No it was not Obama’s election, in fact they were not successful. However Bernie Goldberg has further proof that CBS deliberately lied to try and influence the close Presidential race in 2004.
It has long been known that Dan Rather presented documents on the CBS documentary programme 60 minutes that seemed to show a senior officer’s criticism of a young Lieutenant G W Bush, suggest that he went absent without leave and support accusations that he failed to fulfil his obligations to the Air National Guard. The accusation was that he was a slacker, who was trying to avoid being drafted to Vietnam by joining the ANG and avoiding duties where possible, protected by his father in the Senate.
Of course it turned out that the documents were fake, and there the story ends for most of the news media, an embarrassment brushed over.
Well it turns out that not only did Lt Bush not shirk his duties, not only did he specifically volunteer to go to Vietnam (others with more experience were chosen instead), but that Mary Mapes, the producer of that episode of 60 Minutes, knew at the time it was made that he had volunteered. She had been told on more than one occasion.
This is really very serious.
I was no Bush supporter (although knowing more now I am relieved Gore and Kerry lost) but neither did I ever subscribe to the ridiculous ‘idiot’ or ‘Hitler’ memes. It was always known that election was close, and Vietnam was important. The media painted Kerry as a hero to help his cause (although his record was suspect while he was there, and he told lies about atrocities once he returned).
The Democrats were trying to paint Bush as a coward to contrast, and the 60 Minute episode was widely quoted in the press to support that; it could easily have changed the election result. Mary Mapes was a known ‘liberal’ as the Americans put it. It appears she produced a programme that she knew all along was advancing a lie, in order to influence an election. That is shocking, even for the modern news media.
What is even more widely relevant is that this information has been available for several years, and the US news media do not want to know. They will not tell the truth.
Background For Those Unfamiliar
This incident brought Charles Johnson’s Little Green Football (UPDATE: link removed as Charles Johnson has descended into insanity, and I am not willing to direct people to his creepy blog) libertarian blog to national (and to some degree international) media attention, when he challenged the documents and proved that the document below, dated 1973, was almost certainly produced on Microsoft Word (the animation compares the 60 Minutes fax, and identical wording written in Word with default fonts and paragraph settings), and could not have been written on any known typewriter available in 1973.
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