I moved nine years ago so I'm pleased to be able to say that he is my former congressman. With luck, maybe two years from now everyone in his district would be able to describe him the same way. (Remember Matt McHugh? He had been a fine representative: intelligent, articulate, reasonable, honest, responsible.)

Hey, remember the time Hinchey tried to get on an airplane in Washington with a gun in his bag? He sad he'd forgotten that it was in there. (Now there's an example of responsible handling of firearms! And yet he is in favor of stringent gun control for us peons.)

"And yet he is in favor of stringent gun control for us peons"

typical elitist

Before the echo chamber ratchets up the noise, has anyone ever explained how "Buckhead" knew the memos were forgeries in a few hours despite no known interest in or knowledge of typography? Let's get real: he was tipped off and lying in ambush.

Now, I think by far the most plausible scenario is that when CBS faxed the forged memos to the WH for comment, they realized CBS was about to walk straight off a cliff into deep doo-doo. What's more, the ensuing mess would actually insulate Bush from any genuine skepticism from TANG Veterans For Truth. As you'll recall, the Administration's reaction to the memo story was pretty neutral, "Nothing new, all the documents are out there." But meanwhile Buckhead was ready to bushwhack.

I don't think there's any real evidence that the forgeries originated in the White House or the GOP. But rememeber, you're defending a crew whose idea of a press conference is to hire a whore to ask scripted ridiculous, slanderous "questions"—or do you really think it's possible to get daily passes month in and month out under an alias working for a phony news organization without approval from someone Upstairs?—and I don't think that the idea is completely impossible. And, lo and behold, GuckertGannon is somehow involved with the CBS memos.

"Before the echo chamber ratchets up the noise, has anyone ever explained how "Buckhead" knew the memos were forgeries in a few hours despite no known interest in or knowledge of typography? Let's get real: he was tipped off and lying in ambush."

Because he has clue about typewriters.

I personally laughed in disbelief when someone said 'they're forged'. So I downloaded them myself and used the Mark I eyeball. Which changed my mind IMMEDIATELY. The number of obvious problems isn't small. Proving it is a forgery is much more difficult, but deciding that it could well be a forgery honestly just requires having used & lived with typewriters and the early word processors.

Live in a dream world if you like - but the sheer unlikeliness of a 'planted' set of obvious forgeries getting past world renowned producers would require that one of the producers be a "plant". If you claim it's Mary Mapes I'm going to die laughing.

Regardless, I'm from Mary's old stomping ground of Seattle, and we have the revered Jim McDermott to contest for the 'silliest elected official ever' award.

But, Al, Buckhead didn't say the memos might have been forged. He quite confidently asserted that they were forged. And, frankly, I don't think there's any sign that he knows about typewriters.

The great speed with which Buckhead made this claim and Powerline et. al. confidently took it up—before even any professional authenticators had publically come to the same conclusion—bespeaks advance preparation.

Let's turn your question around: why would a world-renowned producer knowingly put forth forgeries, planted or otherwise, and in sync with her political desires or otherwise? Are you contending that Mary Mapes believed she could put over relatively crude forgeries on the entire American people, indefinitely? Talk about a dream world. It makes much more sense to believe that Mapes was (willingly?) duped, probably more by "scoop" bias than politics.

Al,
Don't worry about AJL, he likes to spout stuff like this. He also is a big fan of ad hominen arguments...

AJL,

has anyone ever explained how "Buckhead" knew the memos were forgeries in a few hours despite no known interest in or knowledge of typography?

Anyone who has used both a typewriter and a modern word processing program has sufficient knowledge to suspect these memo's on first view. The forgeries were that bad.

I think by far the most plausible scenario is that when CBS faxed the forged memos to the WH for comment, they realized CBS was about to walk straight off a cliff into deep doo-doo.

This contradicts your first point about Buckhead. The CBS only gave the Whitehouse a few hours to respond to the memos. Did they have a handy typography expert availble to confirm the memos were fake before launching the CBS sting of stings? No, but they knew that the memos were fake. The forgeries were that bad.

Accepting that they knew the memos were fake, did they fax them out to other news services to ultimately discredit CBS? Possibly, maybe even likely. Even if they did, so what. Everyone knew that CBS was the ultimate source of the memos. CBS even put them on the Web the very next day.

you're defending a crew whose idea of a press conference is to hire a whore to ask scripted ridiculous, slanderous "questions"

Now you're jumping of the cliff. The Whithouse didn't hire Gannon and as far as I know, no one is excluded from getting daily press passes based on past sexual activities, or even allegations of illegal prostitution. Should they be? Has Gannon been even charged, let alone convicted of a crime?

or do you really think it's possible to get daily passes month in and month out under an alias working for a phony news organization without approval from someone Upstairs?

