The fact that the crudest of forgeries were used indicates that this kind of thing has been done before with success. Actually, the current stonewalling suggest to me that CBS in particular and MSM in general use unreliable and/or fictitious sources so commonly that they simply cannot believe that this is not going to work this time.

Katherine — I think you’ve put your finger on something that several of us have been not quite getting. But I was thinking somethig along those lines myself: if this had been done just a few years ago, the documents would have been shown for a moment on TV. Even more, they would have been typed, because there was no other way of making them.

If we hadn’t had the more or less conclusive proof that the documents were made with Word, would all of the things about addresses, wording, and so on have been convincing? Or would the people objecting have been dismissed with “tinfoil hat” sneers?

This is part of why I’m so angry about this: anyone whose inclinations are “conservative: or “libertarian” or “Objectivist” has known for years that things weren’t getting out right. Robert Heinlein wrote somewhere — I think it’s in Expanded Universe but it could be Grumbles from the Grave — that he’d been on the site of three major events covered by Time and they hadn’t gotten even one of them remotely right.

But this makes it clear that the MSM doesn’t just slant things, it flat out makes them up. That’s the real milestone here — the MSM’s real practices have been made glaringly obvious. No one with any sense will ever trust them again.

If the actual forgers had a lick of sense, they’d have done a decent job, and we still wouldn’t know. We’d be suspicious, after that Estrich column — but we could never really prove it.

Well, they say God protects fools, drunks, and the United States of America.