Well we are at the parts of the story where first, the Public gave the “Thumbs Up” much to the disdain of the Democrats and MSM after the Republican Convention and Bush’s brilliant defense of his Presidency. With this they went in for the kill and as they moved to finish Bush off, a majority of the nation has just erupted with “Live!”, “Live!”, Live!

I love it!

Syl

You know, I think you’re onto something.

People who go head-to-head with Bush seem to end up committing suicide a lot.

That’s exactly what Saddam did.

I remember a great op-ed in the NYTIMES, after Saddam issued his 1000-page “response” to the Resolution demanding that he disarm.

The author said Saddam’s response was the longest suicide note ever written.

Wow!

Clinton would have lost to Dubya’s father had he sought re-election, all the polls were clear on that, it was something we on the inside greatly feared

I’ve mentioned a couple of times now that this blog has been incredibly helpful to me personally & emotionally.

I’ve also mentioned that Samuel’s 5 points to the right post was one of the observations that finally let me answer the question, Did I change or did they?

Now I realize that my own move 5-points-to-the-right ended up being a change in category because I was already at the far right end of the Democratic Party spectrum before my post-9/11 shift.

Samuel’s new observation, about Bush 1, suddenly let me understand something else that has been bothering me for these 3 years now.

My husband, now, likes Bush 1.

He speaks of Bush 1 respectfully, says he wishes Bush 1 were in office, not Bush 2, etc.

This abrupt change has made me nuts.

All of a sudden he’s a foreign policy realist!

In my state of uproar, I’ve put the worst possible construction on this shift; I’ve seen this as the height of hypocrisy, coming after all these years of high-horse anti-Reagan foreign policy moralism.

But suddenly, reading Samuel’s comment, I realize I haven’t understood his changes in perspective any better than I’ve understood my own.

He’s not being hypocritical.

He’s changed.

This is his 5-point shift to the right.

From his starting point, a 5-point shift landed him in the camp of Bush 1.

From my starting point, a 5-point shift landed me in the camp of Bush 2.

Simple!

But not so simple to see.

Samuel, thank you!

I’m thinking it would probably be a good thing for people who are interested in politics to start using the concept of a “spectrum.”

My analogy is to the field of autism.

Autism had always been seen as a black-or-white, on-or-off condition. You had it or you didn’t, and if you had it you were sitting in a corner in an institution banging your head against the wall.

Then Ed Ritvo did a study of every single autistic person living in the state of Utah.

Some of the moms would bring their autistic kids in, and they’d say, “Well, he’s just like my husband.”

Ed Ritvo began to think, “Gee. Maybe he is just like her husband.”

The rest is history.

Ritvo and his team took a look at the parents and discovered “11 Married Autistics.”

I think that was the number. Eleven.

It took awhile, but a few years after his observation was published people began to think of autism as a spectrum disorder.

That’s the way I’m going to start thinking about politics.

As a spectrum disorder.

as Juan Williams said the substance of accusations is more important than how it is delivered

Quick comment on this—-

Speaking as a journalist and as a former teacher & professor, in this particular case Williams is dead wrong and I’m sure he knows it.

If plagiarism is the capital crime of intellectual work, forgery is the atrocity.

Situations in which suspect documents like these are used as the basis of major news stories are so rare as to not even have a set & known punishment, such as expulsion from college or being fired from one’s position in a news organization.

Think about it.

Can you think of any other case of a major news personality–or any major, important organ of the MSM–not only falling for documents that raise this many questions about their authenticity, but then defending them? (Many critics of the war feel–wrongly–that this is exactly what happened in the case of Judy Miller’s reliance on Chalabi as a source for front-page TIMES stories on Iraq’s WMD. That’s why there has been such a huge and lasting Tsunami of outrage from the left over TIMES reporting on Iraq. Michael Moore is now writing an entire book essentially blaming the Iraq War on the MSM.)

It’s just barely excusable for a reporter or a journalist to be taken in by a forgery, though it doesn’t look good. It is a black mark on your permanent record.

But to react to questions about authenticity by circling the wagons is a profound breach of professional standards & ethics.

The only acceptable response would be to launch a full investigation, with promises of transparency to public and peers.

Assuming the documents do prove to be forgeries, if Rather were anyone else, he would have to be fired for this.

He may have to be fired, anyway.

Check out Drudge.

He’s running an upside-down photo of the 60 MINUTES logo.

What’s his readership?

10 million?

For anyone working at CBS, as for anyone owning CBS, that is a horror.

So . . . this is one case where “what the memos” say in fact does not matter at all.

What matters is that a major news organization has not only portrayed highly suspect documents as authentic, but has then, under fire, chosen to defend the documents rather than to launch an investigation and report back when it is completed.

Read Kaus on instapundit.

“They’ll be throwing bodies out the window” before this is over.

Thanks for the Chuckling Trip Down Memory Lane. Just a few weeks ago I ran across some VERY old work I’d done. What I had was the carbons. It really was enlightening to look at it and remember how difficult it once was to produce clean copy. The carbons showed the evidence of typos that couldn’t be repaired and had to be stricken through and that was, once upon a time, completely acceptable for anything but the most formalized work.

It was downright quaint to see my yellow “file copy” with the not so crisp type and all that evidence of having been done on the (not so high) quality of typewriter that an ordinary old student might own or have access to “back in the day”. I showed it to my daughters and they looked at it like it was some dried up old shard of bone excavated from an archeological dig. They had, of course, kinda sorta heard about “carbon paper”, but it never dawned on them what it might be like to use it or what copies looked like.

OK, so now I’ll return the “memory lane” gift.

Remember the old school days when you’d be handed your test and the smell of it? Remember the incredible mess of setting up a mimeograph and cranking out copies?

Thank you for a great post.

The Democrats are dirty but the MSM is even filthier and the real villains for in truth they were supposed to be guardians of the process, yet they shirked their duties. In their personal desires and wicked arrogance they could not help themselves as they are trapped between the tainted consciences of the damned and their desire to cleanse themeselves of such by endeavoring to be the do-gooders of society. One problem is they no longer have the ability to properly discern between good and evil as they are jaded. They are the “unwashed” seeking to do the work of the “washed”

The “press” is given a special and exalted postition within our society. It goes to the first ammendment to our consitution. With is special position comes responsibility to play a role within our society and that role is to help the citizenry figure out the important issues facing it. They have abrogated that responsibilty, that duty to the citizenry which has given them their special place. The MSM believes it is they who are “the press”. If they continue to refuse to accept their responsibility to society which grants them special privilege, then they must be replaced by a “press” which accepts its responsibilities along with its privilege. That new “press” may be what people like our host are in the process of creating.

O-my-God—–

How many carbon copies did I make back in college?

I always liked carbon copies. I miss them today. Carbon copies and mimeographs.

My children will grow up never having known the delicious experience of sniffing a brand-new, still-wet mimeograph hot off the teacher’s mimeograph machine in the office.

Dan Rather is an idiot.