Regardless of whether or not the documents are actually forgeries, there's a Dem communications strategy that takes advantage of the controversy.
We should take this opportunity to remind the public that Bush's famous 16 words, and his foolish march to war, were also based on forged documents -- indeed, forgeries dismissed as "crude" by UN experts.
I'm sure better wording can be crafted (suggestions in comments welcome), but I imagine the talking points would be something like these:
- If Dan Rather bases a news cast on forged documents, he gets egg on his face, and life goes on.
But when George Bush takes us to war based on forged documents about Saddam Hussein seeking Uranium in Africa, life doesn't go on for more than 1000 of our young men and women.
- If it turns out that CBS was wrong, Dan Rather should come forward and admit that he was wrong, and take responsibility for his 60 minutes.
That's a lot more responsibility than George Bush has taken for his four years of job losses, of spiraling health care costs, of his many, many wrong decisions that he'd rather we forget [etc.]
This also opens up a further front to talk about the developing FBI investigations into the Administration, which thus far doesn't seem to be a big campaign issue:
the bureau appears to be looking into other controversies that have
roiled the Bush administration ... how the Iraqi National Congress,
a former exile group backed by the Pentagon, allegedly received
highly classified U.S. intelligence on Iran; the leaking of the
name of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporters; and the production
of bogus documents suggesting that Iraq tried to buy uranium for
nuclear weapons from the African country of Niger. Bush repeated the
Niger claim in making the case for war against Iraq.