With Kerry's poll numbers continuing to tank, and his negatives hitting an all-time low, the DNC, along with its 527s and its enablers in the media, are taking one more desperate run at Dubya's National Guard record.

Hilarously, it looks like they're doing so with forged documents. I find it highly unlikely that:

a) Anyone in the Air National Guard would be using a typeball with a superscript "th" in it in the early '70s.

b) The same machine on which this magical typeball existed would also do proportional font (and break lines exactly the same way a word processor would and

c) any document typewritten in that era would be capable of being overlaid with a present-day Word document with exactly the same wording.

I have a high level of confidence at this point that the documents that Dan Rather and Sixty Minutes thought were going to salvage Kerry's presidential campaign were forged. Moreover, I think that the CBS eye has to be looking very black right now, and their credibility in the toilet.

It's been said before, but it bears repeating. If Kerry loses this election (as seems increasingly likely), it won't be his loss alone. It will be a watershed event in which the Internet took down the mainstream media, destroying their increasingly unjustified reputations for either objectivity or accuracy. They will be the real casualties in this election, and it will put the lie to Evan Thomas' notion that their support is worth fifteen points. At the rate they're going, their best shot at getting Kerry elected is to start supporting the president, in an attempt to damage him as much as they have their own anointed candidate.

I have to say that it couldn't happen to a more deserving pack of sanctimonious twits.

Indeed. Oh wait, that's Glenn's line...

Kerry can talk about the Vietnam War until he is blue in the face, but it won't get him anywhere in the polls. Bush owns the national security issue by virtue of his response to 9/11 and Kerry's 20 years of voting against defense and intelligence spending in the Senate.

Right on, Rand. I'd be laughing if it weren't for the fact that SO MANY brainless fools hang on every word from frauds like Rather.

I wonder when our local Martian, Duncan, will pop up to claim that Kerry is actually leading the polls (of course, that according to ABC/CBS/NBC/PBS/NPR/Zogby/MoveOn/DNC)? That, I would laugh about!

I have to say that it couldn't happen to a more deserving pack of sanctimonious twits.

I'll see your sancimonious twits and raise you 2 craniorectal idiots. ;-p

A reply to Dave G:

Duncan, who needs Duncan.

This link tracks through to that bastion of left-wing-nuts, The Wall Street Journal, and they suggest Kerry wins the electoral college notwithstanding polls showing he loses the popular vote.

Wouldn't that be ironic? Bush wins the PV but loses the EC.

Rand,
Reguarding "th" - from the documents release by the White House earlier this year.
This document, page 3, entry "Sept4"
Via TMP.

Dave: I can resist your charms no longer!
While some polls give Bush a healthy lead, the Rassmussun tracking poll has it at less than 1 point, Gallup gives Kerry a 5-point lead in the battleground states, and Fox has Bush lead of only 2 points among likely voters. Zogby has Kerry at 301 electoral votes, although his methology is controversial.
Simple answer is no-one can count anyone out yet.

Joe: If you had noted the news over the past couple of days, terrorism is way up on pre-911 levels. Iraq is degenerating into a collection of sharia cantons, and and after 18 months, 60 G. I.'s are still dying a month. Gotta love that leadership.

And if you think Kerry's record of voting against omnibus bills that happened to contain various weapons systems was bad, you should check out Dick Cheney's record of actually pushing through some of the largest defense cuts of the past fifty years! Why is are there only 21 B-2 bombers? Wasn't Kerry, that for sure. Where is that A-12? Dick Cheney. Where did all those divisions and bases go? Began with Bush I's SoD. Etc etc.
If you consider opposing cuts to defence spending over the last twenty years as your measure of leadership, then the Vice President is Gomer Pyle.

So there was Dan Rather holding that smoking gun...too bad it was pointed right at his head.

