "manly."
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Dan Rather has done this before...
Do you remember when Dan Rather asked W. Bush's father about Iran-Contra connections? It involved a CIA pilot named Eugene Hassenfuss, in Nicaragua.
Rather asked Bush The First about it on the air, and Bush acted all offended, and never answered the question, and later used it against Rather.
Please keep after Bush II, Dan Rather! And maybe, eventually, we will find out about Bush I, Eugene Hassenfuss, and Reagan, and all the rest of those creeps, as well.
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Taliesan
The hitting "girls" thing might have its origins in the fact that Blumenthal, when he was working for the Clintons, was accused by Matt Drudge of being a wifebeater.
http://backissues.cjrarchives.org/year/97/6/drudge.asp
Sid sued Matt for libel. Matt made a half assed apology. However the Little Green Footballs deadenders, still think that Bill Clinton was running drugs into Mena, ergo the deja vu.
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Groenhagen
Yeah, that's why not a single 9/11 hijacker was an Iraqi, no links were found between Saddam and 9/11, and why a Saudi Arabian oil-prince who hated Saddam and everything he stood for, was ultimately behind 9/11.
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Nerdham:
Other Bush documents ALREADY present and accepted in what is left of his service record have proportional fonts, typed on Selectrics. This was known and presented to you in the first *hours* after the Powerline blog and other Rove operators started hyping the "fake document" story. As people who have actually used Selectrics in that era have endlessly testified, as the Air Force could tell you, as IBM could tell you, Selectrics existed with proportional font and special character balls could be installed that of course had super- and sub-scripts. Writers need such things. And the Bush records that you never question have such superscripts. Enough already.
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Bush and Rather
I disagree with Sidney Blumenthal's assessment of the Dan Rather lawsuit against CBS. No one ever accused Bush of serving with distinction in the National Guard. His past as a drinker, a party animal, and a son of privilege is well known and was well known before the 2000 election. No reasonable person could believe that his Guard service was anything more than a way to duck Vietnam. One has to ask, then, why did Rather and Mapes think that they had a scoop? As a young man Bush was a screwup. Everyone already knew that. Strings were pulled on his behalf. Everyone knew that, too. To my thinking it would have been news if Bush had NOT taken advantage of privilege. I also suspect that the public, in reacting to Bush's past, look at their own lives and ask themselves how they would feel if they had to answer for stuff that they screwed up thirty years earlier.
There are two flaws in the CBS report on Bush's Guard service as I see it. 1. It was not news when it was broadcast. 2. It was pinned on that iffy memo, whose content may well be true. Legitimate questions about the memo's authenticity made Rather, Mapes, and CBS News the story, not Bush's Guard service or lack thereof. In pinning the story on the iffy memo, Rather & Co. gave their antagonists the gun with which to shoot them.
Attributing Rather's demise to a right wing conspiracy within CBS, I think, is baloney. As an anchorman he was a disaster. He was the worst possible casting. One can argue that Bob Scheiffer, Rather's immediate successor, has been more critical of Bush more often than Rather ever was, especially in his role as commentator and host of "Face the Nation." Scheiffer, however, has had the grace not to call attention to himself, not to make himself bigger than the news, as it were. Accordingly, he never became a lightning rod for the right wing -- or any other wing.
As a TV professional, I continued to be amazed not only that Rather had got the anchor job in the first place, but also that he lasted as long as he did. It is as if the management of CBS News were too scared to make a change.
I suspect that CBS executives used the memo story as cover to make a change that was long overdue. They had to rebuild a news program that had been damaged by nearly 20 years of Larry Tisch at the helm.
-Ted Faraone
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Speculation
Anonymous,
Yes I am being emotional, probably hyperbolic, if not vitriolic. But your speculation that CBS would not fire Rather because it could cost them money is as valid as the speculation they did fire Rather so it would not cost them money. At a certain point, the focus was no longer on the content of the 60 minutes piece but instead shifting to questioning the integrity of CBS.
That's why my hope is that Rather does not go for a settlement, no matter how tempting, and he forces this to trial where all the laundry comes out. Then we no longer need to speculate.
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Can't spell "taliesan" without "lies"
"Yeah, because we all know how hitting girls is what really makes a man, 'manly.'"
No one said that and it is dishonest to suggest they did.
"Yeah, that's why not a single 9/11 hijacker was an Iraqi, no links were found between Saddam and 9/11, and why a Saudi Arabian oil-prince who hated Saddam and everything he stood for, was ultimately behind 9/11."
How many of the hijackers were Afghans? If you read bin Laden's 1997 interview with CNN, it is clear that 9/11 was done in the name of Iraq. Saddam never protested that linkage. In fact, the official media in Iraq celebrated 9/11.
Your Saudi prince story sounds like a moonbat conspiracy theory.