Letters to the Editor
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Where are the real journalists?
DIG!
Memos were a set up.
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Who is going to take on Clinton.
Joan, I must say that I am disappointed. First thing this morning Joe Scar had Joe Klein visit and they were energised trying to figure how Clinton could be attacked by Edwards and Obama. I read Slate and, surprise surprise, John Dickerson was doing a checklist on how to attack Clinton. Then you come up with an attack meme. Have you all taken leave of your senses. You think Edwards and Obama are going to score points by attacking Clinton. Is this your idea of the new politics. No questions on policies and programs, just attacks.
You are now a very good candidate for the conventional wisdom crowd. Maybe you are more interested in getting on MSNBC than in dealing with campaign issues in less that soundbyte mode.
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Maybe I'll pick Hillary
I'm voting for whichever major Democratic candidate ends up winning the least support from the prison industry or from prison guard unions.
Incarceration is turning into a new kind of pseudo-industry in America. The people involved in this industry have a lot of cash to throw around to politicians who will keep their economy booming.
Their cash has created a real mess in California. Read the LA Times. This is one story where the LA Times shows why it wins Pulitzers and other publications don't.
So now I'm watching the candidates. Obama already screwed up. He's now the property ot the New York prison guards union. Who's going to be next?
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I Always
Thought that the people behind that story were responding to the non-stop swiftboating of Kerry on FOX. Fighting fire with fire.
I always approve of fighting fire with fire.
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Greg Palast.com Check it out
Why are you ignoring the investigative reporter who first reported this story on BBC? Is he too much competition for you? I have posted here before, and no one accepts the challenge. He also reported, not in the U.S., about Dan Rather's admission of Neck-lacing of the Corporate media in about 2003.
You hardly have to dig. Here is the site: www.gregpalast.com
Come back when you have done your "extensive research". How hard could it be to go to www.gregpalast.com?
peace,
st john
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"The Buchanon and Walsh Show"
Thank you Alan Bennett for your letter; I would like to add that Salon is rapidly turning into a big giant sell-out. The worst thing about the news is all the pundit talking-heads playing along with this partisan-hackery theater that serves no valuable purpose to the country.
Yet one more media outlet devoted to keeping America devided; Salon is pro-democrat, but anti-Clinton. Pro-Freedom of Speach but anti-MoveON.org. Pro-art but anti-Michael Moore.
Worst of all, Salon is constantly preaching about how innefective the Democrats are due to fear of "how they will look". Yet ironically, Salon is just as cowardly as the Democrats in Congress with it's knee-jerk obsession with proving to everyone that they aren't really as leftists that some might think (because you know, they hate Clinton). You can trust them. Yeah right.
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Travesty?
"Media Matters' Eric Boehlert is absolutely right about the travesty of mainstream reporting on Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS."
Oh, pah-leeze, Joan. The only travesty (outside of the forged documents Rather tried to pawn off on us) was that he once again displayed his ugly bias by purposely breaking that National Guard "story" a month before the election. What he's doing now is trying to rewrite history. And that's not a travesty. That's pathetic.
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memos never proved fake
What's amazing about the whole memo-gate thing was that they were never proved to be fake. But what the right-wing does best is change the subject. So instead of people asking did Bush complete his national gaurd duty or not? The clear evidence shows he didn't, as documented by the Boston Globe at the time. They got everyone to debate whether the memo was real or fake. So mission accomplished, the story was no longer Bush's failure to complete gaurd duty, but Rather uses fake memo's in news story. I hope Rather wins his lawsuit and gets every penny he deserves. CBS hanged him out to dry, in order to win favor with the Bush White House. CBS deserves what they get.
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Pete H, actually, no
"The memos were such obvious computer-created forgeries (the "th" at the end of the date being a dead giveaway)"
It isn't a dead giveaway. There were IBM typewriters that could do such a "th" and Bush's unit had one. There were other documents from his unit that had that exact same "th".
So such typewriters did exist. At a minimum, there were little inserts you could place between the hammers and the ribbon to do such things.
Having said that, there are internal inconsistencies that cast doubt on the document. Some of the terminology isn't right. But the font used isn't one of them.
The memos were Xeroxed so many times it is really difficult to tell, one way or another. Not all of the characters, for example, line up on the same baseline. Much like typewriters of the day did. But, that could have been because of the many Xeroxings of a computer done document. Neither the kerning nor the "th" means much, typewriters of the time could do both, albeit with some difficulty. And Bush's unit had typewriters that could do both because there are traceable documents that have one or the other from that period. I dunno if one was ever found with both in the same document, however.
In summary, the issue is not nearly as cut and dried as many assume. There are reasons to question the legitimacy of the memos, but not for the popular reasons.
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Never proven fake?