Other reporters getting the daily press passes seem to think it is normal. Oh yeah, what's the criteria that seperates legit and phoney press organizations? Is there some rule or regulation that you can cite? Another thing, Gannon got the passes based on his true identity. Apparently, the Gannon name was truly a professional pseudonym. Should we burn all of Mark Twain's books? Should "Primary Colors" be banned?

and I don't think that the idea is completely impossible. And, lo and behold, GuckertGannon is somehow involved with the CBS memos.

So what? He was a reporter doing his job. I suppose you are insinuating that Gannon received a leak from the administration? Is this what you are trying to say? Even if he did, should he have kept it quiet? Should the reporters that received the Plame leaks have ignored them? It seems consistant that a reporter is going to report. So, somehow, in your mind, the fact that Gannon was acting like a reporter is proof that he was a phoney reporter. That's some clever rhetorical jujitsu there. Bravo!

I don't think there's any real evidence that the forgeries originated in the White House or the GOP

But that's what Hinchey claimed, before he pulled a modified Eason Jordan walkback.

Now, if you want to claim that the White House realized, when faxed the memo, that CBS was about to make a fool of itself or passed that word to "Buckbeak", could be. But that would still leave the responsibility for this story in CBS' court, especially given the short comment time they allowed the WH before the show went on the air.

But Hinchey went way beyond that, to claim that the forgeries originated with the WH or its Republican allies. I have some serious concerns about the fact that my Congressman made a claim like that without proof.

Wizbang nailed the public message of these comments here:

"Liberals keep whining that all these nut cases don't represent the party... This guy's a Congressman. The nut cases clearly do represent the party." [ Link to his post ]

As for the forgeries themselves, the all-time classic comment came to Ranting Raven from Frank Abagnale, of "Catch Me If You Can" fame. Money quote from Mr. Abagnale's firm, which specializes in forgery fraud of course:

"I can tell you that he sent an e-mail to Neil Cavuto of Your World on Fox News Network (he knows him personally) that stated: "If my forgeries looked as bad as the CBS documents, it would have been "Catch Me In Two Days"."

So bad, that this was obvious from looking at a frigging TV screen! And of course, when we deduced where the documents had come from, their quality level made perfect sense.

Nice to see AJL is one of the few still in denial and looking for some grand GOP conspiracy here. See Wizbang's quote above.

no one is excluded from getting daily press passes based on past sexual activities

Backwards. Daily press passes are hard to get for real journalists working for real media outlets. How ever could it happen that a fake journalist—his day job (or is that his night job?) is more humourous here than significant—gets a pass on a regular basis, and then attends the briefing under a false name (has anyone found another example of a journalist using an alias in this situation even once?). It's utterly impossible to believe every low-level guard at the metal detector allowed this, and very easy to believe, given what Gannon's role in the prsee conferences was, that he had been cleared at a much higher level.

I'd also like to point out you are all missing how the White House could have discovered that the memos were forgeries immediately and without recourse to typographical analysis: thye could ask President Bush. And he could tell them either "No, I sloughed off a little but no one ever wrote anything like this" or even "These are fakes because the real ones are much worse, but Karl Rove and I burned every copy of those the week I became Governor of Texas." But if you wish to push this line of attack, it only goes to lend credence to the Congressman's claim the the White House knew the whole setup in advance. CBS gave the White House abuot 24 hours' notice (which, I might add, strikes me as most inadequate as a general practice). Buckhead managed to refute the documents less than four hours after the show aired (and probably even less time after the documents were available for web viewing). Suuure.

I recomment a liberal (and that is a deliberate pun here) application of this principle.

AJL -

Allright, you're provoking some thoughts, so here goes. I think that the WhiteRove had nothing to do with any of this, and I'll just zero in on MY personal timeline here.

I first encountered memogate in the blogosphere the morning after 60 Minutes. One of the very first things I read was about the small 'th'. BOOM! I went right to the CBS page, and saw that 'th'. From that INSTANT, me knowing nothing except that such a 'th' in a 1973 army base typwriter seemed unlikely, in that INSTANT, the memos became, in my mind only at least, probable forgeries, and if someone subsequently came along and said authoritatively, "Oh, that 'th' could easily be valid", then I would re-assess.

