This whole TANG thing is getting more complicated by the minute. The trouble is, the snafu over whether or not the CBS documents were forged is overshadowing something more important...
Just a few days ago, the Associated Press received
two dozen documents released by the Pentagon that turned up after a little extra searching. A few days later, CBS's 60 Minutes released a few more memos showing that Bush got preferential treatment and did not fulfill his duties. CBS claims they are authentic, but others have called them forgeries because of certain features of the typeface. Others claim that those features were widely available on
typewriters circa 1972. My father has an old IBM typewriter from that era with a proportional font and other features on those documents that are supposedly "impossible".
Now, more questions arise. If they are fake, who made them?
Was it Democrats trying to smear Bush? That seems unlikely. Why would they make such obvious forgeries? Surely somebody has an old typewriter in their basement they could use. And if they were such obvious forgeries, how did they fool CBS's experts?
Why not Karl Rove? Supposedly he once bugged his own office to smear an opponent. Could he have produced these to trap Democrats? Maybe, but that seems awfully convoluted to me...
But wait! What about those AP documents? We know those are real; at least, the Pentagon says they are. No doubt, they do show that Bush was missing some of his duties... At the very least, they're consistent with the AWOL theory. Are the new CBS documents forgeries thrown out to confuse the issue? They appeared just days after the AP documents; most people probably recall their release as a single event if they're not paying close attention. Kinda like how Iraq and 9/11 have been convoluted in many Americans' brains. Now that sounds like the Karl Rove I know...
But that still misses the issue!
I mean, I think most people are sick of rehashing crap that happened 30+ years ago. Lots of things went on back then that we aren't exactly proud of. There was no shortage of mistakes during the Vietnam war and a lot of people haven't been able to face them. If you have doubts about this, there's a black granite wall I'd like you to visit. That wall was built propping up French colonialism. Really. How stupid is that?
Republicans love talking about Vietnam because it distracts from the big thing that would otherwise lose them the election. George W. Bush is a miserable failure. In particular, he's been a miserable failure in the war on terror, as outlined in my previous diary.
The GOP knows that if this election becomes a referendum on George W. Bush, he will lose. Anything that distracts us from a discussion of his record is good for them.