Mr. Young,
And what is that tune you're whistleing past the graveyard?
ABC Poll internals:

registered voters by a 27-point margin now say Bush has taken a clearer stand than Kerry on the issues, by 27 points call Bush the stronger leader and by 19 points say he would make the country safer. Bush also has a 22-point advantage in trust to handle terrorism, a 16-point lead on Iraq and perhaps a slight edge even on the lukewarm economy...
Sixty-three percent of Bush's supporters now say they're "very enthusiastic" about him, a new high for Bush in this important measure of motivation. Kerry's support, after dropping in advance of the Republican convention, is flat, at 39 percent very enthusiastic. And while 84 percent of Bush's supporters are affirmatively "for" him, that's true of just 41 percent of Kerry's; more of Kerry's supporters, 55 percent, are chiefly "against" Bush...

Probably worst for Kerry, his "favorable" rating has gone negative, meaning that more registered voters now express an unfavorable than a favorable opinion of him, 42 to 36 percent.

Duncan, Gallup has Bus ahead in Missouri and Ohio and a dead heat in PA. If Kerry had his way, there would be ZERO B-2s, No M1 tanks, no Bradleys, no F-18s.....The base closures were a result of Reagan WINNING the cold war. Given a choice between Gomer Pyle and John Kerry, I'll take Gomer Pyle.

Man, this beats NBC's exploding pickup truck fiasco from some years back.

ABC's article on the documents:

False Documentation?

I looked at this skeptically - it is conceivable there were typewriters that could do this (I know some machines had special keystrokes, "th" among them). Also, because of the degraded images, it is hard to look at the details of the characters.

In looking the documents over, I saw a number of things that were very suspicious to me, but, with my limited expertise, nothing I can say with certainty. I will say it looks very "polished" compared to typical typewriter text.

At this point, I won't rule out that it may be real, but CBS *NEEDS* to respond properly on this. At the very least, I'd like to see an example of a typewriter from that era that could print these documents and other example typewritten documents of that era that have the same font, are proportional, etc.

"While some polls give Bush a healthy lead, the Rassmussun[sic] tracking poll has it at less than 1 point"

Given that Rasmussen was the least accurate among major pollsters in 2000 (the poll had Gore leading by nine percentage points), could you tell us the changes in methodology that would make it more reliable this time?

ROTFLMAO! (at Duncan)

ROTFLMAO more! (at Rather)

And CBS says they're interested in their "integrity"?

ROTFLMAO!

From Duncan Young:
"Where is that A-12?"

The a-12 was cancelled more or less because it was not a proper design for the Navy and Marines. It was becoming too heavy for aircraft carriers. So, they started to incorporate more composites into the design to lighten it up and of course the costs began to balloon to the point where the navy would have spent nearly all the budget just for 100 airplanes.

Duncan:

Surely you understand that there is a difference between opposing programs in 1984 and 1994? That it would be one thing to oppose programs when the Cold War is over, and another while there are Soviet tanks in Poland, Solidarnosc is still being born, the Wall still divides the Unter den Linden?

In 1984, not 1994, John Kerry ran on a platform of opposing the M-1 tank, of opposing the Apache attack helicopter, of opposing cruise missiles.

And, on the topic of him versus Cheney, one thing that he opposed that Dick Cheney supported was the first Gulf War. You remember, the one that had UN support, German support, Russian acquiescence, French participation? He voted against authorizing---and presumably not as a ploy b/c he thought Bush (pere) would do it, but b/c he didn't want to liberate the Kuwaitis. And whatever you might think of the recent Iraq War, the first Gulf War was a war of liberation.

There is no way Bush is ahead 5-11 points in popular vote and loosing the electorial college.

Dick Morris did statistcal analysis for Bill Clinton in 96 on the EC and sad he determined that untill the race was within 7/10s of a point, the Electorial College did not even come into play.

The EC infor you are seeing is not taken when the current natioal polls were. The state polls are take individually once every 4 to 6 weeks and those EC tabulations like Zogby contain some very old data that has yet to cycle out of the system. It is a seperate data set from the one taken for the national poll.

"There are lies, damn lies and statistics." Benjamin Disraeli

It helps much if you can put into context what you are seeing.

