Evil Republicans convinced the guys at McDonalds to shortchange me on chicken nuggets
Steve Gigl talks about Ken Layne’s underwear and has some things to say about the theory that Roger Stone and the Evil Republicans* somehow planted the CBS documents. If you haven’t heard this one yet, Stone gave the docs to someone who gave them to someone who gave them to Bill Burkett, who gave them to… well, we’re not really sure but they eventually wound up at CBS. The docs got to the 60 minutes guys, who of course ran with the story. Once the docs were discredited as fakes, CBS looks bad, but more importantly, people who criticize Bush look bad, and it’s all the Republican’s fault.
A week ago, a co-worker commented on how likely it was that The Evil Liberals would try and turn this around and blame Karl Rove for CBS stupidity. I replied that I hoped they did, because then it’d be patently obvious that they were full of shit. Look, Karl Rove can’t just give the docs to CBS, because that’s serious news; Rather isn’t going to fight to protect Karl Rove, fer crying out loud. And Rove couldn’t have given them to Bill Burkett, because Burkett has hated Bush for years and isn’t going to have any doings with him either.
But the conspiracy killer is that these documents are such totally incompetant forgeries. I haven’t heard a report of a credible forensic document specialist (that is, someone whose full time job is analyzing documents to figure out whether they are authentic or not) who is even on the fence about the CBS docs, let alone leaning toward the idea that they might be authentic.
Because of this, it doesn’t matter who gave the docs to Bill Burkett (if anyone gave him the docs, I think there’s even money that he made them up himself), because once it got to that point, the Evil Conspiracy is out of the conspiracist’s hands. Assume that Roger Stone did give the docs to “Lucy Ramierez”, and she gave them to Burkett, and so on. The flaw is that anyone in the (lengthy) path of the documents could have spotted the forgeries, if they were looking at them critically instead of being blinded by the miraculous revelations they contained.
Furthermore, by some reports CBS had these documents for SIX WEEKS before they ran the story. Once the forgeries hit the internet, it took a blogger less than a day to find a top forensic document specialist who pretty much discredited the whole lot. A random blogger can find a guy in in less than 8 hours but CBS can’t find someone in six weeks?
Look, Karl Rove and Roger Stone don’t run around planting conspiracies like Johnny Appleseed.[**] They’d get more milage per minute out of manning the phones and trying to persuade a couple of likely voters to vote for Bush, instead of wasting their time typing vaguely incriminating memos, crumpling them up to look old, and running them through a photocopier a jillion times, on the off chance that whoever winds up with them is going to believe that they’re true and run with it, just so that Rove & Co. can discredit them months later.
[*] Karl Rove and the Evil Republicans would be a good name for a band. It might be a good thing I don’t actually have a band, because I’d be changing its name all the time. Until I get a band, I content myself with changing my name in MSN messenger to whatever I want. (Right now I’m Meow Skywalker).
[**] I originally pointed this out to my co-worker a week ago. Alas, the internet doesn’t let you see the foofy Karl-Rove-planting-conspiracies-willy-nilly dance that I was doing at the time.