Point is, from what I remember about Buckhead, that was the first thing that caught his eye. And when it did, he, like me, immediately said, "Whoa, wait a minute, could this be wrong?" And, thus for him, the burden of proof was immediately upon CBS to prove them not forged, and THAT is what spread into the sphere. And of course, CBS has yet to prove them real.

So, Buckhead is totally plausible to me, simply because, upon noticing the 'th', he and I had essentially the same thought processes. And THAT is what set the sphere alight to unravel all the rest.

Occam's Razor: CBS wanted it SO bad, they let it blow up in their faces. Simple as that. And Buckhead noticed a tiny 'th' that, once it's pointed out to someone, is virtually impossible to ignore.

Sigh. I'll bite again.

"But, Al, Buckhead didn't say the memos might have been forged. He quite confidently asserted that they were forged."

As would I... IN A CHAT ROOM. In 'real life' I would hedge and otherwise clutter my comments with loopholes. I am a research scientist - ask one "Will the sun come up tomorrow?" and you get "Probably." or "Yes... barring major celestial activity" or something similar. Probably.

Would I go on TV based on my own personal opinion and 3 minutes of thought? Probably not. Would I claim it as fact in a chatroom/forum arrangement after the same review? Sure... WHY NOT?

But my own personal review from the perspective of a skeptic came to exactly the same stunning conclusions Buckhead did in the same 3 minutes. Would I have then turned around and said that in a blog comment somewhere? Yep. I did. Would I publish a paper to that effect? HECK NO Not without further review. As it stands now I would be willing to present the scientific reasons that this must be a forgery in a court of law - even though my credentials as a "font/typography expert" are "Wrote papers with typewriters, wrote papers with early typewriters". Because there's enough data there to turn around and analyze conclusively. (It's hard to argue with measurements of distance, and ratios between those distances, and that's all you need for one of the solid disproofs.)

The only reason the 'Rove is an evil supra-genius' meme keeps floating around is because the 'Bush is a stupid puppet' meme has become dogma. (But Pinky, if he's stupid, how come we keep getting out behinds handed to us?)

AJL,
It is my understanding from several sources that it's pretty straight forward to get the daily passes. Perhaps I am mistaken. Can you point us to any sources that show any major media reporters being denied daily press passes? Any minor ones as well? Or perhaps any documentation on the daily press pass procedure?

What's scary is not only that Hinchey is making these crazy and unsubstantiated charges, but that the audience loved it.

And let me add that just because some of the craziest charges against this administration have a way of turning out to be true -- no WMDs in Iraq, torture and renditions, male prostitute given White House press pass, etc. -- is no reason to conclude that all crazy charges are true.

Even if the Evil Rove supplied the memoes to Dan and Mary, it's their responsibility as seasoned professional journalists to vet their sources and evidence. They shopped the memoes to 4 different forensic document experts, none of whom would vet them. Even shopping them around that much is bad journalism, i.e. fishing for the answer you want to hear instead of letting the expert tell you what is true.

I don't think Rove suppled the docs because Rove would not take the risk that CBS would be that dumb. If CBS was even slightly ethical and impartial, they would have found out the memoes were forgeries as soon as the rest of us. Then watch that blow up in Rove's face!

Really, who would have thought that Dan and Mary were that dumb?

Another point:

Hypothesize that Rove did plant the documents.

Which is a bigger story:
1) Fake documents planted by INSERT-NAME-HERE authorized by Rove.
2) The subject of the memos.

You're positing that CBS is too stupid to recognize a gift wrapped story - and that their integrity is so solid that they wouldn't out the source of the documents if the source was connected to the administration. Simultaneously.

Rove's smart enough to at least switch to Courier New instead of Times, if not go dig a typewriter out of the boxes in the garage.

Really, the thing that astonishes me most is that whoever created the fakes didn't so much as use a monospaced font. If they'd had the mother wit to go to even that much trouble, I doubt we'd ever have known they weren't real. (Which makes me suspect that the creator was someone young enough to simply not be familiar with what 70s-era office correspondence looked like. I don't know what Rather's excuse was, though.)

Here's what Maureen Dowd had to say on press passes:

I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the 'Barberini Faun' is credentialed... At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed... no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer, he said he'd renew the pass— after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months.

