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The reason why this discussion has become so large does have little to do with this election itself. However, it highlights a much larger, and more grave point, and that is the bias that is present in the mainstream media, and in this case, the commission of a federal crime in order to influence an election. That is big stuff.

The documents were obviously forged, and CBS has tried to pretend otherwise, in spite of a mountain of evidence that they are fraudulent. Discussion of typefaces might seem like minutia, but that is the simplest and most direct way to discover the fraud.

While I agree “the bias that is present in the mainstream media” and “the commission of a federal crime in order to influence an election” is “big stuff” ... I have to point out, Dan Rather is not running for election. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are not exactly “unbiased media” either, and if one of them was proven to have walked off the plank on a story, would that be the end of Bush’s chances for reelection? Or “Rather,” should it be?

If these are forgeries, there’s no doubt a crime has been committed. And from what I’ve seen so far, that criminal may well have been a disgruntled Guard member who fed/faked these documents, not anyone in the media or the DNC. They appear to be guilty of gleefully passing on the mud bucket without looking closely at what was in it.

And, trust me, my alien eyes see that happening everywhere, on both sides of the fence.

You say “The documents were obviously forged” and at this point there is a lot of evidence pointing that way. But 18 months ago, it was “obvious” there were WMD’s in Iraq, and a lot of evidence pointed that way.

I await further developments. Wake me when they happen.

I think what actually scares me the most here is that the two parties wouldn’t be spending all this money selling these wares if a lot of consumers weren’t buying it.

Even though I know better, a certain naive voice in my head had been saying for months, “We have two very different choices this year. Let both parties make their best pitches and let the voters decide.”

Obviously, that isn’t happening. Each party knows that no matter how many people in focus groups say they hate attack ads, they continue to buy their messages. We as a public don’t seem to have the ability to differentiate between lies and the truth. Maybe it’s not that we’re stupid, maybe we’re just too lazy to do our homework. If that’s the case, then we get what we deserve. I think Abe Lincoln’s statement needs to finally be amended: “You can fool enough of the people enough of the time to win”.

A friend of mine (who doesn’t really have to work for a living) has finally had enough. He’s fed up with the lies. He’s fed up with the fear. And trust me, this guy has no problem serving his country, and if he felt we were being told the truth and asked to sacrifice to defend our country, he’d be in the front lines. This year he’s voting with his feet. His passport’s ready. In the next couple of weeks, no matter who’s ahead in the polls, he’s getting the hell out of Dodge.

All these controversies form before I was born are getting on my nerves.

I think you are not ready to vote for either Bush or Kerry. May be you should consider the Prohibition Party. I hear they have 3 guys running for President. :-)

Zack, I definitely intend to explore my third party options, but a skim shows them to be fairly bleak. For now, I’m considering The Knucklehead Party. Motto 1: “If You’ve Seen One Stooge, You’ve Seen ‘Em All.” Motto 2: “Vote for a Real Stooge.” Motto 3: “If You Can’t Choose Between Larry and Moe, Vote for Curly!”

I hear they’re running this guy, and he looks reassuringly familiar.

Everyone one is just hangin’ out til the debates. Until then,it’s blank spaces being filled with whatever comes along.

Thanks for the plug. Grasshopper still has much to learn.

I think what actually scares me the most here is that the two parties wouldn’t be spending all this money selling these wares if a lot of consumers weren’t buying it.

I disagree. I think that it’s more likely that organizational irrationality is at work. Bob-the-party-hack gets credit for coming up with [insert smear] whether it actually does anything for his candidate or not. And it’s easier to come up with than a decent healthcare policy.

But I have yet to speak to a single person who has been even a little pursuaded by any of this stuff. I’ve spoken to many people who imagine that other people would be pursuaded. But ZERO first-hand converts.

Think of it this way: if the ‘Nam facts/allegations were completely reversed, would it change your vote? It wouldn’t change mine. Nor, I suspect, would it change the mind of any person who is talking about it.

The way I see it is the desperate Dems are recycling their 1972 game plan, but hoping this time their X-gate scandals will do the trick, if they can just keep the public focusing on scandal rather than Kerry’s vague take on every major issue. The same tactics from the other side didn’t prevent Clinton from being re-elected in 1996, and they won’t work this time.