Actually, the memos were never proven authentic. And if CBS had so much confidence in them, why then wouldn't they have attempted to follow through? I guess they slammed on the breaks when Dan's "unimpeachable source" turned out to be a complete loon. That's when everyone at CBS, including Dan, ran like scared little rabbits.
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www.gregpalast.com
Here is the story http://www.gregpalast.com/dan-rather-tased-and-confused/
"The Still-Unreported Story of “Top Gun” George Bush
by Greg Palast
Monday September 24, 2007
New York- Newly unearthed records reveal that, in 2004, when Americans were in the midst of a brutal electoral battle over whether to reelect a president posing as a war hero, a commanding US reporter, Dan Rather, went AWOL.
Just three months before the election, Rather had a story that might have changed the outcome of that razor-close race. We now know that Dan cut a back-room deal to shut his mouth, grab his ankles, and let his network retract a story he knew to be absolutely true.
In September 2004 when Rather cowered, Bush was riding high in the polls. Now, with Bush’s approval ratings are below smallpox, Rather has come out of hiding to shoot at the lame duck. Thanks, Dan.
It began on September 8, 2004, when Rather, on CBS, ran a story that Daddy Bush Senior had, in 1968, put in the fix to get his baby George out of the Vietnam War and into the Texas Air National Guard. Little George then rode out the war defending Houston from Viet Cong attack.
The story is stone-cold solid. I know, because we ran it on BBC Television a year before CBS (see that broadcast here). BBC has never retracted a word of it.
But CBS caved. So did Dan.
That’s according to Rather’s written confession, his law suit, which is as much a shameful set of admissions as it is a legal complaint. In the suit filed Thursday, Rather tells us that Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom, owner of CBS, was “enraged that the [Air Guard] Broadcast had hurt CBS in the eyes of the Bush administration.” Viacom then set out to, “divert public attention from the accurate facts reported in the Broadcast concerning President Bush’s service (and lack thereof) in the TexANG during the Vietnam War; and enable CBS and Viacom to curry favor with the White House….”
Redstone roared and Dan, hearing his Dark Lord’s voice, admits he then “refrained from defending” the truths in the Broadcast. Dan shut his mouth, he confesses, in return for 30 pieces of Viacom silver: a promise that “his contract would be extended.”
Had Rather stood up to the Viacommunist thugs and defended his story, President Kerry and our nation could today express gratitude for his public service. Instead, Dan traded the public interest for airtime on 60 Minutes. Yuck.
Now Dan is shocked to find that the network snakes didn’t live up to their slimey bargain with him. Well, Dan, that’s what happens with snakes. Get in bed with them and wake up slimed.
By contrast, BBC never backed down from the story of the fix that got Little George out of ‘Nam. We had a smoking hot document [view it here] and an interview with the crucial source: the man who confessed to making the call for Bush to the head of the Air Guard.
No, I won’t give you his name. I don’t expose sources - unlike Dan and CBS. That’s another thing that makes me just FURIOUS. Rather revealed, then blamed, a source, retired Air Guard officer Lt. Col. Bill Burkett. Burkett, an Abilene rancher, is a courageous, stand-up guy. [See The Real Lt. Col. Burkett]. But after standing up with Dan, he was ruined, ostracized from the cattle business. No one would sell him feed. Dan got a multi-million dollar kiss-off from Viacom. Burkett got dead cows and bankruptcy.
And there’s more. More that Dan didn’t report. As I said, Dan picked up an old story, one that I reported, as did others, in 1999. But we added our discovery of a confidential document which had walked its way out of the files of the US Department of Justice. It was a whistleblower statement that explained why the Lt. Governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, who arranged for George W. to get into the Air Guard, kept silent about it for 35 years. It states that, in 1997, Governor George W. Bush overruled his state’s Lottery director and gave a billion-dollar contract to a company tied to Barnes. Barnes received a cool fee of $23 million from the contractor.
...more editing for brevity...go to link
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“It’s an obscene comparison but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people’s necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the tough questions so often. Again, I’m humbled to say I do not except myself from this criticism.”
This is what’s so frustrating about Dan Rather. He’s two people: a real journalist locked inside a television news-actor begging for air-time. Indeed, disgustingly, in his law suit, he conceals his inner reporter by claiming he only “narrated” the draft dodge story. For shame.
But what about all those other preening birds on the chicken ranch known as US television news? Rather tells us he wasn’t alone in failing to ask tough questions. Not one damn US reporter asked Bush at a press conference, “Yes or no, Mr. President: Did your daddy call Ben Barnes to get you out of the war in Vietnam?”
[For the record, BBC did ask for the President’s denial or admission. We got none. And when Dan’s CBS boss, Leslie Moonves, said Dan’s story, “ignored information that cast doubt” on the revelation that Bush Sr. put in the fix to get his son into the Air Guard, I asked Moonves to provide that information. In fact, I offered him $100,000 for his info which would have shown Dan’s story false. He never produced it.]
....edited for space
peace,
st john