The LA Times is reporting that Rather and CBS News President Heyward are committed to the story to the very end. This is going to get messy.

Rather Rides Out Latest Partisan Storm
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-na-rather15sep15,1,1366024.story

" Rather said he has no intention of giving in to those pressures. "Say what you want to about me, I keep my word," Rather said. "No, I'm not going to reveal my source."

"I think we've gone out of our way to reveal more of the process than most journalists do," Heyward said. "We're going to have to take the criticism."

In the end, both Rather and Heyward said, the issue may never be solved, with dueling rosters of document authenticators lining up in equal measure to proclaim them both real and fake.

"If you report this kind of story, you have to know everybody is not going to like you or how you did it," Rather said, adding "the documents may be a `he said, she said,' but the story will stand up.""

This is a crisis of journalism:
http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/006171.php

Bill:
Browsing through the South Park site you got the clip from, I encountered the "Chewbacca Defense" in Season 2. I believe this is the new strategy from CBS.

http://images.southparkstudios.com/media/sounds/214/214_chewbacca.wav

To paraphrase: "If Chewbacca lives on Endor the memos must be real."

Anyone else having trouble getting to littlegreenfootballs? Wonder if some moonbats are trying to knock them off or if it's just the unusual traffic.

twalsh

They were mentioned on several cable channels. Most likely LGF is just snowed under.

Folks,

Doesn't anyone recognize that we're in trouble after exposing Rathergate? Its like hunting terrorists or cockroaches. You kill the dumb ones off and the smart ones live to breed. We may win this battle, but all we have done is taught some 30 something to buy a typewriter next time :)

the next forgery won't be nearly as easy to spot.

When they say "dueling rosters of document authenticators lining up in equal measure to proclaim them both real and fake," I do not think the word equal means what they think it means.

Of course, they may be referring to the same sort of math that makes 250+ Swift Boat Vets fringe voices in the wilderness vs. what? less than twenty brothers in Kerry's band?

dueling rosters of document authenticators lining up in equal measure to proclaim them both real and fake.

Ezqueeze me? It seems they have imaginary authenticators to go with the imaginary magical unimpeachable source.

like I said earlier. the secretary is going to be a problem.

Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/15/politics/campaign/15guard.html

The conspiracy explained...

bate and switch

Good post I don't believe it but hey its as good as my "insanity" expalnation.

oops misspelled bait

I don't have the time, but I'd suggest someone do a table lining up all the "witnesses" on both sides of the issue, just so we can see how "equal" those columns would be.

cf. http://arguewithsigns.net/mt/archives/002230.html

Great work, btw, again bill

Guys - " Rather said he has no intention of giving in to those pressures. "Say what you want to about me, I keep my word," Rather said. "No, I'm not going to reveal my source."

That says it all. He's saying that no matter how much pressure and how much they get hurt this way revealing their sources is unimaginably worse.

Thats just downright scary.....

Up till now I'm pretty much stayed out of the tech. side of things letting people who get payed the big bucks deal with it. But I have to say....I've been a Senior Electronics Design engineer since the early 60's and worked with virtually thousands of types of hardware...way to many things to even try to list in and out of Aerospace and commercial industry....among that us I would guess a wide a range of typwriter/electric typwriter/computer dumb terminal/teletypes/ right up to current Desktop/workstations/home PC's both IBM type and Mac's....Unix and DOS...PDP8's, S100 Buss, IBM140's,Ancient Altrons.... Heres what I can tell you....You could no more type two different memo's on two totally different technically based devices seperated by some 25 years and have them even come close to matching than you could make 100 half court baskets in a row hitting nothing but net..... You just could'nt do it.....Hell you'd have a hard time getting identical memos from the same typewriter to line up, nuch more so than word processor/printer output....It was the nature of the typewriter roller to have slip....period........I've noticed that some people are showing worry as Rather and company hold stubbornly to the deck chairs as the Titanic slides under....Trust me on this....those documents are just what they seem to be....fakes.....That mush I'm sure of.....why the down to the death on the part of CBS is just plain scary....

Given what hunter just posted is true ( as someone with a masters in computer programming I'm pretty damn sure he is) lets consider some assumptions and their consequences:

-Rather believes that they can prevaricate, obfuscate and lawyer the technical issues and the history stuff is just that non-conclusive.

The CBS strategy: Stonewall until it goes away, people will forget in a month .

OR

-This is in fact hard core nastiness for CBS but Rather will go down with the ship.

Implications:
Either rather is insane ( i.e. doing something obviously and completely against his interests for no reason ) or he is protecting something/one ( I think we can all agree he is not taking a stand on principle for a source that mislead him ).

If he is protecting something/one what is important enough to ruin him?

OR

-A combination of the two where they see it as bad but they can take the hit.

OR

-They are stupid/completely incomptent/delusional and believe they are real.
This one seems untenable to me. But I guess maybe Rather would in this case stand on principle and not reveal the source.

Hunter, I agree.

Why is he doing this?

1. They have to know in their heart of hearts that, regardless of the absolute truth that Bush's overall guard service was not stellar and likely he did get help getting in that:

2. Those memos are FAKE, even if the story they told were true.

3. so, if the memos are fake, then,

4. did they know, which goes to fraud and crimes commmitted by somebody and a huge coverup or

5. they didnt know, and if they didnt then somebody conned them. The journalists code says, if you get lied to by your source, the deal is off. They have no obligation to protect the source if it was an outside con. in fact, they have an obligation to turn and pursue the con men/women.

Dan's too smart to believe they are real,
Dan doesnt seem headed for option 5, therefore, you have to think that option 4 is where his head is at.

What did he know and when did he know it?

http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/2004/09/dan_rather_was_.html

you all need to look at this one

Excuuuuuuse me, but 'Dueling Experts'?! At last count, CBS had NO experts declaring those documents as valid, and even their typewriter repairman and spirit-handwriting guru say they can't verify the docs OR the signatures.

Patrick Henry -

Uhm, sorry, kinda. I swear I didn't read your comment before I entered mine. Great Minds, Thinking Alike!

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