Just wake me up when it’s all over.

mcfleshy: “I have yet to speak to a single person who has been even a little pursuaded by any of this stuff.”

It all looks like preaching to the choir to me. The people who hear this stuff and think “Yeah!” long ago decided who they were going to vote for. The “undecideds” are as interested in the motivations of the slingers as they are in the mud being slung. It’s a dual judgement they’re making, on the “authenticity” of the charge itself, and whether the charge has any relevance to today (or tomorrow). And they’re looking to see if that mud is all the candidate has to offer. Mud is unfortunately common these days. But try and tell that to a partisan…

Joel: “Just wake me up when it’s all over.”

I would, but someone’s going to have to wake me up first…

Somewhat amazingly, www.wakemewhenitsover.com is an untaken domain. Now there’s a good joke just waiting for the HTML to express it.

Ouch! Thank you.

I am struggling to awake from this blogpile moment, but it is difficult.

We need a 12 step program.

“Hi, my name is Gerard and I’m a blogpiler…”

I think it’s useful to view this latest dust-up through the prism of how it’d have played out 12 years ago. If there was no internet, and no blogging, would this story have affected the election? I think it would have. It shouldn’t affect anyone’s opinion, but unchallenged, it would have.

IMHO, episodes like this are critical because they are changing the Game. The metrics have changed, now. Reid, I’d expected you to be excited about this because it should, a la game theory, lead to LESS mudslinging in the press and MORE factual reporting. The more often the MsM gets burned by fact-checkers on the net, the less often unsubstantiated nonsense reporting and mudslinging are going to get published. And it applies to both sides of the aisle.

It ought to give you hope as well, O ye wielder of the dimished Georgian vote. Stuff you say online actually can make a difference in how the election is reported.

The more often and more public the MsM fisking, the less frequently it will be required. How can that be anything but good?

Gerard – of all the people who pile on a topic, you are one of the few with a consistently interesting or insightful angle.

Let everyone else get the cure. You can continue to embrace the disease.

You too, Reid. You’re a rare voice of clarity. I never would’ve suspected that the radical middle could be interesting, but you’re proof that there’s substance to be found there.

But, Tony, Harvey says I’m a member of “the radical middle.” Doesn’t that mean I have to be against everything?

Your point is valid regarding a comparison to the ‘92 election. It’s Ken Layne’s “we can fact check your ass” coming to its political fruition (and we can even do it pajamas, apparently … I had no idea there were so many lawyers and law professors blogging in their PJ’s). And I have no problem with uncovering bias and/or fraud at CBS, or wherever. I haven’t liked Dan Rather since he started wearing sweaters.

But, as Gerard calls it, this “blogpile” has been a bit … well, I’m not sure how to put it accurately. This has been perhaps the largest “blogpile” I’ve ever seen, and it was stark to me because it was a mile high when I came back to town. I found the heated and detailed discussion of 30 year old typewriters to be incredibly funny. The total lack of irony just did me in. But the sense of self-importance was pretty unseemly.

It’s as though people think the resolution of this particular episode will win/lose the election, and they are nearly frenzied to do so by themselves (Exclusive!!! Must Credit!!! $10,000 Reward!!!). It may win/lose CBS News’ efforts to remain a respectable source of information of any type, but it’s the “if/then” proposition people seem to have bought into (and are trying to sell) that bugs me. “If these documents are forgeries, then Kerry has lost.”

As mcfleshy asks, if the situation were completely reversed, would it change your vote? If some Republican out to get Kerry due to an old grudge forged documents about his Swift Boat days, and CBS ran with them, would those forgeries doom Bush’s chances for reelection? Should they?

As I noted above, this issue isn’t swaying anyone to one side or the other. The chest beating from both sides is being done by those clearly “decided.” Meanwhile, even people like Jason Kottke (hardly a right winger) are fed up with it

“Let’s look at the men, not the marketing. By all means, factor in their Vietnam military service or lack thereof, but I think it’s safe to say that neither Bush’s National Guard service or Kerry’s Swift Boat adventures were their defining moments as potential leaders of the United States. Let’s stop acting like they were.”