Now, maybe Dowd lost her "hard" pass, although that certainly is a discrepancy in treatment. But it seems Gannon had it pretty easy even for a day pass:

The editor of an online Virginia publication slightly larger than Talon News told RAW STORY today of his difficulties in getting a day pass to the White House, raising new questions of whether discredited White House correspondent Jeff Gannon was given special treatment. Chris Graham, the editor of the moderate Augusta Free Press, said it took him two weeks of phone calls with the White House to get a day pass to cover a local Little League team playing on the White House grounds in 2002. Even after being granted a pass, Graham says, he was told when he arrived that there was no record of him in the system. He wrote about his difficulties in a Sept. 28, 2002 article.

What do you think would happen if I showed up at the White House Gate, said I was Andrew J. Lazarus of "Daily Kos News", and could I please have a day pass for the press briefing—except call me Art Lawrence from now on. And I ask day in and day out. Think I'd get away with that? Do you think someone would at least check with the White House and get the OK? Be real.

Poll time: who thinks that Maureen Dowd is lower than a former/alleged gay prostitute?

AJL,
Can we agree that Ms. Dowd is not a reliable source if what you are looking for is facts?

Chris Graham, the editor of the moderate Augusta Free Press, said it took him two weeks of phone calls with the White House to get a day pass to cover a local Little League team playing on the White House grounds in 2002.

Is there any difference between a pass to cover a special event and the daily press briefing pass?

So far, the only ammunition that you've turned up to advance your thesis is more along the lines of a BB than a bullet. Keep trying though.

Are you suggesting that Dowd made up this press pass experience out of thin air? Rubbish. I'm not enamored of Dowd's analysis, but, no, I don't think she would write that type of baldface lie. You must have her confused with Ann Coulter. The defense you want to make is that Dowd had the so-called hard pass, and Gannon couldn't get that because he failed an initial vetting by other (!) correspondents.

Gannon picked up a daily pass by contacting the White House press office each morning and asking for clearance. Mark Smith, vice president of the White House Correspondents Association, says it's up to White House officials to decide whom they want to wave in each day.

Try the Gedanken experiment, Lurker. Do you think you could go day in and day out to the White House, give the guard your true name, whatever it is, say you represent WoC.net (more genuine news than GOPUSA, too!), get clearance, and go to the White House press briefing—moreover then getting called on not as your true name, but by your alias? And you're going to manage this without making any arrangement with the White House press office or someone else inside the White House? This is almost funny. I'm willing to bet cash money it won't work if you try it.

AJL,

Do you think you could go day in and day out to the White House, give the guard your true name, whatever it is, say you represent WoC.net (more genuine news than GOPUSA, too!), get clearance, and go to the White House press briefing

I don't know. I've never tried. Have you? It may be easy to get a pass like this.

You claim there's a whole list of people that have been turned down. So far, you've only given a marginal case, which appears to be for a pass to cover a special media event (Little League game on WH lawn). This certainly doesn't look like the usual daily pass to me. What do you think? Did Gannon even get a pass that day? Inquiring minds want to know.

Can you produce the names of any acknowledged reporters that were turned down for the same daily pass that Gannon regularly received? If you can't show favoritism toward Gannon on the days that he received passes, then I'm afraid your whole thesis remains unsupported.

You might consider tracking down the procedures for approving the daily passes. If you can show that it was violated (like skipping a background check maybe?) to help Gannon get his passes, then that would be a good first step in the direction you're trying to take it.

moreover then getting called on not as your true name, but by your alias?

Perhaps only the guards checking ID's at the entrance cared about his legal name. How did Gannon identify himself when he was first called on or introduced? It seems that after passing through security, he could revert to his pseudonym with little trouble. Are there security people checking ID's of reporters before they can respond to questions? This seems another weak foundation to build your case on.

Before the echo chamber ratchets up the noise, has anyone ever explained how "Buckhead" knew the memos were forgeries in a few hours despite no known interest in or knowledge of typography? Let's get real: he was tipped off and lying in ambush.

And I said the first time I saw the documents they were faked as well. Now granted, I have around 30 year as a computer geek under my belt... and I leanred how to type on a manual Smith Corona Typewriter. But one need not be an expert to recognize that the docs were either computer generated or typeset... a highly unlikely happening in the early 70s'.

I will await your charge that I was tipped off, forthwith.

CBS and Burkett set themsleves up, it's really that simple.