Kerry had a point with the Apache. And the B-1. And there is a difference between reductions in a time of massive deficits (re Tomahawk and M-1) and opposing altogether.

But if you look at his actual record (remember Bush ran on opposing nation building) you see that most of the RNC claims in terms of Kerry's votes come from 1989 to 1994, about the same time that Cheney was cutting. The exception was stratigic weapons (which is not what the RNC talking points have focused on, as not to many voters work on those sort of systems).

Now thats not to say that either was wrong to contract the military, and try and kill various systems (the A-12 was up with the B-2 as one of the silliest ideas out there). It's that it is dishonest for Dick Cheney to accuse of attacking Kerry on that basis.

And reguarding the first Gulf war, while it liberated the Kuwaitis, it did exactly the reverse to 20 million Iraqis. Iraq did have a legitimate beef with Kuwait - the Kuwaitis were slant drilling into Iraqi oil fields, and they were breaking Iraq with war debts. The Kuwaitis were not innocent little angles there.
Now Iraq shouldn't have invaded. But with the exception of one factor - the termination of Saddam's nuclear program - it is tough to say the consequences of Desert Storm were better than the results of not going in. (and even then, in a cold dispassion analysis, it is hard to say whether Saddam's nukes would have gone West or East-especially if Saddam though he had a friend in America).

Here is some news you won't get from the lying liberal stinking news media. The big secret is...Cheney is one of the greatest heros to come out of the Vietnam War!

Samuel H. Jacobsons "Dick Cheney: Americas Secret Warrior!" documents the role Vice President Dick Cheney played in American covert actions in Vietnam, beginning in 1961 when John F. Kennedy decided that if Hanoi could wage a guerilla war against the South, the U.S. could do the same in the North. Dissatisfied with the CIA's initial results, Kennedy passed responsibility for covert operations to the Pentagon. As part of that effort Dick Cheney and many other brilliant Americans were recruited.

General Westmoreland, Commander of American forces in Vietnam, vastly underestimated the imaginative ways in which underground activities could destabilize an enemy. American covert action focused on disrupting two vital "centers of gravity": the North's own internal stability and the Ho Chi Minh Trail that ran through Laos and Cambodia. Cheney was involved in the former.

Such activities ran counter to the Geneva Accords. This explains Dick Cheneys lack of concern today for the UN and World Court. Nervous diplomats placed them under severe constraints. Permission always had to be obtained from the top, which after 1964 meant an excessively cautious President Johnson, concerned that China would be goaded into intervening openly in Vietnam as it had in Korea.

Had U.S. political and military leaders backed these secret operations with less trepidation, Vietnam might well have been a success story. A revealing look at what unconventional warfare and clandestine operations can really achieve -- IF they are integrated into a cohesive warfighting strategy ...and why they will fail or backfire if prosecuted with only half-hearted support within the highest councils of our government. Samuel H. Jacobson unveils a whole new dimension to Dick Cheneys prowess at espionage, sabotage, and special operations in this page-turning history.

The creative thinking that Cheney contributed to America's secret exploits reads like a racy novel, from the adroit brainwashing and release of captured fishermen to the fabrication of a phantom secret society based on a 15th-century anti-Chinese hero, plus innumerable nasty booby traps.

Author Samuel H. Jacobson has had unusual access to prominent protagonists and to thousands of classified documents made available only to him while he researched this book. Dick Cheney: Americas Secret Warrior! clearly lays out what was achieved and what might have been achieved by covert action in Vietnam, ending with a thoughtful analysis of lessons learned for future politicians and operatives in a post-cold war world.

Review

The Washington Post Book World: An exceptional warrior...a soldier's soldier. Jacobson has written a fine and affecting biography.

To beleive Dick Cheney was a secret Vietnam Vet
is a joke...........LMAO
the biggest joke is how he avoided the war
the bigger joke is, stupid Cheney zombies
that speak hear say with out knowing cheneys movements during vietnam......Tonight your going to witness john Edwards at his finest hour.
Sorry about your hero