You say these changes in The Game will “lead to LESS mudslinging in the press and MORE factual reporting,” and I guess that’s one theory. But so far this election season, practice hasn’t shown that to be the case. There’s plenty-o-mud being slung, not just in the press, and it is indeed met with attempts at “fact checking their ass.” But what we often end up with is two sets of inconclusive mud. And both sides will be happy to tell you, “you’re just not accepting the proper set of facts. Read this…”

But I guess I’ve reached the point where I’m assessing the charge before I even hear the “proof”: Does this charge impact my feelings about either candidate’s ability to be President in the next four years?

In this case, if Dan Rather and CBS got snookered by forged documents, does that mean I think any less of Kerry’s ability to be President? If not, then I’m not sure I care about the “proof.”

No. But then, my opinion was pretty low to begin with…

No, YOU shut up

Gosh, Uncle Mikey, you are the first person on the page to use the phrase “shut up,” so I’m not certain who “YOU” is. But when you do a “drive-by,” the least you could do is let me know if you want us/me to shut up because you favor Bush, or shut up because you favor Kerry.

Give Mikey a little credit. Better than anyone I’ve heard, he has boiled down both arguments to their core.

“I see the first symptoms of an infection of self-importance”

Come on…. It’s fun to do detective work and be noticed for it. And the comparison to WMDs isn’t fair: none of us could go to Iraq to investigate, but a lot of us can pull up Microsoft Word.

What I find ridiculous is the liberal website rebuttals. They are making rebuttals to claims that the original memo debunkers didn’t even make. One’s political ideology shouldn’t have any bearing on whether they think these are forgeries. Even DefeatJohnJohn.com says
“To be perfectly honest, I don’t think Bush completed 100% of his service. I do think he was AWOL for at least a month or two. I do think he was brought up in privilege, used it to his advantage, and got out of the whole Vietnam thing relatively easy. Yeah, it sucks. But, ya know, it’s not exactly news, either.”

I found the whole swift boat thing to be annoying mud-slinging. And I don’t really care about the content of these memos. But I do like the idea of blogs challenging a major media outlet, especially about forgery.

“Come on… It’s fun to do detective work and be noticed for it”

I don’t argue with that. And I, too, “like the idea of blogs challenging a major media outlet” about what appears to be an obvious forgery.

But offering rewards in excess of the median annual income in this country? Headlining your “discoveries” with “Exclusive!! Must Credit!!!”? Granted, the excesses on the other side are only slightly less, but at least they’ve given us the visual image of lawyers and law professors blogging in their PJ’s.

I said I didn’t know quite how to accurately describe how and why this “blogpile” bothered me. And, apparently, I still don’t. But demi-blogger Jonah Goldberg provides an example of what I mean: “If this story were hot fudge, I would smear it all over my body and then roll around in nougat.”

That’s sort of what I saw when I came back into town and was bowled over by the volume of this story. A lot of people wallowing in nuts and hot fudge in naked frenzied abandon, unaware of how they looked from an outside perspective. So I tried to point it out.

It’s a small service I provide, though it is usually ignored.

This does matter.
Why it’s a story is that the vast amount of people who don’t make up their minds on who to vote for until the last minute, after ignoring the entire campaign and/or issues, and then vote for who they like the most at that moment. A good number of them couldn’t name their own senators or the current secretary of defense or even what tax bracket they’re in, but they know who Paris Hilton is & that Donald Trump says “you’re fired” and they knew last month that Bush was running an economy that wasn’t so great but now they know that Bush has been the victim of fraud, just as they knew they liked Clinton better than 41 or that mean Dole and that they liked Bush better than that ‘serial exaggerator’ Gore (sigh).

In a state like PA, getting a bunch of soccer moms to feel sorry for Bush because of this could win the state just as easily as getting a bunch of moms upset that Bush would’ve disobeyed a direct order could swing it to Kerry.

And, in the bigger scope of things, this gives more credence to people (surely I’m not looking at ME….oh, yeah, I am) who have said that Rather & CBS have slanted a bit….well….away from the conservative viewpoint, in their REPORTING OF THE NEWS. And, let’s not forget, someone reporting the news is quite a bit different than Sean Hannity giving me his take on the news.